Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: Going into Election Day, many observers believed the outcome of the referendum would be determined in increasingly Democratic areas like the Kansas City suburbs — that is, by whether enough voters turned out there to compensate for the very conservative lean of the rest of the state. But abortion opponents did surprisingly poorly even in the reddest places. Consider far western Kansas, a rural region along the Colorado border that votes overwhelmingly Republican. In Hamilton…

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The New York Times reports: In Mississippi, which brought the abortion case that ended Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court, Gov. Tate Reeves vowed that the state would now “take every step necessary to support mothers and children.” Today, however, Mississippi fares poorly on just about any measure of that goal. Its infant and maternal mortality rates are among the worst in the nation. State leaders have rejected the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, leaving an estimated 43,000 women…

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NPR reports: Like most women seeking an abortion, Brittany Mostiller already had children when she unexpectedly got pregnant again. “I had two young daughters both under the age of 5, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with my sister,” she says. She’d also just been laid off from her overnight job as a greeter for Greyhound buses. Her unemployment benefits were less than her wages there, and nearly all of them went toward rent and utilities. “I’m not even sure I had…

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Jia Tolentino writes: In the weeks since a draft of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—a case about a Mississippi law that bans abortion after fifteen weeks, with some health-related exceptions but none for rape or incest—was leaked, a slogan has been revived: “We won’t go back.” It has been chanted at marches, defiantly but also somewhat awkwardly, given that this is plainly an era of repression and regression, in which abortion rights are not…

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Dina Zirlott writes: My story is one that some already know, but for the sake of those who might not, and in light of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, it is best summarized by these three sentences: I was raped when I was 17 years old. I was forced to give birth to a baby when I was 18 years old. My baby died when I was 19 years old. I wrote my first essay for HuffPost in…

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