Jessica Valenti’s Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win was published in 2024 by Crown.



A Survey of Reproductive Unfreedom
Hope in Despair: How We Resist the US Antiabortion Agenda
When Facts are Not Enough
Abortion Affects
Short Takes: Provocations on Public Feminism, an open-access feature of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, offers brief comments from prominent feminists about a book that has shaped popular conversations about feminist issues. Short Takes is part of the Feminist Public Intellectuals Project.
A Survey of Reproductive Unfreedom
Natasha Lennard



Natasha Lennard
Anyone who cares about the decimation of reproductive freedoms in the United States in the last decade can be grateful for the constant work of Jessica Valenti. Valenti is a tireless documenter of most every legislative, judicial, and policy-based attack on abortion access championed by Republicans nationwide in their long and successful assault on bodily autonomy. In her daily blog, Abortion, Every Day, Valenti has, for over two years since the fall of Roe, devotedly covered the astroturfed erosion of reproductive rights.
For this task, Valenti, a journalist who made her name writing for liberal feminist magazines and websites, is a reliable guide. She maps the political terrain with clarity; she is a detail-oriented, empathetic reporter who never loses sight of broader contemporary and historical contexts. Valenti’s is public service journalism with a general commitment to an inclusive reproductive justice.
For those seeking an in-depth scholarly treatment of, or radical intervention into, today’s fascistic, patriarchal and racist pronatalist order, however, Valenti’s latest book, Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win, would come up wanting. Rather, Valenti offers a survey course on the state of reproductive unfreedom in the wake of the Dobbs decision. It is a welcome tool for a reader concerned about abortion access, but who may lack the facts, figures, and examples to understand the basic operations by which reproductive freedoms have been and will be taken away. It would be no bad thing if the text were assigned to high schoolers or made required reading for Clintonite liberals who have spent decades treating the thin protections of Roe as the gold standard of reproductive freedom.
Valenti rejects the scarcity logic around abortion that defined the Democratic Party norm for three decades. President Bill Clinton’s famous line, that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” became a mantra of sorts for his party, which treated abortion as an unfortunate necessity rather than an integral part of bodily autonomy and a public good. Little wonder antichoice advocates could hack away at such threadbare defenses. Valenti, offering little in the way of historical analysis, only fleetingly addresses the Democrats’ role in enabling attacks on reproductive rights, nor does she give much in the way of theorizing the rise of the Christian right, but she herself is thankfully clear on the point: her first chapter is titled, “Abortion is Good, Actually,” and she writes, “Abortions are a proactive moral good because they allow people to control their own bodies, lives, and futures.”
Throughout the text, Valenti notes that attacks on abortion disproportionately endanger poor Black women and other women of color. In a chapter on the devious and unrelenting ways Republican lawmakers and prosecutors have found to criminalize the ending of a pregnancy, she writes, “women of color—Black women in particular—are disproportionately targeted in cases like this,” while highlighting the grim case of Brittany Watts, a Black Ohio woman who was charged with a felony following a miscarriage. Valenti peppers her text with numerous disturbing, illustrative cases, which largely speak for themselves.
The author is strongest as a reporter with an extraordinary wealth of examples and facts to call upon. She is also a helpful decoder of right-wing antiabortion rhetorics, for the uninitiated. She is at her weakest, though, in offering analysis and synthesis. She writes, for example, that abortion is “an economic issue, a workers’ rights and racism issue,” which is absolutely the case, but Valenti gives the reader little more than a gloss as to how and why the operations of race and class are so central to the pronatalist right’s antiabortion project. And while Valenti writes in a footnote that “it’s not only women and girls who can get pregnant,” rejecting trans-exclusionary lines, she pays only minimal lip service to the ways in which forced pregnancy and enforced gender binarism work together in the far-right, eugenicist imaginary.
Valenti is herself explicit about what the book cannot do: it cannot be a comprehensive guide to reproductive freedom struggle, least of all because – as her newsletter makes clear – every day brings new attacks on reproductive healthcare, only poised to get worse under President Donald Trump 2.0. But even as a snapshot, Abortion is a useful resource to be shared with those who need it.
At the book’s end, Valenti even compiles a list of resources, including helplines, advice on seeking abortion care, donation suggestions, and key facts – like what pregnancy tissue at nine weeks actually looks like (a wispy fluff of cotton), or that “fifty-five percent of voters, including one-third of Republicans, want abortion legal ‘for any reason,’” or that “some 3.7 million women live in a county without access to abortion and with ‘no or low’ access to maternity care.” Valenti also suggests some further readings, including texts by legal scholars Mary Ziegler and Dorothy Roberts – these are tips, like most in Valenti’s book, that are worth following.
Natasha Lennard is associate director of the Creative Publishing & Critical Journalism program at the New School for Social Research. She is a columnist for The Intercept, and her work has appeared in The Nation, Bookforum, and the New York Times, among others. She is the author of Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life (Verso) and is working on her next book, also for Verso, on how we might better conceptualize uncertainty and certainty.
Hope in Despair: How We Resist the US Antiabortion Agenda
Sian Norris



Sian Norris (photo by Jon Sneddon)
I finished reading Jessica Valenti’s new book, Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Need to Win, the day before Donald Trump was reelected into the White House, and the truths she was telling became more urgent than ever.
The overruling of Roe v. Wade by the US Supreme Court in June 2022 has been catastrophic for women. Within days, multiple states had implemented some of the harshest abortion bans in the world. Millions of women and girls had their human rights stripped away from them. As of November 5, 2024, thirteen states have a total ban on abortion, and eight more have partial bans – including four that ban abortion after six weeks.
Those are the numbers, but the Dobbs decision goes deeper than that. It has sent a message to women that their rights are conditional. Women cannot be free without access to abortion – without control of their own bodies and their own fertility.
Since Dobbs, Valenti has documented daily the assaults on women’s abortion rights: from reports of rape victims being forced to carry pregnancies to term to legal attempts to restrict access to abortion pills and the nightmare of women dying due to being denied reproductive healthcare. That documentation forms the basis of her book.
Of course, if Harris had won the day after I finished reading it, this book would still be necessary. But with Trump in the White House, Valenti’s book has become urgent. She sets out the lies told by an antiabortion movement that is determined to roll back progress and remove women from the public sphere. She helps us understand the next attacks on women’s reproductive rights. And, thankfully, she offers some hope.
The most crucial lie, and the one that feels most fundamental following Trump’s reelection, is that the incoming president is not planning a nationwide ban on abortion. Valenti exposes this as false, explaining how rather than talk about a “ban,” which is unpopular with voters, Republicans and their outriders now refer to “national consensus” and “national limits.”
As a feminist movement, we have to get better at fighting back against this form of political disinformation – before it’s too late.
As well as reflecting on how we got to a world where US women are dying of sepsis in hospital beds, denied abortion care, Valenti warns us of the next attack: on contraception.
The antiabortion movement’s big lie is that IUDs and emergency contraception are a form of abortion. I’ve sat in training webinars where I was encouraged to advise women away from the morning after pill, falsely claiming it is a form of abortion. This is not true, but it is the movement’s key tactic for achieving its aim of removing all reproductive rights from women.
Do that, and they get women where they want us to be: out of the public sphere, pinned to reproduction in the domestic space, no longer considered fully human as men are.
We cannot allow that to happen. And there is hope to be found in Valenti’s book. Most Americans are pro-choice. These bans are happening against their democratic will. If we stand up for our bodies, and defeat their lies, perhaps we can stop this deadly assault on women’s lives.
Sian Norris is a writer and journalist. She currently works as the Senior Investigations Reporter at openDemocracy. She has reported from the UK, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Poland, Kenya, and Romania for the Times, the Observer, i news, The Ferret, The Lead, and many more. Her book, Bodies Under Siege: How the Far Right Attack on Reproductive Rights Went Global, was published by Verso in June 2023.
When Facts are Not Enough
Wendy E. Parmet



Wendy E. Parmet
(photo by Matthew Modoono)
I was still in something of a fugue state when I first picked up Jessica Valenti’s Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win. The slightly surreal sense of dread and paralysis that had overtaken me since the November 2024 election still lingered. Although I was not surprised by the outcome, it still hit hard. I not only feared for the future but also began to question my professional choices. What is the point of teaching and writing about public health law and health equity when public health is disparaged, equity is mocked, and the rule of law is disdained? How can one fight for reproductive justice when the meme “your body, my choice” has gone viral and a credible history of sexual assault seems almost like a qualification for the highest jobs in the land?
With such questions in mind, I was entranced by Valenti’s introduction. In it, she shares the anger and despair she felt toward the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, writing: “Women should not have to convince the world that we are full people worthy of rights, protections, and the ability to control our own bodies. Yet here we are.” Concurring, I was anxious for her to help me understand the current moment and offer insight into how we can emerge from it.
Unfortunately—though perhaps my expectations were unfair—Valenti’s book neither answered my questions nor quelled my dread. In ten relatively short and highly readable chapters, plus a useful list of resources that follow, Valenti lays out some essential facts about abortion, abortion restrictions, and public opinion regarding abortion. Along the way, she peppers her discussion with compelling stories of individuals who have needed abortions, have been helped by them, or have been harmed by restrictions on access to them. She also argues that abortion is “proactively, objectively good.”
Although Valenti oversimplifies some legal issues, many readers who share her perspective will find the facts she gathers and the arguments she makes interesting and useful. Nevertheless, the book provides less context and analysis than I would have welcomed. And Valenti’s confidence that “information” or facts about abortion can move the needle seems, in light of recent events, almost naïve. Despite her anger, her project—which began with a newsletter about abortion—seems founded on the belief that the dissemination of accurate information, combined with a bit of rage, can save abortion access. But surely, we have learned that facts alone do not win out.
Valenti also seems supremely confident, and is quite insistent, that public opinion supports abortion access. She is largely correct about this, as the polls she cites and the many victories that abortion access has won in state ballot initiatives attest. But, as Trump’s election and the reelection of many state politicians who have enacted restrictions on abortion also show, public support can be complicated, fickle, and nuanced. People can support abortion access, vote for referenda to protect it, and then vote for politicians who vow to restrict it. Why people cast such seemingly inconsistent ballots, and how their views about reproductive health coexist with and are influenced by the broader cultural and political climate are questions that those who care about reproductive justice need to probe more deeply.
In her conclusion, Valenti asserts that “the mainstream pro-choice movement needs to get out of their defensive crouch.” “This is,” she cries, “no time for equivocating.” True! But reproductive justice advocates also need to identify which strategies, messages, alliances, and actions may make a real difference and which will do little more than make us feel better—or worse, prove to be counterproductive. Most importantly, we need to learn from the forces that have opposed abortion by formulating a long-term, multifaceted strategy. Alas, doing so requires more than the facts and anger that Valenti so compellingly shares. But if we care about abortion access, and reproductive health and justice more broadly, we need to emerge from our post-election despair and begin the long and hard work that lies ahead.
Wendy E. Parmet is the George J. and Kathleen Waters Matthews Distinguished Professor of Law at Northeastern University, where she is the faculty director of the Center for Health Policy and Law. The author of over one hundred law review and peer reviewed articles, her most recent book is Constitutional Contagion: COVID, The Courts and Public Health (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Parmet is also the Associate Editor for Law & Ethics for the American Journal of Public Health. In 2016, she received the Jay Healey Teaching Award from the American Society of Law and Medicine.
Abortion Affects
Carly Thomsen



Carly Thomsen
These days, I rarely feel anything good when it comes to the state of abortion justice. And yet Jessica Valenti’s newest book Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win left me feeling gratified, emboldened, and inspired—affects I could certainly use more of (!), and that I use to structure my comments here.
Gratified
Valenti discusses an oft overlooked reproductive justice topic that I have spent two decades trying to convince abortion supporters to care about: crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), antiabortion evangelical organizations that appear as if they provide abortions but whose primary goal is to prevent abortions. While I admit that the book’s mention of CPCs initially generated in me self-righteous satisfaction (“Maybe now people will listen to me!”), I quickly came to see Valenti’s take as a crucial and new contribution to analyses of CPCs. With fellow scholars and activists, I have recently been discussing how to make sense of increased state support for CPCs post-Dobbs, especially in places that have banned abortion. Valenti suggests that understanding this dynamic requires thinking about CPCs’ work beyond abortion, including their: developing abstinence-only sex-education curricula; requiring patients to sign forms to refuse their dead fetuses “hospice care” (you really can’t make this up); and banning contraception. In relation to the latter, CPCs allow conservatives to both support efforts to restrict contraceptive access and to distance themselves from these same efforts, which they know are deeply unpopular with voters. While Valenti doesn’t frame CPCs as the backbone of the antiabortion movement (something I have long argued), that she takes CPCs seriously left me feeling both gratified and hopeful that we’re entering a new phase of abortion activism wherein the harms of CPCs are widely understood.
Emboldened
“The myth that Americans are evenly split on the issue undergirds all others about abortion,” Valenti says, “and it allows anti-choice lawmakers to hide the fact that they’re passing abortion bans against voters’ wishes.” Approximately 85 percent of voters believe abortion should be legal in some or all circumstances, 70 percent support legalized abortion medication, and 80 percent believe abortion should be unregulated by the government. Valenti’s point that we need to challenge narratives suggesting abortion is controversial has emboldened me and changed how I talk about abortion. Recently, I was invited to write a policy brief about CPCs. Just as the brief was set to be published, its inclusion in the policy playbook for which it was intended was halted. The email I received noted that the topic is “sensitive” and “unique among the other policy briefs.” I responded that the topic is not sensitive. “The vast majority of Americans,” I said, “support abortion. Jessica Valenti argues, in fact, that anti-abortion advocates have worked tirelessly to produce abortion as controversial as a way to ignore that, actually, it isn’t.” If abortion isn’t controversial, and Valenti convincingly makes this case, then possibilities for engaging with supporters and opponents of abortion alike become more capacious—something that should embolden us all.
Inspired
Valenti concludes the book by imploring readers to ensure “that this post-Roe nightmare is never normalized.” “The danger of the ordinary,” she says “is what keeps me up nights.” I agree that there is danger in the ordinary. But there is power in the ordinary, too. Recently, at Home Depot, a random guy casually commented that the number of light bulb options was overwhelming. I responded, “Right! It’s amazing that in Texas you can get 14,000 types of lightbulbs but not a single abortion.” I didn’t say it aggressively or jokingly—just with the same tone one might respond with “Yeah, there are so many options!” He paused, looked at me, thought for a second, and said “Huh.” After an incredibly pregnant pause, he followed up with, “What kind of light bulb are you looking for?” While I have no idea if this small moment informed how he might think or talk about abortion moving forward, the optimistic part of me wants to read both his pause and his continued engagement as possibility—as something that should inspire us to talk about abortion in unlikely places with unsuspecting interlocutors. In emails about policy briefs that remain unpublished. In encounters with strangers at Home Depot. And in little book clubs with your mom, wherein your discussing this very book leads you to talk in greater depth than you have previously about abortion (thank you, Mom!).
Perhaps the greatest lesson I have learned from implementing Jessica Valenti’s insights into life’s ordinary moments is that, even under these heinous political conditions, generating new abortion affects remains possible—an insight I see as important for both sustaining and building resistance.