Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Jessica Valenti began tracking the effects of the court’s ruling. Fueled by outrage, she decided to write about abortion every day, which became the title of her Substack newsletter. She wanted readers to understand that abortion is a safe, everyday procedure that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe should be legal and decided between patients and their doctors. She kept track of bans, court cases, and strategies to make sure people could connect the dots on how Republicans were making abortion illegal.
I’ve been following Valenti’s Abortion, Every Day newsletter since she began publishing it. I wondered whether her new book, Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win, published on Oct. 1, would offer anything new. The answer is yes. The book is an extraordinarily fine explanation of how the nation has wound up with limited or no abortion care in 20 states.
Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies is a brisk, accessible takedown of the forces perpetrating what Valenti describes as the “decimation of women’s citizenship.” In her previous writing, she has explored topics including rape culture, the obsession with women’s virginity, “slut shaming,” and new motherhood. Many of her books, including Sex Object and The Purity Myth, have been a combination of memoir and the politics of women’s sexuality.
Given her previous work, Valenti is well positioned to explain the Republicans’ current war on women. In an introduction, 10 chapters, and a resource section, she demonstrates how the Supreme Court majority, “two of whom are accused sexual predators,” have followed the agenda of a small coalition of extremists. She includes in this group members of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Students for Life, the Heritage Foundation, Americans United for Life, Human Life International, and AAPLOG (American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs).
Banning abortion, Valenti argues, isn’t the end goal for these organizations. They are working toward “a return to forced traditional gender roles, a forced gender binary, a culture and politics ruled by a white supremacist patriarchy where women had no power, and the punishment of anyone who deviates from it all.” They are animated by cruelty, she says. And so far, they have proved to be tactically brilliant and effective.
The Republicans’ most effective strategy, Valenti writes, is advancing supposedly moderate proposals under a cloak of plausible deniability. For example, they say they aren’t banning birth control. This is true. There is currently no law against birth control.
But the Republicans have made the following policies and practices, all of which limit access to birth control, possible in some states: Employers may refuse to provide health insurance covering expenses for birth control. Pharmacists may refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control. Anti-abortion activists may harass providers and clients at reproductive health clinics or threaten the clinics with lawsuits and loss of licensure if they offer abortion care. States may use public funds to support “crisis pregnancy centers,” which pose as medical clinics but are neither medical nor clinics and provide no information about birth control.
Valenti reports that if a woman wants an IUD (and has had the sex education to know what one is), she may have to travel long distances to find a reproductive health clinic and then pay $2,000 out of pocket to have a safe, effective device inserted to prevent pregnancy.
She quotes from anti-abortion propaganda to show how ridiculous its rhetoric and reasoning can be. Human Life International, a worldwide Catholic anti-abortion organization, claims in its literature that abortion “transforms the endometrium from a welcoming, lush forest into a barren, sterile desert.”
Republicans don’t want voters to know that they are motivated by such hooey to make abortion illegal. Why? “I think we know the answer,” Valenti writes. “They’re afraid of us. The good news is they should be.”
More than 85 percent of American voters think abortion should be legal in some or all circumstances, and more than 70 percent want abortion medication to remain legal. Valenti wants to mobilize voters to better understand the Republicans’ tactics and not be hoodwinked by their seemingly reasonable claims.
Valenti also blames the news media. Republicans know, she says, that if they get caught pushing policies most Americans don’t want, they’ll get voted out of office. “So, they lie, mess with language, make up nonsense terms” such as “maternal fetal separation procedures,” “partial birth abortion,” “previable,” and “late abortion,” she writes. Reporters don’t explain that none of these are medical terms. “Mainstream journalists have been trained to give equal space to ‘both sides’ of an issue,” Valenti says, and wind up giving “equal space and credibility to absolute nonsense.”
She advises readers to think of abortions as beginning, not ending, lives. She uses her own experiences of abortion as examples. Her first, at 28, allowed her to launch her career, wed, and have a much-wanted child. Her second abortion, after her marriage, prevented her from experiencing life-threatening complications. For her and for any pregnant person, she writes, “All abortions create something. Paths forward, lives lived, connections made.”
Valenti acknowledges that she may be preaching to the choir. But if they want to help Democrats make abortion and birth control legal nationally, the choir has to know how to fight back. “I’m arming the choir,” she writes. “With fact, and with fury.”
