‘Resist the State’: Activists Teach Floridians to ‘Self-Manage’ Abortions After Ban
OOn Wednesday, the same day that Florida banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, a small group of young people gathered in a reading room in Gainesville, Florida, to listen to a lecture on how to induce your own abortion through pills—and how you can support your friends who have abortions.
“You don’t have to take them alone,” one organizer, who gave her name as J, told the group of more than a dozen attendees. “Ultimately, we are here to build a community care network around abortion support.”
There was also another reason for the event: it was, in the words of another organizer, “a big fuck you to Florida.”
Although more than a dozen states, including Florida and the entire Deep South, have passed strict abortion bans in the wake of the fall of Roe v Wade, these bans target people who have abortions, not women who undergo them. ‘Managing’ your own abortion using pills remains legally fraught, but experts generally believe that it is medically safe if the pills are used early enough in pregnancy.
Seated in comfortable chairs on a stage under a PowerPoint-style presentation, whose slides were often presented in sepia tones and wrapped in floral imagery, J and another organizer, who gave their name as E, guided the excited group through the steps of use of abortion. pills: how to find them online, what to expect, how to know if something has gone wrong. At least two attendees scribbled notes.
If you want to go to a hospital, E and J emphasize, you do not have to tell your doctor that you have had an abortion. Instead they said, just say you had a miscarriage.
“Other people who betray you are really a security risk,” says E, whose pronouns are they/them. “Nurses and doctors are damn traitors sometimes.”
For E and J, the struggle for abortion and reproductive rights was nested within a broader struggle for bodily autonomy—a struggle that, in their view, was inextricably intertwined with issues like prison abolition and the pro-Palestinian movement. The pair peppered their speech with mentions of “comrades” and urged attendees to “resist the state.” One slide celebrated the Labor Day holiday, which also happened to fall on Wednesday, complete with an illustration of a Molotov cocktail.
“It’s May 1, we deserve access to care, we must fight for the bodily autonomy of ourselves and our comrades. And so we did it,” J said with a giggle in an interview after the lecture. “I’m really glad we had a space that reminded me of the ways we can care for each other and build a better world, and how that is possible because in many ways it already exists.”
The attendees became increasingly interactive during the lecture. When E and J asked the crowd for suggestions on how to best support people through abortions, people offered the methods they had used for their friends or supported through their own abortions. One participant said they helped a friend by being a “stupid little boy” during their abortion. (Several people laughed.) Another person said that after their abortion they tried to talk about it as much as possible.
“Making it normal and not so damn weird is the only way I know how to help right now,” they said.
They had set a table with a veritable buffet of reproductive health resources: several black-and-white zines with information about self-managed abortion; a zine titled “FREE BLEED: A NON-GENDERED, ANALOG PERIOD TRACKER,” featuring a calendar for people who want to track their periods without the use of apps; piles of emergency contraceptive pills, sanitary pads and condoms.
On another table lay a framed poster that read, “Blessed are the abortion providers.” Covered with flowers, bones and a candle, the table looked like a shrine.
During the lecture, no one said that Florida voters will have the opportunity to vote on a ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution in November. However, in an interview, E said they collected signatures to get the measure on the ballot.
“I’m pretty confident that collectively we’ll be able to get that done,” said E. “Once people have a chance to decide, it’s pretty clear that people don’t like these bans.”
E had an abortion in Florida before Roe fell. At the time they were more than six weeks pregnant; Today, they wouldn’t have been able to get that abortion at a clinic in Florida.
“I have deep empathy for everyone who is affected now, who finds out today that they are pregnant and faces the consequences of the state criminalizing it for no reason and for arbitrary reasons,” they said. “We need these bans or anything else that blocks access to health care like this.”