Why Can't the People Have What They Want?

On doing fun things at an un-fun time

Hi, everyone. One of my goals for the summer has been to revive this newsletter, which I last wrote a couple years ago—so here it goes. I’ve moved it over from Tinyletter, where it was called Contents May Have Shifted, and renamed it Occasional Katherine, which was the name of an ancient blog I used to keep, but also, it occurred to me, a reflection of what I am writing here, i.e. “occasional essays.” (As a bonus piece of wordplay, I’ll be publishing these only, um, occasionally.) To kick off, here’s a piece I started during the last week of June. I hope you like it.

They won’t all be this soapbox-y. Basically, this newsletter is a way for me to get myself to write something, a postcard from the present, and put it out there, even if it’s sketchy and imperfect. I humbly thank you for being part of that, and I’m happy to return the favor any time. Please feel no pressure to read, stay subscribed, or otherwise engage w/ these missives in any way.* I make no promises except that I’ll be over here, writing occasionally about whatever moves me to do so.

*On the other hand, if you love it, send it to a friend! :)

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I just got back from New York City, where I went to celebrate my birthday weekend. Some birthday. On Saturday morning, paper copies of the New York Times with the screaming headline ROE OVERTURNED lingered in doorways, waiting to be retrieved.

I already knew, of course, and as others have observed, for weeks we knew it was coming, and yet I almost certainly won’t be able to convey in words the force of the blow.

Instead of even trying, here are some scattered notes from the field.

On Sunday, my actual birthday, I went on a walk with a guy I’d just met for the first time. He has a daughter who’s eleven. I tried gently to convey to him that I’m upset, that these are not normal days for me. I know, it’s terrible, he said. But we’ll do the things we can. Vote in every election. Give a recurring donation to Planned Parenthood each month. Our daughters will be all right, he said. We have enough resources . . .

It was not the right thing to say.

Why? Because rarely have I felt as much like part of a group as I do now, in the wake of this disastrous act of oppression toward women. Ironically, the sense of group identity that leads me to abhor the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling even more than I probably already would have is precisely an outgrowth of my experience of pregnancy and motherhood.

When I was pregnant, as a lot of pregnant women do, I felt a sudden and powerful connection to women all over the world and throughout history. It would not be too much to label this feeling a spiritual one, or even to call it a spiritual awakening of sorts. I understood that there were dimensions to the world that I had never sensed before: layers of beauty, responsibility, love, and horror that had always been there but had gone unperceived by me, like dark matter.

I learned firsthand that the experience of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood are so intense and so completely transformative that I grasped, as if for the first time, the horror of inflicting that transformation on anyone who doesn’t embrace it. I also freshly understood the horror of being unable to provide for a child in any way: emotional, practical, or situational. To put this more colloquially, until I was pregnant and becoming a mother myself, I could not have understood how deeply messed up it is to force these experiences on someone who does not desire or feel capable of them.

This is not a moment to say that I, individually, will be all right, or that my family will be all right. This is a moment for solidarity. Somewhere in this country there’s a woman who had an abortion scheduled for next week, who now has no idea what is going on, who has been made powerless over her fate. That woman is living in a state of horror, and as long as she is, so am I.

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On Saturday the 25th of June, I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I walked around sobbing and also noticing that the subject of almost every picture created before 1900 (and a majority of those after) is one or more of the following: babies/children, family relationships, female beauty, religion, or power in general. This longed-for museum trip was refreshing, as art is always refreshing, but not the thorough escape I might have hoped for.

Later, I walked across Central Park with a friend. We discussed the lack of visibility and leadership in the pro-choice movement, and in the women’s-rights movement more generally. (No doubt we had all been suffering, until very recently, from the impression that we did not need to shovel a lot of time and energy into a special movement dedicated to securing and defending our rights.) Why isn’t there a pin? A shirt? A logo? Why aren’t there leaders, whose names I can name, whose words I can say and whose faces I can envision? What kind of cause is this anyway? I agree with Jia Tolentino, who wrote in the New Yorker the other day that the pro-choice movement has been too timid, particularly in portraying abortion as a regrettable option.

And look where politeness and delicacy have gotten us!

A few weeks ago, after the leaked draft opinion, I told someone that I was having my “first they came for the Jews” moment. What I meant by that was that above all things, I see the overturning of Roe as an act of misogyny. But also that I feel called onto the carpet in a personal way. The battle lines have been drawn (apparently they were there all along, but now they are starkly visible, indubitably real). Along with millions of others, I feel I have been pulled into a fight, one that will likely occupy me for the rest of my life.

The overturn of Roe is part of a pattern, or at least a bigger picture: a picture of the United States as only a middling place in which to be a woman. In 2019, the United Nations updated its worldwide “gender equality index,” placing the US in forty-second place on a ranking of 189 nations: right above Slovakia, right behind Libya, Latvia, and China. I wonder how many rungs we’re going to fall now, in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson.

“Freedom” isn’t a word that’s been one of my words, not really. During my lifetime it’s been associated more definitely with the other side, conservatives and libertarians. It is a foundational American word that the left hasn’t been cozying up to in recent decades. Except this recanting of Roe is completely an issue of freedom . . . and of power. It has no other purpose than to deny and diminish women’s freedom, and to aggrandize a tiny sliver of leadership at this expense.

As a Democrat (and I wonder sometimes how long the party is going to last, particularly if it doesn’t step up in a big way, very quickly), I am tired of losing. I’ve huddled too many times on too many political mornings-after, pondering what we are going to do now, getting excited about direct action and then not following through on it. The morning that Kerry lost to Bush (how quaint that seems, now). The morning that Trump took the White House. The whole period when the Senate would not hold confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland.

The Democrats have won the popular vote but lost the Presidency twice in the last twenty-five years: Gore in 2000, and Clinton in 2016. When it comes to abortion rights, 62 percent of the American people think that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

I’m aware that the Supreme Court of the United States is not meant to be an institution of representative democracy. And yet, I’m starting to wonder where the representative democracy is. Do we even live in a democracy anymore? How would we know? Why can’t the people of this country have what they want?

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As a sidebar that’s actually pretty central, I’m tired of seeing burdens fall unequally on the poor and under-resourced. Climate justice is just one example that I think of often, as often as we have a code red or code orange day for air quality here in Baltimore. It’s a situation that strains the health of the old, the asthmatic, the homeless, the ones who can’t afford air conditioning. It creates headaches for the good people who work at my son’s daycare, who by the center’s rules can’t take the kids outside in bad air, and must endure being cooped up and devising alternate activities for the kids. All this while the capitalist class sits comfortably in front of their computers in air-conditioned rooms, contributing the most to the problems by which they are the least scathed.

Climate change is fucked up, but it’s more fucked up the more you happen to be poor or weak at baseline. Taking away the right to an abortion is no different. It’s exactly the same, another situation that ramifies in shittiness in direct proportion to how subaltern you already are. I’m sick of it. I want a ruling class that has to live—personally—with the consequences of their decisions. (Cue Zoe Leonard’s ever-invigorating “I Want a President,” written in the depths of the AIDS crisis.) This is another reason why the old “but our own daughters will probably be all right” line of reasoning rubs me the wrong way: because our daughters being all right while someone else’s daughters aren’t is precisely the problem.

The experiment with women’s rights is not that old. When my grandmother was born, in 1906, women couldn’t vote. They got that right in 1920. It’s only in the last hundred years that women have begun to work outside the home for wages en masse. Until 1974, a married woman couldn’t get a credit card in her own name without her husband as a co-signer, and single women were often turned down for credit or made to bring in a man to co-sign for them.

Sexual freedom has only been a freedom in certain times and places, and is newer than we’d like to believe. The freedom to divorce, likewise. The freedom to own property. (Somewhere, later, I’ll write an essay about the relationship between capitalism and feminism, which I find completely fascinating.) This isn’t a time to take anything for granted, or to let anything slide. The job is so not done. The job is just beginning.

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Coda(s): on the train on the way home, I read Happening, by Annie Ernaux. First published in 2000, and translated from the French, it is a 95-page memoir about the author’s abortion, which she had at 23 years old, in 1963. (Abortion was illegal in France until 1975.) Ernaux is apparently considered “a living legend” in France for her memoirs and novels. The book is very French, completely gripping, and should be required reading for anyone who wants to think about what a place where abortion is illegal would really be like.

I set up a recurring donation to the National Network of Abortion Funds, and you can too. Donations to the Center for Reproductive Rights, ACLU, and Vote Pro Choice are coming. I already give to Act Blue.

After seeing a “We Won’t Go Back” sign in the window of a house nearby, I decided I wanted one for here. Planned Parenthood has a nice placard for just $3, though shipping brings it closer to $10. Mine is on its way.

The Know Your Enemy podcast has a three-part series on the conservative movement and the fifty-year path to overturning Roe. The first episode, which I “listened” to in the car over and around two kids and an iPad, was deep, well-informed, fascinating, at times disheartening but in a helpful way, and filled with both f-bombs and fifty-cent vocabulary words, just the way I like it.

It would be typical for me to let the paltriness of what I have done so far shut me down completely, but I’m not gong to let it happen this time, and I suggest you don’t, either.

I will keep going and report back.