You Know Us: A Letter from a Clinic Escort
In the wake of the abortion bans, reproductive rights has a new rallying cry
ECOSY
I used to volunteer as a clinic escort in Louisiana. For those who don't know, a clinic escort is someone who helps people attending reproductive health clinics get safely through the crowds of pro-life protesters. I’ll never forget the best thing a protester ever said to me. After stopping him from following a teenage girl he was berating to her car, this dude looked me dead in the eye and said with zero irony: “Your mother should have aborted you.”
In the wake of the most restrictive abortion bans of our modern time, Busy Phillips began the hashtag #YouKnowMe. This hashtag has the potential to become #MeToo for reproductive rights, and operates on a similar premise: If you don't think that this issue affects you and yours, fucking think again.
The numbers on abortion have been around for some time. One in four American women has an abortion before the age of 45. Statistically, you have met one at some point. And yet, somehow, many people in this country continue to believe that this is a problem that only affects some hypothetical subset of Americans they have yet to personally encounter. Poor ones. Slutty ones. Undocumented ones. Coastal elites inexplicably bent on infanticide.
In other words: Women they see as not having anything in common with the women they know.
The people that think only certain "types" of women need abortions tend to share a few traits: They're white, financially stable, culturally conservative. A lot of them are men. They even exist in liberal cities. They feel very comfortable thinking, if not saying: "No one I know. Not my girlfriend. Not my daughter. I just don't know any women who would get themselves into that situation."
I’ve seen this thinking firsthand many times. After clinic escorting, I can say with absolute certainty that there is no such thing as a “type” of person who needs an abortion. I saw every kind of woman at the clinic: From teenaged to middle-aged, single to married, and of every ethnicity. Fifty-nine percent of women who get an abortion already have at least one child, and simply can’t afford another one. The myth of the young, dumb and promiscuous girl gleefully using abortion as birth control is extremely far from the reality.
The numbers on abortion have been around for some time. One in four American women has an abortion before the age of 45. Statistically, you have met one at some point. And yet, somehow, many people in this country continue to believe that this is a problem that only affects some hypothetical subset of Americans they have yet to personally encounter. Poor ones. Slutty ones. Undocumented ones. Coastal elites inexplicably bent on infanticide.
In other words: Women they see as not having anything in common with the women they know.
The people that think only certain "types" of women need abortions tend to share a few traits: They're white, financially stable, culturally conservative. A lot of them are men. They even exist in liberal cities. They feel very comfortable thinking, if not saying: "No one I know. Not my girlfriend. Not my daughter. I just don't know any women who would get themselves into that situation."
I’ve seen this thinking firsthand many times. After clinic escorting, I can say with absolute certainty that there is no such thing as a “type” of person who needs an abortion. I saw every kind of woman at the clinic: From teenaged to middle-aged, single to married, and of every ethnicity. Fifty-nine percent of women who get an abortion already have at least one child, and simply can’t afford another one. The myth of the young, dumb and promiscuous girl gleefully using abortion as birth control is extremely far from the reality.
After clinic escorting, I can say with absolute certainty that there is no such thing as a “type” of person who needs an abortion.
The pro-life protesters were unfortunately not able to grasp that concept. After figuring out that we would literally body-block them when they tried to harass the patients (we weren’t allowed to speak to them, so standing in their way was the best we could do), they quickly turned their abuse on us. These god-fearing folk routinely said the most heinous things possible to us. If a girl had short hair, they'd say she was a lesbian and only didn't like men because she'd been raped as a child. Black women were called race-traitors and berated for supporting the supposed “abortion genocide" against black babies. If a man was escorting, it would be something along the lines of calling him a cuck or child murderer. And me, well, they got creative.
I'm a white cis woman who is just generally blandly wholesome-looking, and thus tend to basically look a lot like the protesters themselves. They created a whole backstory for me that they would recite when they got tired of screaming in my face. I was a good Catholic girl (lol), who had gotten radicalized by higher education (why not), and fell in with these feminazis (darn tootin’), but deep down I loved my family and would someday see the light and settle down to happily raise children of my own.
Essentially, I was too much like the women they knew, and this story was the only way they could explain me. Despite the fact that I am clearly female and thus could also be at risk of an unwanted pregnancy, they literally never even considered that I could have a vested interest in reproductive rights myself. To do what they did, they had to believe that people like them wouldn’t be affected.
This demonstrates the sad necessity of #YouKnowMe. In the national debate on abortion, we often hear stories about women in the most precarious positions, as those are the women who need the right the most. As it should be. These are the women who can’t afford to have a child or to go to a private doctor, who are the most vulnerable to abusive partners and sexual violence. These are the women forced to go to the public clinics that their state legislatures have been regulating out of existence. These are also the women that are the easiest for people in power to decline to care about, because the people in power don’t personally know them. This shouldn’t be the case, but it’s what we have to work with. Thus, the necessity of #YouKnowMe.
You can be a conservative in the South and look at your good Christian daughter and think, "Thank God she’d never get herself pregnant." You can be a liberal in New York or California who looks at Alabama and thinks, "Thank God that's not where I live." There might even be a little voice, deep down, that just wants a break from all the political stress and says, “I'm going to sit this one out. My state is fine." You might think, "I’ll be okay. I can afford a private doctor for myself or my daughter. Let Alabama be as shitty as it wants." If you find yourself thinking that, stop. Because you are dead wrong.
I'm a lawyer and as such, I know just how grave the situation surrounding the right to abortion has become. The constitutional right to abortion has been under attack since Roe v. Wade was decided (see: TRAP laws). Now that we have a majority conservative Supreme Court, multiple states are on a purposeful campaign to get that right abolished once and for all.
Cases that go to the Supreme Court are often very carefully orchestrated for that purpose. Rosa Parks wasn’t just a weary commuter. Such cases are usually part of a wider civil rights effort. These Southern states are creating laws that they know will be challenged and appealed up to the Supreme Court. Now that the court has a conservative majority, they could likely make a definitive ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, thus rendering abortion officially unconstitutional nationwide. In other words, these states are finally shooting their shot, and their dream of a real-life Gilead has a good chance of coming to pass.
I'm a white cis woman who is just generally blandly wholesome-looking, and thus tend to basically look a lot like the protesters themselves. They created a whole backstory for me that they would recite when they got tired of screaming in my face. I was a good Catholic girl (lol), who had gotten radicalized by higher education (why not), and fell in with these feminazis (darn tootin’), but deep down I loved my family and would someday see the light and settle down to happily raise children of my own.
Essentially, I was too much like the women they knew, and this story was the only way they could explain me. Despite the fact that I am clearly female and thus could also be at risk of an unwanted pregnancy, they literally never even considered that I could have a vested interest in reproductive rights myself. To do what they did, they had to believe that people like them wouldn’t be affected.
This demonstrates the sad necessity of #YouKnowMe. In the national debate on abortion, we often hear stories about women in the most precarious positions, as those are the women who need the right the most. As it should be. These are the women who can’t afford to have a child or to go to a private doctor, who are the most vulnerable to abusive partners and sexual violence. These are the women forced to go to the public clinics that their state legislatures have been regulating out of existence. These are also the women that are the easiest for people in power to decline to care about, because the people in power don’t personally know them. This shouldn’t be the case, but it’s what we have to work with. Thus, the necessity of #YouKnowMe.
You can be a conservative in the South and look at your good Christian daughter and think, "Thank God she’d never get herself pregnant." You can be a liberal in New York or California who looks at Alabama and thinks, "Thank God that's not where I live." There might even be a little voice, deep down, that just wants a break from all the political stress and says, “I'm going to sit this one out. My state is fine." You might think, "I’ll be okay. I can afford a private doctor for myself or my daughter. Let Alabama be as shitty as it wants." If you find yourself thinking that, stop. Because you are dead wrong.
I'm a lawyer and as such, I know just how grave the situation surrounding the right to abortion has become. The constitutional right to abortion has been under attack since Roe v. Wade was decided (see: TRAP laws). Now that we have a majority conservative Supreme Court, multiple states are on a purposeful campaign to get that right abolished once and for all.
Cases that go to the Supreme Court are often very carefully orchestrated for that purpose. Rosa Parks wasn’t just a weary commuter. Such cases are usually part of a wider civil rights effort. These Southern states are creating laws that they know will be challenged and appealed up to the Supreme Court. Now that the court has a conservative majority, they could likely make a definitive ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, thus rendering abortion officially unconstitutional nationwide. In other words, these states are finally shooting their shot, and their dream of a real-life Gilead has a good chance of coming to pass.
When you fail to support the right to abortion, you are telling each and every woman that her role as an agent of reproduction is her ultimate purpose.
Abortion has always been available for the privileged. You can literally google a list of anti-choice politicians who have gotten abortions for their mistresses. If I had come home pregnant at 17—let alone pregnant outside of marriage—you can bet my hard-core conservative family would have marched me to the nearest discrete doctor and gotten it dealt with immediately. That’s what people with money have always been able to do. Therefore, it’s hard to tell whether these privileged pro-life legislators truly grasp what a national version of the Alabama bill would mean. If a private doctor is risking life in jail for performing the procedure, you can bet that getting stuff “quietly dealt with” for your daughters and mistresses will no longer be an option. But that shouldn’t matter to the men who created that law—because they only know good girls, right?
To that I say: SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER! Turns out, you know me! Tricked you, didn't I? I’m nothing if not a good girl on paper, just like those pro-life protesters assumed. I’m privileged, white and educated. I'm cis and femme. I'm not a sex worker. I wear glasses and unflattering turtlenecks. And I've been infiltrating your supposedly "dumb sluts who need abortions"-free circles my whole life. GOTCHA, BITCH.
Because it turns out anything can happen—even to good girls raised by Republicans. When I was 17, I was what most red-blooded Americans are at that age: horny and inexperienced. I let some garbage boy I was dating convince me that pulling out was a super solid method of birth control. Needless to say, it is not. I still don’t know if what happened to me later was a miscarriage, or a bad reaction to the Plan B I ultimately took. Either way, while I didn’t have an abortion, I was in a positon where an unwanted pregnancy was fully, undeniably possible. Because at the end of the day, shit happens, even to the Sunday-school-raised daughters of affluent white Republicans.
The privileged people who make these laws don’t seem to realize that there is no sector of society that is immune from unwanted pregnancy. Again: Shit happens. No amount of privilege or preparation can change that. And if there’s one thing humans have undeniably continued to do throughout history, it’s fuck and make more of us. So riddle me this, Mr. Alabama Legislator: Do you really think your god-fearing daughter would have done better than me? Do you think her abstinence-only sex ed taught her about precum? That your little girl—raised in a culture so patriarchal that a small collection of cells is more valued than her right to control her body—can't be talked into sex without a condom? That she would have stood up to an erect and aggressive teenage boy who insisted he knew better?
Are you sure enough of that to bet her future on it?
Are you sure enough that she’s completely safe from anyone who could sexually assault her?
The men making these laws have put no more real thought into the potential consequences for the women they know than that pro-life protestor put into the wildly nonsensical statement that he wished my mother had aborted me.
These laws are not about a right to life. They are about controlling women. There are a million hypocrisies within the “pro-life” movement (where were they for Black Lives Matter?), and they all point to the same thing: it’s not about being pro-life. It’s about being anti-choice. Specifically, it's about being anti-women’s choice. You may think you’re not hurting the women you know. But supporting or failing to fight an anti-choice agenda means dehumanizing every woman you have ever met. When you fail to support the right to abortion, you are telling each and every woman that her role as an agent of reproduction is her ultimate purpose. You are telling her that the capabilities of her uterus are more important than the capabilities of her mind.
Try saying that to the face of someone you love. Say it. I dare you. Say it to your sister. Say it to your mother. Say it to your daughter. Say it to your girlfriend. Say it to that girl at work you have a crush on. Say it to a stranger on the street. Because when you fail to fight this ban, that’s what you are telling all women about what they’re worth.
So to whoever needs to hear it: #YouKnowMe. And you are fucking me the fuck over.
To that I say: SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER! Turns out, you know me! Tricked you, didn't I? I’m nothing if not a good girl on paper, just like those pro-life protesters assumed. I’m privileged, white and educated. I'm cis and femme. I'm not a sex worker. I wear glasses and unflattering turtlenecks. And I've been infiltrating your supposedly "dumb sluts who need abortions"-free circles my whole life. GOTCHA, BITCH.
Because it turns out anything can happen—even to good girls raised by Republicans. When I was 17, I was what most red-blooded Americans are at that age: horny and inexperienced. I let some garbage boy I was dating convince me that pulling out was a super solid method of birth control. Needless to say, it is not. I still don’t know if what happened to me later was a miscarriage, or a bad reaction to the Plan B I ultimately took. Either way, while I didn’t have an abortion, I was in a positon where an unwanted pregnancy was fully, undeniably possible. Because at the end of the day, shit happens, even to the Sunday-school-raised daughters of affluent white Republicans.
The privileged people who make these laws don’t seem to realize that there is no sector of society that is immune from unwanted pregnancy. Again: Shit happens. No amount of privilege or preparation can change that. And if there’s one thing humans have undeniably continued to do throughout history, it’s fuck and make more of us. So riddle me this, Mr. Alabama Legislator: Do you really think your god-fearing daughter would have done better than me? Do you think her abstinence-only sex ed taught her about precum? That your little girl—raised in a culture so patriarchal that a small collection of cells is more valued than her right to control her body—can't be talked into sex without a condom? That she would have stood up to an erect and aggressive teenage boy who insisted he knew better?
Are you sure enough of that to bet her future on it?
Are you sure enough that she’s completely safe from anyone who could sexually assault her?
The men making these laws have put no more real thought into the potential consequences for the women they know than that pro-life protestor put into the wildly nonsensical statement that he wished my mother had aborted me.
These laws are not about a right to life. They are about controlling women. There are a million hypocrisies within the “pro-life” movement (where were they for Black Lives Matter?), and they all point to the same thing: it’s not about being pro-life. It’s about being anti-choice. Specifically, it's about being anti-women’s choice. You may think you’re not hurting the women you know. But supporting or failing to fight an anti-choice agenda means dehumanizing every woman you have ever met. When you fail to support the right to abortion, you are telling each and every woman that her role as an agent of reproduction is her ultimate purpose. You are telling her that the capabilities of her uterus are more important than the capabilities of her mind.
Try saying that to the face of someone you love. Say it. I dare you. Say it to your sister. Say it to your mother. Say it to your daughter. Say it to your girlfriend. Say it to that girl at work you have a crush on. Say it to a stranger on the street. Because when you fail to fight this ban, that’s what you are telling all women about what they’re worth.
So to whoever needs to hear it: #YouKnowMe. And you are fucking me the fuck over.
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