Jessica Valenti writes and talks about abortion like someone who thinks about it for dozens of hours every week—because she does.
For around two years—since the fall of Roe—Valenti has been writing about reproductive justice every day in her newsletter, aptly titled Abortion, Every Day. But, in her new book, Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win, she jokes that she could have called the newsletter Abortion, Every Hour, because “that’s how quickly things are moving in post-Roe America.”
It’s true, and the elections since Dobbs, including this one, have largely been defined by abortion. Voters in battleground states, particularly women voters younger than 45, increasingly say abortion is the most important issue to their vote, according to a New York Times / Siena College poll conducted in August. Over 25 million women, ages 15 to 44, reside in states that have more restrictions on accessing abortion than before Dobbs, despite living in a country whose populace overwhelmingly supports access to reproductive health care like abortion. Meanwhile, Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance have been jumping through rhetorical hoops, attempting to soften their past remarks and actions on the issue, as Vice President Kamala Harris has spoken about reproductive freedom on the debate stage in unprecedentedly stark terms.
Valenti has spent the last two decades writing about women and gendered violence, launching the blog Feministing in 2004 and writing for newsrooms like The Guardian, The Nation, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Bitch. This is her eighth book. “I was just so angry and intent on not missing a thing,” Valenti writes of her newsletter in Abortion. This anger, she explains in the text, is what keeps her going. “Republicans want us to be afraid. They want us to be too scared to help each other, too anxious to share our abortion plan with a friend, too scared, even, to get medical help when we need it. It’s heartbreaking: they’ve criminalized community.”
Abortion reads like a letter to women and allies who are afraid, at once challenging and encyclopedic. (After the last chapter, Valenti includes pages of resources and statistics to employ when talking to others about abortion.) In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, she explains why language is so critical to this debate, what questions journalists should ask Republicans, and what abortion stories still make her cry.
Vanity Fair: In a footnote in your introduction, you write, “The hardest thing about writing a book about abortion is knowing that you could never possibly fit everything that needs talking about.” How hard was it to narrow down hundreds of days of writing about abortion into less than 200 pages?
Jessica Valenti: It was one of the most challenging things I’ve done in my life, honestly. Because it’s not just that you know that these stories are changing day to day, hour to hour, and so that any story you put out there is going to be hugely different by the time the book comes out. It does feel like sort of creating this hierarchy of issues within abortion, which I don’t like to do, because they’re all so important. I sort of had to just say, “All right, I’m trying to capture a particular moment in time.” This seems to be the big, broad issues that are happening right now in the two years in the aftermath of Dobbs. When I was recording the audiobook a couple of weeks ago, every other page, I was like, “Shit, I wish I could have added this,” or, “I should have talked about that.” It’s really hard.