Overturning Roe v. Wade: Our Response
Note: In lieu of posting our final Pride Month interview, we are choosing to use this platform to respond to Friday’s SCOTUS decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion. We will share our final Pride month post later in July. We continue to honor and celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community (who are particularly impacted by this decision), but in this moment, we feel it is urgent and necessary to respond and provide resources.
The content of this post differs from our usual content. For women to thrive in and out of the theatre industry, we need to have fundamental human rights.
CW: abortion, pregnancy, language, miscarriage, fascism, police brutality
“I’m going back and forth between feeling completely numb, feeling like an emotional wreck, feeling all the rage in the world, just all of the things.”
“Exhausted. Rageful. Numb. In despair. It’s a cycle.”
“We hold privilege in this conversation and will be less directly affected than others, so what do we do?”
“We do what we need to do to take care of ourselves. And then we get to work.”
Amy: So we’re here.
Hayley: We’re here.
Amy: It’s been a rough week for the world, especially for people with uteruses. And people who don’t want to be shot with guns. How are you feeling?
Hayley: Despite knowing this would happen for a while, there was some irrational part of me that still felt like, “They can’t really do this though, can they? That would be one step too far.” And at the same time…I can’t say I was really surprised, either.
Amy: I read an interesting take on the leaked Supreme Court decision that said look, a clerk risked their entire legal career to leak that decision. That person wouldn’t have taken the risk if they didn’t think that leaking it would have some effect other than stirring up public outrage. So yeah, there wasn’t a big mountain of hope. But there was a tiny pebble of hope, and it just went away.
Hayley: I’m very disappointed that Biden hasn’t codified Roe. We saw the insane things that Trump was able to do during his presidency. I understand that it was non-democratic and not reflective of how the system is supposed to work…but it feels like Democrats are just waiting for the Republicans to stoop lower and lower. We are allowing it to happen. I just feel like you have to meet the circumstances, but also…
Amy: It’s hard! I think there’s a difficult line that Democratic politicians are toeing between what it takes to get stuff done in this political climate and the ideal of a democracy that we theoretically have but I don’t think has existed for a long time. I think the system was fundamentally broken from the beginning. But the last decade of US politics has really highlighted just how broken it is and how far we are from that ideal.
The decisions that came out this week feel like cruelty. It doesn’t feel like the highest court in the land. It feels like a bunch of little boys who feel like they’ve been wronged by the progressive movement saying, “We’re gonna get retribution.” It’s so removed from actual people’s lives and needs. And so willfully ignorant of the real impact that these decisions have on people’s lives.
Hayley: I’ve been thinking about how this decision is going to result in more child abuse and more violence against people with uteruses. There’s a lot of discourse on social media talking about separation of church and state. And that’s really important to talk about. But I’m not seeing as many conversations about the cost of being a pregnant person, and how this will force people into hospitals and into debt.
Amy: When I was pregnant with my daughter, I remember being toward the end of my pregnancy and trying to figure out how much the hospital stay was going to cost us. I kept reading horror stories about people who had given birth and then were unexpectedly billed thousands of dollars. And I was calling my doctor, calling the hospital, asking, “How much should I expect to pay?” and no one will give you any answer! And I understand, every birth is different, there are a lot of factors, they charge for the services used and you don't know ahead of time what services you’ll need…
Hayley: Right, but you should at least get a breakdown of services saying how much each thing costs.
Amy: I don’t think that is a thing that exists.
Hayley: It needs to exist! If you want to have a baby in the United States of America, or if you are forced to have a baby, there should be a list of services that are likely to be used and how much they cost.
Amy: They should at least be able to give you a range! Or they should have systems in place for patients who are not swimming in money to guarantee that the birth will not exceed a certain amount.
Hayley: Especially when abortion is no longer possible! The whole argument about if you don’t want a baby, just give it up for adoption, it’s like, you still have to pay for the cost of being pregnant!
Amy: Pregnant people’s voices get lost in these conversations, especially the voices of people who choose to have abortions. A lot of people feel that giving a baby up for adoption, that’s not choosing not to have a baby, it’s choosing to become a parent and then not take care of your child. How do you know the child will be well cared for? What if the child grows up and resents you for giving them up? People talk about adoption as this simple alternative to abortion, but they really are completely separate things. They are not comparable.
Hayley: That’s a really good point. And to your point about voices being left out of the conversation, I want to acknowledge that nonbinary folks and trans men specifically are left out of discourse. I’ve not heard any of those perspectives breaking through the conversation around abortion.
Amy: The most impacted groups are not being heard on this issue. The most impacted groups are women of color, immigrant women of every status, LGBTQIA folks regardless of gender. Every person who has a uterus and especially people who have a uterus and are already a part of marginalized groups. That’s who is affected. And that’s whose voices are not being heard. If I have to hear one more white cis-man commenting on this issue…
Hayley: I’m just so tired of being told, “You have equality now.” I’m so tired of having people roll their eyes at me for being a feminist and being outspoken about these issues. No! This decision is a very clear indicator that we are still not considered people in this country. We don’t have bodily autonomy. We are a commodity in the eyes of the government. We are something to be controlled for power.
Amy: We’ve talked on Women & Theatre before about women’s bodies in theatrical spaces. In this country, if we don’t have the right to make major medical decisions about our bodies, it really does say that we are lesser than and that yes, we are a commodity to be controlled. And that has implications for theatre and every space in the world.
All of a sudden, there are very new stakes to casual sex, which is a very common and encouraged pursuit in this country. It was always on people who can get pregnant to protect themselves, but now it’s even higher stakes. You can’t have casual sex. You can’t get raped. And young people! We haven’t even talked about young people.
Hayley: In a country where sex education is not prioritized –
Amy: Where women’s empowerment is not prioritized! Women are taught that they are the gatekeepers. And that it is their responsibility simultaneously to attract men and to keep men out of their vaginas…I remember being confused as hell navigating that as a young woman. People have sex for the first time, maybe consent is a little murky because you are young and nobody really knows what they want yet, and then you get pregnant. Young people could now have their entire futures derailed because of that. AND there are also amazing young parents who CHOOSE to have children and live wonderful, fulfilling lives. But that’s their choice.
Hayley: And we haven’t even touched on the shame that goes along with that. For people who get pregnant “too early.”
Amy: Or in non-community-sanctioned ways.
Hayley: To bring it back to the conversation about casual sex. Women can’t have casual sex anymore. People who are socialized as women already have so much shame around sex, but then you amplify this intense, very real fear of pregnancy around it, it just makes me so mad.
Amy: I don’t know a sexually active woman who hasn’t had a pregnancy scare at some point in her life. To have those stakes…it’s unthinkable. We live in New York. If we need an abortion, we can get an abortion. But one of the big problems that’s coming up is that in the states where abortion is legal, all of this is creating a huge strain on providers and abortion funds because they are overwhelmed with people who can no longer get an abortion in their home state. It needs to be something that we nationally have a right to. It is not appropriate for this to be left up to the states.
I have a daughter. I’m thinking about the fact that this decision has now cut in half the number of states where she can go to college. You better believe she’s not going to college somewhere where she can’t get an abortion if she needs one.
Hayley: I can’t help but think too…they are trying to keep people with uteruses out of the workforce!
Amy: They are already trying to keep us out of the workforce! The fact that school hours and work hours are not the same prevents us from being in the workforce. The fact that childcare is prohibitively expensive keeps us out of the workforce. The fact that so many child situations require you to have a single point of contact so that you have to choose one parent as the “primary parent” keeps us out of the workforce. And often forces women to be the primary caregiver even if they don’t want their family dynamic to look that way.
I’m going through it right now. Every decision about work and childcare has been very fraught. There is this consideration of, can we afford to be a one-income household? Can we afford to not be a one-income household? Neither is affordable. There are hidden costs to all of it. This country doesn’t give a fuck about babies once they leave the womb.
And we live in New York! My daughter was in free public education last year because New York City has Universal 3K, which nowhere else in the country does. She’s going into Pre-K this year, and the school day goes until 3:00 and the work day goes until 5:00 at least. And I just got an email from her school about after-school extended care…and it costs $9000. And we only have one child. It’s crazy that childcare isn’t subsidized by the government. It’s crazy that we say we care about lives when we so obviously don’t. It’s crazy that states can’t prohibit you from carrying a hidden gun, but states can tell you that you MUST carry a baby. That’s crazy. I’m going back and forth between feeling completely numb, feeling like an emotional wreck, feeling all the rage in the world, just all of the things.
Hayley: Same. Exhausted. Rageful. Numb. In despair. It’s a cycle.
Amy: How can we make art if we’re not considered people?
Hayley: Art is already something that is gate-kept for people who have a certain amount of wealth, right? And it’s the reason that BIPOC, trans people, queer people have been left out of the documentation of art and also just left out of art for so long. It’s like Virginia Woolf said: you need a certain amount of money and you need a room of your own to be able to be an artist. To be able to make art. When we bring it back to theatre, we already have all of these barriers. We don’t have enough women in directing roles, in producing roles, in roles in the theatre in which you can make a decent living and actually make a real impact if things work out for you. The higher-paying roles in our industry are already SO inaccessible to women. And now imagine how much worse it will be.
Amy: For women who already have compounded barriers to access to the arts and to stable well-paying jobs in the arts - if we add on top of that this legal decision that anytime they get pregnant by accident they have to have the baby, that is fewer and fewer women who are able to access these positions…
Hayley: And contribute to the conversation! Writers, producers, and directors are the ones who are telling stories on a big scale and deciding which stories get told. You brought up the word access. And it made me think about the fact that in the last few years, we have made progress by having more and more conversations about access. And now, we are having conversations about yet another barrier that wasn't there before. Now we’re having conversations about how to get BACK to the place where we’re talking about access again.
Amy: You know, 60% of people who have abortions are already parents. That’s a statistic I don’t think people talk about enough. There’s this societal stereotype that irresponsible young teenagers “get themselves pregnant,” as if it’s a one-person job. And actually, the majority of people who have abortions are people who already have kids and know very well the financial, mental, emotional, and life costs of raising children and are making the informed decision not to have another child.
The other relevant statistic that isn’t in the conversation, and I think should be, is that 75% of people who have abortions are poor or low-income, which means they make less than 200% of the federal poverty level. This is a giant reason why people have abortions! Because they can’t afford children. And pregnancy is expensive and birth is expensive and childcare is expensive. And people don’t have access to health insurance coverage in this country, which is the one thing that makes having kids more affordable.
Hayley: Yes. These policy moves are coming from a place of trying to keep poor people poor. And as with everything in this country, it’s going to have the worst trickle-down effect on marginalized communities.
Amy: There was a study that collected data on folks who weren’t able to access abortion. They were able to reach people who had enough access that they could get to a clinic. But there are so many people who never get to that point. Because they can’t take time off from work or they don’t have health insurance or they don’t have childcare or they hear all this national stigma about abortion and think it’s illegal or “bad” even if it’s actually legal in their state.
And I just get the sense from looking at this Supreme Court decision and hearing what the white cis-male politicos are saying, that they are not aware of any of this! They are children playing around in a china shop, completely unaware of the massive and complex impact that this decision has on real people’s lives.
Hayley: And the people in power who are aware enough to know the impact that this will have have really really fucked-up intentions.
Amy: Even liberal, progressive politicians are so far removed from the people who are actually affected by this. They are talking to advocacy groups, most of which are run by a bunch of white cis-women. They aren’t going and talking to clinics and providers and patients because that would be bad optics. What does that say about our society?
There are Twitter threads that capture some of the stupid shit that male politicians have said about the ways in which they think that our bodies function. There have been super high-profile cases of this, like when former Missouri Rep. Todd Akin said, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” He was literally saying that if a woman is raped, she won’t get pregant because her body knows it was rape. A white man in power literally said that.
A friend of mine who lives in Florida - she’s moving out of Florida because she has a uterus - said she overheard two young white guys having a conversation, and one of them was like, “You know, if a woman doesn’t know that she’s pregnant at four weeks, she should have to keep it.” It’s complete ignorance of how bodies function! You don’t know you are pregnant until five or six weeks at the EARLIEST. Gestation is an estimate, and it’s measured from your last period, not from when you have sex or from when the egg is fertilized or implants in the uterus. When we’re talking about becoming pregnant, people throw around numbers they don’t understand and they throw around “facts” that aren’t real. It is maddening that these are the people who are given the power to make decisions about our bodies!
Hayley: I just had another thought when you were talking about your friend who is leaving Florida. The Republicans are also driving liberal people out of those states to make sure they can win those states in the next election.
Amy: You’re right! That’s really insidious.
Hayley: It seems like they are setting it up so that it will basically be a dictatorship and the Democrats can never win again. It sounds like a conspiracy, but if you think about it logically…
Amy: It’s 100% true!
Hayley: All of these insidious decisions are another step toward our democracy going down the drain. Also, the thing about the police not having to read you your rights –
Amy: That is a fucked-up decision! Who looks at that and thinks, “This is a good decision”?
Hayley: It’s already so hard to prosecute police officers. More Black people, people of color are going to die unnecessarily. More Black trans women are gonna die unnecessarily because it gets easier and easier for police officers to murder people without consequences. It’s so easy for cops to not be held accountable for their actions, especially when the victims are Black folks, trans people, nonbinary folks, anyone who doesn’t fit the white supremacist bullshit ideals of this society.
Amy: When Trump won the election, a lot of people - myself included - were considering whether to leave the country. At that point, I remember saying, if Roe is overturned, we need to leave the country. Now Roe is overturned. But there are a lot of factors that go into leaving. The logistics of moving to another country. Where would you go? And many people need to stay because of their careers or other factors. It’s scary, I think about slippery slopes and about the Holocaust and I worry about whether we will wait too long to get out and then it will be too late.
Hayley: That’s real. I think about leaving sometimes. I think about my career in theatre and how I feel like I need to be here. But then I also think about the fact that I won’t be able to have a career if I’m stripped of fundamental rights either. Soon maybe women won’t be allowed to work! Who knows? If we take things to their unfortunately logical conclusions and if Trump is re-elected.
Amy: I’ve also been talking to friends who are gay who are like, “We’d better hurry up and get married, because pretty soon we’re not gonna be able to.” They are going after gay marriage, they are going after contraception. The writing’s on the wall.
And we haven’t talked about that there are times when you need an abortion or you will die. Before my daughter was born, I was pregnant and I had a miscarriage, and my body did not recognize that I had miscarried so it didn’t release the pregnancy. Luckily, my body figured it out and I was able to release it naturally - which involved a long ER stay and a lot of blood loss and was overall horrendous. But in case that didn’t happen, I had a D&C scheduled, because that was the appropriate medical care for that heartbreaking circumstance which so many people go through. Ectopic pregnancies, you need to have an abortion or you will die. Certain fetal anomalies, pregnancy anomalies, you need to have an abortion or you will die. That’s not to lessen the importance of being able to CHOOSE that you want to have an abortion just because you want to. That’s totally valid and important. And it’s also important to remember that when we say, “No one can have an abortion,” people will die. It’s in effect now. People are dying now.
Hayley: Not to mention if people do find access to abortions illegally, they are potentially facing criminal charges for having an abortion –
Amy: And don’t even get me started on the abortion reporting laws in Texas and Oklahoma. That is Nazi territory.
Hayley: That’s the thing! When I talked about women potentially not being allowed to work, that’s what I was talking about! Unfortunately, that is the logical next step. It will be another excuse for this country to imprison more Black people on bullshit charges.
We think about our careers – many of us won’t have careers if America continues down this road.
Amy: And the arts can’t flourish in a society like that.
Hayley: So what do we do, Amy? We hold privilege in this conversation and will be less directly affected than other people with uteruses, so what do we do?
Amy: We point people to resources:
Planned Parenthood: Is it still legal for me to get an abortion?
We do what we can to fund the abortion rights infrastructure that is already working to accommodate people from states where abortion is illegal and to make sure that everybody has access to the care they need.
Donate to the National Network of Abortion Funds
Donate to SisterSong, a reproductive justice organization that works to amplify the voices of Black and Indigenous women and improve institutional policies and systems that impact the lives of marginalized communities
Donate to Haven Coalition, a nonprofit made up of volunteers dedicated to supporting people traveling to New York City for abortions
People are saying donate to the ACLU, people are saying to vote, and those are super important things. And also, I think the immediate response is that abortion funds need money to help people get to clinics and get care. For me, the house is on fire, so what do we save first? We funnel money into the infrastructure that already exists.
I want to make sure that people know that we support abortion rights and that we are resources if they are having trouble accessing care. Fuck, we’re writers, we write about it! We make art that changes people’s hearts and minds. That sounds super privileged and woo, but it is actually how society moves forward, through the arts. I don’t know. Honestly, right now, I feel like nothing I do has the impact I want it to.
Hayley: Yeah me too, like nothing is enough.
Amy: Right, but that doesn’t mean we bury our heads in the sand. We do have privilege, and with privilege comes responsibility. We do what we need to do to take care of ourselves – if that means getting off social media, checking on people in our lives with uteruses, taking a bubble bath, having a nice meal, a coffee – we do that. And then we get to work. Even if we don’t feel it’s enough.
Hayley: More to come.
