Jessica Valenti Says Her Work on Abortion Isn’t “Preaching to the Choir.” It’s Arming It.

Jessica Valenti writes and talks about abortion like someone who thinks about it for dozens of hours every week—because she does.

For around two years—since the fall of Roe—Valenti has been writing about reproductive justice every day in her newsletter, aptly titled Abortion, Every Day. But, in her new book, Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win, she jokes that she could have called the newsletter Abortion, Every Hour, because “that’s how quickly things are moving in post-Roe America.”

It’s true, and the elections since Dobbs, including this one, have largely been defined by abortion. Voters in battleground states, particularly women voters younger than 45, increasingly say abortion is the most important issue to their vote, according to a New York Times / Siena College poll conducted in August. Over 25 million women, ages 15 to 44, reside in states that have more restrictions on accessing abortion than before Dobbs, despite living in a country whose populace overwhelmingly supports access to reproductive health care like abortion. Meanwhile, Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance have been jumping through rhetorical hoops, attempting to soften their past remarks and actions on the issue, as Vice President Kamala Harris has spoken about reproductive freedom on the debate stage in unprecedentedly stark terms.

‘Abortion’ by Jessica Valenti

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Valenti has spent the last two decades writing about women and gendered violence, launching the blog Feministing in 2004 and writing for newsrooms like The Guardian, The Nation, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Bitch. This is her eighth book. “I was just so angry and intent on not missing a thing,” Valenti writes of her newsletter in Abortion. This anger, she explains in the text, is what keeps her going. “Republicans want us to be afraid. They want us to be too scared to help each other, too anxious to share our abortion plan with a friend, too scared, even, to get medical help when we need it. It’s heartbreaking: they’ve criminalized community.”

Abortion reads like a letter to women and allies who are afraid, at once challenging and encyclopedic. (After the last chapter, Valenti includes pages of resources and statistics to employ when talking to others about abortion.) In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, she explains why language is so critical to this debate, what questions journalists should ask Republicans, and what abortion stories still make her cry.

Vanity Fair: In a footnote in your introduction, you write, “The hardest thing about writing a book about abortion is knowing that you could never possibly fit everything that needs talking about.” How hard was it to narrow down hundreds of days of writing about abortion into less than 200 pages?

Jessica Valenti: It was one of the most challenging things I’ve done in my life, honestly. Because it’s not just that you know that these stories are changing day to day, hour to hour, and so that any story you put out there is going to be hugely different by the time the book comes out. It does feel like sort of creating this hierarchy of issues within abortion, which I don’t like to do, because they’re all so important. I sort of had to just say, “All right, I’m trying to capture a particular moment in time.” This seems to be the big, broad issues that are happening right now in the two years in the aftermath of Dobbs. When I was recording the audiobook a couple of weeks ago, every other page, I was like, “Shit, I wish I could have added this,” or, “I should have talked about that.” It’s really hard.

I can imagine you, as you’re recording the audio for the text, being like, “And another thing!”

It was so tempting, so tempting. It’s so—funny is not the right word. When I think about the fact that for so long, this issue was treated as this ancillary women’s issue, culture war issue, that was not given its due respect as this incredibly nuanced political topic. It’s just wild to me.

In the book, you explain that you’re not in the business of convincing people that one in four American women aren’t murderers. Could you tell me a little bit about who your intended readership is for this book, and how you were thinking of this imagined group of people while you were writing?

So a question I get asked a lot, with the newsletter especially, is, “Don’t you feel like you’re preaching to the choir?” Like, these are all people who already care about this issue, who are already going to vote in a particular way. And that, for the most part, is true. I do not expect to change hearts and minds with the work that I’m doing. And so I don’t think of it as preaching to the choir. I think of it as arming the choir. As someone who’s been writing opinion for a long time, it is pretty rare, I think, that I’ll write a column and someone will send me an email like, “Oh, I sent that column to my uncle, and he completely changed his tune, and now he’s a feminist.” That’s not the way these things work. But what might happen is maybe that young woman feels empowered to have a more in-depth conversation with that person. I think it’s the people who are close to us who change our minds and make us see things in a different way.

You spend a decent amount of the first few chapters talking about how Republicans are better at language: being “pro-life,” claiming that the pill causes “silent abortions.” And a favorite of mine that you mention is the reframing of abortions for medical reasons as “maternal-fetal separations.” Can you explain what the stakes are for how Democrats respond to that language?

If you take something like the word ban, this is a word I’m thinking about a lot. We’re so close to the election and Trump is claiming he doesn’t support a federal abortion ban. JD Vance is out there saying “We would never sign a federal abortion ban.” But I know that what they mean by ban is very, very different than what the vast majority of Americans understand ban to mean. They have redefined ban to mean no abortion, even if someone is going to die. And so under this definition, there are no abortion bans in America. And so it’s sort of like the rhetorical equivalent of crossing your fingers behind your back and saying, “Of course, I don’t believe in a ban. I believe in a federal restriction”—which is the same fucking thing. Watching Democrats not understand that, watching mainstream media outlets say, “Oh, well, they said that he would veto a ban,” without providing that context of what they mean by ban, I mean, the stakes honestly couldn’t be higher.

You, of course, are very intentional about the language you use in this book. You say “forced surgery,” “forced childbirth,” “forced pregnancy.” You say “helpers” instead of those who “aid and abet.” I’m curious, how difficult has it been for you to divest from the more milquetoast language used to describe abortion care?

You sort of have to be proactive about it, because it’s such a part of our cultural vernacular. Even “pro-choice,” “ending a pregnancy,” like all of the language that we sort of use. I try to think carefully and strategically about it. Also, I think, because I don’t buy into the more mainstream framing of abortion rights, it is a little bit easier for me. I’ve never been a safe, legal, and rare type of girl—like, that’s not my vibe. I’m also just taking cues from the activists around me who are doing all of this really important, incredible work. And so if they are using a particular language, I am trying to model that.

Abortion, as you remind the reader throughout the text, is incredibly popular across the US—as is contraception and protecting victims and survivors of sexual violence. The right, you explain, knows this, so they frame abortion rights as attacks on parental rights, and scapegoat trans communities in the process. What does this strategy tell us about the future connections between abortion bans, bans on gender-affirming care, and rights for kids and teens?

As sneaky as they are, Republicans really are giving us this map to their strategy. They are laying out what they think the future of their movement is. They very clearly know that abortion rights are extremely popular. They know that they’re not really convincing voters by focusing on the “abortion is murder” line—it’s old and it hasn’t worked for a long time. But they think if they can focus on anti-trans bigotry, if they can focus on parental rights, which, unfortunately, are more popular than their takes on abortion, that maybe they can twist this to benefit them. But those aren’t just like rhetorical plays. They’re not just doing it because of messaging. They’re doing it because they see those issues as inexorably connected. There’s a reason that in Nebraska, for example, the abortion ban is the same law that bans gender-affirming care for minors. To them, they want to stop bodily autonomy. To them, this is about not just reinforcing traditional gender roles, but reinforcing a traditional gender binary. So they are telling us “We see these issues as connected,” and so it’s really important that we are also treating those issues as connected. Same thing with minors. I really feel so strongly about this, because this is one of the areas where I feel like the pro-choice movement does not do well enough, because they are so afraid of this [baseless] conservative talking point that Planned Parenthood is indoctrinating children. They’re so afraid of that that oftentimes they are leaving behind the most vulnerable community, which are young people. So yeah, it’s both about the language and their political rhetoric, but very, very much about how they are telling us what they’re going to do next. Are we going to listen?

At the beginning, you mentioned that by the time this book got published, you knew that more information would be out there. You wrote this book before the ProPublica reporting came out about Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller. I was struck that, in the book, you described how the first reported deaths from abortion bans would likely happen. You write, “Whoever she is, wherever she lives, chances are that her death won’t be caused by an illegal abortion, but a denial of care.” And that’s what happened. How are abortion ban-related deaths going to look different in a post-Dobbs world from a pre-Roe world?

It’s the difference between women dying in back alleys versus under fluorescent lights at a hospital. I am not sure which one is worse. In one way, dying in a hospital is worse because you’re surrounded by people who could save your life and don’t. But I think that is going to be the vast majority of deaths that we see—women dying preventable deaths in hospitals. And that is what we have seen. Everyone knows that these two deaths are not the only two deaths that have happened. Anyone who works in abortion rights has multiple, multiple stories of women and girls, young people who have died. I’m trying to think about all the stories I’ve heard. I think every single one of them has been denial of care. It makes it really emotionally difficult, and it also makes it really politically beneficial to the right, because they are using that as a way to say: the laws are fine, the doctors should have done something.

You spend time talking in the book about this reality for doctors. Obviously there’s been a lot of noise around that in the past couple of weeks. You asked the reader, “If you were risking years in prison—decades, even— what would you choose?” And I’m curious how you wrestle with this question of people being able to save someone’s life and—even framing this question is hard. How do you wrestle with it?

I had a conversation a couple of days ago with an activist friend of mine about this. I find it really challenging. There is one part of me that is like, “Have some fucking moral courage and just do it.” But I am a writer in New York, who works behind a computer screen, who is not risking arrest. Like that is a really easy thing for me to say, not living in one of these states, not doing this work. It’s a horrible situation all around and it causes so much moral injury too, I think, to the medical community because of that position that they’re in. We’re seeing huge rates of depression and anxiety among people who provide reproductive health care. Some people are having to pick up their lives and move. So it’s just had all of these massive ripple effects.

You also explain how anti-abortion laws depend on American misogyny and racism. That “the very idea of exceptions is built on the notion that some women deserve care while others don’t.” And that anti-abortion groups “are betting that when the maternal mortality data does come out, people won’t care because the women overwhelmingly impacted— the women who are going to be dying—are disproportionately women of color, Black women especially. ” Can you talk about the impact of delineating who deserves care and whose pain matters?

Yeah. I mean, it is a very deliberate, insidious, fucked-up strategy that they know will work. They know that this country loves to hate women who make “bad choices.” They love the idea of punishing a sexually promiscuous woman. Embedded in all of those exceptions [to abortion bans] is this notion that there are good women and bad women, women who deserve to have abortions and women who don’t—because you should be punished with a baby. With the maternal mortality stuff, I am just so incredibly worried about it, because I can see what they’re doing. Because they know that it’s primarily Black women who are going to be most affected—not just women of color, but Black women specifically—they have started to preemptively put out policy papers where they say “We’re trying to combat the maternal mortality crisis among Black women, and it seems like it’s mostly because they’re obese.” They are literally putting out the wildest, most victim-blaming shit you can possibly imagine in anticipation of these women dying.

One thing that was notable to me is how many times you invite the reader to “imagine.” Imagine what it would mean if pregnant people were criminalized for being “inhospitable” carriers, imagine trying to find birth control and landing at an anti-abortion clinic, imagine being blamed if your abuser caused your miscarriage. Can you tell me about the decision to include these “imagines” in your writing?

I did it deliberately because I think what happens naturally—and I see it with myself writing about this issue—is it is so horrible, it is such a difficult pill to swallow, the horror of it all, that I know when I write about it, and I imagine when people read about it, that you sort of compartmentalize. As you’re reading, you sort of need to separate yourself from it a little bit. As hard as it is, I actually think it is really important that we’re able to place ourselves in these situations. Imagine that this is happening to the people we care about, because it is and it will. This will absolutely touch everyone in the country. Whether it’s because Trump wins and they pass some sort of national ban, or because pro-choice states are so inundated with out-of-state patients that you have to wait a month or two to get an abortion or a pap smear. I wanted people to understand, you can’t distance yourself from this. I mean, obviously we all have to do what we have to do in order to get through another day, and self-care and all that jazz. My big worry about this issue is that we’re becoming numb to it, that it’s becoming so normalized.

I remember you writing that it’s the things that have been normalized that keep you up at night.

Yeah, it is. The fact that we’re in this place where the AG of Alabama [Steve Marshall] is literally arguing, in writing, in a court filing, that it is legal for the state to restrict pregnant people’s travel, and that is not front page news, that is not causing this immediate uproar, that there’s not sustained coverage of that really scares me.

You call out the American media in the book, and suggest that reporters ask Republicans better and different questions. A few that stood out to me: How do you define ban? What kind of contraception do you support? How sick must a person be to legally qualify for an abortion? Can you tell us how much an abortion costs? Why is it important that journalists begin to ask these different questions, and what impact do you think it will have on coverage and newsrooms?

I’ve just seen it happen so often with things like the word ban, with things like birth control, where they say, “Do you support birth control?” “Oh, yeah, I support birth control.” “Oh, okay, great.” I’m trying to be more empathetic towards mainstream media outlets. Because this issue was seen as an ancillary issue for so long, there are not that many abortion rights reporters. The ones that we have are great. There’s a lot of people who are doing truly, truly excellent work on this issue. But because so much is happening, what we’re seeing is a lot of generalist political reporters, general health reporters covering this issue, who aren’t necessarily tracking the strategies of the anti-abortion movement. So, I think that there has to be sort of more expertise and understanding of what’s actually happening so that you can ask the right questions. They had 50 years to plan for this moment. None of this is by accident. Everything that they’re doing has been so well planned, well strategized, well thought out. I just think voters deserve to know—Americans are not going to be fully informed about this issue unless those questions are asked. If you don’t ask them what kind of birth control they support, then you’ll never know that they consider emergency contraception and IUDs abortions—and that’s a huge story. It feels to me like reporters are missing out on what is a huge political story, which is that these laws are being passed against the wishes of the vast majority of voters.

Lastly, I want to ask you about a TikTok that you made recently where you say that you feel like you’ve “aged fucking 20 years over the last two.” You also note that, because you’re writing about multiple stories every day, there’s always one that “puts you over the edge.” You called it your “crying story for the day.” What was that story yesterday?

I think probably it was the story from KFF Health News about the woman in South Carolina who was arrested for having a miscarriage. And there was this moment in the story, it’s a great piece, where—I’m gonna cry again if I talk about it—they talked about her having to wear an ankle bracelet when she went home. And, unsurprisingly, she’s a Black woman. This is a person who had a pregnancy loss, who had a medical trauma, and they charged her with murder. I was pretty distressed about that one yesterday.

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