Abortion Is Thinking. Thinking Is Banned.
everyday thinking, democratic living, an essay, long live the small mag
Happy new year, friends. We’re traveling around a bizarrely warm East Coast and today I’m sharing a short essay adapted/updated from Hole Studies, on abortion and everyday thinking—I expanded out a passage in the book after Roe fell. In Ohio abortion rights have been vulnerable and in the courts since the summer, purgatorial, right now fortunately still legal till 22 weeks, with more battles approaching in the new year. This essay of mine, “Abortion Is Thinking. Thinking Is Banned,” appears as the final installment in the beautiful online magazine The Sultan’s Seal, edited by friend Youssef Rakha, a bilingual magazine in Arabic and English, featuring gorgeous photography, translations, writing from all over, an utterly distinctive and rich literary & cultural gathering space, “Cairo’s coolest cosmopolitan hotel.” Over the years I’ve appeared there a few times, usually at Youssef’s generous & generative invitation—an ideal practice of editing, in which someone honors you by asking you a question, you write a piece you’d never otherwise have written, and perhaps more importantly, thought something much more fully than you would have otherwise, invited into further dialogue with self, others, world. Thank you, Youssef, for making this space exist.
I realized this morning that of the 5 literary magazines that have featured essays from my recent book, 3 have closed—in fact, closed shortly after. Small but striking anecdotal example. I don’t think that publishing one of my essays is the kiss of death, or is it. I do think that this work—of editing a literary magazine, mostly unfunded, and even funded—is under supported and requires a consistent supply of labor, time, care, and money that the culture doesn’t readily replenish. So many literary projects are shepherded by a single individual, admirably, for years, so of course people may need to move on at some point, nothing wrong with a natural life cycle. The work is both nourishing and fatiguing, you have to rotate your crops. The question is whether there’s anyone ready to hand things off to, or a new small magazine preparing dreamily to launch. The existence of these small real gathering spaces is precarious yet precious. Hummingbirds are important pollinators, too, I’m thinking. If you know of some new small lit mags (Annulet, e.g.) to support please share.
Essay here & below.
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ABORTION IS THINKING. THINKING IS BANNED.
When Roe fell, I felt what lots of people felt. My feelings were common.
I felt that the lives of everyone I knew had been made possible, in the forms we know as ourselves, by access to reproductive healthcare. Everyone, most especially women and trans and nonbinary people. The job I have—the shape and status and income and independence of my working life—was barely available to those of my mother’s generation and unheard of to my grandmother’s. This is all so obvious it’s almost embarrassing to state, but apparently these days we must. Contraception and abortion are perfectly material. But the profound ways that access to them shapes us—the structures of our relationships and workplaces and society and politics, the nature of our opportunities, our ideas of who we are—aren’t easy to quantify, or even to think.
We won’t go back, as the pro-choice rallying cry says. Sometimes, for no clear reason in the middle of any day, this phrases surges up in me, a futile refusal.
Back into systems and structures—a world—unthinkably more constrained, less free. Back, of course, is already here, in stories of women imprisoned for miscarriages (it’s been happening), or pregnant and bleeding on the floor of a jail, or going into sepsis while they wait to see what the law says. Recent years of cultural conversation have spotlighted the word systemic—which helps describe the situation outlined above: how access to reproductive healthcare alters and expands the pathways through which our lives flow—yet these conversations have not developed, I fear, enough language beyond that word. How do we understand the forces that precede us and shape us, the field in which our limited agency takes form? In the wake of international protests after Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd, we saw a powerful new upsurge of energy, a new critique of the systemic: to recognize that systemic racism is and is everywhere; to start to talk, in every realm, about dismantling it… Yet often discussions and initiatives refocused immediately on the individual and the personal. Nothing could be easier in America, where individualism is deeply systemic. We lack language for systems, for thinking the collective. How can we build the language, the conversations, the collective power we need?
Abortion provides, I think, a model. An occasion. The thinking that takes place around an abortion defines our agency, intimately and specifically, against the pressures and oppressions of the systemic. Here we think our responsibility, our connection to others, the capacities and limits of ourselves, what we want, what we owe, what’s possible, by the light of this one struck match, a decision, throwing our small freedom into sharp relief. Abortion exemplifies an everyday mode of thinking that is essential to democratic living. No wonder they have to ban it.
… Please read the rest here.
beautiful ❤️