Before Roe v. Wade, the term "therapeutic abortion" referred to abortions to save a woman's life.(See, for example, California in the 1960s.) Mental illness, for example, psychosis, could be a pretext for a "therapeutic abortion."
Today, Lydia Paar writes that U.S. doctors told her 18-year-old mother in the 1960s that "she 'didn't look sad enough'" to qualify for an abortion. As a result, "my grandmother had flown my mom to Japan" to get the abortion. So when Lydia, at age 20, wanted her tubes tied, her mother, "instead of telling me to 'just wait and see' or that I would 'probably change my mind' like so many other people have, she called around...Within a week or two, I had an outpatient tubal ligation procedure."
— "I Told My Mom I Wanted To Get My Tubes Tied At Age 20. Her Response Changed My Life.": "I went and talked to the only person I felt might really understand my need to not mother: my mother." Lydia Paar. HuffPost Personal. Oct 24, 2023.
There are some parallels to discourse about trans people today. Trans people are expected to report "dysphoria," i.e. severe unhappiness interfering with ability to function in life, to qualify for hormones and surgery. Essentially, if we don't "look sad enough," we're told we don't qualify. Even if we do express sadness, we're told we should "just wait and see" because we'll "probably change [our] mind."
We can just have autonomy to transition, because that is a thing that human beings can be allowed to do.
It is a thing that humans can know we want to do.
We shouldn't need to prove that we'll never change our minds — that's impossible for anyone to do regarding how they'll feel about any present-day choice from some future standpoint.
We should be allowed to make choices.
Preventing trans people from changing our bodies to reflect our sense of sex, gender and sexuality has parallels in preventing pregnant people from getting abortions. Transphobia is a cousin of sexism.
"I am located in Canada, where we're starting to have anti-trans bills that would have been mostly unheard of just five years ago. In the U.S., the fact that the courts are so stacked by Trump appointees at the federal level has been particularly daunting. We are seeing alliances between the anti-reproductive justice and anti-trans movements, which is really concerning."
— Florence Ashley, interviewed by OpenMind, April 2024
Gillian Branstetter says: "how they cast doubt on something like the Turnaway Study--the most comprehensive survey of those denied an abortion to date--is just copy-and-pasted onto the USTS and transgender care" (Bluesky, login-only, April 25, 2024)
The dignity of choosing your life
Of Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in Dobbs, Moira Donegan tells us that Sotomayor wasn't writing to "the judicial public" (i.e., other judges), but "to people like us."
"This is not technical writing. This is writing in sweeping historic and moral terms. It is writing about the values of the nation. It is writing about what constitutes citizenship. It is writing about dignity as well as about material fairness. It is not about the technicalities of the law or the petty little rationalizations, often quite impressive in their flights of reasoning, that this court has made to justify a lot of its opinions. This is a moral document.
It is also, we should acknowledge, a document of defeat. This is the kind of thing that feminists really don’t like to do, to admit when things are going badly or to dwell in the futility of many feminist efforts. There can be this pansy-ass denial and Pollyannaish optimism in the face of what are frankly catastrophes.
Dobbs was a catastrophe. It has made us less free than our mothers were. It will mean that the women who are in positions of authority or power or prominence now will slowly disappear from those positions as more and more of them are pushed out of the workforce. It means women who are entering public life are going to lose their mentors. It means that women and trans people who become pregnant will be denied the foundational dignity to determine the course and content of their lives. Something I appreciate Sotomayor doing here is addressing American women in a way misogyny never wants to, which is as adults."
"You can’t prove" whether any given woman will be worse off for not being allowed to have an abortion. However:
"It’s entirely possible that if these women who are being denied abortions now were able to get them, they would not become doctors and lawyers and politicians and Nobel Prize–winning geniuses. Some of them would. But a lot of them would live quieter, more ordinary lives that would simply be endowed with the dignity of having been chosen lives. I think that’s a worthwhile point a lot of critics of these abortion-rights counterfactuals often make.
Sotomayor here is drawing our attention to an absence, to the lives that will go unlived, the possibilities that will go unfulfilled. It’s hard to see an absence. You have to gesture at the shape of it. The future that has been denied to you is not exactly a deprivation because it’s something you never had, and now it’s something you’ll never be allowed to have."
— A Gender Emergency, Moira Donegan, interviewed by Merve Emre, Episode Five of “The Critic and Her Publics”, New York Review of Books, March 26, 2024
Abortion funds need money
"'I’m afraid that there is this level of complacency that has happened post-Dobbs,' [National Network of Abortion Funds executive director Oriaku] Njoku said. 'This is not the same movement that it was five years ago, let alone 50 years ago, and yet we’re still operating and funding as if it were the same issue as it was before.'"
— Abortion Funds Are In ‘A State Of Emergency’ 2 Years After Dobbs: After the overturn of Roe v. Wade, donations flowed to abortion funds, but over time the money has dried up -- endangering care for people across the country. Alanna Vagianos, HuffPost, Jun 24, 2024
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