July 11, 2023

Hey y’all,

Today, I’m keeping an eye on the nonsense coming out of Iowa’s legislature. Recall that a few weeks ago, Iowa’s Supreme Court deadlocked over a challenge to a six-week ban, leaving in place a lower court’s restriction that blocked the law from taking effect. A deadlock is not a ruling, and therefore, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds called a special session for today to pass another six-week ban. “I believe the pro-life movement is the most important human rights cause of our time,” Gov. Reynolds said upon announcing the session last week. Given the makeup of the legislature, the new ban is very likely to pass. If and when it does, we’ll do the whole courts dance all over again. What fun.

Onward. 

Repro Rundown

The good: As a political junkie, there is little I love more than a good campaign ad, and Missouri House Minority Leader Crystal Quade’s new ad for governor is top-notch. It’s got everything: ROLLER DERBY 🛼, a classic American bootstraps origin story (the good stuff, not of the conservative “I-don’t-see-inequity” variety), and the unapologetic use of the word “abortion,” which is very much in line with Quade’s brand. H/T to Jessica Valenti for this one!

The fair-to-middlin’: Florida’s Supreme Court announced that it will hear oral arguments on Sept. 8 regarding the state’s proposed 15-week abortion ban. This one has… a lot of moving parts, so we’re gonna break it down here for a minute. 

In 2022, the Florida legislature passed a law banning abortions after 15 weeks; seven abortion clinics and physician Shelly Hsiao-Ying Tien quickly filed a lawsuit to challenge the constitutionality of the ban, and it’s been in legal limbo ever since. The case hinges on a privacy clause in Florida’s constitution. Attorney General Ashley Moody’s office is arguing that abortion is an issue for the legislature and not the courts. 

If the Court agrees with Moody’s assessment, the ruling will pave the way for a six-week ban that was passed earlier this year in the legislature to take effect. I wrote about the proposed ban for Reckon:

The bill, which identifies itself in part as “an act relating to pregnancy and parenting support,” also “prohibits the use of state funds for a person to travel to another state to receive services intended to support an abortion,” as well as limiting the distribution of medication for abortions to in-person physician visits. Physicians who provide abortions after six weeks, as well as “any person who...actively participates in a termination of pregnancy” after that point, commit a felony. This opens the door, too, for pregnant people who seek abortions to be prosecuted.

Florida is a critical access point for abortion seekers in the Southeast, given that it borders states that have more burdensome restrictions. Indeed, much of the South, except for North Carolina and South Carolina, either ban abortion after six weeks or outright. In 2021, after Texas’ six-week ban took effect, Robin Marty, director of operations at West Alabama Women’s Center in Tuscaloosa, and I discussed what would happen next in the Southeast as states got the message that it was perfectly fine to ignore the (then-constitutional) right to abortion and ban the procedure after six weeks. “Maybe Florida will stay intact, I really hope so, because Florida is all we’ve got,” she said.

The damn ugly: Jezebel’s Susan Rinknaus has a stunning report about a mother in Nebraska who is facing two years in prison for helping her daughter self-manage her abortion. The whole story is galling, to say the least, but one thing that stood out to me is that Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, handed over Facebook messages to prosecutors that made these charges possible. Please please please, if you read nothing else in this newsletter, read this and take it to heart: do not use social media to communicate with others about self-managed abortion. Use a secure, encrypted messaging service like Signal instead. For more information on digital privacy around abortion, see this guide from the Digital Defense Fund.

This week, I’m in conversation with Ashima Yadava, a South Asian artist and activist based in the Bay Area who has recently put out a stunning project called Huq: I Seek No Favor, which compiles works of art based off of passages from the Dobbs decision. Read more about the project and Ashima’s story below!

Hi! I know you and I have talked about this, but I wonder if you can tell folks a little bit about your project?

Last year when the the Supreme Court draft was leaked in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, part of me…I guess I didn’t want to believe it was happening. And so I downloaded it, and I started reading through it to make sense of what was going on. And the more pages I read, the angrier I got, and the more unsettled I was. At some point, I started marking words to make haikus of what I was reading. I would shred some pages, make pulp and paper out of it, just using different forms to try and make sense of it. Then in June, the final decision came out, and it was a 213-page document. I realized that this year would be the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and I thought it was important to mark that date and point out that we’re being taken back all of these years. Everything that women have fought for, everything that nonbinary people have fought for, everything that anyone who cares about equality and equity in the workforce was being overturned. And the number 50 really stuck with me. 

I decided to reach out to 50 people for their reactions. I divided the 213 pages by 50, which came out to 4.2, and I reached out to artists to see if they wanted to use this as a way to process the rage that we were all feeling. 

How did your personal history growing up female in India inform the project?

Everything that I ever do stems from having grown up in India. There’s a line in a poem by the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti that says, “The fish, even in the fisherman's net, still carries the smell of the sea.” My sensibilities you know, as an artist as who I am, everything that I do is colored with that lens of having grown up in India. When I moved to the United States, it was to put distance between myself and the circumstances that said I had to live a certain way because I’m a woman. I remember my father hated if I wore a sleeveless dress, I remember him getting me out of the car and sending me back home to change because he didn’t think what I was wearing was appropriate. It's so in your face every single day of your life that you're a woman, you're a girl, you can’t do all these things that men can. And I'm not talking 1900 or whatever. This is all relevant now.

I think that's why it feels even harder to accept what is happening in the United States, because I was promised a better future in this country. America stood for certain things, and that is changing.

What’s the inspiration behind the project’s title?

“Huq” is the Hindustani word for “rights”—I think it has origins in Arabic. I always heard this word growing up, like, this is my right, this is my huq. I thought it was important to have a bilingual title because I think it pointed to the fact that this ruling is affecting a very diverse group of people. “I seek no favor” comes from an Audre Lorde poem, “A Woman Speaks.” The whole point is basically talking about not being defined by our circumstances, and fighting for your rights and seeking our tribe. With this project, I wanted to bring a tribe together and get a community of people to react to this. And so Huq: I Seek No Favor became the name. Reproductive autonomy is my right, I'm not seeking a favor.

I think there’s a lot of power in reacting directly to a Supreme Court decision, too, in this way, given that legal language is so lofty and inaccessible. Was that part of your intent?

I think the act of taking a bite, in the way I had to process the decision, Becca—making haikus and tearing those pages, there was some sort of a relief or an outlet in that and it was very empowering. As I spoke to more and more collaborators, I would send them the four pages, they would read, and we would brainstorm, we would talk. In those conversations, we would discuss form, we would mark words, we would try to process the meaning within those four pages. I have friends who are lawyers who are part of this project, and they pointed out to me that this language and process is deliberately complex. It’s meant to confuse people. This is done to keep you embroiled in these conversations about language and stuff. It doesn’t mean shit.

To take all of that apart felt empowering in a time of helplessness and rage.

See y'all next week.

In love and solidarity,

Becca

 Reckon: Reproductive Justice with Becca Andrews

1143 1st Ave. S. Suite 300, Birmingham, AL 35233

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