Monday, June 27, 2022

Opinion Today: Angry about Roe? Here’s what you can do.

Protest is only one tactic if you're feeling despair — or rage.
Author Headshot

By Sarah Wildman

Staff Editor, Opinion

The end of federal protection for abortion wasn't a shock, and yet it is profoundly shocking. The inevitable reversal of Roe v. Wade has hovered over Americans who believe in reproductive rights for years: not just after the leaked draft of Justice Samuel Alito's decision rejecting Roe appeared in May, but since 2016, when Donald Trump was elected, promising to place justices on the bench who opposed abortion rights.

And yet it feels different now that the page has turned, and a right that has been in place for more than two generations of Americans — enabling many to structure their lives, their families, their futures — will now likely be denied to half the country.

Soon after the leaked draft of the Dobbs decision appeared, reproductive rights activists began to take to the streets in cities across the country. My 13-year-old daughter, Orli, asked to attend one rally organized by the National Council of Jewish Women. "People who don't have uteruses shouldn't decide," she said to me, simple as that.

One of the rallying cries heard at the marches earlier this spring was, "We won't go back." It's true: America hasn't returned to a pre-Roe past. Instead the country is entering a new era, where people who seek abortions might find their actions criminalized, where providers risk running afoul of the law and where miscarriages potentially become more dangerous. The lives of women may hinge on decisions made by doctors legally required to also consider the presence of fetal cardiac activity. If the fetus is equal before the law to the woman carrying it, what happens then?

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For Robin Marty, author of "Handbook for a Post-Roe America," what she calls "a guide for how to obtain or assist someone in obtaining an abortion — legally or otherwise," it wasn't enough to take to Twitter, the streets or the page to protest dwindling abortion rights. As she writes in her recent guest essay, Robin uprooted her family and moved to Alabama where she joined the staff of the Yellowhammer Fund, an organization that supports funding for people to obtain abortions. Months later, the Yellowhammer Fund purchased the West Alabama Women's Center, the state's biggest abortion clinic, and Robin soon became its director of operations. "With almost half a century of abortion rights dissolving into thin air, it is understandable to want to make a grand gesture," she writes.

But while Robin's decision was dramatic, she says that for those feeling despair — or rage — her brand of activism is only one tactic. In her essay, she offers for those who wish to uphold reproductive rights a slew of options that go far beyond marching. "The focus now must be on tapping that energy and making it sustainable. Small actions every day may well mitigate the harm that many experts predict will occur for women nationally, but it will take an army of supporters to get this done."

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