‘Resist the state’: activists teach Floridians to ‘self-manage’ abortions in wake of ban
On Wednesday, the same day Florida banned abortion past six weeks of pregnancy, a small group of young people gathered in a reading room in Gainesville, Florida, to listen to a talk about how to induce your own abortion through pills – and how to support your friends going through abortions.
“You don’t have to take them alone,” one organizer, who gave her name as J, told the group of more than a dozen attendees. “We are ultimately here to be establishing a community care network around abortion support.”
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There was also another reason for the event: it was, in the words of another organizer, “a big fuck you to Florida”.
Although more than a dozen states, including Florida and all of the deep south, have implemented strict abortion bans in the wake of the fall of Roe v Wade, those bans target people who provide abortions, not women who undergo them. “Self-managing” your own abortion using pills remains legally fraught, but experts widely believe that it is medically safe if the pills are used early enough in pregnancy.
Sitting on comfy chairs on a dais beneath a Powerpoint-style presentation, whose slides were frequently rendered in sepia tones and wreathed in floral imagery, J and another organizer, who gave their name as E, walked the rapt group through the steps of using abortion pills: how to find them online, what to expect, how to know if something’s gone wrong. At least two attendees scribbled notes.
If you want to go to a hospital, E and J emphasized, you do not need to tell your medical provider that you had an abortion. Instead, they said, just say you had a miscarriage.
“Other people snitching on you is really a security risk,” said E, whose pronouns are they/them. “Nurses and doctors are fucking snitches sometimes.”
For E and J, the fight for abortion and reproductive rights was nestled within a broader fight for bodily autonomy – one that, in their view, was inextricably intertwined with causes like prison abolition and the pro-Palestine movement. The pair peppered their talk with mentions of “comrades” and urged attendees to “resist the state”. One slide celebrated the labor holiday of May Day, which coincidentally also fell on Wednesday, complete with an illustration of a molotov cocktail.
“It’s May Day, we deserve access to care, we should fight for our and our comrades’ bodily autonomy. And so we did it,” J said in an interview after the talk, with a giggle. “I’m really glad that we had a space that reminded me of the ways that we can care for each other and build a better world, and how that is possible, because in a lot of ways it already exists.”
The attendees grew increasingly interactive throughout the talk. When E and J asked the crowd for suggestions on how to best support people through abortions, people offered up the methods they had used for their friends or had been supported with through their own abortions. One attendee said they had helped a friend by being a “silly little guy” during their abortion. (Several people laughed.) Another person said that, after their abortion, they tried to talk about it as much as possible.
“Making it normal and not as fucking weird is the only way I know how to help right now,” they said.
They had set up a table with a veritable buffet of reproductive health resources: multiple black-and-white zines with information about self-managed abortion; a zine titled Free Bleed: A Non-Gendered, Analog Period Tracker, which featured a calendar for people looking to track their periods without the use of apps; stacks of emergency contraceptive pills, pads and condoms.
On another table lay a framed poster that read: “Blessed are the abortion providers.” Covered with flowers, bones and a candle, the table had the look of a shrine.
During the talk, nobody mentioned that, come November, Florida voters will have a chance to vote on a ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution. In an interview, though, E said that they had gathered signatures to get the measure on the ballot.
“I’m pretty confident in our collective ability to get that passed,” E said. “Once the people have the opportunity to decide, it’s pretty clear people don’t like these bans.”
E had an abortion in Florida before Roe fell. At the time, they were beyond six weeks of pregnancy; today, they wouldn’t have been able to get that abortion in a Florida clinic.
“I have deep empathy for everyone that is now affected, that finds out they’re pregnant today and has to deal with the repercussions of the state criminalizing that for no reason, for arbitrary reasons,” they said. “We don’t need to have these bans or anything that are barriers to access to healthcare like this.”
