Abortion After All: A Dialogue on Reproductive Justice in a Post-Dobbs World

Heather Latimer, Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia, Okanagan

Karen Weingarten, Associate Professor, Queens College, City University of New York

We've been discussing abortion politics for more than ten years. When we met, very little had been published about abortion's representation in fiction or film. In contemporary mainstream culture, abortion tended to be represented in conservative ways. Now on the anniversary of the Dobbs decision, we wanted to talk about abortion storytelling, and more precisely, about the changes we've seen over the past decade or so in abortion's representation, politics, and rhetoric. This conversation was recorded on May 4, 2023 and edited for brevity.

Karen: What representations of abortion have been significant to you in the last year since the Dobbs decision?

Heather: I've been thinking about a documentary I screened in an upper-level undergraduate class last semester, called The Janes (2022).1 It tells the story of members of the Jane Collective, a group of young women who performed illegal abortions in Chicago between 1968 and 1973. It struck me how inspired, but also overwhelmed, my students were by watching a story about a group of young people who saw an injustice and did something about it. My students couldn't believe that The Janes broke the law, and that they set up an underground abortion organization, learnt how to do abortions themselves, and were willing to go to jail. My students' reactions indicate that young people are thirsty for stories about people fighting oppressive political situations. However, the fact they were shocked also struck me. Perhaps it undid some of their own internalized progress narratives, or they were surprised to see models and tools for political action in the past. Their reactions made me think about how we normally represent abortion. Why did this seem so shocking to them? Is it because we don't historicize abortion? Is it because they usually see abortion represented as an individual, often traumatic, experience, rather than as a collective or positive one?

Karen: These questions interest me because your students are going to university in Canada, which has very different abortion laws than the US. Similarly, I'm teaching students in New York City, which also has liberal abortion laws compared to the rest of the country. And while NYC has its share of anti-abortion activists, a lot of anti-abortion activism is happening in the South or in the Midwest, where state legislatures and governors are successfully restricting or outlawing abortion. The Dobbs decision has revealed again just how fractured the United States is. This has always been true, as you know. Even before Dobbs, people's access to abortion was varied across states, and across North America, too. But that has become more pronounced since Dobbs and will only become more so going forward. I wonder how representations of abortion will reflect these changes because fiction sometimes glosses over those differences. I'm thinking of Leni Zumas's science fiction novel Red Clocks (2018), where anti-abortion laws apply evenly across all of the US, and only in Canada can you access abortion.2 But what we're actually seeing since Dobbs is that abortion restrictions are more likely to be unevenly passed in American states. More can be done to address some of that nuance in fictional and nonfictional representations.

Heather: Zumas calls the border with Canada the "pink wall," indicating there is freedom above it, but I think it is important that in the novel the Canadian border agents give pregnancy tests and send pregnant people back to be arrested. They are complicit. That seems truer to me than almost anything else in the novel. Canada is not the utopia it sometimes gets painted as in the media. There are divisions here, between attitudes and places, especially when it comes to abortion access. There are also different strategies at play in Canada, which sometimes get overlooked. Fetal-centric, Christian anti-abortion rhetoric has never had the same impact in Canada as in the US, so strategies are different. Recently, anti-abortion groups have focused on the idea that "abortion hurts women," and that being anti-abortion is being pro-woman, feminist even, which is an attempt to appeal to young people. Last term there were two days when there were anti-abortionists protesting on campus. So, I think this is different from what is happening in the US, certainly, but it is hard to see and discuss those differences if we imagine Canada as a "pink utopia."

Karen: I'm glad you mentioned the rhetoric of protecting women because that rhetoric was commonly used when anti-abortion laws were passed in the 19th century, and you can hear echoes of it in the Roe decision too. I've been thinking about this recently because of the Texas judge who tried to outlaw mifepristone, one of the drugs used in medication abortions. His arguments were about protectionism too, when he argued that the drug is harmful to women and that the FDA should never have approved it for abortion. One thing that's happening in the US is that Dobbs allowed for every anti-abortion strategy to come into play. Whereas while Roe was in place, the strategies were very much about chipping away abortion access, within the confines of Roe.

There are some recent films that have done a good job capturing the consequences of the pre-Dobbs approach, Unpregnant (2020) and Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always (2020).3 Both films show young women who live in states where you can't have an abortion without parental consent if you're a minor. These young women have to find (or steal) the financial means to travel to another state where they can get an abortion. The way these films portray abortion access is going to become increasingly more important to understanding abortion politics today. In Unpregnant, which is a comedy, Veronica, the main character, goes on a fantastical road trip to New Mexico, where abortion is allowed without parental consent. She succeeds in obtaining her abortion, but so many things have to magically fall into place for her, both financially and practically. Yet, how many people are put in impossible situations like hers when they live in states that outlaw or restrict abortions? How many people actually succeed in finding thousands of dollars, or getting several days off work or school in order to travel for an abortion? I'd like to see more representations of people needing to access abortion under these circumstances, and also more representations of people using abortion pills, which are increasingly the method used for the majority of abortions in the US. And then, of course, both those films portray white women, and that is also not an entirely accurate representation of who is most likely to be in these precarious situations.

Heather: There are aspects of those films that strike me as important for their representational value. In Unpregnant, it's significant that the best friend, Bailey, is gay. There's a key scene where they are on a ride at an amusement park, and Bailey has recently come out to Veronica, and they start laughing and shouting "we are gay and we are pregnant." Linking abortion to queer sexualities in that moment makes something clear that is often hard to see, which is that abortion and queerness pose similar threats to heteropatriarchy. They both upset what is imagined as the proper, feminine life course, which is as much about heterosexuality as maternity. The scene is funny, but it points out that abortion allows women to subvert, or to queer, heteropatriarchy.

We see a similar critique of patriarchy in Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always in the everyday misogyny that surrounds the main characters, Autumn and Skylar. The film shows us relentless gendered and sexual harassment. It is saturated with an overwhelming feeling that sexual violence could happen at any moment. I was moved by the scene where Autumn's family is watching TV together, and her dad is petting the family dog, and he calls the dog a "little slut" for enjoying the affection. That comment is tracked around the room, and we watch the exact moment that Autumn understands she will find no support in that house. Additionally, there is Jasper, the guy who tries to pick Autumn and Skylar up on the bus to New York, and who coerces Skylar into giving him sexual access for money he knows they desperately need. These are just two examples of how the film demonstrates gendered power relations and social conditions are what make the girls unsafe. The film does an excellent job of revealing the structural issues that shape young women's sexual and reproductive lives and choices.

Karen: Coincidentally, both these films came out in 2020. I'm wondering, how do you see these films as representing a shift or change in abortion's representation? There were earlier films that represented abortion that you've written about, like Knocked Up (2007) or Juno (2007), where abortion is raised as a possibility, but then immediately discarded because there's always a better option according to the narrative.4

Heather: There was a period post-Roe, in the 1980s, where abortion was a plot point in films about a different topic. I am thinking about Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) or Dirty Dancing (1987), where abortion moves along the narrative but is not the focus of the film.5 After that, we have several decades of abortion being taboo, and often absent when it should be present, almost glaringly present in its absence. Here I'm thinking of a film like Knocked Up (2007). During this period, we also sometimes saw abortion considered, but then something happens, usually a miscarriage, and the pregnant character does not have to make a decision. Now, however, we are seeing a lot of films specifically about abortion, like Unpregnant, which indicates a shift in the collective consciousness.

I know you've worked on television. Do you think there's been a similar shift in abortion's representation on TV?

Karen: I've written about Scandal, which is produced by Shonda Rhimes, who has always pushed boundaries when it comes to depicting abortion on network TV. Rhimes has talked about how in the first season of Grey's Anatomy (2005) she wanted to show Christina Yang having an abortion after an unplanned pregnancy, but she ultimately felt American audiences weren't ready.6 So instead, Christina ends up having an ectopic pregnancy and needs to have emergency surgery. Even though Christina isn't happy when she learns she's pregnant, she never has to make the decision to have an abortion. However, in the seventh season of the series (2010), Christina is accidentally pregnant again, and this time she's in a more mature relationship with a boyfriend who wants to have a baby with her. Despite this, Christina is firm that she never wanted to be a mother, and that she's having an abortion, against her partner's wishes. That was transgressive for American network TV. For that reason, it didn't surprise me to see Olivia's abortion on Scandal.7 When Olivia walks into the abortion clinic, we don't even know she's pregnant. She just shows up; we see her having the abortion; and then the show moves on. There are probably a handful of examples where there's no drama at all over the character's decision to have an abortion. There's no narrative tension about making that choice; it just happens.

Heather: That's one of the things that is still missing in general. Abortion is rarely depicted as a non-event. I remember there was an abortion by a minor character on the show Girls (2012), and it was dealt with offhandedly and quickly.8 I was surprised that it was brought up and then just put aside. It wasn't a major trauma, and we didn't watch a whole episode devoted to whether it was the right choice. On the other side of things, I also think we rarely see people grieving their abortion but still asserting it was the right choice. Perhaps because it is difficult to represent gray areas within a polarized pro-life/ pro-choice dichotomy. I would like to see more representations that undo that dichotomy. I love that line in Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015), where she writes that pregnant people know a pregnancy is both a choice and a child.9 She says something like "we're not idiots, we understand the stakes, and sometimes we choose death." It's very difficult to carve out space for a position like that in our current political climate.

Karen: It's hard because we live in an environment where you can't express any nuance, and you can't express contradictory feelings if you believe in legal abortion because it might give ammunition to anti-abortionists. You can't say, my abortion made me sad because I thought of a future where having this baby might be possible, but I ultimately decided this is not the future I want. The show Dear White People (2017) does a good job representing this ambiguity.10 Coco is accidentally pregnant, and she expresses ambivalence about having an abortion. She even imagines having a daughter who will be successful, and in this future, everything works out well, even for her. At the end, she still chooses to have the abortion, despite those uncertain feelings. This episode was unusual too because Coco is a young Black woman. She's the first person in her family to go to college, and she is the daughter of a teenage mom. I appreciated how the episode grappled with some of the nuance and complication that goes into the decision to have an abortion, especially for a young, Black woman. But it's still pretty rare to see that.

Heather: This reminds me of a memoir that I've written about called Deep Salt Water (2017), by Marianne Apostolides. 11 She expresses grief about her abortion even though it was the right choice. She grapples with that gray area. One of the ways she does so is by juxtaposing abortion with climate change, which allows her to think about the choices we are all making, all the time, about life and death on a planetary scale. She realizes that deciding to have a child is not a neutral choice at a time of climate catastrophe. This is similar to what Naomi Morgenstern explores in Wild Child (2018), when she discusses realizing that the only thing you can be sure of when you choose to have a child is that eventually that child will die.12 Apostolides' memoir similarly suggests that when we "choose life" we also choose death.

Karen: This feels like an important conversation to have, even as it feels scary, especially in our post-Dobbs world. Acknowledging that despite the loss, abortion was the right decision. How can we have this conversation at this particular moment?

Heather: I think because we have both been working on abortion for a long time, and had gotten to a point where we were critical of Roe, that before Dobbs we were ready to make new, more nuanced arguments. For me, I was ready to basically say, ok "pro-lifers," I'll concede that abortion is a kind of killing, but only if you concede that women should be able to commit that kind of violence, and that they have the moral authority to make decisions about life and death. This is something Sophie Lewis argues really persuasively (2022).13 But now, after Dobbs, I feel less sure about making those kinds of claims. I'm not certain they're the most politically persuasive or effective arguments.

Karen: We've both argued that using the rhetoric and logic of choice and privacy was a problematic way to legalize abortion. It's what allowed abortion access to be eroded in many states. If abortion had been decriminalized, as in Canada, where there are no abortion laws because abortion is just a medical procedure, or if Congress had passed a law legalizing abortion, we might not be where we are now. However, since abortion was legalized through a Supreme Court decision, and not one based on bodily autonomy, but privacy, the ground beneath us was always shaky. And of course, the ruling could always be reversed, as it was. Still, now that Roe has been overturned, I mourn for it, and it's uncomfortable to miss something of which you were so critical.

Heather: I think this indicates that we have to shift our attention to building a different framework. There's been a lot written about this by Black feminists and women of color, who have been saying the same thing for decades, which is that we haven't adequately framed abortion as part of reproductive justice, and that we need to be thinking as much about who's not allowed to have and safely raise the children they want as about who's being forced to keep unwanted pregnancies. We need to be thinking about abortion alongside the foster care system, the criminal justice system, and histories of reproductive racism and abuse.

Karen: When you look back to the early 20th century, anti-abortion activists were explicit about linking abortion laws to race and ethnicity. They were passing anti-abortion laws at the same time as they were passing laws that legalized sterilization. It annoys me deeply when people like Clarence Thomas argue that abortion was a tool of eugenicists. Actually, eugenicists were against abortion too. They wanted to outlaw abortion because they wanted to encourage white women to reproduce, and then they had other tools, like sterilization, to prevent Black, poor, and disabled women from reproducing. They saw these laws as working together to control women's reproduction and shape a population according to their racist and ableist vision. Those of us who are pro-abortion could do more to think about how abortion access is rooted in all different structures.

Heather: Black feminists have been saying this for decades, right?

Karen: Definitely, like Dorothy Roberts in Killing the Black Body (1997).14

Heather: And Angela Davis writing on birth control (1982).15 White feminism has not been able to cope with the history you're outlining. For instance, so much of what gets popularly described as oppressive is highly racialized. It's significant that most of the films, television shows, and texts we're talking about depict white women who can't get the reproductive healthcare they need, and that this is seen as the pinnacle of reproductive oppression. What we're seeing as "newly" oppressive is representations of white women experiencing the same lack of bodily autonomy that Black women, for example, have been experiencing for hundreds of years.

Karen: Related to this conversation is Louise Erdrich's work.16 We've both talked about her novel, Future Home of the Living God (2017), which is about all the things you're describing. It's a dystopian novel, but it's saying, well, actually for Native Americans, dystopia arrived more than 200 years ago. So even if what white people are experiencing feels acutely dystopic, this is not any different for Native Americans. And, of course, Erdrich is talking about reproduction in this context as well.

Heather: Yes, and I think it's so important that in Erdrich's version of dystopia we see Indigenous resurgence. The Indigenous characters use the political instability of the moment to assert sovereignty over their own lands. This points to what you just said, and to the question of what is dystopic and for whom? For many Indigenous peoples, the apocalypse happened hundreds of years ago and has been ongoing since. It's similar to how some viewers of The Handmaid's Tale (2017) are horrified, while others, predominantly Black and Indigenous viewers, point out that there's nothing particularly new about the show's reproductive violence.17 

Karen: It's also significant that Cedar, Erdrich's main character, decides to have a baby in the midst of an apocalypse, when everyone is saying to her, what are you doing? You need to have an abortion. This is not the time to have a baby. And she asserts her right to have a baby on her own terms.

Heather: Especially since on the first page of the novel she mentions she's already had an abortion.

Karen: I wonder whether Erdrich made that choice because she didn't want the novel to come off as anti-abortion.

Heather: She has said as much in interviews, yes.

Karen: In that opening scene, where Cedar makes the choice to reproduce, Erdrich pushes her readers to understand how the right to reproduce is as important as the right to have an abortion. Cedar very much chooses to have her baby, even as the repercussions of that choice place her and her baby in increasingly dangerous situations.

Heather: Yet Cedar's baby is apprehended by the state at the end of the novel, which again points to the importance of reproductive justice. Perhaps one of the things the novel demonstrates, then, is just how inadequate "choice" is for making sense of reproductive decisions, and that without a better framework we'll keep getting caught up in the same circular, inadequate arguments about abortion.

Karen: I recently met a youth activist who works for NYC for Abortion Rights, a reproductive justice organization that is unapologetically pro-abortion, intersectional, and abolitionist. It was heartening to hear her speak about how she sees her work defending abortion clinics as interconnected with bodily autonomy for trans people and racial justice. In our post-Dobbs world, this is the kind of activism we need to see right now. This is the Jane Collective for our future.

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Heather Latimer is the author of Reproductive Acts: Sexual Politics in North American Fiction and Film (2013) and has written about representations of abortion for Feminist Theory, Social Text, and Feminist Studies, among other venues.

Karen Weingarten recently published Pregnancy Test (2023); her first book was Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880-1940 (2014). She's written about the rhetoric and representation of abortion in feminist journals and for various public-facing publications. 

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