My name is Jessica Valenti and since Roe was overturned, I’ve been documenting the harms caused by abortion bans in a newsletter called Abortion, Every Day. I cover everything from legislation and court battles, to anti-abortion strategy and language, but the topic that I find myself writing about most, I’m sorry to say, is suffering.
And while Americans know about some of the suffering caused by abortion bans, thanks to the bravery of women like Doctor Dennard, there are hundred of other stories that go unreported. I have spoken to a 21-year old woman in Texas who was denied an abortion even though her fetus developed without a head, and a hospital worker in South Carolina who watched a college student die after attempting to end her own pregnancy. I get more messages every day than I could ever possibly answer. And while I could share stories that would shock and sicken you in the way that I am shocked and sickened every single day doing this work, I wanted to use my time here to stress that this incredible suffering, this cruelty that treats American women as less than human, is all by design.
Despite Republican assurances that cases like Doctor Dennard’s are the result of legislative growing pains, or doctors simply not understanding the law, despite claims that their bans just need to be tweaked or clarified. I want to make clear that all of this pain and suffering was not just expected. It was planned for. Anti-abortion lawmakers and activists would have voters believe that they had no idea that this is what post-America, post-Roe America would look like, but they had 50 years to plan for this moment, and they made that plan carefully, strategically, and callously.
Every raped child forced to give birth, ever cancer patient denied care and every woman arrested after having a miscarriage was accounted for and strategized over. But with Americans getting angrier and angrier at what abortion bans are doing to their families and communities, Republicans are desperate to hide that truth from voters. They need us to believe that they’re not the cruel extremists that their laws show them to be. And they certainly don’t want us to know that they planned for women’s deaths in the same way they strategize over a talking point or a poll. And I mean that literally.
For months I have been tracking a conservative campaign to sow distrust in maternal mortality numbers. Republicans know that the data is going to show that their laws kill women, so they’re preemptively claiming that maternal death numbers aren’t accurate. Some states have even disbanded their maternal death review committees entirely, and because the people most likely to die are the most marginalized among us, their hope is that no one will care.
I’ve also documented how the anti-abortion movement laid the groundwork over months to blame doctors for women’s deaths, as if the people working under threat of losing their license or jail time are the problem, and not the laws that prevent them from doing their jobs. All of which is to say, when Republicans feign surprise or compassion over post-Roe horror stories, they are lying. They knew that women would suffer and die as a result of their laws. They decided it was a trade off worth making, and everything they’ve done since Roe was overturned has been in service of hiding that fact.
Most of those lies are hiding in plain sight. When Republicans tell Americans that the national fifteen week ban they’re proposing is a reasonable middle ground, they leave out the fact that the law would force women to carry non-viable pregnancies to term. Their compromise would do to any American capable of pregnancy, what Texas tried to do to Kate Cox and again, this is not an oversight, it is a deliberate part of a much broader extremist strategy.
Right now, there is a quiet but well-funded campaign led by the most powerful anti-abortion groups in the country, that is focused entirely on pressuring and forcing women to carry doomed pregnancies to term. They’re not only trying to do away with exceptions for non-viable pregnancies, they’re trying to eradicate prenatal testing altogether. It’s a lot easier to force women to carry a dying fetus to term if they never get diagnosed to begin with.
When I tell people about this, the question I get asked out often is “why?” Why would anyone want to deliberately create a world where women are forced to be walking coffins? It is inexplicable until you understand that this has nothing to do with families or babies but enforcing a worldview that says it’s women’s job to be pregnant, and to stay pregnant to matter what the cost or consequence. But because Republicans don’t have the bravery to admit that truth, and because they’re afraid of voters who are more pro-choice than ever, they lie. They talk about compassion because they know that their laws are cruel, they use the word consensus while passing bans that voters don’t want, and they call Democrats extremists while fighting for the right to deny women life-saving abortions in emergency rooms.
And because Republicans know that votes overwhelmingly oppose their bans, they claim to be softening on abortion by pushing one of the biggest lies in abortion politics, exceptions. Again and again, Republicans propose and pass exceptions that no one will ever qualify for. The only purpose they serve is to allow extremist lawmakers to feign moderation, or pretend as if they’ve conceded something.
And frankly, any Republican who claims that exceptions are real should have to do so in front of all the people who’ve been told that they do not qualify for care even as they went septic or had their uteruses removed. They should have to defend themselves in front of women like Kate Cox and Doctor Dennard, or Brittany Watts, who wasn’t just denied care by by religious hospital when her water broke too early for her pregnancy to survive, but was arrested when she miscarried at home.
The only Republican exception that holds an iota of truth is the one about women’s lives, though not in the way that they think. When you look at any Republican “life of the mother” exception, they all contain a caveat. And that caveat says that when women’s whose lives are at risk can be given abortions, unless the risk is because she’s suicidal, and I want to stress how telling that is. Republicans know that forcing people to be pregnant against their will, will make them want to kill themselves, and they enshrined, into law, that they don’t care. In a moment when we are hearing so many extreme horror stories it can be difficult I think to get back to that foundational cruelty. That to force someone to be pregnant against their will, for any reason, at any point, causes profound existential harm. Abortion is health care, but it is also freedom. That’s why every abortion denied is a tragedy, and increasingly Americans understand that. They don’t want the government involved in their decisions about pregnancy at any point.
The first time I came to DC was in 1992. I was 13 years old and my mother brought me here, for the pro-choice March for Women’s Lives, maybe some of you were there. I remember men screaming at us from the sidelines, and I remember how confused I was, over why they hated us so much. Today, my 13 year old daughter is in the room, and it’s her first time in Washington and yet somehow she’s here with less rights than I had 32 years ago, and I think that we should be ashamed of that. My deepest hope is that she doesn’t need to follow in the steps of her mother and grandmother, and come here decades from now to defend her daughter’s humanity. Thank you for your time.
