Whatever May Come: Here's How I'm Preparing for the Supreme Court's Abortion Ruling

This week is the 49th Anniversary of the decision by the Supreme Court which asserted that pregnant people have a constitutionally protected right to an abortion. By the end of this term, the Court will rule on an abortion case from Mississippi that might overturn Roe. Many state legislatures have put laws (aka “trigger laws” a rightfully scary term for an incredibly scary prospect) in place just waiting for a day the Supreme Court decides there is no constitutional right to abortion, and leaves the matter to each individual state.

If the justices accept Mississippi’s argument, about half the country could see abortion bans implemented pretty quickly.

This moment serves as a reminder that perhaps one of the most deeply embedded mythologies of American exceptionalism is that this is a nation of ever-expanding access to rights. 

The story goes: Undoubtedly, there have been times when this was a country in which some people’s rights were violated, and badly, but we are also a nation always striving toward social progress, and look how far we’ve come. Undoubtedly, we still have a way to go, but we had a Black president, didn’t we? Women and non-white, non-male, non-landowners can vote (in theory, if not in practice), can’t they? The gays can marry! 

All signs point in the same direction. Progress. 

The cracks in the narrative splintered deeper and deeper during the Trump Presidency, when a common refrain from the mouths of moderates and liberals was, “this is not the America I know.” For anyone attuned to structural and systemic injustice this rang offensively hollow, and read as a marker of the willful ignorance embedded in liberalism. Though the arc of progress might indeed bend toward justice, it’s difficult to imagine the path as anything but serpentine.  

Since the Inauguration of Joe Biden happened under the shadow of an attempted coup last year, I often find myself searching for new emotional anchors that can help me to continue my activist work, knowing that rather than a straight path ahead, we will often have to fight the same battles repeatedly. It all feels more like a pendulum, and right now, we are clearly on the down swing. 

How do we sustain ourselves, and keep our eyes focused ahead, on the potential upswing, on the moment right for us to jump off and the swing, and head in the direction of justice, as we swing backwards? The physics of this endeavor are as nauseating as they sound. 

Yet, this is the question so many of us who are organizers and movement strategists ask ourselves every day. I ask myself a version of it at least once a week. 

In her book, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope bell hooks writes, “Individuals from marginalized groups, whether victimized by dysfunctional families or by political systems of domination, often find their way to freedom by heeding the call of prophetic imaginations.” This serves as an interesting prompt for us,  all who need to prepare for bad news. But what to do if you are too tightly wound from the stress and anxiety of it all? How can we access our imagination, such that it can serve its liberatory function?

In her book, Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed writes on what it means to build and then dwell inside the world of our prophetic imaginations. In an interview in the Paris Review, Ahmed talks about “letting loose.”

“To let loose is to express yourself. It can even be about losing your temper. But it can also just mean to loosen one’s hold. Lauren Berlant taught me a lot about loosening a hold on things. They had an incredible way of creating room in the description of an attachment to something, which I think is really hard to do. And my aunt, Gulzar Bano, who is a feminist poet, taught me something, too. She wrote poems that were angry, on one level, but also very, very loving…”

“In an interview with Adrienne Rich, [Audre] Lorde talked about writing [the poem ‘Power’] after stopping the car because she heard about the acquittal of a white police officer for the murder of a Black child. She had to stop the car, she said, otherwise she was going to have an accident. She had to stop the car, and a poem came out. She had to stop the car to get the poem out. That’s the connection, I think, between my auntie, and Lauren, and Audre—the absolute willingness to register the impact of violence, so that that registering is also the creation of a possibility for being otherwise.”

To take this approach, perhaps our work now, in the face of impending bad news, whether on the matter of abortion access, or voting rights, or immigration, or the unrelenting pandemic in which the political calculus has rendered life, particularly those that are ill, disabled, poor, queer, people of color, second in value to profit margins for businesses.

So, as we mark the annniversaries of rights that were hard fought, rights that were supposed to be the starting line and not the finish line, let us loosen our grip, and see what possibilities it affords us. 

Here are some of my own attempts at loosening my hold:

• Setting down some of my rage at the white feminist movement leaders who constantly sacrifice(d) the rights of those more vulnerable than them to protect their own right to an abortion, most narrowly imagined as a legal right, leaving it inaccessible to most people. This setting down is not exactly forgiveness, but it’s also no longer seething anger. It is a determined stance to keep moving ahead, looking to the women of color leaders who are my comrades and co-conspirators. I will build what I seek — alongside those to whom I am accountable and with whom I am aligned. 

• Refusing to talk, or think, about abortion without talking about the most expansive understanding of what it means to control your own body, fertility, and family. For me, this is about queer liberation and family formation. It is about justice for all those who are disabled, whose very lives are negotiated without attention to our shared humanity, by liberals and conservatives alike. It is about racial justice, and Black liberation, knowing that anytime something is made illegal, it is Black people who will be targeted for criminalization first, and worst. This view of abortion is expansive, it is breathtakingly expansive. It is vital, and it is non-negotiable.

• Remembering that I am powerful, and moreover, we who believe in reproductive justice are powerful beyond measure. Together we raise and distribute mutual aid across beautiful webs that span communities through the country, coast to coast to coast. We have never cowered at a political loss. We have helped each other, we have chained ourselves to things, we have written and forged new ways of fighting back and making the world safe for each other. This is dignity, and it is not on the docket for the Supreme Court’s consideration. 

As we each begin to steel our spines for worst case scenarios, I think we have already made our map for the road ahead. I invite each of you, also gripping hard to navigate the tense times ahead, to think about what might you might loosen your grip on, and how that might incite new understandings, offer new perspectives, and ultimately, hopefully, sustain you for the work to come.