A post shared by Virginia Sole-Smith (@v_solesmith)
I was half-parenting, half-working when I got the news about the end of Roe, and it took a full hour for me to take it in enough to cry. I kept making turkey sandwiches because democracy died, but we still needed to eat. I’m numb because we knew this was coming but now it’s here and it’s worse than we expected because this is a country where a person with a uterus doesn’t have the right to their own body, but anyone can carry a concealed weapon and JFC, where do we even begin?
I will also refer you back to this post, if you need a reminder about what life was like before Roe. (It will be worse now.) And we will fight and donate and do all the things.
But for now, if you need a space to cry, vent, whatever — comments are open to all. Please be kind and respectful and gentle with each other. Share stories, resources and support.
Abortion is a fat rights issue. And also basic healthcare and a fundamental human right. And if you need help accessing one, I will help you.
I’m just so enraged I can barely verbalize the fury. My seething rage is casting a wide net, too.
First of all, fuck the fucking theocrats who think they can dictate the healthcare and reproductive choices I make for myself and my family. The biggest and most heartfelt fuck you to those guys.
Secondly, fuck the disorganized Democrats who allowed this to happen. It didn’t come out of nowhere. We’ve known this was the GOP’s endgame for quite literally decades and we’ve watched with open eyes while they systematically turned the courts into a partisan lawmaking tool. And they did nothing, or at least not enough to protect us.
Thirdly, fuck Clarence Thomas for having the absolute GALL to threaten contraception, same-sex intimacy and marriage. How. Dare. You.
Fourthly, I’d like to present a special fuck you each to Susan Collins and Mitch McConnell.
I can’t quite bring myself to tell RBG to fuck off, but she made a terrible mistake and now the American women she wanted to protect and liberate are going to pay the price. It’s obvious now it was a fatal misjudgment for her to stay in that seat. I sympathize, but it has cost us dearly.
However I have no problem raising both middle fingers toward Brian Kemp, the governor of my state, whose stupid Heartbeat Ban is surely about to go into effect. Fuck you, Brian, you absolute asshole.
Please forgive the profanity. I know my mother would not be impressed, but my vocabulary has all dried up today. There’s not really a good way to put a primal scream in English.
Though not at all surprised, I’m absolutely gutted. I live squarely in the bluest of blue states, but I have two nieces in their early 20s who live in TX and I’m terrified for them. I also feel like our country has been taken over by an evangelical, white supremacist, patriarchal cult that worships nothing but their guns and their grudges. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.
I was at home, enjoying coffee and breakfast. I told my husband to schedule a vasectomy. I texted the women I love and trust in my life and we're holding space for one another. I thought of my 2.5-year-old son, at daycare, unaware of how fortunate he is to have been brought into this world by parents who were able to choose. All I can think of is how our place as women in this country has now been firmly secured as 2nd class citizens, at best. How children will come into this world only knowing food insecurity and poverty and no way out. And how personally violated and devastated I feel to know, without a doubt, that my body is no longer my own.
I need to stop being told by well meaning people that we need to change the system. I am so mad. Let me be mad today. Let me fight the system tomorrow. I am devastated. I just sobbed thru the end of endgame so hard. My son is six, I wanted more babies. I am 36. Now I don’t know if it is responsible to bring more babies into this world where they may not have rights one day because they may not be the right religion or gender or sexuality.
Today. This fucking day we knew was coming but my WORD does it feel like a kick in the teeth. Like a stomp on my soul. And the icing on the cake was the notice I got an hour later saying that we didn’t get a spot in afterschool care for next year. I was just like: WTF. This country just does not care about women and children.
This, paired with the SCOTUS gun ruling yesterday (specifically making guns easier to get in NY, where I live), just make me feel so unsafe. My job is not remote and I have to go out in the world every day (happy for those who WFH but I'd like to point out that not all of us do, many people don't have the option). The US is just not a safe country. It's not a safe place to live. I wonder, should I try to leave to make a better life for my daughter? But then I think about all the privilege in that. We're so screwed!
I was so looking forward to talking about summer clothes and sharing a photo of me at a wedding in leggings and a tunic and a cowboy hat... and now I can't even. I am in the numb place right now. No tears. No raging. But I know it's coming. Where the fuck are we living?
Ha. Well. Now I don't see a way to do that so maybe it was just wishful thinking that we'd all be posting ourselves in fun outfits instead of grieving the loss of our full citizenship. (And if someone knows how to add a photo, do tell!)
This is making me realize that we SHOULD be able to add photos and I don't think we can! But thank you for the lovely thought. And yes to the numbness.
I can't believe Clarence Thomas actually said, out loud, in print, that next they're going for marriage equality and birth control. I have rarely felt so sick about the future.
I called my Senators and Congressman, and cried on the phone with the twenty year old intern, who was also sad and scared and doing her best to do something about this shit show. The Congressional Switchboard is 202-224-3121 if you’d like to cry and rage on the phone AND take civic action during your lunch break.
I just buried myself in a work project (coincidentally editing a podcast episode discussing the definition of moral injury as the break between the expectation of other human beings acting justly and...the real world) for two hours because I just can't. This has been coming for decades, and the fact that Thomas (whose wife gets a right to privacy to plot actual goddamn treason) explicitly said they're coming for contraception and queer people is just...FUCK. I'm so angry. And I'm so angry at the dems who hem and haw about playing by the rules and appealing to a mythical working class centrist who thinks other people's rights are too divisive.
Husband has a vasectomy scheduled at the end of this month, which feels relieving for me but also like I'm escaping something unfairly. So furious at the news even though it was expected all along. The baby boy was fussing this morning and the bag of pumped milk sprayed everywhere as I shook it (wasn't closed right) and I screamed and swore and started to cry. It's not his fault he's a boy and he's going to grow up with more rights than me and that he's fussing right now. The milk is just milk. But there's nothing like watching your rights go down the drain before your very eyes.
I was in the doctor's office and started to cry in the waiting room. What is there to say - we knew it was coming but it's devastating anyway, for us, for our children, for everyone.
Ruth, I was at the doctor too. I’m 41 and have not breastfed in 7 years but somehow got fucking mastitis this week and I was getting an ultrasound to rule out inflammatory breast cancer. Was waiting for the radiologist to read the images when I saw the news and when the doctor came in, she thought I was crying because of my breast issues. Thankfully my health is okay but it felt ironic to be in a women’s care clinic when I found out that women’s care just got taken away. I often get sick during stressful times and it’s like my body knew this was going to be a big one.
threeforfreedom.com is a website hub established by Dr. Jenniifer Lincoln where you can find legitimate websites to be able to get emergency contraception and medication abortion pills to have on hand if you were to need them in the future.
I live in Kentucky, so abortion was immediately banned once the decision was announced. We’re planning to start TTC our first baby in a year and I’m so scared. It’s up to the doctors’ “reasonable medical judgement” to decide to terminate a life threatening pregnancy, but only after they try to save the fetus. I’m so afraid that I won’t be able to get miscarriage care if I need it or that god forbid, any emergency care would be delayed while hospital administrators decide what to do. If we need a late term abortion, we will have to fly across the country. At least we are fortunate enough to have that option. I’m scared for everyone for all of the reasons, *and* I’m really scared for my childbearing years.
We’re raising kids in Tennessee. My daughter is 7, my son will be 9 in a month. My husband and I both work in government. We are stuck in this place and the system or whatever you want to call it wants it that way. We can leave but there’s little hope of being able to support ourselves elsewhere. I told my son to go to university overseas and to never come back. It’s been a bad day in a string of them and with no sign of relief. I’m just heartbroken.
I feel like it's so easy to say "just move away!" but that takes thousands -- or tens of thousands -- of dollars and rent/mortgages in blue states are insane. Where, exactly, are people in red states from the middle class on down supposed to go?
I feel so numb. I’ve absorbed that the people in charge don’t have our interests at heart, only their own righteous agenda and moralistic revenge bullshit. I’ve given up that it’s safe here. I’ve given up on any sense of actual legitimate governing from the government. It’s patriarchal macho backwards drivel, point-making score-settling self centered bravado. I have nothing in common with those people and yet they decide for ME like I’m their child. It’s sickening and feels hopeless
Thank you for this space, Virginia. I've worried about Roe being overturned since I was a teenager. This morning I had to tell my daughter, a teenager, that it actually had been and I'm just... Enraged does not begin to cover it. I wish people trusted us to make our own decisions about our own bodies.
I had just turned in a giant rant about Title IX to an editor when the news broke, and my first reaction was why my writer's block hadn't persisted just a few minutes longer so I could have included both rants. I'm attending a rally tonight as a reporter, so I can't go in as fully as I might like to, but it feels like a useful outlet on many levels.
I’m chilled by how much loathing I feel for every forced-birth advocate. I don’t want to engage with them, try to understand their concerns, or attempt to identify areas of shared views; I want them to feel the full expression of my contempt. Bluntly, I want them to suffer. It doesn’t feel good to want this, and that makes me hate them more.
My daughter is only 17 months, so I don't need to tell her anything yet, but how am I going to explain to her that we live in a country that regulates her body, but not other people's guns? It's horrifying and heartbreaking.
We live in a blue city in a blue state, and we are white and are financially comfortable, so if I needed an abortion I could get one, but why should that accident of birth mean that I get to be safe but others don't? The main lesson of this week is, the Supreme Court doesn't care that women and children are going to die. It's just devastating, if not at all surprising.
I'm mired in grief and rage. So angry a the right and at the paralysis of the left who, as some said below, has known this was coming for a long time, yet done nothing, meanwhile becoming become more and more divisive within itself.
I'm also struggling right now with this weird feeling of what I'll call "departure guilt" (like "survivor's guilt"). In the 80s I was escorting at abortion clinics, very involved with women's political organizations supporting women's rights and then my career and life path path took a different turn. While I absolutely love my work and it undeniably has made a difference in people's lives, I sitting here wondering what would have happened had I and others like me stayed a feminist activist. Would we be here today? Obviously I'm one person but I think I'm not alone.
I can understand your departure guilt -- I have privilege guilt all the time and know I could be doing more -- but I think all that really matters is that we're all in it now.
I was hosting a play date/babysitting when I picked up my phone to take a picture to send to the mom of my daughter's friend when the gut wrenching news about Roe v Wade being overturned popped up on my screen. I tried to mask the devastation and punch in the gut feeling as I continued to the camera mode and tried to smile. It was 11:42 AM, and I desperately wanted to just curl in a fetal position and start crying, drinking, or both. Parents and guardians don't get that luxury, as you very well know. My uterus has been cramping all day, despite that time of month being over. This is not the world I wanted for my daughter to grow up in, or any girl in this country.
I cried. I didn't think I'd cry, but I did. Of course I cried. I thought about the (more than one) abortions I've had and how, if I were sixteen now, I may die having an unsafe abortion. I thanked god the abortion pill exists. I wonder if I will lose my rights as a nonbinary person. I wonder what it looks like in our children's eyes. I am trying to sift through the anger, trying not to tell myself it's time to leave the United States. I am moving from Seattle to Florida in a month and maybe that's good, because I can do more in Florida than I can in Seattle.
What really makes the bile collect in my throat is the conservative Christian people whose posts I never see on FB except when shit like this happens and then they're like "glory be to God!" and the algorithm serves them to me directly. Fuck all the way off implying that this has anything to do with God or that this corrupt government is somehow guided by God's hand and that those of us who are opposed--and even other Christians who are opposed!--are defying God's will. The self righteousness makes me physically ill. Even if I unfriend them, I know they're out there.
They're so hyper focused on "the babies" and promise that someone...not them personally but someone! will "adopt all the precious babies," and not recognizing that PEOPLE WILL DIE.
Could people share orgs they know that are on the ground getting services to people in states with trigger laws or soon-to-be-banned abortion rights? I’m thinking of things like direct mail of medication, travel funds, etc. Thank you, wonderful community.
We donate monthly to the National Network of Abortion Funds. They distribute to local funds according to need, so I figure they know the distribution better than we do.
Hi all, so grateful for this space; thank you Virginia for creating it and for all of you for being awesome within it.
I will never forget the pain and anger in my oldest son's eyes when he asked me if I had heard what Thomas wrote about Obergefell. This court and conservatives are coming for his rights next, and those of my trans daughter.
And all of those maternal panic feelings are only part of the grief and fury I'm feeling about Roe. The risks to women's health, the utter disregard for our autonomy, the attempt to imprint christo-fascist beliefs on the majority who do not hold those beliefs.
I try to hold on to hope; I'm encouraging my kids to take even small actions when they feel despair. We can write an email, we can help a mutual aid fund, we can knock on doors for campaigns, we can volunteer or show up to city council and school board meetings.
We are not utterly powerless, even though it feels that way, and I do not think we will ultimately fail in shutting these monsters down. I just think it's going to take a while and I might not live to see it but I'll fight so that others will.
Wanted to add that my thoughts on hope are my own and how I process rage and grief; I definitely am not here to tell anyone not to feel pissed off an hopeless, today of all days.
I’m so grateful for this thread. I feel gutted- woke up and just cannot stop crying. It’s like everything we have feared since 2016 has finally happened and I am so fucking sick of this cycle of trauma and tragedy and giving money and feeling so devastated to be raising children in this country.
It’s the day after, and it took me until last night to cry.
I live in Michigan, and it’s still legal here for now because of our absolute hero of a governor. There is a petition that we circulated and signed. If the courts decide it’s legal here, we will open up our guest room for anyone who needs it.
That feels like something relatively hopeful to do this morning. Hoping the same for you all if you’re ready, and I’m holding space for all the awful feelings too.
I’m just so enraged I can barely verbalize the fury. My seething rage is casting a wide net, too.
First of all, fuck the fucking theocrats who think they can dictate the healthcare and reproductive choices I make for myself and my family. The biggest and most heartfelt fuck you to those guys.
Secondly, fuck the disorganized Democrats who allowed this to happen. It didn’t come out of nowhere. We’ve known this was the GOP’s endgame for quite literally decades and we’ve watched with open eyes while they systematically turned the courts into a partisan lawmaking tool. And they did nothing, or at least not enough to protect us.
Thirdly, fuck Clarence Thomas for having the absolute GALL to threaten contraception, same-sex intimacy and marriage. How. Dare. You.
Fourthly, I’d like to present a special fuck you each to Susan Collins and Mitch McConnell.
I can’t quite bring myself to tell RBG to fuck off, but she made a terrible mistake and now the American women she wanted to protect and liberate are going to pay the price. It’s obvious now it was a fatal misjudgment for her to stay in that seat. I sympathize, but it has cost us dearly.
However I have no problem raising both middle fingers toward Brian Kemp, the governor of my state, whose stupid Heartbeat Ban is surely about to go into effect. Fuck you, Brian, you absolute asshole.
Please forgive the profanity. I know my mother would not be impressed, but my vocabulary has all dried up today. There’s not really a good way to put a primal scream in English.
Here for every last one of these fucks.
::slow claps in appreciation::
Heather, I'm with you all the way!
Wish we could do GIF replies here, because I'd share multiple "standing to applaud" GIFs.
Though not at all surprised, I’m absolutely gutted. I live squarely in the bluest of blue states, but I have two nieces in their early 20s who live in TX and I’m terrified for them. I also feel like our country has been taken over by an evangelical, white supremacist, patriarchal cult that worships nothing but their guns and their grudges. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.
So so scary.
I’m not religious at all but I follow @thenewevangelicals on Instagram, and you are not wrong.
yeah this is very similar to how I feel about the US right now.
We have pockets of sanctuary, but they are under attack, for sure.
I was at home, enjoying coffee and breakfast. I told my husband to schedule a vasectomy. I texted the women I love and trust in my life and we're holding space for one another. I thought of my 2.5-year-old son, at daycare, unaware of how fortunate he is to have been brought into this world by parents who were able to choose. All I can think of is how our place as women in this country has now been firmly secured as 2nd class citizens, at best. How children will come into this world only knowing food insecurity and poverty and no way out. And how personally violated and devastated I feel to know, without a doubt, that my body is no longer my own.
This, this, this. I want to see SO MANY HUSBANDS SCHEDULING VASECTOMIES NOW. (Mine did it 3 years ago if anyone needs a pep talk.)
My husband is getting one next week and it has never felt more like the right decision!
I need to stop being told by well meaning people that we need to change the system. I am so mad. Let me be mad today. Let me fight the system tomorrow. I am devastated. I just sobbed thru the end of endgame so hard. My son is six, I wanted more babies. I am 36. Now I don’t know if it is responsible to bring more babies into this world where they may not have rights one day because they may not be the right religion or gender or sexuality.
Once upon a time I believed in my country
Now I am saddened by it
I so feel that. We WILL FIGHT, we ALWAYS FIGHT, but we're allowed to feel our feelings too.
(Also I am a subscriber but for some reason it logged me into my second email account here and not my primary… today egging sucks)
Bleh! So sorry!
Today. This fucking day we knew was coming but my WORD does it feel like a kick in the teeth. Like a stomp on my soul. And the icing on the cake was the notice I got an hour later saying that we didn’t get a spot in afterschool care for next year. I was just like: WTF. This country just does not care about women and children.
JESUS NOT TODAY AFTERCARE
I was like WTF YOU COULDN'T HOLD THIS SHIT UNTIL MONDAY?
I feel like somehow, someway, Susan Collins owes you afterschool care.
This, paired with the SCOTUS gun ruling yesterday (specifically making guns easier to get in NY, where I live), just make me feel so unsafe. My job is not remote and I have to go out in the world every day (happy for those who WFH but I'd like to point out that not all of us do, many people don't have the option). The US is just not a safe country. It's not a safe place to live. I wonder, should I try to leave to make a better life for my daughter? But then I think about all the privilege in that. We're so screwed!
Relate to all of this so much.
I was so looking forward to talking about summer clothes and sharing a photo of me at a wedding in leggings and a tunic and a cowboy hat... and now I can't even. I am in the numb place right now. No tears. No raging. But I know it's coming. Where the fuck are we living?
I still wanna see the pic!!!!
Ha. Well. Now I don't see a way to do that so maybe it was just wishful thinking that we'd all be posting ourselves in fun outfits instead of grieving the loss of our full citizenship. (And if someone knows how to add a photo, do tell!)
This is making me realize that we SHOULD be able to add photos and I don't think we can! But thank you for the lovely thought. And yes to the numbness.
OK, so just imagine me looking like a beautiful badass in my wedding outfit in May and now looking like a numb badass in my Feminist AF tshirt today.
But the theme is BADASS and I am here for THAT
Can we link to imgur? 🤔
I'm not sure I know what that is?
It’s kind of… I use it for Reddit— to li k images there. It’s an image/meme/idk/garbage dump of photo links 😂
I can't believe Clarence Thomas actually said, out loud, in print, that next they're going for marriage equality and birth control. I have rarely felt so sick about the future.
That was a gut punch
I called my Senators and Congressman, and cried on the phone with the twenty year old intern, who was also sad and scared and doing her best to do something about this shit show. The Congressional Switchboard is 202-224-3121 if you’d like to cry and rage on the phone AND take civic action during your lunch break.
Thank you for this!
I just buried myself in a work project (coincidentally editing a podcast episode discussing the definition of moral injury as the break between the expectation of other human beings acting justly and...the real world) for two hours because I just can't. This has been coming for decades, and the fact that Thomas (whose wife gets a right to privacy to plot actual goddamn treason) explicitly said they're coming for contraception and queer people is just...FUCK. I'm so angry. And I'm so angry at the dems who hem and haw about playing by the rules and appealing to a mythical working class centrist who thinks other people's rights are too divisive.
Live in rural Georgia. I heard fireworks going off when it was announced. Not ok. Devastating.
Sending love. We're with you.
As a fellow Georgian: ♥️.
Fuck
Husband has a vasectomy scheduled at the end of this month, which feels relieving for me but also like I'm escaping something unfairly. So furious at the news even though it was expected all along. The baby boy was fussing this morning and the bag of pumped milk sprayed everywhere as I shook it (wasn't closed right) and I screamed and swore and started to cry. It's not his fault he's a boy and he's going to grow up with more rights than me and that he's fussing right now. The milk is just milk. But there's nothing like watching your rights go down the drain before your very eyes.
So glad about the vasectomy. Yes to all of this.
I was in the doctor's office and started to cry in the waiting room. What is there to say - we knew it was coming but it's devastating anyway, for us, for our children, for everyone.
exactly where I am
Ruth, I was at the doctor too. I’m 41 and have not breastfed in 7 years but somehow got fucking mastitis this week and I was getting an ultrasound to rule out inflammatory breast cancer. Was waiting for the radiologist to read the images when I saw the news and when the doctor came in, she thought I was crying because of my breast issues. Thankfully my health is okay but it felt ironic to be in a women’s care clinic when I found out that women’s care just got taken away. I often get sick during stressful times and it’s like my body knew this was going to be a big one.
threeforfreedom.com is a website hub established by Dr. Jenniifer Lincoln where you can find legitimate websites to be able to get emergency contraception and medication abortion pills to have on hand if you were to need them in the future.
Thank you, fantastic resource!
I live in Kentucky, so abortion was immediately banned once the decision was announced. We’re planning to start TTC our first baby in a year and I’m so scared. It’s up to the doctors’ “reasonable medical judgement” to decide to terminate a life threatening pregnancy, but only after they try to save the fetus. I’m so afraid that I won’t be able to get miscarriage care if I need it or that god forbid, any emergency care would be delayed while hospital administrators decide what to do. If we need a late term abortion, we will have to fly across the country. At least we are fortunate enough to have that option. I’m scared for everyone for all of the reasons, *and* I’m really scared for my childbearing years.
We’re raising kids in Tennessee. My daughter is 7, my son will be 9 in a month. My husband and I both work in government. We are stuck in this place and the system or whatever you want to call it wants it that way. We can leave but there’s little hope of being able to support ourselves elsewhere. I told my son to go to university overseas and to never come back. It’s been a bad day in a string of them and with no sign of relief. I’m just heartbroken.
I'm so sorry. Sending love.
I feel like it's so easy to say "just move away!" but that takes thousands -- or tens of thousands -- of dollars and rent/mortgages in blue states are insane. Where, exactly, are people in red states from the middle class on down supposed to go?
I feel so numb. I’ve absorbed that the people in charge don’t have our interests at heart, only their own righteous agenda and moralistic revenge bullshit. I’ve given up that it’s safe here. I’ve given up on any sense of actual legitimate governing from the government. It’s patriarchal macho backwards drivel, point-making score-settling self centered bravado. I have nothing in common with those people and yet they decide for ME like I’m their child. It’s sickening and feels hopeless
Sickening is the perfect word
Thank you for this space, Virginia. I've worried about Roe being overturned since I was a teenager. This morning I had to tell my daughter, a teenager, that it actually had been and I'm just... Enraged does not begin to cover it. I wish people trusted us to make our own decisions about our own bodies.
Enraged, enraged, enraged.
I just read the dissent and it is chilling. This is only the beginning of our rights being taken from us.
Agreed
I had just turned in a giant rant about Title IX to an editor when the news broke, and my first reaction was why my writer's block hadn't persisted just a few minutes longer so I could have included both rants. I'm attending a rally tonight as a reporter, so I can't go in as fully as I might like to, but it feels like a useful outlet on many levels.
I'm glad you have that and THANK YOU for your work.
I’m chilled by how much loathing I feel for every forced-birth advocate. I don’t want to engage with them, try to understand their concerns, or attempt to identify areas of shared views; I want them to feel the full expression of my contempt. Bluntly, I want them to suffer. It doesn’t feel good to want this, and that makes me hate them more.
I feel you. I woke up with a rage hangover. And I’m still enraged.
My daughter is only 17 months, so I don't need to tell her anything yet, but how am I going to explain to her that we live in a country that regulates her body, but not other people's guns? It's horrifying and heartbreaking.
We live in a blue city in a blue state, and we are white and are financially comfortable, so if I needed an abortion I could get one, but why should that accident of birth mean that I get to be safe but others don't? The main lesson of this week is, the Supreme Court doesn't care that women and children are going to die. It's just devastating, if not at all surprising.
It was good to read all these comments.
I'm mired in grief and rage. So angry a the right and at the paralysis of the left who, as some said below, has known this was coming for a long time, yet done nothing, meanwhile becoming become more and more divisive within itself.
I'm also struggling right now with this weird feeling of what I'll call "departure guilt" (like "survivor's guilt"). In the 80s I was escorting at abortion clinics, very involved with women's political organizations supporting women's rights and then my career and life path path took a different turn. While I absolutely love my work and it undeniably has made a difference in people's lives, I sitting here wondering what would have happened had I and others like me stayed a feminist activist. Would we be here today? Obviously I'm one person but I think I'm not alone.
This article may have kicked it all off for me and I'm wondering what others thought about it: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/opinion/roe-dobbs-abortion-feminism.html?searchResultPosition=2
Anyway it feels good to be in this collective space to mourn and rage together. Love to you all. Maybe enough righteous anger will turn the tide.
I can understand your departure guilt -- I have privilege guilt all the time and know I could be doing more -- but I think all that really matters is that we're all in it now.
I was hosting a play date/babysitting when I picked up my phone to take a picture to send to the mom of my daughter's friend when the gut wrenching news about Roe v Wade being overturned popped up on my screen. I tried to mask the devastation and punch in the gut feeling as I continued to the camera mode and tried to smile. It was 11:42 AM, and I desperately wanted to just curl in a fetal position and start crying, drinking, or both. Parents and guardians don't get that luxury, as you very well know. My uterus has been cramping all day, despite that time of month being over. This is not the world I wanted for my daughter to grow up in, or any girl in this country.
Thank you for creating this safe space to vent.
sending hugs
Thank you, Virginia. Let’s fight like
Hell.
WE WILL
I cried. I didn't think I'd cry, but I did. Of course I cried. I thought about the (more than one) abortions I've had and how, if I were sixteen now, I may die having an unsafe abortion. I thanked god the abortion pill exists. I wonder if I will lose my rights as a nonbinary person. I wonder what it looks like in our children's eyes. I am trying to sift through the anger, trying not to tell myself it's time to leave the United States. I am moving from Seattle to Florida in a month and maybe that's good, because I can do more in Florida than I can in Seattle.
What really makes the bile collect in my throat is the conservative Christian people whose posts I never see on FB except when shit like this happens and then they're like "glory be to God!" and the algorithm serves them to me directly. Fuck all the way off implying that this has anything to do with God or that this corrupt government is somehow guided by God's hand and that those of us who are opposed--and even other Christians who are opposed!--are defying God's will. The self righteousness makes me physically ill. Even if I unfriend them, I know they're out there.
They're so hyper focused on "the babies" and promise that someone...not them personally but someone! will "adopt all the precious babies," and not recognizing that PEOPLE WILL DIE.
Could people share orgs they know that are on the ground getting services to people in states with trigger laws or soon-to-be-banned abortion rights? I’m thinking of things like direct mail of medication, travel funds, etc. Thank you, wonderful community.
My step-mom has been putting together a pretty comprehensive list here: https://www.abortionandwomensrights1970.com/get-involved
Look up the thread. Someone posted a link to Three for Freedom. I saw a link to votesaveamerica.com/roe also.
I know of the Kentucky Health Justice Network.
We donate monthly to the National Network of Abortion Funds. They distribute to local funds according to need, so I figure they know the distribution better than we do.
Hi all, so grateful for this space; thank you Virginia for creating it and for all of you for being awesome within it.
I will never forget the pain and anger in my oldest son's eyes when he asked me if I had heard what Thomas wrote about Obergefell. This court and conservatives are coming for his rights next, and those of my trans daughter.
And all of those maternal panic feelings are only part of the grief and fury I'm feeling about Roe. The risks to women's health, the utter disregard for our autonomy, the attempt to imprint christo-fascist beliefs on the majority who do not hold those beliefs.
I try to hold on to hope; I'm encouraging my kids to take even small actions when they feel despair. We can write an email, we can help a mutual aid fund, we can knock on doors for campaigns, we can volunteer or show up to city council and school board meetings.
We are not utterly powerless, even though it feels that way, and I do not think we will ultimately fail in shutting these monsters down. I just think it's going to take a while and I might not live to see it but I'll fight so that others will.
Wanted to add that my thoughts on hope are my own and how I process rage and grief; I definitely am not here to tell anyone not to feel pissed off an hopeless, today of all days.
I’m so grateful for this thread. I feel gutted- woke up and just cannot stop crying. It’s like everything we have feared since 2016 has finally happened and I am so fucking sick of this cycle of trauma and tragedy and giving money and feeling so devastated to be raising children in this country.
It’s the day after, and it took me until last night to cry.
I live in Michigan, and it’s still legal here for now because of our absolute hero of a governor. There is a petition that we circulated and signed. If the courts decide it’s legal here, we will open up our guest room for anyone who needs it.
That feels like something relatively hopeful to do this morning. Hoping the same for you all if you’re ready, and I’m holding space for all the awful feelings too.
We can never give up or give in.