I love you, keep going.

Take care, push forward.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

Dear readers,

My amazing friend, collaborator, and teacher Emily Shapiro often ends her yoga classes with this mantra: I love you keep going, I love you keep going, I love you keep going.

Since reading this morning’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe, I’ve been angry, sad, shaking — and as the day as ticked on, I’ve started to whisper that mantra to myself, and cheesy as I feel typing this, I’ve been sending it out to you, too:

I love you keep going, I love you keep going, I love you keep going.

There is something quietly radical about that combination of love and forward motion; the idea that love propels and buoys. This mantra always strikes me because it asserts two things at once: That the listener is loved, worthy of love, hopefully loves themselves; and that love enables the act of keeping going; keeping going is itself a demonstration of self-love, of receiving love.

It says: Love requires perseverance, and love catalyzes perseverance.

I am still furious. Today I am raging, and I am trying to fight off despair, but at some moments I feel like this is all that’s left: A puddle of sorrow, a pyre of fury. Rage, certainly, is crucial to movements for human rights and social justice.

But so is love.

Rage is explosive, but love, too, is propulsive. And these aren’t opposite emotions; they are intertwined and interrelated. My rage today is responsive to acts of malice, domination, and degradation; it is wild and deep because of the depth and profundity of my devotion to a vision of something better, and how much I care about those the powerful and malevolent are determined to subjugate — my love for myself, too, a member of that group that today is maligned, dominated, and degraded by our country’s highest legal authority.

I’m angry because I care so goddamned much. My rage burns in proportion to my dedication.

So today: Be angry. And be gentle on yourself and those you love and who love you in return. Say I love you — to yourself, to others.

And then: Keep going.

What does it mean to keep going? A few ideas on this dark day:

• Know how and where to get abortion pills. Aid Access and Plan C are two reputable options.

• Understand that abortion-inducing medications mimic a miscarriage. If you use them to self-manage an abortion, or if you help someone else to use them to self-manage and abortion, and the abortion doesn’t complete and you need to see a health worker, say you are having a miscarriage. This is basically true, and helps to shield you / your loved one from legal risk.

• Consider how brave you are willing to be. There are a lot of different ways to help with different levels of risk. Will you help people in need get abortions if they need them? Will you donate to abortion funds or to groups that are getting pills into women’s hands? Will you volunteer with organizations that help to get women across state lines, or at the clinics in more permissive states that will be inundated with clients? If you are a health worker, will you be trained in abortion care?

• Vote in the midterms, yes, but push Congress to act now to protect our rights as much as possible. There is some debate on what’s the most important right legislatively, but to me these are particularly crucial:

  • National legislation protecting anyone who has an abortion from criminal or any other form of prosecution. Look, in my ideal world, we would have legislation protecting anyone who has an abortion and anyone who helps someone who has an abortion, but we are living very far away from my ideal world and I am not sure that the latter legislation would stand a chance. Right now, though, we are in a delicate moment: The pendulum has swung right, but it could go further still. Democrats, at the very least, need to enshrine very basic protections right now that are politically popular on both sides of the aisle. Not putting women in jail for abortion is one of them — but it’s one that, I am afraid, will shift as time goes on and more radical anti-abortion laws pass. So get it on the books now: No one goes to jail or faces any other penalty for having an abortion.

  • Equally as important are freedom of information laws. You’re already seeing Republicans trying to criminalize the dissemination of information on how to safely self-manage an abortion — that is, if you so much as give a person information on how to get their hands on abortion-inducing medication or how to use it, you could go to jail. I cannot overstate how dangerous that legislation is. It’s a clear encroachment on the First Amendment, and it’s guaranteed to put millions of lives at risk. It would make newsletters like this one, where I advocate for abortion rights and tell you where to get abortion pills, a crime. And it would be a tremendous authoritarian crackdown on the free exchange of information.

  • Freedom to travel. Another conservative target: People who cross state lines for abortions. This will be easier to regulate when it comes to minors, but trust that they are also trying to make it illegal for anyone to go to another state to end a pregnancy. The freedom to cross state lines for medical care must be maintained.

• Keep an eye on Big Tech. So much of the information people will have access to will depend on unaccountable technology companies which I guarantee will be pressed by conservative lawmakers to limit the information they allow on their platforms. Will Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc allow advocates to disseminate information about self-managed abortion in states where abortion is outlawed? Will Google ensure that people who search for their pregnancy options online see medically accurate information —or will they defer to state law and knock information that details extralegal methods way down in the search results? Will tech companies comply with subpoenas to turn over data from the phones of people who travel for abortions, or people who help them? We have no idea how this is going to play out, and it may well be more influential than just about any federal law.

There is so much more to do. Feel free to send me your ideas and suggestions and I will put them into another newsletter in the coming days. But for now, I just wanted to send this, and to tell you that I value your work, your care, your dedication. That if you are feeling like I am feeling today, I am with you, I am sending you love, and I am sending you strength.

I love you. Keep going.

(There is no other choice.)

Jill

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