New Platform, Same Old Me (or Maybe New and Improved Me?)
New Platform, Same Old Me (or Maybe New and Improved Me?)
Still have sh*t to say before I die.
Hi Friends,
Once again, I find myself trying to figure out how best to express myself and how best to share said expressions. I am now giving Substack a try. I have found Medium disheartening for a number of reasons, so I’m gonna try here for now. This also means my newsletter is now coming from here instead of Constant Contact. I will also continue to post most things I write on www.justonlyjenn.com.
With that housekeeping note taken care of, I turn to abortion. So much of my life story revolves around abortion. In my teen years, while trying to be by mother’s perfect daughter, I solidly identified as “pro-life”. When I got to college, I still identified as “pro-life” until I broke away from my parents’ control and left the Catholic Church. As I began to think more for myself and define my own values, I remained sort of ambivalent toward abortion. I began to state I was “pro-choice”, but I wasn’t passionate about it, and I didn’t think a lot about it. Even when I got pregnant and had an abortion, I wasn’t passionately “pro-choice”. I found the bitter arguing on both sides off-putting. It wasn’t until I read the book The Story of Jane, by Laura Kaplan, and I learned the history of what abortion was like before Roe vs. Wade made abortion legal across America did I begin to become passionate.
Despite my personal passion, for so many years, my fear of so many things kept me from living the life I wanted to live, and that included keeping me from being a publicly passionate and vocal supporter of abortion.
Thankfully, that has changed. I’ve written about some of it before, but I am going to write so much more in the coming weeks and months. I have learned so much over the years about abortion and feminism and reproductive justice and racial justice, and I am going to share it all. I think I’ve been tip-toeing around this the whole time I’ve been writing. I’ve been trying to share myself and my journey with you, on some level, in hopes of making you “like me”, so that I could “win you over to my side” before I started hitting you over the head with abortion (lol).
Well, time is running out, and I won’t tip-toe anymore. I need to share everything I know and have learned because I need people to understand how abortion has been used as a “slippery slope initiative”, as George Lakoff would describe, to foment hate, white supremacy, and division. Everything we are living through today can be traced back to the rise of the Religious Right and the rise of the abortion “culture wars” (and then traced further back to the racist roots of all of this to the racist reaction by white Americans to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s, to the racist reaction of white Americans to the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, to the racist reasons for the Civil War, to the racists who helped frame our Constitution and the founding of our nation.)
Not everyone has time to read as much as I do, nor do you have my life experience to put it into context, so I feel it my duty to share all I have learned and continue to learn, and yes, I hope I will inspire at least some of you to read and learn and begin to speak out about a number of things along the way.
I am going to be an abortion and racial justice evangelist, if you will.
Join me in my journey. All of our lives depend on it.