On revulsion

It Happened to Me: I found an article distasteful!

First, some backstory: Like many millennial women who came of age at the peak of the Purity Wars, I was a single issue voter on abortion for years before I could legally cast a ballot. A vintage “no more wire hangers” button adorned my backpack for all four years of high school; as a college senior, I screamed myself hoarse at the March for Women’s Lives, carrying a KEEP YOUR LAWS OFF MY BODY placard through the streets of Washington.

I was very passionate and very smug — which is to say, I was very 22 years old — but I was also in earnest. The notion that the government might stand between a woman and her bodily autonomy genuinely infuriated me! Also, it was hard not to notice at the time that the loudest voices from the opposing side were also anti-sex education and anti-birth control and overall just seemed a lot more interested in shaming women for having sex than in protecting unborn life.

Fast forward twenty years, and I’ve admittedly mellowed on this issue in certain ways, for various reasons. Some are practical (both the science and stigma surrounding birth control have come a long way since the 1990s), some are political (I preferred the safe/legal/rare framing of the pre-y2k era to the “shout your abortion” 2010s), and some are personal, which is to say, that whole “it’s just a bundle of cells” thing kinda hits different after you’ve been in the infertility trenches and seen the bundle of cells that contains all your hopes and dreams die in a petri dish not once, not twice, but eighteen fucking times.

What hasn’t changed, though, is that I’m still resoundingly on the side of letting women make their own reproductive decisions, and I’m extremely not a fan of using the blunt instrument of the state to restrict them. This is neither a surprise nor a secret; I’ve been writing about it since way before Dobbs prompted the evaporation of abortion rights at the federal level.

All of which is to say, I should be right in the target audience for articles like the anonymous essay that ran in The Argument last week titled “An abortion ban pushed me toward abortion,” written by a mother in Georgia who struggled to get an abortion after her IUD failed. Stories like this have been ubiquitous since the fall of Roe v. Wade and turn on a simple premise: that anti-abortion laws are not just endangering women’s lives or curbing their freedom, but perversely incentivizing more of the thing they’re designed to prevent, including the termination of healthy, wanted pregnancies. The subtext — or in this case, the subhed — is that even when the anti-abortion movement succeeds, it fails: “Is this what the pro-life movement intended?”

The writer of this article reportedly pitched it in exactly these grounds— “If our policies weren’t so illiberal, I very well might have decided to stay pregnant” — and I fully expected to sympathize with her, to mourn with her, and to be outraged on her behalf.

Instead, I was completely repelled, with a ferocity and depth that genuinely shocked me.

I spent some time this weekend trying to figure out why this essay horrified me, and I think it’s this: I don’t believe it. I wish I could — I wanted to! — but I don’t.

Partly it’s the tone of the thing, which reads like an XO Jane confessional married with a scripted political ad: breezy and glib, its pro-choice talking points interspersed with periodic asides for the author to mix her metaphors in a lame attempt at profundity (”It felt less like scheduling a doctor’s appointment and more like planning a heist; mapping out clues in a cold case with so many thumbtacks and red strings”) or make cutesy jokes acknowledging her privilege (”Cards on the table: I’m a white woman living in a major U.S. city with good health care and a matcha-latte budget”.)

But more than that, it’s that the author’s own narrative of events belies at every turn the notion that she might have kept her baby. From the first, that she might be pregnant is treated as a disturbing and unwelcome development; once confirmed, her sole expressed desire is to obtain an abortion. When she does terminate the pregnancy — which, it’s strongly implied, happened well after the second-trimester cutoff beyond which most Americans start to get uneasy about elective abortions — she grieves for the country (”I mourn an alternate reality without extreme abortion laws”) and for the women “who are navigating this system without my good fortune”. For the potential life no longer inside her, she does not spare a single thought.

In short, this isn’t a story about a woman who, as she put it, “very well might have decided to stay pregnant.” It’s a story about a woman who wanted an abortion, and got the abortion she wanted, and then — in order to score political points — opportunistically and disingenuously recast it as something she didn’t want, but that was forced on her by Republicans. Look what you made me do.

That does seem appalling to me — not because of the abortion, but because it’s so dishonest, and cynical, and manipulative. It feels like emotional blackmail dressed up as investigative journalism, with the bizarre, added twist that we have no idea who’s doing the blackmailing or whether she’s telling the truth. The moral framework for this piece is one thing, but there’s also the matter of its credibility, of claims that beg for clarification. (As Leah Libresco Sargent noted, the author seems to misrepresent the Georgia law that allegedly deterred her from carrying her pregnancy to term.) Maybe there’s a reasonable explanation for this, but the anonymous byline makes it impossible to ask for one — or to verify any aspect of her story independently.

To her credit, The Argument founder Jerusalem Demsas is aware of this, and says in an editor’s note that “the decision to grant anonymity — and any criticism — rests with me.” I don’t envy her that responsibility, and I think she’s doing her best to navigate a difficult situation (albeit one of her own creation). But in running interference for the article and its author, as well as scolding those who criticize it in terms she dislikes, Demsas makes herself an obstacle to honest discussion. Yes, social media is what it is and the usual axioms about heat and kitchens apply, but if registering an opinion about an article in The Argument means that its EIC might just prompt her followers to hurl invective at you online for the next 24 hours, a certain number of people are going to reasonably decide that joining the conversation isn’t worth the annoyance.

That’s unfortunate, because more conversation would have probably been a good thing when it came to this piece. I’m not persuaded that it’s actually in the public interest to publish anonymous stories that seem to play fast and loose with the truth in order to score political points, at the expense of needlessly frightening people (or worse, dissuading them from seeking medical care because they’ve been incorrectly informed that doctors will refuse to treat pregnant women with life-threatening conditions.) And certainly, this story will persuade exactly zero pro-lifers to reconsider their positions. At best, it comes off as propaganda; at worst, it reads like a false flag operation intended to make liberal women look like sociopaths, terminating healthy pregnancies out of spite.

But perhaps there’s a version of this story that doesn’t do these things — and that wouldn’t have been so alienating to anyone (read: most people) who thinks abortion should be legally protected but also that it’s serious, and sad. I would have liked to read it.