With reproductive freedom experiencing unprecedented rollbacks in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, women’s bodily autonomy and lives are under attack. Now is the time to educate ourselves about the implications of legislation already passed and to take action to make sure that we protect our hard-won rights and not further regress.
In a recent panel at Woodstock Bookfest, “Women’s Rights in Post-Roe America,” I asked three award-winning writers to share their valuable perspectives and visions of a path forward: Jessica Valenti, one of the leading journalists reporting on the state of abortion rights in the U.S. with her newsletter Abortion, Every Day and her new New York Times bestselling book Abortion. Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win; Clara Bingham, former journalist and political insider and author of The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973; and Jamia Wilson, social impact strategist, Executive Editor of Random House, and author of Make Good Trouble and This Book Is Feminist among others.
Marianne Schnall: Jessica, in the wake of the Dobbs decision in 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade, you have been doing such critical, comprehensive, valuable reporting on what is actually happening to reproductive rights and women’s health care across this country, which of course you also cover in your new book. Can you give us your assessment of where we are today? What concerns you most?
Jessica Valenti: That’s such a hard question because there is so much going on. It’s a constant onslaught, which is very much the point. The idea is to make us completely overwhelmed, completely exhausted. It feels like There’s nothing that we can do about it. that’s part of the reason that I started the newsletter, was to hopefully give people a little order in the middle of the chaos. So I guess I can tell you what I’m most worried about this past week. What I’m most worried about is the criminalization of miscarriage patients.
I don’t know if anyone saw this story—you probably have not because it has not been covered by any mainstream outlet—but a young woman in Georgia was arrested for how she disposed of her miscarriage. Her mugshot was in the local Georgia crime pages. They just dropped those charges, thank goodness. But that was because of a public backlash that was marked mostly online through viral TikToks, things like that.
The criminalization is bad enough, but it’s the normalization that really, really keeps me up at night. The fact that this was not covered in mainstream outlets, the fact that this is being treated like business as usual. And that is really the thing that I worry about the most: that this is just normal for a lot of people, and it’s become normal for the people in power. And it’s become normal for newsrooms.
that’s not to say There’s not hope. I think that there is. The fact that these charges were dropped, the fact that when people do find out about what is happening locally, they do take action and change is able to happen—I think that’s amazing. But people can’t do that if they don’t know, right? that’s why I focus so much on media outlets and local and national coverage. So that’s my big thing right now: criminalization and media coverage.
“It’s life or death. And, therefore, it’s constitutional. Do we have the same rights that men have? In the banned states, obviously we don’t. And the question is: when are people going to fully wake up?” —Clara Bingham
Marianne Schnall: Clara, you have written extensively about the movement for women’s rights, including your book The Movement, which depicts the ways in which women’s liberation transformed America. How do you contextualize what is happening now within the long arc and struggle for equality?
Clara Bingham: I look back at these heroes of the Second Wave [of feminism] and look for jewels of wisdom from them. One of them is Pauli Murray, who I consider the legal legal architect of the Second Wave, wrote a brilliant brief that was published in GW Law Journal in 1965, right after the Civil Rights Act was passed, called “Jane Crow and the Law.” And that is what we’re living through now. What she did in that legal journal was describe all the different laws in America that were very different for women than men. And they were the kind of things that eventually Ruth Bader Ginsburg would tackle in the Supreme Court. But we now have women in banned states who are living under Jane Crow.
I feel that it’s so important now for people to know what it was like then. And it’s too easy for women who don’t live in [abortion ban] states to kind of shrug it off and think, “Oh, it’s not my problem.” Or, “They can always travel.” Just remember that in 1973, when Roe was passed, a million women a year were getting illegal abortions in America and risking their lives. We don’t know the exact number, but between 1000 and 5,000 women were dying because of this.
Every single day we’re going back to Jane Crow, and we’re going back to our humanity not being respected. We are no longer first-class citizens in banned states.
We have to look at what happened in the second wave and organize—and organize legally. There were a few cases that never made it to the Supreme Court. The most important one, I think, was Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz, which was a New York State class action lawsuit, and 350 women signed onto it. The idea was to confront the constitutionality of abortion laws under the 14th Amendment. That was really about liberty, not privacy, which is what Roe was eventually decided on. And, unfortunately, it became moot because in April 1970, the New York State legislature legalized abortion.
I do feel like the only chance we really have in terms of constitutionality is with massive class actions that prove that abortion bans are constitutionally illegal based on the 14th amendment. This has to be about life and liberty. And that was, of course, the achilles heel of the Roe case. that’s why it was always vulnerable ever since it passed in 1973. The right was very strategic; they knew it was vulnerable and they knew how to kill it over time. And so we have to be equally as strategic legally and figure out what Bill is going to be the one that will thread that needle. I can’t tell you which one it is, but I’m hoping it may be bubbling up now, because there are a lot of them going on. The Center for Reproductive Rights is doing a heroic job of supporting cases all over the country.
We need to look at things like that: how to build coalitions and how to legally create massive class actions that will have a huge impact and move millions of people to try to [create] change.
Marianne Schnall: Jamia, your new book is titled Make Good Trouble inspired by civil rights activist and congressman John Lewis’s call to challenge injustice and explore famous moments of global activism throughout history with more than 70 narrative stories. What do you think it means in this moment to “make good trouble”?
Jamia Wilson: This book—which is for middle grade readers, but is also for readers of all ages who like illustrated books and history—is because I have given a lot of thought to, as a woman, when girls start to lose their confidence when girls are gaslit into questioning their feelings of self-dignity, self-determination, and sovereignty.
I grew up in a patriarchal church system, and so I’m still a very spiritual person—I identify as a Christian mystic. But I very much started to realize, when I started to question and I started to question right and wrong, it happened actually within the church that was supposed to be guiding my own sense of understanding what those values are.
And where I first became aware of the issue of abortion was when I was growing up as an American expatriate in Saudi Arabia during a very different time—this was not when people could go to Saudi Arabia on tourism—and I was going to underground Sunday School. And I went to my liberal, Black, Southern pragmatist parents, always Democrats, and said, “Today at Sunday School they were talking about abortion. What is that?” At Sunday School they were telling us that these people who get abortions and the people who facilitate them are terrible people. And I came with all this rhetoric, and my mother sat me down with a cup of lemon tea and said, “There are people you love who've had abortions. Here are the reasons, these are the systems in our society and the reasons why they've had to have these abortions. And you absolutely believe in access to abortion, and you can still be a Christian.”
Making good trouble is being unafraid to speak truth to power and to speak about what you know is true. So when I started to learn that sometimes that wasn't so welcome in a lot of spaces—to be a cycle breaker or truth teller or scapegoat—it’s made me really identify with that younger part of myself and the treatment I experienced in the church and other spaces because I would speak out.
When Representative Lewis said, “Make good trouble, necessary trouble,” as he was about to transition from this world, I thought about how he got started doing this work when he was 13 years old and what would it be like if young people never lost that sense of being entitled to the dignity of knowing their truth, and knowing that we don’t have to inherit a world and just accept it as it is? We can continue to fight for what we know is right for the next generations to thrive.
And so that got me really curious about where in the world has that happened before and what are the movements that we can learn from the mistakes people made? What are the ways in which people used youth activism in bad ways? So, I engage Hitler youth in this book as well as talk about the people who were countering it, like the Alweiss Pirates and the Jazz Swing Kids, to show how we have to be vigilant about what it means to speak our truth together and also to hold each other accountable.
This is a playbook for young people to look at ways people make good trouble and how, on my own behalf, can I make good trouble in my local community and in a global context?
“I don’t think people necessarily understand just how endangered abortion access is across the country.” —Jessica Valenti
Marianne Schnall: Part of activism right now is being informed, so Jessica, given how in the weeds you are, what are some stories or pieces of legislation you’ve covered that you think have been overlooked by the mainstream media, but that we should all know about?
Jessica Valenti: First and foremost, equal protection bills are literally bills that would charge abortion patients as murderers with homicide. And in a lot of these states, that could mean the death penalty. And we’ve sort of been told that these are extremists, these are outlier legislators who are doing this. But some of these bills have two dozen co-sponsors
And we’re not talking about them in that way. In Georgia, I think they just killed this bill 441, when the Associated Press covered it, they covered it as a total abortion ban. There was no mention of the punishment piece. And that is very much what they want. They want no one to really understand what these bills would actually do in practice.
And the other thing I wanted to say about illegal abortions is, thank goodness, the one thing that has changed is that self-managed abortions are so much safer. we’re in a position where people don’t need to get illegal procedural abortions for the most part. Abortion medication really has changed the game in this really incredible way, and that’s why you're seeing so many attacks on the pills specifically.
The anti-abortion movement right now is also putting so much energy, policy effort, and legislative effort into young people—not for what's going to happen with young people tomorrow, but what young people are going to turn into 20 or 30 years from now. There’s a legislative trend I’ve been following called the Baby Olivia Bill, and there are about 15 states that are considering it, and two or three states have already passed it. It would force an anti-abortion propaganda video into public school classrooms, and it would force it into science and health classrooms, because unlike sex ed, which you can opt out of, you can’t opt your kid out of science and health, right? And so they are thinking so strategically about this, and they’re trying to completely overhaul the national educational guidelines to teach that personhood begins at conception.
And the reason they’re doing that is that they know that young people are the most pro-choice demographic in the country. They know that they need to intervene as early as possible. And they also know that, unfortunately, the mainstream pro-choice movement takes young people's support for granted. We sort of think that young people are always going to support abortion rights. that’s not true if you have legislation like this, if you have the really insidious cultural campaign that’s been happening on TikTok and Instagram reels, they are everywhere.
So those are two big things I’m thinking about: what they’re doing for the next generation and the way they are advancing extremism without anyone noticing.
I don’t think people necessarily understand just how endangered abortion access is across the country. Just to give an example: the Trump administration could start enforcing something called the Comstock Act. And that would make it illegal to ship abortion medication anywhere. Even in New York, 65% of abortions are done using medication. So overnight, even for New York, this would end up being an informal abortion ban.
I do think we are very, very close to getting to a point where every single person in this country is going to be touched in some way by an abortion ban. Whether it’s because someone they knew was denied care or because they need to wait three months for a pap smear in New York because all of the OB-GYNs are busy helping other people. I do think that we are not very far off from this being an issue that touches everyone.
Marianne Schnall: There’s so much that’s happening that it’s hard to contextualize and track. There are certain things that happen that I only learned from clicking on one of your Instagram stories, like what happened with Title X this past week.
Jessica Valenti: Yeah, Title X, they cut $35 million for birth control for poor people. And this is what I try to explain in the newsletter. it’s like they don’t need to pass a law that says birth control is illegal in order to make birth control impossible to get, right? They can say, “Well, we didn't pass any laws that said birth control was illegal. we’re just going to make sure that first no poor people can get it, then teenagers can’t get it. Then we’re going to say it’s really bad for you, so you're going to need to go to like three doctors.” they’re doing this slow chipping away approach in the same way that we saw with abortion rights.
Marianne Schnall: Clara, your book The Movement specifically covers the ten years leading up to the Roe v. Wade decision. Are there any lessons you think feminists today can learn from those who lived before Roe and fought for it as we adjust to (and resist) life after Roe?
Clara Bingham: Definitely organizing, organizing, organizing. The second wave was essentially a perfect storm of activism, because so many of the women who were involved in the movement had been involved in either or both the civil rights movement in the South and the anti-Vietnam War movement. And so many of them [knew] how to coalition build, how to consciousness raise. They had hundreds and hundreds of consciousness raising groups all over the country. And by the time these women realized that their comrades in arms were really sexist and they broke off on their own, they had the skills to make change.
And so we need to do that same thing. I think it’s so important to coalition build. We now have such a serious enemy that we can all coalesce against. I’m hoping that will help everyone get over whatever our differences are, so that millions of women and men can work together. that’s, I think, our real hope.
Marianne Schnall: Jamia, what can we learn from stories you uncovered in your book that can give us energy and direction today? While I’m sure all of the stories are inspiring, are there any in particular that you think impart a lesson that’s particularly resonant for this moment in time?
Jamia Wilson: I have learned so much. What I found was these stories that we should all know, that we should have all been taught about in school, that can really help us find a way forward. Because sometimes we feel like we need to invent something when there are already humans who've tried things, done things, that we can learn and build on, or also innovate and iterate on our own behalf.
One example is the beautiful story of Bessie Watson, who was a girl bagpiper in the UK, who had been ill and had tuberculosis in her family and had to live a bit of a sheltered existence. But she was so inspired by Emily Pankhurst and the suffragists that she would go and play outside of the prison while these women were being tortured and locked up and play them songs. After school, she would race there to play her bagpipes.
That teaches us we don’t always have to all do the same thing. There are people who use their art, their voices, their music, their faith, their community, their ability to bring people together, their ability to recognize patterns and share them with other people— whatever it is we each have, we can be expansive and not in scarcity. We can come together and realize that we don’t have to sort of be fighting over who has control of the message. We have enough problems to solve; we need all the strengths to fix them.
Another example is Standing Rock and the young people water protectors from First Nations community who were doing a lot of things: marching, helping the elders in the community tend their gardens on those lands, helping to support the traditions and protection of the traditional ways, guarding with horses, doing the work that their elders and foreparents had done before to guard the community in their native ways.
We can learn a lot from those stories about the shared threads of the things that tend to work, and I think that’s mutual aid, organizing, action, cultural protests. I think a big part of this, too, is about bridge building and coalitions.
One of the things I am most passionate about having grown up in Saudi Arabia during the time I did was I was really raised to really see the connections between people. And I’ve grown a passion for languages, and I’ve often thought the way we could really radically take over this world is if Americans were pushed to learn more than one language in school.
The fact that I understand the French language and speak it in an okay way, knowing that language helps me understand the movements, it helps me understand the people. It helps me understand why when Dobbs dropped, I was actually supposed to fly to Paris the next day, and I felt a little guilty. I thought, “Oh, maybe I need to fight here.” And my French activist friend said, “No, you're coming here to our march.” And those French feminists shut down downtown Paris for us that day. they’re texting me every day now being like, “When are you guys going to shut it all down? “
This is the anniversary of their movement, where over 300 French women came together and said they had abortions, and it changed their country and changed their world. So I just wanted to share that, too, to say that people have always been sharing across these borders, that were created by men, sharing the tools, sharing across our languages, and using things together.
So I want to also put forth the idea of a commons for the next generation, to say, “You may be told There’s a division between you and the other, but that’s imaginary. And what would it be like if we actually came together?” There’s something I grew up with in Saudi Arabia that I think might come from a proverb there, which is that it’s easy to break one stick, but if you have a bundle of sticks, you can’t break it. So these stories together—the youth activism, even though they happen in different times of space—these are a bundle of sticks that show young people that There’s always been a beating pulse of courage and community and connection. And if we lean toward that, they will always give us the next step toward good.
“The way that these laws are being written, the fact that her humanity is being discussed as if it’s a political talking point, this is what kills me. It’s about our very personhood and humanity.” —Jessica Valenti
Marianne Schnall: we’ve been discussing the various political consequences of this moment in time, but just to clearly articulate it: what is truly at stake if we don’t proactively reverse this trend and direction that we’re headed in for our daughters and for future generations to come?
Jessica Valenti: My 14-year-old is in the room so, obviously, I think about this quite a lot and what this means for her generation. It’s not just the right to abortion in banned states, but in every state, the right to birth control is already very much at risk. I think what's at stake is the ability not to be criminalized for negative pregnancy outcomes, whether it’s a miscarriage, a stillbirth—a lot of these laws are opening the door to investigations of negative pregnancy outcomes.
But in the broader sense, it’s that their world’s getting smaller and their humanity is at stake. My daughter's 14 and she’ll go to college in a couple of years, but she's not going to apply to colleges in half the states in the country. Her world has gotten smaller as a result of these laws.
The way that these laws are being written, the fact that her humanity is being discussed as if it’s a political talking point, this is what kills me. The fact that our personhood is being discussed in courtrooms. When emergency abortion was in front of the Supreme Court, there was a moment in the oral arguments where they were discussing how many organs would be acceptable for a woman to lose before the state should be required to give her an abortion. I mean, literally, that’s where we’re at. And so for me, we’re already there. it’s about our very personhood and humanity.
Jamia Wilson: One thing that really strikes me is there are countries in this world where the pro-life movement is the movement that is about choice. So they’re surprised when they hear the framing of pro-life being used to dominate and control women's bodies, because pro-life is about our lives. And I think about this a lot because I think that the only choice we have if we lose these rights is death.
I was thinking about how I live with chronic illnesses and I’ve had to deal with getting care as a Black woman in our culture and society. And let me tell you, that’s a whole other conversation that we can have, but when I think about the dehumanizing parts of that and the reality that There’s already pattern and precedence for criminalizing women who look like me and using this as another way to disenfranchise us as voters, and also to kill us when we have one of the highest maternal death rates in the world for Black women, it gets very distressing for me to think that this is actually about killing us.
I lost my mother to uterine cancer and I have had to have D&Cs as it relates to my own genetic relationship with the same illness. And when I think about the fact that there are certain states that would want me to have to take pregnancy tests if I have to have a D&C to save my life or to do a screening, states that I was born in, that’s really distressing to me. So I really want to say that the stakes are life or death.
Clara Bingham: I was going to say the same thing: it’s life or death. And so, therefore it’s constitutional. Do we have the same rights that men have? In the banned states, obviously we don’t. And the question is: when are people going to fully wake up? As Jessica has pointed out in her amazing book, the numbers are with us. The majority of Republicans believe in choice. And so it’s really a question of harnessing our political power and our legal power and doing so on parallel tracks.
I also think there will be a wake up as the trickle down effect begins to take place, which already has happened in terms of maternal deaths, which are happening, but also the fact that, for example, healthcare for everyone is going to start to be impacted. In the state of Idaho, there is only one high-risk OB-GYN who works in Boise, Idaho. that’s it. So if you have a high-risk pregnancy, no luck for you. Also, the numbers of residents applying for medical schools in banned states has dropped by 20%. So this is going to start affecting everybody, men and women and women, regardless of what your religious beliefs are.
So, if any of these laws that Jessica just talked about actually get passed, There’s going to be a major backlash. I do think that what is at stake right now is everything. And it’s going to be about getting the word out, organizing, and fighting.
Marianne Schnall: How can we engage more men on this issue?
Jamia Wilson: What I love is that there are men who are supporting people who are doing this work in myriad ways, and I think that’s really important. The other thing I would say is, I used to teach gender studies at John Jay in the city, and I had a lot of undergrads who would come in, and some of the men who would come into my class would be, you know, “I’m gonna take this feminist elective to challenge”—they wanted to be “debate me bros” as I call it throughout the whole semester. So we would have these conversations in class. I would say, “If you can argue your point to me well, you'll still get a good grade, even if we disagree.” And what I learned was that a lot of the people who came in were actually really misinformed about the realities of abortion, what the laws are, what they aren’t. They were actually victims of an education system that had been taken over by misinformation and disinformation.
So rather than shaming them, it was actually about getting into conversations and sharing stories and data, showing them documentaries, giving them books like Jessica’s to read and to debate about and talk about. And the majority of those people at the end of the class realized that ultimately most people agree that we should have the right to make our own medical decisions with ourselves and our conscience, and also have constitutional equality, which we do not have as women in this country. So I want to share that because what I really learned with that was that shaming is not an effective tactic for us, nor is it strategic, nor is it kind.
What I learned is if you really get curious about how people came to these conclusions and educate them about the realities of how these policies impact people in their lives, it actually moves them.
And the last thing I’ll say about men, and I’m speaking specifically about the community I grew up with in North Carolina, there are men in my family who really had a problem with the fact that I was working at Planned Parenthood. But some of those men, when I took them to a clinic and they saw women being harassed on the way to get care, became very pro-choice. So I also believe that it’s important for us to build those bridges and to connect with people and create the invitation to help people grow on their own behalf, and not make assumptions that people don’t want to build and grow with us.
Jessica Valenti: I think that you hit on something really important: that we have an entry point even with more moderate men, which is this idea of men as protectors. we’re in a moment when women are dying, women are going septic. If you consider yourself a protector of the women in your life, this is a way that you can show up. I think that that is a really terrific entry point.
The second thing is, I’ve heard from a lot of men who are interested and want to get involved, but they’re afraid of mansplaining. they’re afraid of taking up too much space. And what I tell them is that’ll probably happen. And you sort of have to deal with the discomfort of that, right? Like, show up anyway. Someone is going to say, “you're taking up too much space,” and that’s fine, because you're there. We need your presence, and it’s important.
“Engage your time, talent or treasure—or all three if you have them. Share your stories and uplift the stories of others as well. Because the research also shows that abortion storytelling is one of the most effective ways to move hearts and minds on this issue.” —Jamia Wilson
Marianne Schnall: My last question to everyone is: what is your call to action and what advice do you have on creating change, particularly in a moment like this?
Jessica Valenti: I would say just be in the room, and I’ll explain what I mean by that. A few months ago, right around the time that Florida passed its six week abortion ban, I went down to the state to meet with some abortion providers and tour clinics and meet with the folks who were doing the amendment for the ballot measure campaign. I was doing a tour of this independent clinic, and because the six week ban had just passed, it was very, very empty. The waiting room was empty, the exam rooms were empty.
Then they took us all the way to the back of the building, this windowless room, and when we walked in, there were a dozen or more young women all wearing headsets, all on the phone, booking bus tickets, making hotel accommodations, talking to people about how they could get out of state for that. There was one woman who was texting with a patient who had never been on a plane before to give her the emotional support that she needed to get out of state.
Of all the things I’ve been lucky enough to see in this work, that got me immediately really emotional. And it really struck me because it was such a good reminder that as terrible as things are every single day, in every single community in every single state, there are rooms full of women and there are rooms full of activists who are working their asses off, who are using their time, their money, their energy to make sure that if someone needs care, that they can get it, whether or not we see it. That is something that gives me a tremendous amount of hope. So I would say just find a room and be in it.
Jamia Wilson: Engage your time, talent or treasure or all three if you have them. If you can donate to local abortion funds or those in states with the most dire laws, do that. Protect the most vulnerable. If you can be a clinic escort and stand in front of clinics and help protect people who are getting care, do that. And if you can support organizations who are doing this work, who are facing challenges to funding like never before, do that.
Share your stories and uplift the stories of others as well. Because the research also shows that abortion storytelling is one of the most effective ways to move hearts and minds on this issue. So now that we’re dealing with algorithmic challenges and blocks to information, it’s also really important that we’re getting these messages out here with all the tools we have at our disposal.
Clara Bingham: I, of course, agree with all of these. I would add two things. One way to share your stories is to subscribe to news outlets. And I think we need to pay for our news right now. We need to pay for local news. We need to pay for real national news. We need to pay for Jessica's incredible work, and pay for the voices that are helping us amplify these stories. it’s all about stories. it’s all about humanizing the impact of these laws.
I also think donating and working for any of these abortion funds, and there are plenty in New York that are also helping others, is so important. But also being politically active. I mean, the fact that Susan Crawford just won in Wisconsin is incredibly important. I have multiple Zooms with these incredible grass grassroots women who are writing letters for campaigns all across the country. And just doing that from wherever you are, having any kind of political engagement, is both incredibly cathartic, let's face it, and also makes a difference. We all can make a difference if we do one or two things that we are capable of doing.
The above panel discussion has been edited for clarity and length.
Portions of this conversation appeared at Ms. Magazine.
Watch the full conversation below or click here.
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Marianne Schnall is a widely-published interviewer and journalist and author of What Will It Take to Make a Woman President?, Leading the Way, and Dare to Be You: Inspirational Advice for Girls. She is also the founder of Feminist.com and What Will It Take Movements and the host of the podcast ShiftMakers.
You can find out more about her work and writings at www.marianneschnall.com.