Our 4-year-old granddaughter takes ballet classes, so we took the train out to the suburbs of Copenhagen for the annual recital. As we were leaving the train at our stop, our little girl spotted one of her instructors, a teenage girl, also exiting the train for the recital. Our little girl pulled my sleeve and said “that’s Agnes!” (An-yes in Danish) in a hushed, celebrity- spotting tone like another person might say “that’s Taylor Swift!”.
In love with graceful Agnes. Little girl worship of bigger girls is something I remember from both my own childhood and my daughter’s childhood – it’s a beautiful thing.
As I have written here many times, I am interested in and open to any liberal or Leftist who is willing to take a fresh look at rebuilding a democratic liberal framework in the US. The guardrails and institutions we thought we could rely on were weak and they all failed, some catastrophically and permanently. We can’t go back to 2015, even if we want to.
Mistermix sent me a link to a You Tube video by Imani Gandy (formerly “ABL”) about how we go forward now that American women have lost the right of bodily autonomy and are dying due to abortion bans. It’s very good work and is exactly the sort of fresh analysis I now seek out.
In “If Roe was never Enough Why was it Everything?” Gandy argues that we on the pro-choice side had two strategies, a legal strategy and a public health strategy. We used both. But we treated those as separate projects instead of as a comprehensive whole. We won the narrow legal battle but we never won the public health argument with the broader public.
She argues that the legal basis for Roe was obliterated using the raw power of the federal judiciary but what remains is the reality of women’s health and women’s lives under abortion bans and that reality can’t be overturned. She says that she has a particular interest in the public health argument, because Black women in the US have maternal (and fetal) health outcomes that are much worse than those of white women, so Black women are suffering more as a result of our failure to elevate women’s health as the central issue in reproductive health care, including abortion.
My only quibble with this analysis is I’m not sure Americans care enough about the lives of women and girls to care about a public health issue that doesn’t include men any more than they cared about a legal issue that didn’t include men, but, what the hell, give it a go.
At the time Mistermix sent me the link, I was reading this paper on a new approach to thinking about pregnant girls (not women) and what happens to them when they cannot access abortion. The authors of the paper make a public health argument that share some commonalities with Imani’s position, but rather than focusing on Black women it focuses on girls. It treats pregnant girls as children because of course that’s what they are:
Pregnancies in girls are more common than we might suppose. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that, in 2022 alone, the birth rate for girls ages ten to fourteen was 0.2 per 1,000 females (1,825 births), with 1,292 abortions recorded.28 For ages fifteen to nineteen, the 2022 rate was 13.5 births per 1,000, with over 143,000 births recorded, 35,318 of those for girls ages fifteen to seventeen, with 49,251 abortions recorded.
Of the various moral considerations that make abortion care part of adequate medical care for an impregnated child, primary among them is her well-being. An impregnated child faces acute risks, regardless of whether she then tries to mother. A shorter expected lifespan is one acute risk that pregnancy poses to her well-being. Enduring pregnancy in childhood is linked not only to a higher risk of maternal mortality (detailed below) but also to a general risk of premature death in adulthood, for example, dying in one’s thirties.33 Equally pressing are the ways that pregnancy affects a child’s body, mind, material conditions, safety, standing, and future prospects. Pregnancy is, by nature, a risky business.34 In childhood, it is even riskier. Impregnated children and older teenagers (i.e., eighteen-to-nineteen-year-olds) have high-risk pregnancies with a greater risk of preeclampsia, anemia, or a rupture of the fetal membrane.35 They also face a higher risk of adverse birth outcomes, including low fetal weight, preterm delivery, and neonatal death.
The child who gestates and then tries to mother faces even greater risks. Impregnated children and older teens confront adverse mental health outcomes as parents, including guilt, anxiety, and depression, which occur in response to both the pregnancy itself and the difficult decisions an impregnated girl must often make.39 The rates of depression alone are documented to be at least twice as high for adolescent girls who mother, compared to peers in their age cohort. Finally, trying to mother during adolescence is associated with poorer social outcomes, including rapid repeated pregnancy, having a greater number of children, lower levels of education, higher levels of poverty, and greater risk of incarceration.40 We can only imagine that younger children would experience similar outcomes, if not worse. In essence, pregnancy is a physically and psychologically taxing experience, and the risks for girls are far more serious than the risks for adults.41
This centers Imani’s public health argument but narrows it to girls. There is nothing abstract about the state forcing a ten-year-old rape victim to sacrifice her life for the dogmatic requirements of a religious test. People might care about that.
