1). “Antis Want to Do Away with Buffer Zones”, Nov 18, 2024, Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day, at < https://jessica.substack.com/
2). “A leading abortion provider on why restrictive laws are taking us back to the Dark Ages: For 60 years, Dr. Warren Hern has been a leader on abortion care. Here's what drives him”, Oct 13, 2024, Nicole Karlis interviews Dr. Warren Hern, Salon, at < https://www.salon.com/2024/10/
3). “The deaths from abortion bans you won't hear about: Doctors may be even more hesitant to discuss cases that involve a death for fear of retaliation”, Oct 21, 2024, Nicole Karlis, Salon, at < https://www.salon.com/2024/10/
4). “How America changed post-Dobbs — and how the fight for abortion rights continues: Author Jessica Valenti spoke with Salon about her new book, covering the shifting landscape of reproductive rights”, Oct 2, 2024, Nicole Karlis interviews Jessica Valenti, Salon, at < https://www.salon.com/2024/10/
5). “Abortion exceptions "have no meaning at all" — and estimates of pregnancies by rape prove it: A new report estimates 65,000 pregnancies by rape in abortion-ban states, underscoring the fallacy of these laws”, Jan 26, 2024, Nicole Karlis, Salon, at < https://www.salon.com/2024/01/
6). “Medical school graduates are avoiding states with abortion bans. Experts warn it could cause chaos: Abortion ban states see fewer residency applications. The trend could cause the U.S. healthcare system to unravel”, May 14, 2024, Nicole Karlis, Salon, at < https://www.salon.com/2024/05/
7). “Georgia's abortion ban killed a young mother. The Christian right now blames the victim: Anti-choice activists argue that if Amber Nicole Thurman had submitted to forced childbirth, she'd still be alive”, Sep 19, 2024, Amanda Marcotte, Salon, at < https://www.salon.com/2024/05/
8). “ 'Tradwives' offer an alluring vision of right-wing Christianity — online warriors are fighting back: The #FundieSnark movement battles to 'deconstruct' those picture-perfect images of Christian social media”, Mar 8, 2024, Amanda Marcotte, Salon, at < https://www.salon.com/2024/03/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: These 8 articles, that were published from January 26th to November 18th of this year, provide important context and background to the issues of Abortion Access and the right to Reproductive Health Care for American women. Item 1)., “Antis Want to ….”, discusses the latest developments. Valenti, always on top of things, mentions among other things, that the Forced-Pregnancy / Forced-Birth movement has brought a lawsuit against the City of Carbondale, Illinois challenging the buffer zone the city council established after a series of aggressive assaults on abortion seeking women by Forced-Pregnancy / Forced-Birth operatives & activists. She also points out that the Attorney's General of Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri have filed a case claiming that they are losing revenue and power because of abortions and low birth rates. In a different article the author pointed out that the three reactionary run states even complained that they are suffering economically from a low rate of teen-age pregnancy.
In an excellent series addressing abortion issues in Salon, Items 2). - 6). are all written by Nicole Karlis. She addresses issues ranging from the descent of the U.S. into a new Dark Age; to the fact that supposed exceptions to abortion bans are actually phony; to the hidden pregnancy / lack of access to safe abotions death data that physicians avoid publicizing; to Medical Students avoiding being trained in Trump Abortion Bans states. Items 7 & 8 are written by Amanda Marcotte and Item 7). looks at the machinations the Forced-Pregnancy / Forced-Birth movement went to to try and blame Amber Nicole Thurman for her own death, that was actually caused by her inability to obtain a timely abortion. And Item 8). that takes a hard look at the Trad-Wife movement and exposes some of the fallacies promoted by Trad-wife advocates and propagandists.
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Antis Want to Do Away with Buffer Zones
Click to skip ahead: In Ballot Measures, Missouri Republicans want to roll back Amendment 3, and more about the dirty tricks in Nebraska. In the States, news out of Massachusetts, Montana, Ohio and more. In the Nation, the pronatalist bent of the latest mifepristone case. Anti-Abortion Strategy gets into the attacks on abortion clinic buffer zones. And after all that, I’m offering some quick hits of positivity with In Better News.
Ballot Measures
In news that will surprise no one, Missouri Republicans are making moves to undo Amendment 3—the pro-choice ballot measure passed by voters on election day. Senate Majority Leader Tony Luetkemeyer says the state GOP plays to try to “pull back” on some of the more “radical” parts of the amendment.
Luetkemeyer defended the move by claiming that Amendment 3 “passed very narrowly,” and that it failed in most counties:
“It was largely pulled across the finish line by our major Democratic strongholds in the state, whether that be St. Louis, Kansas City, Columbia, but outside of those two metro areas and Columbia, it failed in most of the state.”
Does he think that votes in certain cities are worth less than others? Just because a measure won thanks to Democrats doesn’t make it any less what voters want!
Luetkemeyer’s comments come at the same time that Catholic leaders say they expect to see legislation to override the will of Missouri voters. Jamie Morris, executive director of the Missouri Catholic Conference (MCC) said he believes Republicans will “protect against some of the harms that Amendment 3 poses,” and that he hopes “we will see legislation proposed to chip away at or potentially repeal Amendment 3.”
You can be sure that Republicans are in conversation with anti-abortion groups about how to make all this happen; so I’ll keep you updated as I find out specifics.
Meanwhile, we’re getting more information from activists in Nebraska about just how much trickery was involved in passing an anti-abortion ballot measure. Remember, voters had two abortion-related measures in front of them—one that would protect abortion rights, and one that would codify Nebraska’s 12-week ban into the state constitution. The latter passed largely because anti-abortion activists tricked voters into thinking the measure was pro-choice.
Shelley Mann, Executive Director of the abortion fund Nebraska Abortion Resources (NEAR), details at Prism all the different ways conservatives successfully sowed confusion and disinformation:
“They co-opted our language, our logo, and our fonts; they strategically used phrases like ‘reproductive rights are human rights.’ Petitioners were even caught directly lying to voters by telling them that signing the anti-abortion petition would protect their right to access abortion…Hundreds of voters came forward to have their names removed from the ‘wrong’ petition, but it was too late. Ads ran on every platform throughout the campaign phase, claiming that voting against the viability measure would protect Nebraskans from government interference in abortion care. This was gaslighting on a massive scale, and it succeeded.”
Mann also points out something vital: “What happened in Nebraska will soon be replicated in other states.”
This is exactly right, and something I’ve warned about myself. After all, there’s a reason that anti-abortion groups spent nearly as much money in Nebraska as they did in Florida: They were treating the state as testing ground to see just how well pretending to be pro-choice would work out for them.
I’ll publish a column this week about the different ways we can expect to see this strategy in action, but in the meantime read Abortion, Every Day’s past coverage of the tactic below:
In the States
The anti-abortion “Men’s March” showed up in Boston, Massachusetts this weekend, reminding all of us that “your body, my choice” isn’t just an online rallying cry—but a belief system. The only good thing about this march is that for the past few years, they’re accompanied by a very special counter-protest: the Clown March. These are activists wearing clown costumes and playing circus music to remind everyone what a fucking joke these men are.
Pro-choice activist Zoe Weiss told WBUR, "We're here to make a mockery of these men who are in their suits and ties walking down the street, telling women what they should do with their bodies, as though they should have any choice in the matter.”
It wasn’t all wigs and red noses this year, though; over a dozen people were arrested after police clashed with protesters. It appears that the majority of those arrested were pro-choice activists. (If any AED readers were there, I’d love to hear about what you saw.)
Some good news today: A judge has temporarily blocked new licensing requirements for Montana abortion clinics while the broader legal case plays out. Republicans put the new rules in place with the goal of shutting down clinics in the state. They’re similar to other kinds of onerous TRAP laws that we’ve seen elsewhere—like those requiring that clinics be constructed as ambulatory or outpatient surgical centers.
But the county judge found that the requirements likely violate patients’ rights to equal protection, and pointed out that they treat abortion providers differently than other health care providers who perform the same procedures. (Doctors treating miscarriages, for example, aren’t required to adhere to the same standards.)
Montana Republicans have been trying to pass all sorts of abortion restrictions since Roe was overturned, even though abortion has been protected in the state constitution since 1999. Voters in the state also enshrined that 1999 state Supreme Court ruling in a ballot measure on election day.
Ohio Republicans are pushing a bill to punish local towns and cities that help low-income abortion patients by funding logistical costs like childcare or transportation. House Bill 475 would even take that funding and reallocate it towards anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers!
I honestly don’t see how this legislation withstands legal scrutiny. Because remember, Ohio passed a ballot measure last year protecting abortion rights in the state constitution. And as Jaime Miracle with Abortion Forward noted, that protection includes a prohibition on the state penalizing “either an individual’s voluntary exercise of this right or a person or entity that assists the individual exercising this right.”
But as we know, Republicans will try anything to overrule the will of the people.
Finally, pro-choice states are understandably worried about what a Trump presidency will mean for abortion rights. Here’s some local coverage about how Democrats and abortion rights activists are thinking about the issue in Oregon, California, and Minnesota.
Quick hits:
Mother Jones has more on the move by Texas Republicans to make abortion medication a controlled substance;
The ACLU wants to expand their legal challenge against Kentucky’s abortion ban into a class action suit;
NBC News on the North Carolina Republican who told a constituent to “move to China” if she didn’t like the state’s abortion ban;
And some New Jersey Democrats want to codify abortion rights in the state constitution.
“People kind of think that abortion access can be like a light switch, like you flip it up because the law allows you to provide abortion care, and suddenly there’s all of these clinics and providers who are able to provide care. You flip it down when abortion is restricted, and those providers are able to just pause but not go anywhere. That’s just not the case. What we see fairly frequently when there is a change in abortion law is that it just takes a bit of time, if ever, for that infrastructure to be built back up.”
In the Nation
States Newsroom points out today that the states that lost federal family planning dollars over their anti-abortion extremism may be able to get it back under the new Trump administration. (In fact, I’d say it’s a near-certainty.)
A refresher: States like Tennessee and Oklahoma lost millions in Title X funding due to a simple requirement—federally-funded health centers had to inform patients that abortion is an option in other states. In fact, the centers wouldn’t even need to give people details! The Department of Health and Human Services only required them to share a national hotline with information on abortion and other pregnancy options—and even then, only if a patient asked. What’s more, those with religious objections could opt-out.
Still, Republican leaders in these states chose to throw away contraception access for low-income residents rather than lose a political fight.
But with Trump in office, his administration could reverse that rule and restore the millions in funding to anti-abortion states that don’t give a shit about women’s health. There’s also concern over Title X funding more broadly because Project 2025 calls for gutting the federal family planning program and diverting the dollars to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers.
Something else to flag in post-election nightmare news: Most of the coverage around Donald Trump’s nominations have focused on Matt Gaetz and RFK Jr. Reasonably so, because they’re terrifying. But we can’t let appointment madness overshadow the fact that Trump announced Karoline Leavitt will be the White House press secretary.
This is a woman who parrots the disgraced former president’s lies without blinking. It wasn’t so long ago, for example, that Leavitt repeated Trump’s ‘post-birth’ abortion bullshit—claiming that Democrats support “abortion up until birth and even after birth, and forcing taxpayers to fund it.”
Linda Greenhouse at The New York Times wrote today about the “astonishing” legal challenge against mifepristone brought by the Attorneys General of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri. Specifically, she focuses on the argument that abortion medication causes “a loss in potential population or potential population increase,” and that “decreased births” constitute an injury to the states:
“So now we find ourselves in a new pronatalist moment when the top lawyers of three states feel free to call openly on the federal courts for help in making women have more babies.”
Whew. You may remember this suit because Abortion, Every Day broke the news about it last month. If you didn’t read the breakdown I wrote at the time, you should—it is truly bananas.
Quick hits:
Ms. magazine on the college students fighting for abortion access on campus;
The Markup breaks down how to protect your privacy if you’re seeking an abortion;
And Jia Tolentino writes at The New Yorker about the young men telling women online and off, “your body, my choice.”
Anti-Abortion Strategy
The Supreme Court is set to decide this week whether or not to hear a legal challenge against abortion clinic buffer zones—a case that could determine whether or not anti-abortion protesters are allowed to harass and intimidate patients up close and personal.
For those who need a reminder: Buffer zones are rules that keep anti-abortion protestors a certain number of feet away from clinic property in order to protect patients and staff from harassment and violence. But anti-abortion activists claim that they have a First Amendment right to get up in patients’ faces.
They’ve launched multiple lawsuits across the country in the hopes of getting SCOTUS to overturn Hill v. Colorado, which determined that limiting harassment in front of a clinic isn’t a free speech violation. The case we’ll hear about this week is one I told you about last month: A group of anti-abortion activists, represented by the powerful Thomas More Society, are suing Carbondale, Illinois over its buffer zone.
St. Louis Public Radio has a good breakdown of how this all came to be, but the short version is that Carbondale is a border town close to anti-abortion states like Tennessee; it’s become a vital abortion access hub for those in the South. Unfortunately, it’s also become a hub for anti-abortion harassment and protests. In the months after Roe was overturned, anti-choice activists showed up and were aggressive, used a ladder to peek into the clinics over a security fence, and even told patients that they were clinic staff in a effort to reroute them elsewhere.
Understandably, the city council made it illegal to come within 8 feet of a person within a 100-foot radius around an abortion clinic. Then came the lawsuit. Anti-abortion protestors insist that they’re peaceful (they’re not) and that they need to get close enough to “make eye contact” with women in order to effectively change their minds about abortion.
In other words, they want to have a constitutional right to harass women. If SCOTUS decides to take up the case, there would be massive national implications. Anti-abortion violence has already been on the rise since Roe was overturned—imagine what would happen if there were zero buffer zones outside of clinics?
What’s more, this is part of a broader strategy outlined in Project 2025: In addition to doing away with buffer zones, conservatives want to repeal the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act—which makes the obstruction of abortion clinics and violence against them a federal crime.
The hope is to allow people to harass and attack abortion patients and clinic staff with impunity and without consequence.
In Better News
Amanda Zurwaski, the Texas woman who sued the state after nearly dying of sepsis, isn’t ruling out a run for public office;
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Why abortion bans returning us to the Dark Ages
Throughout this election cycle, the term “late-term abortion” has popped up several times, despite not being an actual medical term. Not only did the first presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump include a very misinformed discussion about “late-term abortions” before Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, but the Republican Party adopted a “Make America Great Again” policy platform ahead of its national convention, stating in a 16-page document that the party will oppose "late-term abortion.”
This isn’t the first time anti-abortion advocates have made it seem as if abortions were happening well into the third trimester of pregnancy or after an infant has been born. As Salon has previously reported, the term is nothing more than a made-up phrase that has no basis in medicine yet is frequently used by anti-abortion advocates.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2021 about 81 percent of abortions in the U.S. occurred at nine weeks of pregnancy or earlier; 94 percent happened in the first 13 weeks, 3 percent occurred between 16 and 20 weeks of gestation. Less than one percent of abortions in the United States occur after 21 weeks of gestation.
Dr. Warren Hern, who specializes in fetal anomaly abortions and director of the Boulder Abortion Clinic, is one of the few providers to provide abortion care later in pregnancy. In fact, he is more than a provider, but also a pioneer in his field. But it doesn’t come without a cost to his safety every day. When Salon spoke to Dr. Hern over a video call, he mentioned that he was sitting behind bulletproof glass. In his latest book, “Abortion in the Age of Unreason,” he discusses stalkers, the assassination of colleagues, like Dr. David Gunn, as well as the “why” behind his work.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why do you think we are in the "Age of Unreason?" And why did you make this the title of your book?
As I said at the beginning of the book, we can compare this to the 18th Century, which was called the "Age of Reason," in which people began to discover that you could learn about the world with science, reason, logic, thought and observation — as distinguished from blind belief, superstition, fantasy and supernatural things. That was a very important epoch in human history. But by contrast, we've had several episodes of unreason. And what we are seeing now in our society, American society in particular, is a new age of unreason.
We have people who are opposed to scientific knowledge about the world, and who are totally committed to fanatic ideas of theocracy, superstition and religion, that have nothing to do with reality. And they’re trying to force the rest of us into that mold, and they are completely opposed to facts. We saw this under the Trump Administration with the COVID pandemic, for example. And now, the new Project 2025, [a set of proposed policies criticized as anti-scientific.]
And in terms of what we're doing here, they want to abolish all health care for women, to take us back beyond earlier than the Dark Ages. And I think that these people are living in the dark ages. There were citations in the Dobbs decision going back to the 17th Century of some guy who prosecuted witches. There are plenty of people, plenty of men, who do not like the fact that contraception and abortion have been effective and safe fertility control for women.
Dr Warren Hern talk on the phone in his clinic on January 31, 2022 in Boulder, Colorado. He has been performing abortions since the 1970s. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
You start this book with somewhat of a tone to justify yourself and the work you do, at least that’s what I got a sense of: that it was important for you to explain to the reader why you provide abortions later in pregnancy. I’m curious if you can elaborate more on that.
Well, let's put it this way. There’s a different way of looking at it. I don't feel that I have to justify what I'm doing. I think I need to explain it to the people, to the public, because there's a lot of misunderstanding about it and it’s a very complicated, difficult subject.
It begins with the fact that as primates, as animals, we are hardwired to take care of human babies and other small, helpless creatures. And what we're doing in this new situation is we’re giving an opportunity to make sure that women have an opportunity to do what they want to do as people, as citizens, and that includes ending pregnancies for various reasons, some of which are the woman does not want to be pregnant and have a baby, and others, the pregnancy is a clear threat to her life. And I think that this bothers people.
"This is a life and death matter for women. It is not a matter of personal satisfaction or personal whims."
What I tried to do with my book, as well as to help people understand how I got to this and why what we're doing is so important. How it developed over 60 years, why it's important to women, why it's important to their families, and why it's important to our society. That this is how this works, and this is why we do this, and this is why this is a life and death matter for women. It is not a matter of personal satisfaction or personal whims. It's not capricious. It's not frivolous. It’s vital. I think that we are at a new point in human history of the last 15,000 years where women can make decisions to continue pregnancy or end pregnancy safely. And that’s brand new.
I thought your chapter on the “illness of pregnancy” was interesting. Can you explain how abortion care, in your opinion, is a treatment for pregnancy? How you consider it to be a part of the standard medical care for pregnancy, just like prenatal care?
When I was a medical student exactly 60 years ago, on my first rotation on obstetrics in 1963 as a third-year medical student, I saw a lot of things happening that were quite frightening. I give the example of a woman named Sharon. She went from being a very healthy young woman about to give birth to a healthy baby, to within a few minutes, the point of dying. I watched this happen, and I watched what needed to be done to help her survive.
It was pretty clear that her baby was going to be seriously brain damaged, and that she was going to give it up for adoption. It didn't have any future, and this was a catastrophic situation. Meanwhile, the obstetrics textbook which I'm using kept saying that a woman is most normal when she's pregnant, that that's the most normal thing that can happen to her.
But then the next question is, what is she when she's not pregnant? Does that mean she's not normal? That her function is to be pregnant? That her purpose is to have babies as well as give sexual pleasure to men and make cookies? It didn't add up. I thought about that a lot, and at one point I gave a paper at an anthropology meeting about the cultural definitions of normality and pregnancy, and there’s a discussion of that in the book. And then I published a paper. I was invited to publish a paper in 1971 in the journal Family Planning Perspective, and I pointed out that circumstances have changed. That we now have the possibility of different perspectives about pregnancy that we didn't have 100, 200 or 500 years ago.
And so one of the conclusions of my paper was that the treatment of choice for the condition of pregnancy is abortion unless the woman wants to have a baby. There is no justification for forcing a woman to carry the pregnancy to term.
In your book, you talk about the harassment and assaults you’ve faced at your job. There have been stalkers. There have been gunshots fired at you, dating back to the '70s. What keeps you going in your job? What has kept you from saying you’re done with this?
There are various answers, some of the answers could be like a cartoon. And I'll give you an example: in the movie "Midnight Cowboy," there's a scene where Dustin Hoffman and John Voight are walking across the intersection. Hoffman plays a character named Ratso Rizzo, who's a scruffy guy — and the car pushes against him and he slams the hood of the car and says "I'm walking here."
The other answer, which is more complicated, is based on lots of things, including compassion for those who are suffering. I saw many examples as a medical student, as a young physician of women suffering unnecessarily from the effects of unsafe abortion. In the book, I talk about the fact of going to a maternity hospital in Brazil where I was serving as a Peace Corps physician in the ‘60s. My Brazilian colleagues showed me one ward full of women recovering from childbirth, and two wards full of women trying to survive the effects of an unsafe abortion. Fifty percent of those women died by the time they got to the hospital. They were too sick to save at that time.
I have an interest in helping women survive these things and to have the best medical care is a very important part of what I do and why I do it. When people come in, they're all different, and I find it an incredibly satisfying experience to help women and their families in these circumstances. I have developed techniques for doing this as safely as possible. Instruments, I've designed protocols, and procedures that I use and other physicians are using in different ways. And that's very satisfying.
I thought it was powerful how you pointed out how the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. has been increasing over the past couple of decades. How, in your opinion have abortion bans and restrictions contributed to that?
At the end of World War I, the maternal mortality ratio was about 900 per every 10,000 live births. In 1920, the maternal mortality ratio was 680 per 100,000 live births. By 1960, it was 38 per 100,000 lives of birth. It was reduced because of antibiotics, new surgical techniques, blood transfusions, and a wide variety of medical advantages that had been developed over that time in the medical profession.
"I have an interest in helping women survive these things and to have the best medical care is a very important part of what I do and why I do it."
By the mid-'90s, for example, the American maternal mortality ratio dropped by about seven per 100,000 live births. The last time I looked at about 33 per every 100,000 live births. We're going backward. Why? Well, there are several reasons, and one of them is the restrictions on access to abortion services. If a woman has a ruptured membrane, for example, even if they have a desired pregnancy, they can't get that treatment in places like Texas or Oklahoma. And this is a five-minute operation. It's absurd.
Could you have ever anticipated, when you started your work in the ‘60s and ‘70s, that this is where you would be? Providing abortion care in this climate?
I couldn't imagine. I was going to have a career in teaching research epidemiology. I wanted to have an academic career. I love to teach research, and I have a major research project going on for Peru over the last 60 years. I find that epidemiology endlessly fascinating.
But I found myself compelled to do this work because of the women. One day in 1974, I walked into the operating room. A young woman, who was in her 30s, I think, who had red hair, I remember quite well, was shaking uncontrollably. And I said, "What's wrong? How are you? Tell me how you feel." She said: "It's so different. The lights are on, you’re a doctor, it's clean, the windows are open."
Then she told me about her illegal abortion, which was the most frightening and humiliating experience of her life. And she looked at me and said, "Please don't ever stop doing this." So I didn’t.
What do you hope people take away from your book?
I want people to go out, vote and organize politically. To throw the Republicans out of office and to take the government back. That's what I hope. And I hope that people understand why it's important to support women's rights to have access to full health care. Safe abortion, is a fundamental, essential component of women's health.
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The deaths from abortion bans you won't hear about
Last month, ProPublica published two stories of women who died from abortion bans after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 via the Dobbs decision. While it wasn’t the first story to surface in the media about such a tragedy — the New Yorker published a similar account in January this year — it was the first time these deaths were deemed “preventable” by a state committee of experts in maternal health.
In the first story, a woman named Amber Nicole Thurman, a 28-year-old mother, died less than a month after Georgia passed its abortion law after waiting 20 hours to get treatment for a rare complication from taking an abortion pill. A 10-member committee set up to examine maternal mortality cases deemed she would have likely lived if doctors had used the protocols that had been in place before the Georgia law made them a felony.
A second story involved a woman named Candi Miller, a 41-year-old mother of three, who had been told by doctors that "having another baby could kill her." Miller had lupus, diabetes and hypertension. She took abortion pills ordered online, and, like Thurman, had an incomplete abortion. In pre-Dobbs Georgia, this would not be a problem, because she could go to the emergency room and walk out a few hours, safe and pregnancy-free. Instead, she died in bed, afraid and in pain. The state committee that reviewed her case was also “preventable.”
Pro-abortion activists warned before and after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health ruling that abortion bans would kill women. However, the three women whose stories have been reported are likely not the only ones. In Jessica Valenti’s new book, "Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win,” she posits that more deaths are happening, but the public just isn’t hearing about them, in part because activists want to protect families from the inevitable backlash if they go public with their stories.
Even with Thurman’s story, anti-abortion activists quickly went into victim-blaming mode. Another reason, Valenti speculated, was that Republican lawmakers have made it difficult for doctors to speak out in abortion bans states. “Coming forward with a patient’s story means risking your job and any future employment,” she wrote in her book, pointing to what happened to Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the provider in Indiana who treated a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio. She was fined $3,000 and issued a letter of reprimand from the Indiana Medical Licensing Board.
"This study shows that abortion bans are fundamentally degrading medical care."
“It’s easy for me to imagine the pressures put on doctors in Idaho, in Texas, in Mississippi, in Alabama,” Carole Joffe, a professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, told Salon. “You live in that community, your livelihood and your status in your community depend on getting along both with your medical colleagues and neighbors.”
Additionally, the bans prohibit doctors from providing immediate care, despite so-called exceptions. In September, a report from the University of California San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) revealed more in-depth stories about how health care providers are unable to provide proper medical care to pregnant people in states with abortion bans. Through the accounts of 86 health care providers between September 2022 and August 2024, the report documented a range of harm occurring, such as situations of increased risk of death, complications and delays in care causing worsened health outcomes.
“This study shows that abortion bans are fundamentally degrading medical care – not just in a single state or for a certain type of patient but for people with a range of health conditions living anywhere these bans are in place,” Dr. Kari White, executive director of Resound Research and study co-author, said in a media statement at the time.
Notably, maternal mortality rates were an issue even before Roe was overturned. According to research in Jama Network Open, maternal deaths increased during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, that rate dropped to levels similar to pre-pandemic levels. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black women die at twice the national rate, and three times more than white women.
Dr. Daniel Grossman, ANSIRH Director and lead report author of the UCSF, told Salon via email that they are “hearing from doctors in states with abortion bans that they are being told by their employers or the hospitals where they work not to discuss cases related to emergency abortion care with the media.”
“Doctors may be even more reticent to discuss cases that involve a death because of concerns regarding malpractice litigation,” he said. “In addition, there may be a delay before these cases are examined by a state maternal mortality review committee, which is why the deaths of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller just recently came to light.”
He added that given the number of “near misses” they heard about in their study, where a patient suffered a complication and could have died if the delay had been longer, he said it’s “very likely” there have been other deaths.
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How America changed post-Dobbs — and how the fight for abortion rights continues
The night the Dobbs decision was leaked, feminist writer Jessica Valenti wailed. She crawled into bed with her husband, sobbing, saying “My daughter, my daughter.” When it was made official in June 2022, she again wondered how she was supposed to protect her daughter when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion.
Eventually, she turned her despair into action, quickly starting a newsletter called “Abortion, Every Day.” At first, Valenti wasn’t planning on starting a publication. She was just so angry and committed to not missing any ban, any court case, or any anti-abortion tactic that might pop up. Today, the newsletter is a thriving hub and go-to destination for all abortion-related news in the post-Dobbs landscape (sometimes featuring Salon's reporting), highlighting the news almost daily and putting it into context.
“My joke has become that I should have called the newsletter 'Abortion, Every Hour,'” Valenti told Salon in a video interview. “That’s how quickly things are changing; it’s complete chaos.”
Indeed, it is. But Valenti decided to take the platform a step further and turn it into a book.
“The newsletter is sort of here one day and gone the next,” she said. “It lives on the website, but it does feel sort of temporary.” Hence, her publishing "Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win.” Salon spoke with Valenti to discuss how the media reports on abortion access and reproductive rights, and what those in despair can do right now.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The book is a compilation of your newsletter, Abortion, Every Day. You do such a good job of putting into context what's happening in real time. I'm curious if you can share why you decided to extend this project into book form, and if you could share a little bit about what that process was like.
"Any abortion denied is a tragedy. Some of those tragedies are going to have different mental health and physical health outcomes."
As much as I do try in the newsletter to contextualize everything and connect the dots to the broader narrative, I really wanted to be able to do that in something tangible, in something that you could hold and have. The newsletter is very much about keeping everyone updated and providing some order to the chaos. But I was thinking of the book as something that people could use, something that gives them the information and the language they need to do the work they're interested in doing when it comes to abortion. Whether they're a seasoned activist who's already out there, or maybe someone who is new to the issue, who feels uncomfortable and doesn't know quite how to articulate something, I wanted to create something that was super accessible for anyone, no matter what their level of engagement on the issue.
And with the election coming up, I wanted to capture this particular moment in time. I imagine we'll look back in a year from now, and some of these trends will be the same, and a lot of them will be different, right?
I appreciated how you prefaced the book by saying some of the things you write about now may have changed by the time someone is reading this. I bet that made for an interesting challenge in writing the book.
It was difficult. I just finished taping the audiobook version, and even as I was reading it out loud and seeing it for the first time in a while, you're like, well, there's been an update on that, and that's changed. It’s challenging because things do change every day. I tried to pick issues that I thought would stand the test of time, and also that demonstrate these broader trends. Like, what happens in Florida with the ballot measure is going to be different than when I was writing about it. But attacks on democracy are still going to be there. And having an understanding of that is really important.
It was definitely challenging because you sort of instinctively want to make sure you're covering everything, but you have to put that idea to the side and just be okay that there is no way that you can capture everything that's going on with this issue.
In Chapter 1, you write about how abortion is usually seen as an ending. Even in the rhetoric in which we use to describe an abortion — the termination of a pregnancy. But you write it's very much the opposite for many. Abortion can be the start of something. And as you share with your readers, that was true for you and your abortions. I'm curious, how do you think people can communicate the shift in tone? That it can be an opportunity, not an ending.
"We're coming from this place of letting them frame the debate, and coming from a vantage point of this is a necessary evil, rather than a proactive moral good."
I think such a huge part of it is undoing the stigma. And I think part of undoing that stigma is not talking about this issue apologetically — not feeling like I have to tell you why it was important that I had access to this basic health care. And that's why I framed it that way and told my own story because I think that talking about the lives, the choices, and the paths that abortion made possible for people, is a really important reminder to folks.
I feel really confident if you talk to most people about their abortions, and you ask, “What did your abortion make possible for you?” they're going to have some really incredible answers.
In Chapter 3, you talk about the debate on who deserves abortion care and who doesn't, especially in this post-Dobbs landscape. It’s so noticeable in the media that more attention is given to these stories of those who wanted to be mothers and were denied care. But I can’t help but think so many stories are being left behind, and as you said, women who don't want to be pregnant are being portrayed as murderers. What is the path forward to embracing a message that the “why” doesn't matter.
I fall into that trap myself too, right? It’s difficult not to because I think my instinct is to provide evidence for the horrors of this. You want to change hearts and minds. You know what is compelling. But it does leave people behind. And I think it does open up windows and doors for Republicans to say, ‘Well, yeah, you're right, a rape victim should have access, and here's your bulls**t exception.” We have to remember not to allow them to frame the debate.
We’re coming from this place of apologeticness. We're coming from this place of letting them frame the debate, and coming from a vantage point of this is a necessary evil, rather than a proactive moral good. I think talking about the value of women’s and pregnant people's lives, futures and decisions is a big part of that. And recognizing that any abortion denied is a tragedy. Some of those tragedies are going to have different mental health and physical health outcomes for people, and it's important that we talk about all of them. But we're not going to get anywhere by leaving people behind and we run the danger of replicating, I think, the same mistakes that we made with Roe.
I found your chapter on birth control very interesting, especially how you brought up the trad wife and wellness influencers, some of whom are spreading misinformation about hormonal birth control. Can you elaborate on the consequences of this, and how does this ultimately strengthen the anti-abortion movement’s campaign on restricting access to birth control?
The thing that I worry about most with this campaign against birth control, and specifically this really culturally insidious piece of it with the trad wives and the wellness influencers, is that anti-abortion activists and legislators are taking advantage of a very real issue — which is medical sexism. [These are] real issues that women have with all sorts of medication, not just birth control, and they're tapping into this valid, legitimate fear and concern that women have, and they're exploiting it.
And that is what I find so egregious about the entire thing. And they know that feminist language, feminist rhetoric, feminist ideas, resonate with people and resonate with young women They're successful in painting this really negative picture. When let's say, they start doing certain kinds of restrictions, which we've already seen in some cases like with Title X funding, they can paint it as protecting women, which we've seen all of them do in all sorts of ways when it comes to abortion restrictions. But it becomes a lot easier for them to pass those restrictions without voter outrage — like a 24-hour waiting period, right? I worry about that chipping-away approach going unnoticed.
I wanted to talk about the phrase "abortion ban" with you. As you point out in your book, mainstream media outlets don't always use it. It’s frequently reported that there's this law, in this state, restricting access to abortion with this specific gestational limit, and it has these specific exceptions. I got a sense from your book that you sympathize with the media, because there is this pressure to be objective with all of this information. At the same time, it can almost be as if reporters are unintentionally supporting the anti-abortion agenda. How, in your opinion, should journalists be describing abortion bans and their exceptions in their reporting?
I do have a lot of sympathy for them. Especially when you're talking about individual reporters who are beholden to editors, who are beholden to senior editors, who are beholden to publishers — it's not just obviously one reporter's singular decision. But like, in a perfect world, I think we would just call things what they are. An abortion ban is an abortion ban, right?
And I wish they wouldn't use the word exception. Or if you’re going to write about exceptions, say what Republicans call an exception, right? Because that is objectively true. That is honest. That is factual. It’s impossible to say that Mississippi has a rape exception if no rape victims in Mississippi can get an abortion. That's not an exception.
In your book, you also talk about how anti-abortion activists and lawmakers are targeting the helpers, but you put a little bit of a positive spin on that. Yes, they are targeting the helpers, but the good news is that they know people are paying attention and doing something about it. For people reading this who want to help, what would you suggest?
That's a really good question. I think, what is so incredible about the way that people have risen to the occasion since Roe was overturned, is that there are so many different ways to help. I think for so long, people sort of thought that the only way that I can be like an activist or do something was to like be out with a picket sign or be really knowledgeable about an issue. There's so much work that's required to help each and every person get the care that they need.
"It’s impossible to say that Mississippi has a rape exception if no rape victims in Mississippi can get an abortion."
And so it really can be anything from volunteering, giving money, to sitting on the phone as an abortion navigator. There are a million steps between someone's positive pregnancy test for an unwanted pregnancy and then getting to the clinic. Generally what I tell people is to look who is already doing work in your community and see what they need. I think that that is the best starting point.
What else do you hope people take away from your book?
I think knowing that the anger, sadness and horror that they feel is fine and understandable. And that it also can be used to do something. That we don't have to feel stuck in it. I think that is one of the hardest things about this moment with a lot of issues. It's easy to feel sort of frozen with the overwhelm of it all. I really want people to understand that it doesn't have to be that way. That you can move out of that stuck, frozen feeling and into something better, especially when you're looking at the incredible community of people who are already doing work on this issue.
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Rape-related pregnancies estimates show exceptions 'have no meaning at all'
For years, Dr. Samuel Dickman was an abortion provider in Texas. Currently, he works as the chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood in Montana. But in both states, he’s had patients who have spontaneously revealed that they were pregnant as a result of rape.
Dickman and his colleagues thought if some people are revealing this to their abortion providers, without being prompted, there have to be more who aren’t because they understandably don’t feel comfortable doing so. Moreover, what was happening to pregnant survivors of rape in states with abortion bans?
Since the U.S. Supreme Court made the unprecedented decision to end the constitutional right to abortion, striking down the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized the right to choose abortion nationwide, 14 states have enacted abortion bans. Few of these states have exceptions for rape. And those that do have exceptions require people to report the rape to law enforcement, creating yet another barrier to access abortion care. Since Dobbs, how many rape-related pregnancies have there been in abortion ban states? Dickman and his colleagues came to a startling estimate: 64,565 pregnancies.
“All of this data is very hard to collect for obvious reasons related to stigma and under-appreciation of how important of a problem this is,” he told Salon in a phone interview. “But we used the best data that we could find to come up with what we think are reasonable estimates.”
"“This affects a huge number of people across the country, and it’s not just women in states with abortion bans."
Specifically, data in the research letter published on Wednesday in JAMA Internal Medicine estimated that nearly 520,000 rapes have occurred in states with abortion bans during the 4 to 18 months that bans were in effect, a time period that varied. Of that estimate, 9 percent of rape-related pregnancies occurred in states with rape exceptions, and 91 percent in states with no rape exception. The core part of the data analysis relied on a survey that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics on criminal victimization and FBI Uniform Crime Reports that looked at the number of vaginal rapes of women between the ages of 15 and 45 that happened in those 14 states while abortion bans were in effect.
“This affects a huge number of people across the country, and it’s not just women in states with abortion bans. Sexual assault is unfortunately extremely common everywhere, and survivors deserve a medical system that protects them and is allowed to help take care of them,” Dickman said. “And that includes abortion care.”
In the research letter, the authors emphasized that rape exceptions fail to provide reasonable access to abortion for survivors of rape. He emphasized that one major barrier is that these exceptions require reporting the law enforcement and getting a provider who is willing to take a legal risk.
“Even if, in theory, the patient meets all of the criteria for that exception, it's just not happening in real life,” Dickman said. “To my knowledge, there's really no provider in any of these in any of these states that is quickly providing abortion care for rape survivors”
Survivors, he said, are having to order abortion pills online if that’s an option, travel out of state for abortion care or continue the pregnancy. Exceptions, he added, are a very “powerful political tool.”
“They make it seem like abortion bans include some goal of understanding that survivors need medical care, including abortion care,” Dickman said. “But I think what we see in our study and others is that that's purely theoretical, and in practice those exceptions have no meaning at all.”
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Medical school graduates are avoiding states with abortion bans. Experts warn it could cause chaos
Abortion restrictions might be influencing where medical students apply for residency programs, which could have stark implications across entire state healthcare systems, with some doctors warning it could essentially unravel entirely.
According to a new analysis by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Research and Action Institute, updated data from 2023 found a continued decline in medical students applying to residency programs located in states with restrictive abortion laws. The trend aligned with a similar one that the research institute saw in the first year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
“The biggest takeaway is that for a second year, we are seeing decreases in the number of applications in states where abortion bans are in place,” Kendal Orgera, a senior research analyst at AAMC told Salon in a phone interview. “And that varies by specialty — for OBGYNs in states where abortion is banned has decreased even more and this shows a big implication of the potential workforce of the future.”
As of May 2, 2024, abortions are nearly totally banned in 14 states across the country. Some, but not all, have narrow exceptions, such as preventing the death of the mother, when the pregnancy is the result of incest or rape, or when there is a lethal fetal anomaly. While many of these states don’t make it technically illegal for a pregnant person to get an abortion, they do penalize providers, like OBGYNs or family medicine doctors, for conducting them.
"It's a big message to legislators that doctors don't want to be told how to practice medicine."
Penalties vary by state. For example, in Idaho, providers live in constant fear that they will have to deny a pregnant patient stabilizing, emergency abortion care, or they will face two to five years in prison and lose their medical license. In Texas, providers can be fined at least $100,000 or face between 5 to 99 years of jail time.
As Orgera said, residency applications for a variety of specialties declined in abortion ban staes. But for OBGYNs, the decline was even more drastic.
“It was a 4.2 decrease overall in the states that have banned abortion, but it was a 6.7 percent drop in OBGYNs,” Orgera said. “Texas has actually seen a decrease in senior med students since 2021.”
According to the report, states with restrictive abortion laws saw a bigger decrease in the numbers of both OBGYN and emergency medicine applicants applying for residency programs than states with less restrictive gestational limits. The continued decline, the AAMC stated, comes after nearly five years of growth.
“The examination of two years of data suggests that restrictions on women's health care may continue to disproportionately decrease the likelihood that new doctors will apply to residencies in states that offer the most restrictive practice environments,’” the researchers wrote. "Because these policy decisions appear to affect where physicians plan to practice, state governments and health care leaders need to consider the potential impact of those decisions on the physician workforce.”
Dr. Kara Cadwallader, who is a family medicine physician in Idaho, told Salon this shows how the impact highly restrictive abortion laws will have on the country’s healthcare system.
"Why would anyone want to train where they can't really learn the right standard of care?"
“I thought it was very interesting that it's not just the specialties we would imagine, like OBGYN and family medicine, pediatrics and emergency medicine, had a big decline, which is scary, and that’s our workforce pipeline,” Cadwallader said. “I think the fact that it's not just specialties that tend to take care of pregnant women is really telling — it's a big message to legislators that doctors don't want to be told how to practice medicine.”
Cadwallader said abortion bans say “very loud and clear” that if a doctor comes to the state, legislators “will tell you how to practice medicine.”
“Why would anyone want to train where they can't really learn the right standard of care?” Cadwallader said. “I think it's a mistake to think that this is just about abortion — this is about the government dictating medical practice. And that goes bad, especially when they refuse to take any input from doctors and write laws that are ambiguous and harmful.”
Dr. David Hackney, a Cleveland-based maternal fetal medicine doctor, told Salon he often communicates with doctors with different specialties when caring for a pregnant patient. For example, if a pregnant patient has cancer he’s working with oncology. He said he is frequently communicating with people in cardiology, neurology and neurosurgery.
“Pregnancy itself is not siloed away within the field of OBGYN, and I think one of the things that many medical specialties have specifically realized after the Dobbs decision is the extent to which everyone is involved,” Hackney told Salon. “The other major issue, of course, is medical students are generally of reproductive age. A lot of residents and fellows are in the age group that's overlapping with when people would often have children. This is a group that’s potentially deciding where they want to go to start their families.”
Both Hackney and Cadwallader said medical students frequently choose residency programs based on where they want to practice medicine as well.
This decline in residency applicants also comes at a time when doctors who have practiced in abortion ban states for years are uprooting their practices and moving elsewhere. As previously reported by Salon, a report published last month by the Idaho Physician Well-being Action Collaborative found that Idaho lost 22 percent of its practicing OGBYNs in the 15 months following Dobbs. The report also found that 55 percent of the state’s high-risk OBGYNs have left the state, leaving less than five in the entire state to treat patients.
If there isn’t a pipeline to fill these spots, it will cause chaos in the healthcare system, doctors said.
“I think our system is already starting to fall apart in Idaho, because we've lost our ability to care for pregnant women,” Cadwallader said. “It sounds really dramatic, but I think our healthcare system is starting to unravel.”
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"Tradwives" offer an alluring vision of-right wing Christianity — meet the people fighting back
As social media stunts go, it's hard to top this one: Give birth to your eighth child at age 33. Then, just two weeks later, compete in a beauty pageant, complete with a swimsuit competition. Hannah Neeleman, a "momfluencer" who has nearly 9 million followers for her Instagram account "Ballerina Farm," did just that in January, strutting in the Mrs. World pageant after winning the Mrs. America pageant last year. "I don’t think there’s any shame in showing I just had a baby," Neeleman told the New York Times. "Like, I’m not going to have a perfectly flat stomach."
Her videos and photos of the event suggest that whatever tummy imperfections she was confessing to were not visible to the naked eye.
This combination of faux humility and orchestrated perfection is intoxicating to some, infuriating to others and confusing to many. But what's indisputable is that it's hard to look away. It's how this Utah resident built an online following of millions for a social media account that purports to portray the humble life of a former ballerina turned farm wife. (It's fair to note that her family's financial security has other sources: Her father-in-law founded JetBlue.)
Neeleman, with her bucolic images of grazing cattle and her sourdough recipes, is an especially successful example of the growing industry of social media influencers often described as "trad" (for "traditional"), or as "momfluencers" and "beige moms," for the minimalist aesthetic that dominates this online universe. Some of these influencers are married couples and some are just women, but they all sell variations of the same fantasy: a simple-but-luxurious life with a loving husband and charming children, all for the low, low price of abandoning one's ambitions of a career outside the home.
Feminist critics like Sara Petersen, Anne Helen Petersen (no relation) and Anna North have built an impressive body of social criticism unveiling the cynical blend of capitalism, gender politics and plain old dishonesty of the "momfluencer" enterprise. (Neeleman's feed, for example, never shows us her farm workers, her kids' full-time teacher, her babysitters or her personal assistant.) What is less often discussed in these critiques is the ways many of these online influencers also function as propaganda outlets for the Christian right.
There's another group of whistleblowers, however, who are working to confront what they see as a deeply misleading portrayal of life inside right-wing religion. It's an amorphous but devoted collection of former evangelicals, former members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka the Mormons) and other critics of the Christian right. What unites them is the desire to call B.S. on the idyllic self-portrayal of conservative Christian influencers. And they're fighting on the same turf as their adversaries: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Spotify.
"You could have this too, if you just submit to your husband"
It's hard to keep track of the metastasizing numbers of Christian influencers peddling beatific images of their family lives online: Estee Williams, Nara Smith, Cynthia Loewen, Natalie Bennett and Mrs. Midwest, just to name a few. These women (and occasionally couples) often rack up followers in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, despite (or because of) a depressing sameness in their presentation: Magazine-perfect kitchens and gardens. Rows of mostly-blond children. Long, layered haircuts, ranging from cornsilk blond to light brown with blond highlights.
"They lead with the beautiful babies and the pretty families and the obedient children," explained Tia Levings, a former fundamentalist who now releases TikTok and Instagram videos exposing what's known as "Christian patriarchy." It's "a very wholesome image of function and beauty and order."
She continued, "In chaotic times, people crave order, they crave fundamentalism. They want formulas."
"It's seductive," said Matthias Roberts, a therapist who helps people recover from religious trauma. "It offers certainty and belonging, which are core to what we need as humans."
"They lead with the beautiful babies and the pretty families and the obedient children. It's a very wholesome image of function and beauty and order."
Dr. Laura Anderson, a therapist who herself left a fundamentalist sect and now helps others who are leaving, said she had longed for that "sense of stability" and argued that "fundamentalism is a coping mechanism for a deregulated nervous system." But what's "underneath the photos," she said, is not "reality."
In one sense, there's nothing new about Christian influencers, explained Blake Chastain, who hosts the Exvangelical podcast. Christian right YouTubers and TikTokers, he said, are continuing a century-old "alternative media ecosystem."
Evangelicals have always "seized whatever the media was at the time," Jennifer Bryant of the YouTube channel Fundie Fridays said. "Before you had radio, they were doing tent revivals. Then they started to get on TV. Now it's on TikTok."
Christian social media differs from those previous efforts in two principal ways. The omnipresent nature of the internet means that online personalities can have wider reach and more influence than even the biggest televangelists of the past. Bradley Onishi, a former evangelical minister who now hosts the "Straight White American Jesus" podcast, described how the "rabbit hole" effect of social media leads people to consume exponentially more of this content than they ever could in the past.
Even in his hardcore Christian youth, Onishi said, he might "go to church three times a week and, in between, visit a Christian bookstore and listen to Christian radio." Now, he argued, by the time a believer gets to church on Sunday morning, they've "digested a hundred hours of influencers, podcast, pundits, talking heads, Fox News and YouTube." Online Christianity has, for many, totally overwhelmed what's on offer from a pastor "you see once or twice a week." More than 40% of self-described evangelicals rarely or never attend church. As Ruth Graham and Charles Homans reported for the New York Times, these unchurched Christians build their spiritual lives around "podcasts and YouTube channels that discuss politics ... from a right-wing, and sometimes Christian, worldview."
Secondly, social media influencers who present themselves as lifestyle gurus aimed largely at women don't necessarily foreground religion. Their primary focus is guidance on parenting, housekeeping, sexuality and being more attractive to men. "They're the marketing department," Bryant said. Their "job is to look pretty" and advertise "how amazing my life is," with the underlying pitch: "You could have this too, if you just submit to your husband."
"They will do all this normal influencer stuff," McKay Forsyth, who hosts a popular ex-Mormon YouTube channel, said. "Then they'll just slip in a Sunday photo of them going to church."
"Fundamentalism is really good at taking what we love in our hearts and using it to exploit us," Levings said.
"I know your Bible way better than you"
This veneer of polished perfection is increasingly under attack, however, by social media competitors who want to tell a different story about what's going on behind all those family photos and lovely landscapes. "The only way to debunk something that is so pretty and so attractive and so comforting," Levings said, "is for people who've actually lived it to share" their stories.
The people doing this work often call themselves "exvangelicals," or "ex-mos" for former members of the Latter-day Saints. Some call their campaign "#fundiesnark," a phrase that apparently launched on Reddit, and is now a common hashtag on Instagram or TikTok. A more serious term is "deconstructor," derived from the "deconstruction" concept pioneered by philosopher Jacques Derrida. Originally that meant exploring the dynamic relationship between a "text" — which could be writing, visual art, film or something else — and its social context. For the anti-fundamentalist movement, it's become a favored term to describe the process of unlearning what they see as the toxic and unhealthy views enforced by conservative religion.
Maybe it's a big leap to link 20th-century European philosophy to people who make YouTube videos mocking "tradwives." Spend enough time with the fundie-snarkers, though, and it starts to make sense. Authoritarian religious leaders push the notion, for instance, that the Bible is literal truth — and there's only one correct reading. Through music, storytelling and, of course, humor, the snarkers undercut that certainty, arguing that such texts are being selectively interpreted to suit the political and social goals of fundamentalists.
Anti-fundamentalist influencers who spoke to Salon almost universally described their community as one grappling with massive trauma inflicted by conservative religion. At the same time, an irresistibly infectious sense of fun informs their debunking of conservative Christian ideas.
"It's so liberating, not only to question but to laugh," said journalist Sarah Stankorb, the author of "Disobedient Women."
"Why Don't Mormon Influencers Wear Their Garments?" asks one popular video by McKay Forsyth and his wife, Jordan. The video is an amusing explanation of what the "magical underwear" worn by Latter-day Saints actually is, and why so many popular Mormon influencers clearly are not wearing it. Garments that cover the body from shoulder to mid-thigh, the Forsyths explain, are mandatory for all adult members of the church — which probably turns a blind eye to influencers who show up online in miniskirts and tank tops, serving as attractive, relatable symbols of their faith.
But if people actually join the church, McKay Forsyth said, they will find the garments are not optional. It's just an effort to sell "a more palatable version of Mormonism" and get people "started down their high-demand religion path."
Karen Alea, who hosts the podcast "Deconversion Therapy," told Salon that she and her co-host, known only as Bonnie, wanted to share the "funny and odd experiences" they and others like them had "growing up as Christians." One listener described how, as a child, he was finally given the stuffed Smurf he'd longed for, only to see it burned in a church bonfire targeting "demonic influences." He saw "Papa Smurf flying over his head into the fire," Alea said, followed by a cloud of "blue toxic smoke."
Levings makes videos recounting the horrors of the "Quiverfull" life. But watching them is hardly a death march — they're often sarcastic and focused on the weirder details of her former life, such as being told that girls and women never need haircuts:
Fundie Fridays started off as a channel where Jen Bryant did her makeup on camera while telling the back story of some famous or influential fundamentalist. If that sounds like a bizarre juxtaposition, it worked brilliantly on YouTube, creating an atmosphere of intimacy. She no longer does her makeup in public view, although she still shows up with enviably colorful looks. Now she and her husband, James Bryant, bring a mix of research, clever editing and their personal charm to bear in a series of videos meant to capture what James calls "the best and the worst of Christianity."
That, of course, entails a lot of dunking on Christian influencers and revealing the less-than-godly motivations that drive lucrative online ministries. In one recent video, "Kat Von D is Christian Now," Jen Bryant recounted how the famous tattoo artist and makeup peddler "rebranded" herself as a Christian after losing fans and sponsorship deals amid allegations of racism and anti-vaccine views. Jen Bryant points out that this Christian "rebrand" brought Von D to an audience with different standards than the secular world, where marrying a guy with a swastika tattoo is frowned upon.
There's "a low, low point of entry" to the Christian-influencer world, James Bryant said. "As long as you're like, 'I'm saved, I found Jesus,' you're going to get people who mindlessly agree with that to follow." But to keep that audience, an influencer must keep dishing out more red meat, which usually means increasingly right-wing politics. "You see this pattern of them doubling down more over time" in pursuit of that audience, he said. "You're making yourself, ironically, more niche," since most people outside the world of conservative Christianity reject those far-right views.
There's "a low, low point of entry" to the Christian-influencer world, James Bryant said. "As long as you're like, 'I'm saved, I found Jesus,' you're going to get people who mindlessly agree with that to follow."
This new crop of anti-fundamentalists is dramatically different from the militant and male-dominated "New Atheist" movement that emerged early in this century. These newer and younger opponents of the religious right are more focused on social justice issues than on whether or not there's a God. Many still identify as Christians or hold other spiritual beliefs. Their focus is on fighting what they see as the widespread damage done by right-wing religion. Many will point out that evangelical intolerance and Christian nationalism "cause problems for the rest of" believing Christians, by giving them a bad name.
While many of this movement's prominent figures are women and LGBTQ folks, the #fundiesnark and deconstruction world is predominantly white. In that sense, of course, they resemble their conservative Christian rivals and peers. As Bradley Onishi points out, this sometimes means unintentionally minimizing the role that racism and white identity play in the Christian cultures they critique.
But this cultural mirroring also lends the #fundiesnark community a major strength: They come from the world they're now attacking, and bring a level of knowledge that makes their criticisms harder to ignore. "You'll never out-evangelical me," Onishi said. "I know your Bible way better than you. I can speak your language with no accent.” This cultural fluency makes it easier, he said, to reach people who are still inside right-wing religion but are "trying to find a window to the outside."
"On the sly," Onishi said, someone like that can "listen to the podcast, watch the YouTube channel" and come to understand "the other ways people think" and "why they left."
The journey Onishi describes, from conservative Christianity to more skeptical circles, was dramatically illustrated this week. Dav Beal — the husband of popular Christian influencer Bethany Beal, of "Girl Defined" — revealed that he is "circling deconstruction," meaning that he's considering leaving his faith. "When I try to find my identity in Christ, it just doesn't seem to work," he said in a video the couple posted. The announcement spurred a frenzy of excitement in the #fundiesnark community.
There are dozens of Reddit threads about this, largely expressing a desire to welcome Beal to their side, and glee that their message seems to be breaking through.
Sex sells ... Jesus?
Hannah Neeleman, she of Ballerina Farm and the beauty pageants, is no outlier with her swimsuit photos and her unfathomably toned post-partum body. It swiftly becomes apparent, when one delves into the world of tradwives and Christian-influencer content, how downright sexy a lot of it is. It's not just the Latter-day Saints forgoing otherwise mandatory garments in order to pose in spandex and low-cut blouses. As I noted in a November column on tradwife content, it's hard not to get a cheesecake vibe off the chest-first photography or the TikTok videos that pretend it's normal to bake bread while dressed like a pin-up.
Even when Christian influencers aren't using age-old tricks to capture eyeballs by appealing to the lizard brain, it's astonishing how much of their content is about sex and romantic relationships. Indeed, that's primarily what the term "trad" reflects. Sure, influencers go on about all manner of "traditional" lifestyle choices, but "trad" largely refers to the fundamentalist conception of what a healthy sex life should look life: Heterosexual and married, with overtly regressive gender roles.
Deconstructors call this "purity culture," and it runs much deeper than the well-documented fundamentalist obsession with controlling people's sex lives. Purity culture is also a promise that conservative Christians make to young people: If you follow the strict life path we're showing you, you'll be rewarded with true love, a beautiful family and lots of scorching hot sex — within the bounds of marriage, of course.
This sales pitch goes back decades, Chastain explained, citing Elisabeth Elliot's 1984 book "Passion and Purity," a romantic account of her brief marriage to a Christian missionary who was killed in Ecuador in 1956 by members of an indigenous group he tried to convert. As Liz Charlotte Grant at the Revealer recently wrote, the book appeals to those "hungry for romance," turning that longing into an argument for self-denial. As a young woman, Grant wrote, "I loved her example of courtship, of 'saving yourself' for ecstatic marital sex, of the hand of God directing a humble woman’s love life." But, she added, "it never worked for me."
It's hard not to get a cheesecake vibe off the chest-first photography or the TikTok videos that pretend it's normal to bake bread while dressed like a pin-up.
Other bestsellers have made similar pitches: "Every Man's Battle" portrays giving up masturbation as the path to a satisfying sex life; the self-explanatory "I Kissed Dating Goodbye," which has since been rejected by its author; "Love & Respect" by Emerson Eggerichs argues for rigid gender roles and chastity before marriage.
The rulebook of purity culture often goes beyond a ban on premarital sex to proscribing kissing and holding hands. Some go further and seek to forbid all forms of dating, embracing a "courtship" model almost indistinguishable from arranged marriage. (The infamous Duggar family of reality TV believes in "courtship.") Of course abortion is forbidden, but in many cases so are all forms of birth control.
Therapist Laura Anderson said that when she was still a believer, "the tenets of purity culture provided a sense of stability." She didn't like the restrictions, but amid the "chaos of having to choose a career and life path," it felt like a "life raft": "If I did things this way, then I would get this reward."
In the world of Christian influencers, with intense competition for audience share, things can get weird fast. Influencers use sex to get attention, while also proving their purity bona fides through performative adherence to ever-stricter rules. The result can be uncanny, as in videos of conventionally attractive young couples discussing whether it's OK to kiss before marriage. Or when the aforementioned Bethany Beal, who built an empire by pushing abstinence before marriage, now hawks "The Ultimate Sex Course for Christian Women" for $169 a pop.
Jeremiah Gibson, a couples therapist who hosts the Sexvangelicals podcast with his wife and fellow therapist Julia Postema, told Salon that the sex-and-relationships material that dominates the Christian influencer world is a form of bait-and-switch. "Conservative folks are less concerned about sex and more concerned about the performance of gender," he said. "Sex just happens to be the vehicle" they use to promote rigid gender roles.
Content that promises to be about sex is really "talking about a gender dynamic," Gibson said. In this worldview, being a man means "you lift weights. You eat certain foods. You stuff your emotions down." Being a woman means "you bake bread. You pay attention to the needs of your husband." For many people, it can be comforting to "sit with" these kinds of stereotypes, hoping they'll solve all your problems. But what Gibson and Postema find in their practice, they say, is that these "gender scripts stop working for people."
Multiple sources said this dynamic is especially pronounced among LGBTQ people, whose bodies, desires and identities simply can't adhere to the idealized vision of purity culture. A 2023 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA found that "two-thirds of LGBTQ people who were raised Christian no longer identify as Christian." Levings argues, however, that "everybody who grew up in those kinds of environments" experiences this pain to some degree.
"People get married young and then they realize that there's a whole bunch more to marriage than just sex. It leads oftentimes to a self-discovery that is a lot more painful."
For deconstructors, Christian influencers' focus on sex and relationships is a kind of Achilles heel, offering a crucial opportunity to tell the world that these promises of sexual bliss are empty. When people buy into purity culture, Anderson said, "we have a lot of sexual dysfunction as a result." She has seen "sexual pain" and a lot of "shame and disgust toward self" in her practice, she said, along with people who define themselves as asexual "because sex feels so uncomfortable."
Chastain agreed that this disconnect between the sexual promises of purity culture and the messy realities of life leads many people to start questioning conservative Christian values. "People get married young and then they realize that there's a whole bunch more to marriage than just sex," he said. "It leads oftentimes to a self-discovery that is a lot more painful."
People struggling with that disconnect have often done so in silence and shame. Now they're a few Google inquiries away from finding videos, podcasts and other media from the deconstruction community that validates what they're feeling. "When we've experienced trauma in community," Roberts said, "the only way to heal that is by being in community."
While online spaces are no substitute for therapy or in-person community, he said, they can offer a "breadth of voices" that open up "more options for people to really find what works for them."
Freeing oneself from conventionally gendered scripts about love and sex isn't easy, Gibson said, but it can allow people to "develop a sustainable happiness" based on "challenging each other and pushing each other."
"They get really defensive"
The conflict between Christian influencers and the anti-fundamentalist community invites an irresistible comparison to the biblical story of David and Goliath. The Christians have more money, sleeker marketing and institutional support from their churches, while the deconstructors are a ragtag bunch of nerds broadcasting from their bedrooms. Many began with nothing more than an iPhone and a ring-light. Yet there are signs the Christian Goliaths are worried about their online hecklers.
For one thing, various churches, faith organizations and Christian influencers appear to have invested in search engine optimization around the term "deconstruction." Typing terms like "Christian deconstruction" into Google's search bar returns pages of results from Christian sites with titles like "The Most Dangerous Form of Deconstruction" or warnings that "you can easily come out the other side a lonely and bitter person with no hope." Some sites that claim to offer "deconstruction" content deliver bland Christian generalities, possibly concealing a more conservative agenda. (A technique seen recently in the "He Gets Us" ads aired during the Super Bowl.)
“People that are still within the evangelical camp," Chastain said, rarely engage with genuine "exvangelicals," only with "straw-man versions." Most anti-fundamentalist influencers that spoke with Salon don't seem worried. Many noted that they had built up audiences with little to no marketing, and saw no need to echo the aggressive proselytizing of their counterparts. Most offered some version of "If we build it, they will come." Faith may require an advertising budget, they argue, but doubt sells itself.
Trolls are more of an annoyance, especially those Christians who genuinely seem hurt or aggrieved by anyone who dares to criticize them. "A lot of them think I am attacking the religion, so they get really defensive," Jen Bryant said. Some of her jokes are "a little mean," she admits, while saying she doesn't intend to attack anyone's faith. The Bryants, who do not come from religious backgrounds, avoid discussing theology on Fundie Fridays, focusing on the real-world harm they see caused by the bigotry or corruption of religious leaders and Christian influencers.
Alea is amused by the trolls, who she says typically can't even land good insults. They'll accuse her of not being married (although she is) or say that "she lives at home with three cats." Apparently the worst thing they can say about a woman, she jokes, is that she's single. "This reveals where modern Christianity is today. I let it display itself," Alea said.
Various churches, faith organizations and Christian influencers appear to have invested in search engine optimization around the term "deconstruction."
Some Christian influencers escalate past complaints or arguments into attempted censorship, usually through bogus copyright claims. A good deal of #fundiesnark content relies on appropriating clips, images and music from Christian influencers, which generally falls within the bounds of legal "fair use," since it's deployed "to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work." But the big corporations behind social media networks are generally unwilling to adjudicate disputes between users, and tend to err on the side of those who claim copyright infringement, often without bothering to investigate.
Fundie Fridays nearly lost its YouTube channel in 2022 when Lawson Bates, a Christian influencer who has spun off his own empire from his relationship to the Duggar family, kept lodging copyright claims against the Bryants. At first the couple appealed to Bates directly, asking him to chill out about obvious parody. When that failed, they had to fight to keep their channel, which provided a full-time living by that point. Eventually, they prevailed and got it reinstated, but the experience left a bad taste in their mouths.
Sometimes efforts by conservative Christians to silence their critics can backfire in a fashion reminiscent of the "Streisand effect." That's what happened in the case of Matthew Blake, aka "Flamy Grant," a drag singer-songwriter. Blake belongs to an LGBTQ-affirming Christian church and wrote a '90s-style country-pop tune called "Good Day" for their congregation to "sing on Sunday mornings." The song is religious in a broadly appealing sense, with lyrics like, "Out of the light, I'm not gonna hide/ I got a heart in the right place."
Flamy tasted the ugly side of online attention when Christian nationalist influencer Sean Feucht attacked her on Twitter, accusing Flamy of trying to force "perversion" on kids and quoting a threatening Bible passage calling for "a large millstone [to be] hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea."
Flamy admitted to Salon that the incident was frightening, since Feucht is a notorious MAGA-world character. Still, "drag queens know how to make lemonade," she said. Instead of pulling back, Flamy went to her followers: "I was like, 'Hey, I've got this album, I've got this song.'" People spread the word and started downloading "Good Day" on Apple Music, driving the song to No. 1 on the iTunes Christian music charts.
"There's no such thing as bad publicity, right?" Flamy said. She recalled being a child in an evangelical family reading criticism about the 1995 drag-centric film "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar" in Focus on the Family's magazine. "I didn't even realize I was queer — I was like, I need to see this movie."
"They're like sirens"
Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but most #fundiesnark and deconstruction influencers believe they've seen a dramatic surge in interest in their content in recent years. "Once the 2016 election cycle began, we started to see an outflux of people from high-control religion," Anderson said.
"Because of our political realities, people are realizing this world that I once existed in is not good, I want to get out," Roberts agreed. There's some evidence to back that up. Church attendance has gradually declined for decades, but took a precipitous fall after the election of Donald Trump. The COVID pandemic, which forced churches to choose between protecting their congregants by closing down or yielding to MAGA pressure to stay open, creating major rifts that have not healed. Church attendance has not recovered to pre-pandemic levels. For those in the anti-fundamentalist online world, offering a soft landing to people who are bailing out is a major priority.
When you leave a "high-control religion," Cait West, an escapee from Christian patriarchy said, you're often "leaving your friends and your family and your community." To go online and "find people who understand what you're going through, it's like a found family."
“My end goal is making people feel seen and safe," Flamy said. "I realized that my drag had the power to do that for people, because that's what it did for me.”
"You're not anti-MAGA one day and then you wake up ... storming the Capitol." Far-right radicalization is a "slow fade" that "slowly chips away at a person's sense of self and autonomy."
Even for those who haven't suffered these experiences, this struggle matters. There may be no single greater predictor of support for Trump than white evangelical identity. As Atlantic reporter and lifelong evangelical Tim Alberta makes clear in his new book "The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory," people within that subculture are not allowed to harbor doubts about Trump. Those who do often find they are no longer welcome in their faith communities.
Anti-fundamentalists are keenly aware of how Christian influencers try to normalize far-right politics — and recruit vulnerable young people.
"I am worried about younger men," West said, noting that "trad" content offers them a deceptive promise: "If only the world was like this, then I would get what I deserve."
"It's not an overnight thing," Anderson noted. "You're not anti-MAGA one day and then you wake up the next day" to find yourself "storming the Capitol." She called radicalization a "slow fade" that "slowly chips away at a person's sense of self and autonomy" until they find themselves deeply entrenched in far-right ideology.
Jen Bryant noted that social media has created "the perfect place for pipelines" of radicalization, "because of the never-ending scroll" and the promise of community that conservative influencers offer. "Their job is to entice you in. They're like sirens.”
As extremism researcher Brian Hughes told Salon last year, "individuals pursue radicalization because it meets certain social and psychological needs." There's no easy way to measure how much a counternarrative, delivered within the same social media networks, can help deter people from that path. Anti-fundamentalists believe that encountering progressives, especially those who defy ugly stereotypes and are literate in internet humor, can undercut right-wing messaging and interrupt young people's journey to darker places.
Social media can be a hellscape of bad faith, right-wing propaganda and porn-inflected material. It can also be where people learn how to think, debate and discuss ideas. In that sense, the #fundiesnark and deconstruction world suggests the best possibilities of the internet. "I like to think of the old philosophers' dens, where it was just 20 or 30 students going back and forth," James Bryant said. These kinds of exchanges can get heated, he said, but they have a purpose. "You're figuring out life. You're breaking the world down around you in those conversations.”
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