Thank you to all my subscribers, and for all the positive feedback, y’all are truly wonderful!
Quick Reminder: I divide the newsletter into 3 sections:
Social Impact Insights
Surf Synthesis
Tarot Inspiration
Social Impact Insights: Dobbs/Roe and the Next 50 Years
I have said a few times that an ongoing theme of this newsletter is Female Rage. Both because in any given cultural moment, there are abundant reasons to feel a collective Female Rage, and because there is great power in harnessing, channeling, and leveraging it. It is truly a fire that cannot and will not be contained. In fact, fear of this very power is what has fed the impulse to control women and girls and people who step outside of traditional gender norms—our desires, our bodies, and our destinies—for thousands of years across cultures and regions.
Almost everyone I encounter is feeling so devastated and heavy over the Dobbs/Roe ruling, and with good reason. I don’t usually remember my dreams past the first bit of waking up, but I had a dream a month ago about being at DC’s Union Station, getting on a train, and a young girl nearby—surrounded by her family—needed an abortion, but couldn’t get one. I was unable to help, kept away by an invisible wall and instead drifted onto my own train headed in the opposite direction, knowing her parents couldn’t help her either. I feel sick every time that dream comes back to me. People talk a lot about the unsafe abortions that are to come. And of course that’s horrible. And yet for me, as a woman who has never wanted children, the thought of all those forced pregnancies just stops me in my tracks.
I’m generally not a fan of body horror as a film genre (in fact, I don’t like horror at all), but one of the films that most made an impression on me last year was Titane, the 2021 Cannes Palme d’Or winner by French director Julia Ducournau. It’s about a dangerous young woman—a serial killer—who is drawn to have sex with cars, and becomes pregnant. I watched most of it through splayed fingers over my eyes, but I’ve thought about it a lot over the last year and especially since the leak of the draft decision. (See, leak? The draft decision leaked and so do car engines! Welcome to my gallows humor.) If you can tolerate it, check out this film as a foreshadowing and a commentary on our current times.
Here are my Diagnostics on how we ended up here. Warning: I am usually a positive and optimistic person, but these next few paragraphs are blistering:
We have known this was coming for 30 years, since the Casey decision in 1992. While Casey affirmed the overall principle of Roe, it changed the legal standard, and opened the door to a tidal wave of restrictive state and local laws that have made abortion more and more difficult to obtain over the last 15-20 years. With 30 years of notice, you might think our progressive movements and the Democratic Party would have taken the lead on a long-term vision and solutions. And there have been elements in play. A federal bill called the Freedom of Choice Act, as it was called in the 90s, and these days another version of it, the Women’s Health Protection Act. Unfortunately, mainstream feminist groups have never partnered with the women’s health, racial justice, criminal justice, reproductive justice, democracy, and abortion access fields to organize and prioritize these bills with a long-term inclusive strategy to leverage power and get them passed/signed into law.
Even as these large national abortion rights organizations have brought in millions more dollars over the last few decades as the Casey restrictions have mounted, they have narrowed their strategy to focus on inside-the-Beltway tactics, relying on cozy relationships with elected officials and policymakers to hold the line and do the least. They’ve also focused on defensive litigation strategies that attacked each incremental limitation on access to abortion and pregnancy prevention. So they gave their power away in failing to set a bold affirmative long-term vision that could build political will and power with a wide and cross-cutting base of supporters.
In fact, Big Feminism has on occasion supported and given traction to policies that further criminalized survivors of violence, LGBTQ+ youth, and communities of color in order to stay in good position with their stalwart elected officials. This closed mindset and limited set of tactics, ever divorced from a vision that forged links to grassroots organizing and established power at the state and local level, has played a huge part in our current moment.
Many of us in cross-cutting areas of work called for a mindset and a strategy that connects abortion care and rights to the other issues that affect all of us: health care, criminal justice, racial justice, local infrastructure/community development, economic opportunity, and democracy/civic engagement. As a law student in the mid-90s, I was writing about fetal personhood laws, racial justice, and the criminal justice system. And I was by no means a sophisticated person connected to anyone with special insight. These ideas and solutions and advocacy around women’s dignity and self-determination, and our place in the world, have been in play for a long time and across so many venues. In fact, I focused early in my career on the abortion rights field—it was all I wanted to work on at one point—and left because the strategies were so disconnected from anything I, as a Brown girl from an immigrant family, could connect to. I wanted to work on issues that integrated the needs of immigrant women, and got pulled into advocacy in the criminal justice system and the intersection of gender/sexuality and racial justice, and never looked back. The silos I encountered in my own career trajectory inform my understanding of the challenges—and the solutions—ahead.
On the communications strategy side of this question, the mainstream feminist movement has focused on “Choice” or “Who Decides,” which definitely speaks to me and many in my circles. But that’s the issue: The Choice framework speaks to certain audiences in specific contexts, but it’s not the centerpiece of a values-based brand or narrative framework. As you can see from the image that accompanies this section, a successful set of values-focused brand pillars on abortion includes Dignity + Self-Determination, but also centers the role of women as Leaders/Agents of Change in Families and Communities, and as Economic Leaders. The bottom line on abortion is, it’s making these kinds of decisions that is a crucial piece of our ability to be the ones who lead and act as the hubs of community life. And we are almost always the ones who lead, whether we get that credit and visibility, or not. Our ability to make these decisions is what allows us to do the important work of being women in the world. Making abortion a piece of the broader role women play in society and what we need in order to play that role is key. And there is so much communications research, as well as advocacy models from other countries, that supports this.
It’s well beyond time for a reset on abortion from a gender and racial equity perspective, and in moving into an affirmative long-term position. This is our collective moment to wake up and follow the work of activists in the field who have been fighting with scarce resources for the last three decades. And to invest in state and local elections and political appointments. And to follow the work of global activists who have used more compelling messaging and brand frameworks to make change on these issues.
A bright light in all this bleakness: All the women I’ve been in touch with—especially those who are not in the day-to-day of social justice/progressive work—are super angry and super fired up. Folks are reeling from that devastated feeling, but also ready to organize; to get involved in state and local elections and organizing; to use new brand pillars and frameworks; to push for widespread availability of abortion pills; and to hold our politicians accountable.
I have been saying since 2016 that it is our job to lay the foundation for the next 50 years, while minimizing suffering along the way. There’s definitely a lot of action-oriented energy out there. Let’s get to it!
Surf Synthesis: Being in a State of Flow
I’ve not been surfing as much as I’d like lately, probably once every two weeks, which is the bare minimum I need to stay sane. I actually start having bad dreams about surfing once I hit the 3-week mark. But in good news, my sessions have been fairly solid. I’ve largely been able to throw out my thinking mind (although I do have to remind myself to do that even while in the water), and focused on a state of flow and muscle memory as much as possible. I actually went surfing the day the Dobbs/Roe decision came down, and all the women surfers I encountered were devastated and distracted and angry. And really needing the soothing wash of the ocean. It reminded me that surfing is not the only place where we need to be in a mind-body connection. It’s the case with advocacy too. When your Strategy for Change and your Vision/Values flow seamlessly together, that’s where the winning usually happens. When it feels easy, even though it’s not.
Tarot Inspiration: The Empress
This one came to me very easily, given the topic. She’s almost too on the nose, and I considered going in a different direction. But she feels just right for our current moment of heaviness. The Empress is one of the first of the Major Arcana that The Child encounters on their journey. She symbolizes fertility, but not just in the traditional sense. She’s also exuding the fertility of nature, the fertility of creativity, and an abundance of love and nurturing that has nothing to do with specific gender roles or a desire for engaging in parenting. The Empress can guide us as we nurture ideas, nature such as a garden or a field or the ocean, or a nascent project.
As we lay a foundation for the next 50 years of building the kind of world we want to see, she’s the right guide to nurture our collective imagination and creative solutions, and to remind us to nurture ourselves and each other, as the road is long and the work will be hard.
Take care, folks, we all need a bit of nurturing.
More to come! Let me know what you want more of in these newsletters, subscribe, and share with others who you think will be interested.