Jessica Valenti’s Field Guide to Decoding the GOP’s Paradoxical Abortion Rhetoric

The longtime reproductive rights journalist's new book predicted Republicans' pre-election playbook—in part because they've been using the same one for years. “How many times do feminists have to be right before we start being listened to?” she asked Jezebel.

By Kylie Cheung  |  October 31, 2024 | 12:55pm
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Jessica Valenti’s Field Guide to Decoding the GOP’s Paradoxical Abortion Rhetoric

At the vice presidential debate on October 1, JD Vance stared directly into the camera and lied to voters that he’s “never supported a national abortion ban” and has only supported “some minimum national standard.” Those, of course, are the exact same thing. Whether it’s a six-week, 15-week, or 20-week “minimum national standard,” that’s a ban on whether and when people can access abortion. Vance has only doubled down on that language since, as has the entire GOP, including Donald Trump. 

“It’s fascinating to see them be so open with it,” journalist Jessica Valenti told Jezebel. “They’re not hiding it as well as they used to.”

Valenti has written about abortion and reproductive rights for nearly two decades, and since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling in 2022, she’s painstakingly tracked Republican bullshit on the issue. Her newsletter, “Abortion, Every Day,” eventually paved the way for her new book, Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win. Valenti says the goal of her book, like her newsletter, is to “help people who might be new to this issue know what it all means.”

Early on in Abortion, Valenti warns that Republicans are trying “to get away with attacking us under the cover of national overwhelm”—with one extreme bill after another, they’re testing and pushing the boundaries of what they can get away with, thinking we can’t possibly follow everything. With five days until Election Day, as Republicans lie about their position on a national ban while paving the way for one, I asked Valenti how she’s processing the repetitiveness of it all. She responded with a question of her own about repetitiveness: “How many times do feminists have to be right before we start being listened to?” 

To Valenti’s point, feminists and leaders of the reproductive rights movement warned for years that abortion had become inaccessible to large swaths of the country, and that Roe v. Wade was under threat, while Republicans called them “hysterical.” Still, in 2018, about 60% of voters said they didn’t think it likely the Supreme Court would really kill Roe. But what happened four years later? The Supreme Court killed Roe. And as Republicans expand their women-controlling crusade to birth control, abortion-related travel, fertility technology like IVF, and more, they’re using the same manipulative language they used to pretend Roe was safe to pretend they’ll stop at Roe.

The power of language in the anti-abortion movement is a focal point of Valenti’s book. She begins by laying out how Republicans aren’t just trying to rebrand abortion bans—they’re quite literally trying to redefine abortion itself. For example, at a House Judiciary hearing in 2022, Americans United for Life president Catherine Glenn Foster said that “if a 10-year-old becomes pregnant as a result of rape and it was threatening her life, then that’s not an abortion.” Similarly, the National Review in 2022 argued there’s “a difference between necessary women’s health care”—AKA, an emergency abortion—and “intentionally killing a baby.” It’s simple, really, as Valenti writes in Abortion: “In Republicans’ view, women who want to be pregnant, adhering to traditional gender roles that say women should be mothers, deserve abortions. Those who don’t…are murderers.” 

Valenti raises that the anti-abortion movement is also increasingly trying to equate birth control—especially IUDs and emergency contraception—with abortion, teeing it up to be banned and criminalized as well. She offers several key examples, including the case of a Georgia woman she spoke to whose insurance wouldn’t cover an IUD because the company regarded it as a “sanctity of life” issue, and the 2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ruling which allows companies to deny coverage of IUDs and Plan B because they supposedly end pregnancies. (Just to be crystal clear, birth control prevents pregnancies and abortion terminates a pregnancy that’s underway—very different!)

The GOP has been playing this game for years, Valenti writes. State lawmakers have blocked Medicaid coverage of birth control by calling it abortifacients.  Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) referred to contraception as “abortion-inducing drugs” during Amy Coney Barrett’s 2020 Supreme Court confirmation hearing. House Speaker Mike Johnson said point-blank in 2013, “The morning-after pill, as we know, is an abortifacient.” 

We’re missing this incredibly big political story: that these laws are being passed against people’s wishes. Americans want abortion to be legal. It’s not polarizing or evenly split, but a very small group is imposing their will on the vast majority.

There’s nothing Republicans are above lying about or obfuscating to advance their agenda of subjugating and dehumanizing pregnant people—including children. In 2022, a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio had to travel to Indiana to receive care. The story came to light because the girl’s doctor, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, publicly discussed some non-identifying aspects of it. Quickly, Republican politicians wrote it off as a “hoax” and “fabrication” because law enforcement agencies hadn’t yet made an arrest; Valenti notes that a Washington Post fact-checker wrote the child’s story off, too, citing lack of police confirmation and his (false) claim that child rape victims are “pretty rare.” An arrest was ultimately made, but why did we need one? Why wasn’t Bernard, the child’s doctor, enough? Or, as Valenti writes: “Why would a police officer’s account, or state official’s, be more reliable than the one from the doctor who was in the room? Are we really to believe that in a state where abortion is criminalized, government officials are objective?”

Even as anti-abortion leaders did their utmost to dismiss the case of Bernard and her patient, it ignited fresh outrage about the lack of rape exceptions in most states’ abortion bans. But as Valenti argues in Abortion, exceptions themselves, are another piece of Republicans’ strategy of deceit. They don’t work in practice, for rape or for medical conditions, and serve to make abortion bans seem more humane while still denying patients care. For example, Valenti writes about an Idaho Republican who said she and her colleagues tried to write a list of emergencies to allow abortion, but the “list was endless,” so they stopped. In other words, in the face of an “endless” number of things that can go wrong during pregnancy, they opted to do nothing and instead let pregnant people die.

In Abortion, Valenti contends that Democrats are making their lives harder by being apologetic and defensive about supporting abortion rights. “Democrats need to stop giving credence to this idea that abortion is something to be apologized for or be defensive over, or that at some point, there needs to be regulation of a person’s body,” she said. That’s the problem with their fixation on rape exceptions; on “restoring Roe”; on specific scenarios. By ceding ground to Republicans on these details, Democrats “stop trusting a woman at 15 weeks or 24 weeks” and leave “some powerful talking points on the table.”

She presents a few key stats to make the case for this: Specifically, 81% of Americans don’t want pregnancy and abortion regulated by the government. Other polls show about 70% support for legal abortion. But as Valenti writes, all of this is fundamentally shaped by what pollsters are asking in the first place: Are they asking when or whether the government should legislate our bodies? Why is it a given that they should at all?

The country is not split on abortion, even though you’d probably think it is from reading the painstakingly “balanced” coverage in publications like the New York Times or CNN, Valenti writes. When media outlets think the country is split on abortion, or that it’s controversial, that shapes how they cover it. They characterize medical facts as liberal “beliefs,” and balance patients’ heart-rending abortion stories with the voices of anti-abortion activists calling them murderers, to give equal weight to two supposedly equally held perspectives. 

“The problem is, there has to be an understanding that truth is more important than the appearance of objectivity,” Valenti told me. The other reason we should place greater focus on the popularity of abortion is to make clear that abortion bans are at odds with democracy. “We’re missing this incredibly big political story: that these laws are being passed against people’s wishes. Americans want abortion to be legal. It’s not polarizing or evenly split, but a very small group is imposing their will on the vast majority.”

Controlling reproduction is also foundational to fascism. It wasn’t enough for Republicans to merely ban abortion—now, they’re trying to police anyone who helps someone seek abortion, through so-called “abortion trafficking” bills or county ordinances that outlaw driving someone for abortion-related travel. “They know our strength is our support of each other and being in community,” she said. “Their strategy is putting a wedge in communities, making people distrust and fear helping each other.” Nevertheless, we’re all still helping each other, she says, and that’s been the most “heartening” piece of post-Dobbs life. 

Valenti is a mother—thanks in no small part, she writes, to her abortions. Abortion is dedicated to her daughter, and Valenti is afraid of what the future holds for her. But that fear has lit a fire in her to seek to build something better and more durable. “The more abortion rights activists I speak to, people who’ve been doing this work for a long time—their big concern is recreating this paradigm, this unsustainable model [Roe] that we’ll need to fight for all over again in a few years,” Valenti said. “I don’t want something that my daughter’s going to have to fight for all over again, fighting for a world where people are still being denied care. There’s a real opportunity to be unapologetic, to win something lasting.”

 
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