'Abusers are enforcing abortion bans on their victims'

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If you’ve been following along this week, you’ll know I’m actually in Japan right now. Specifically, Tokyo. Which is why I’m running a series of longer interviews with some of my favorite female authors about issues impacting women and girls right now.

Today, I’m talking to Jezebel reporter Kylie Cheung about her upcoming book Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans. Kylie writes some of the most important yet harrowing dispatches from the front lines of women and marginalized people getting their rights systemically stripped and violated around the world. Despite the horrors, she’s also one of the coolest, kindest, and funniest people I know. (You can subscribe to her newsletter here!)

Our interview is edited for length and clarity.

Kat Tenbarge: When did you start reporting on abortion?

Kylie Cheung: Ten years ago, my junior year of high school. There wasn’t a lot of conversation about the nuances of different state abortion laws. Roe was the law of the land at that point, but it would catch my attention when there would be a bill in Missouri like “Oh, this abortion clinic can’t be built because it’s within this distance from like, schools.” And I was like, why is health care inappropriate for middle schoolers? I would keep seeing bills like that pop up and all these different insidious ways that like, yes, abortion is legal, but there would just be so much institutionalized red tape around it that makes it impossible to access in these different communities. Or, like 90% of counties don’t have an abortion clinic, and at that point, it’s legal, but is it accessible?

That same summer was when all these anti-abortion organizations filmed these really out-of-context videos at Planned Parenthood clinics that they framed as selling “baby parts.” It sparked all these Congressional investigations. There was just so much misinformation going around and a lot of violent rhetoric about “baby parts.” That culminated in the shooting at a Colorado clinic in October 2015 that killed three people. It was by this guy who said that he killed three people to save a thousand babies. So that was kind of the context for when I started down this path of zeroing in on this issue. It’s so naive to think about now, but I was just so bewildered at the fact that there’s this health service that’s been legal for a long time now and people are still killing over it. People are still trying to do anything to make it impossible to access.

KT: So it struck you that there was a rising threat to Roe and abortion access well before it was widely accepted in the mainstream.

KC: Yeah, definitely. Over time, as I continued to pull at those threads, some of the numbers really astounded me. There had been thousands of restrictions on abortion passed in state legislatures across the country over the past fifty years. And a huge number of them were passed in recent years. And there's no public reckoning with that, really. I was gauging threats from the anti-abortion movement on that level, incredibly successful threats that obviously culminated in 2022. But I think before Dobbs, to me, what felt very existential and frustrating and what really drove me a lot was that there was no sense of urgency whatsoever among people who supposedly supported abortion rights. Democratic lawmakers just kept rolling over for these restrictions or wouldn’t fight back or let the Republicans or anti-abortion movement dictate the terms of these conversations. There was no real urgency, because there was Roe, and people just kind of had this assumption that as long as it existed, there was no real problem.

We’re really feeling the direct impact of not having it and that has created, in some spaces, more urgency. But a lot of these fires that are happening now were happening before that. People were traveling out of state to get abortions because that was the closest location. Some states would have two or three-day waiting periods, and that’s not tenable for everyone. That’s in addition to this years-long strategy and playbook to get Dobbs to happen, to get it to the Supreme Court at all.

KT: How has reporting on abortion changed post-Dobbs compared to when you first started out?

KC: Dobbs was a very crushing moment. As I had been writing and reporting about for years, a lot of states had what are known as “trigger laws,” where they were waiting for this moment and had prepared for it so that an abortion ban could immediately take effect once that ruling came down. People have to accept that the threat is real now. There’s a difference from even a year before, where there was a level of not listening that felt very gendered. It’s going to sound cliché and 2014 feminism or whatever, but there was a very serious issue of not taking mostly women and feminist voices seriously when they were raising the issue of these threats while Roe still existed. I think there was a 2018 survey that found over half of voters did not believe there was a real threat that Roe would be overturned, and then four years later, obviously, it was.

A lot of talking heads, even ones who weren’t conservative, were like “It’s unlikely they’ll overturn Roe, blah, blah, blah.” There was a lot of insinuating that we were being hysterical, which is innately gendered. Then when it was actually overturned, they were still suggesting we were being hysterical, because they said “You can still travel out of state to get an abortion.” At the same time they say that, Republicans in the U.S. Senate are blocking a bill that would codify the right to interstate travel for abortion. And then you look at states like Idaho or Tennessee, and these bills are constantly being challenged in court and put on pause, but they would criminalize adults helping minors travel out of state for abortion. Across Texas, there are all these counties that prohibit use of their roads to travel for abortion. What does enforcement of that even look like? But the point is confusion and discouraging people from doing it, because they don’t know what will happen.

KT: I feel like abortion was one of the issues that really preceded a lot of what we're seeing now with, for example, Chuck Schumer saying Trump might be defying the lower courts but it’s not a problem until he defies the Supreme Court. There is such an instinct in establishment Democrats to say the crisis is not really happening, and if it is, it’s on you, the voters.

KC: In the years leading up to the Dobbs decision, there were a lot of different chances, I think, for Democrats to have been proactive. Democrats, as you and I know, are addicted to fundraising. Every other text I get is like a hostage photo of Nancy Pelosi asking for $5. A lot of that fundraising relied on this perpetual threat to our right to abortion existing. And if Democrats did anything to decisively eliminate that threat, how would they fundraise off of it?

It’s interesting, because the anti-abortion movement’s biggest success came after the Roe decision, whereas a lot of liberal and abortion rights activists started to take a step back. There were some organizations where originally their pitch was to repeal all abortion laws, which I think is correct. And now you’ll see more conditions and qualifications. If you look at polls about approval for abortion, most of them, generally, will say around 70%, but it all depends on how you frame the question. If you frame it as whether the government should have power or control over your pregnancy, 80% will say no. But if you ask when it should and shouldn’t be illegal, the answers change a lot. Before Roe, running on the message to get rid of all abortion laws was powerful and correct. And then a lot of that activism and the spirt of that activism died down, whereas the anti-abortion movement exploded. They were militant as hell after the Roe ruling. They were everywhere outside of clinics. They started passing all of these laws to restrict and scale it back.

KT: Over the course of decades, Republicans were able to establish this playbook to take a very popular precedent and flip it. Some Democrats act like it’s impossible to do that. But anti-abortion extremists were able to accomplish it. It frustrates me endlessly that establishment Democrats don’t want to do that.

KC: Abortion is more popular than any president or politician, almost ever. It’s more popular than all of these different issues that Democrats have decided to plant firmly on. It’s a very recent development that they’re even saying this word or that they’ve even started having people with abortion experiences come up and share stories or that they’ve genuinely acknowledged this at all. They had to wait for Dobbs to happen. Before that it was nonexistent, and it was confounding to me, because 7 in 10 people support abortion rights, support Roe. This is a huge wedge issue. And the fact that it’s gone when it’s so popular is one of the clearest signs that we do not live in a democracy whatsoever. Democracy and abortion rights are very much tied, and if we lived in a direct democracy, abortion would be legal.

I genuinely think no one who has an unwanted pregnancy should have to have it for more than an hour longer than they want to. And that hour is going to be, in a lot of ways, excruciating. I approach this from the perspective of an activist or movement journalist, someone who is going to make these full demands and be very uncompromising about that. I don’t know what compromise there is about whether I should be allowed to decide to not be pregnant. There is none. A lot of Democratic politicians, especially in swing parts of the country, they place so much emphasis on these horrible realities of child rape victims who are being denied care or being forced to travel out of state, or these horrible cases of women who had a very much wanted pregnancy and then they have these complications, now they’re at risk of sepsis, or they almost die because they’re denied a very time-sensitive emergency procedure. And all of that is incredibly true, it’s horrific, it’s a direct consequence of abortion bans. And we should talk about these cases, because they are very much happening, and there’s still a lot of denialism and gaslighting about whether it is. We see these Democratic politicians sharing these stories, and I think they're important, and at the same time what’s also important is just not wanting to be fucking pregnant. It’s a form of state-sanctioned rape and sexual violence to invade someone’s body and to make them be pregnant against their will. It’s physically awful and violating under the “best circumstances.”

KT: I grew up Catholic, and this conversation makes me think of this idea of Catholic guilt around abortion, where it’s like you should be allowed to get one but you should have to feel bad about it. You should have to feel guilty about it. And we should create hurdles so that only the cases we deem the most severe are able to get abortions. This is no longer the most popular opinion and it has overstayed its welcome among establishment Democrats.

KC: Safe, legal, and rare. A lot of them were a big part of that in the 90s. That went hard in the 90s. The Catholic guilt parallel is so interesting. I think it’s very real.

KT: Meanwhile, I think we should have McDonald’s-style abortion clinics. Safe, legal, and everywhere.

Another thing I wanted to talk to you about, which is kind of the central framework of your new book and is something that I think people really fail to recognize, is the link between abortion access and domestic violence. You cite research that actually links the restriction of abortion access to an increase in domestic violence. Why is this happening?

KC: So, I wrote Survivor Injustice in 2023. The thesis of that book was that abusers and the state are this endless feedback loop of violence against rape victims. In my earliest days of anti-rape activism, something that was really important to me was challenging this misconception that an act of rape or gender-based violence ends with that act. It’s followed by everything that happens to you after. There’s the trauma, obviously, but deeply embedded in our policies are tools for abusers. I think that one of the most obvious manifestations of this concept of the state as the abuser or the state colluding with the abuser is abortion bans. I can never stress this enough, but the government invading your body in that way is sexual violence. There are laws that require a transvaginal ultrasound. What else do you call it when you have to be penetrated by an object because the state mandated it? I see abortion bans as abuse.

And then, how are people supposed to be literate in all of these different laws and their complexities? People have busy fucking lives. I spoke to someone at If/When/How and something that she said was if something is illegal, it stands to reason that you think you’re being criminalized if you violate that. Most of these laws criminalize the abortion provider, but confusion and ambiguity around that is a tool in the toolbox of abusers. In summer 2023, the National Domestic Violence Hotline reported that the number of calls related to reproductive coercion doubled from the summer of the Dobbs ruling to the summer of 2023. When people are confused about these laws, abusers will tell them “I will call the police if you try to have an abortion,” “I will sue you if you try to have an abortion.” And we’ve seen several cases of abusers taking legal action. We've seen the Texas Attorney General's Office literally recruiting men to file legal actions against people who have abortions by using pills that are mailed from out of state. They’re triggering these lawsuits to try and ban the act of mailing abortion pills from out of state.

Because there’s so much confusion about all of this, that absolutely advantages abusers. The goal of reproductive coercion is to impregnate someone and entrap them with you. In the same way, states are trying to entrap you under abortion bans by increasingly coming after your right to travel. There is no distinction between the state and the abuser at this point. They aid each other, state governments create this very powerful tool, and abusers are enforcing abortion bans on their victims. A lot of these survivors said that a reproductive health clinic or sexual health clinic near them was a lifeline, because it could help them with contraception. They would go there and for the first time ever, a health care worker would ask them, “Are you okay? Are you safe?” And now these clinics are shuttering, and that is a huge part of the abuse. If someone has to drive a certain distance or if they’re in an abusive situation where they don’t have a lot of mobility, they’re just trapped.

KT: How can people fight back against what’s happening now?

KC: Obviously, money is a huge part of it. After Dobbs, there was this influx of one-time rage donations, which is obviously great. Abortion funds need money. The reason they place so much emphasis on sustained donations, even small donations, is because it’s about sustainability. It’s about time and endurance and recognizing that these are very long fights. They’re not even lifelong fights. This will go beyond our lifetime. One of the most critical things is to be in this for the long haul. That’s going to look different for a lot of us. But maybe part of that isn’t just doing a one-time $100, donation, it’s sustaining that, or doing whatever it takes to be sustainable over time—maybe $5 or $10 a month. It took so fucking long to even get Roe. Now it’s gone and we have a Supreme Court that is a six-three majority. Who knows what the Supreme Court or the judicial landscape will look like by the end of Trump’s term. Look at who he appointed last time. And this time he’s going to appoint 25-year-old Neo-Nazis in JD Vance and Elon Musk’s group chats. Or they’ll do recruitment operations on 4Chan. We’re not even prepared for how horrible it’s going to be. But what I’m saying is that it’s about longevity. It’s hard to pick up on signs that you’re burning out, but it’s important to be mindful of that.

The other thing I would say is that there’s so much misinformation about abortion. A lot of it can come from well-meaning people. Viability is a made-up concept, the trimester system is a made-up concept. It was made up by the Supreme Court in 1973 and these people are not fucking doctors. Every pregnancy is so different. You should not be putting arbitrary parameters around it. There’s so much malicious misinformation coming from the right, and then there’s stuff from Democrats about viability or trying to make compromises and it’s rooted in misinformation. A proactive step you can take that makes a huge difference is self-education and following the right people who are fighting that misinformation. You can be a part of sharing it. That can seem so small and insignificant but sharing accurate information is huge, because these are the conversations that drive policies and what Democrats are willing to fight for.

Finally, don’t call the police for pregnancy-related reasons. A lot of these criminal cases emerge because people think they have some kind of legal obligation to report someone to the police. There were a lot of criminal cases around pregnancy and abortion before Dobbs, but after Dobbs, I’ll just say it: police are fucking stupid. Because there’s no Roe, they act like being pregnant is criminal activity. There’s a specter of criminalization where people call the police on pregnancy-related things, healthcare workers think they have to because they aren’t reproductive rights lawyers. They’re so scared of losing their license. I want to hammer home not to do this. Share resources. Put Plan C stickers everywhere. Make sure people know they can get an abortion, because like I said, there’s misinformation everywhere. You absolutely can travel out of state to get an abortion, you can get abortion pills. Challenge the misinformation economy, don’t call the police, call hotlines that have pledged not to call the police. All of these things are rooted in self-preservation and community care. If you can care for yourself, you can care for other people who come your way.