How Angry Should Women Voters Be?

The night she learned the U.S. Supreme Court was planning to bring down Roe v. Wade, the journalist and author Jessica Valenti went to bed and wept.

“I kept saying, ‘My daughter, my daughter,” she writes. “A mother’s job is to protect her children. How could I possibly do that now?”

Valenti’s grief quickly metastasized into anger. That anger materialized as a newsletter. Abortion, Every Day. For her readers, Valenti provides daily reports on the pro-life movement in the U.S. She has sustained it ever since that fateful day in June 2022 when Roe was overturned, ending a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion in the U.S. 

Valenti is furious at the calculated way America’s pro-life movement brought down Roe, and at the way the movement manipulates language, using phrases like “national minimum standard” to mislead voters into thinking abortion bans aren’t actually happening. But most of all, she is furious for all the women whose health and lives are being destroyed. 

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a U.S.-based nonprofit focused on protecting reproductive rights worldwide, 41 states now have some form of abortion ban in effect; as for exceptions based on the gestation duration, the pregnant person’s health or in cases of rape or incest, it’s a veritable patchwork.

All of this is groundwork for Valenti’s new book, “Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win,” out this month.

The book contains tales as chilling as "The Handmaid’s Tale"—except of course, this isn’t fiction. Like the story of a woman, miscarrying in an Oklahoma hospital parking lot, who was told she would not receive care until she was “just about to die;” or that of a teenager in Florida who was denied an abortion because “her poor grades were proof that she wasn’t mature enough to decide to end her pregnancy.”

Throughout all of it, Valenti’s forensic attention to detail makes that anger contagious. It is a radicalizing rage—which, she admits to me, is her intention. “I think a lot of us feel really powerless,” she says. She wants to “arm people who feel radicalized with everything they need to go out to do something with that energy and that anger.”

In the run-up to next week's election, Valenti told me that giving that rage “a bit of direction” is vital. A Donald Trump win, she warns, could bring about the end of abortion medication and, eventually, birth control. Only by being properly informed about the pro-life movement’s strategies can voters prevent that, she says.

Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Did you start off this angry? Or have you gotten angrier?

It's a good question. I've always been pretty pissed off, but once Roe was overturned, that anger became more urgent. Every day, I think: ‘It would be harder to get angrier than I already am,’ and every day I manage to do just that. You're reading a new story of some horrible thing that's happening to some poor, vulnerable person, and it's hard not to get continually outraged. But honestly, I think that that is OK. It's somewhere to put that energy and sadness.

From where I’m sitting, it’s hard to really understand what motivates the pro-life movement. Can you explain it?

What they’re doing is the easiest and quickest way to reinforce traditional gender norms. What better way to ensure women are erased from the public sphere than to trap them in the home? What better way to reassert male dominance than to make women poorer, and to make it harder for them to have physical freedom by restricting their right to movement? To me, it's all in service of that. And pregnancy is the easiest way to attack women, and make that happen. 

You often talk about “they.” They want to reinforce traditional gender norms, they want to reassert male dominance. Who are they?

There’s not an easy way to define it, but if you're talking about it broadly, I'd say right wing white Christian nationalists. If you're talking about the “they” who are enacting these laws and who are behind the tangible policies and culture moves, you're really talking about a handful of individual people. It really is, relatively speaking, a small group of people—a very small group of extremists who just have an inordinate amount of power.

There are two pages in your book where you list the names of women and girls to whom  horrible things have happened since Roe fell. Have you met any pro-lifers who have seen this evidence and decided they were wrong?

In terms of the people behind this, no, I don't think they're going to see anything and change their minds. I mean, they are very, very aware of this. They knew this was going to happen. They've planned for this for 50 years, and they have strategized over this. But there are people I have heard from—from quite a few—who were raised anti-abortion and then they came out of it. As you get older, as you read these stories, as you understand what the actual consequences of these laws are, and then you start to shift.

Let’s talk about the election. When it comes to abortion, have the Democrats made the right arguments during this election cycle? 

They have done much better than in years past. Obviously, there are things I wish they would have done, like push back on some of the “later abortion” rhetoric. I do think, though, that Kamala Harris has done better than anyone who's come before her. 

The way that Harris talks about Amber Thurman, the woman in Georgia who was killed by the state's abortion ban, has been really remarkable: She framed Amber getting that abortion as a normal part of her healthcare. She had a son, she had a job, she was excited to go start something new, and she got pregnant, and she didn't want to be, so she had an abortion—and that, mundane as it sounds, is an incredibly radical way for a Democratic politician to talk about abortion.

But I've seen a lot of polling from battleground states where voters who are on the fence think that Trump is pro-choice, or they don't understand what he would do on reproductive rights if he was in office. That’s because Republicans have been so good at muddying the waters.

OK, let's get into it, then. If Trump gets into office, what will happen to abortion—his comments thus far have been all over the place. 

He could replace the head of the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) and repeal access to abortion medication, which is used in 63% of abortions. 

He could also replace the head of the DOJ (Department of Justice), and enforce a law called the Comstock Act, which says you can't mail “obscene materials”—abortion medication and abortion tools included—which means that even in pro-choice states, you're not going to be able to get abortion medication shipped there, and ob-gyns are not going to be able to get tools for abortion shipped there. 

Overnight, you could have this de facto informal national abortion ban that goes into effect. 

OK, and then? Birth control? What's next?

Birth control could be targeted using Comstock. Republicans have spent the last decade or so laying the legal groundwork to argue that certain kinds of birth control are not birth control at all, but abortion. 

So I think first we'll see the restriction of emergency contraception. And, like I write in the book, they'll target teenagers first: they'll restrict emergency contraception for teenagers, they'll restrict hormonal birth control for teenagers, then they're going to make it harder and harder to get for everyone else. 

It's not going to be a single law that says, “Oh by the way, birth control is illegal,” because they know that people would be furious and out on the streets. They'll just make it a little bit more difficult bit by bit, until no one can access it, no matter what the law says.

And what about IVF? 

We're already seeing what conservatives are doing on IVF—pretending to be OK with it and saying “we're just interested in enforcing safety standards.” What they’re actually doing is enacting all of these incredibly onerous restrictions (like tracking and reporting) that make it impossible for doctors to do their job. 

They're going to put restrictions on coverage for it, and so it'll be a similar sort of thing to birth control, where they are making it harder and harder to access, rather than stating explicitly, “you can't have this.”

And if Kamala Harris wins—for abortion and IVF, what's going to happen? 

There's some things she can do in terms of making abortion medication more available. Like using the power of the FDA to remove some restrictions, making telehealth more available, making it so that anti-abortion states can't get the medical records of patients who leave the state for an abortion. She can make sure that law enforcement doesn't collaborate or give information to anti-abortion states. There is a lot of stuff she can do that goes beyond national legislation.

Is abortion, as an issue, going to win this election? What do the polls suggest?

I think the polls haven't been as good as they could have at showing just how angry women voters are, and just how much this issue is motivating folks.