Accurate icon is accurate

[elisi]

To whom it may concern,

My apologies
I know I have fallen behind
on my work
please understand that it is not
that I have forgotten
about my various obligations
but that I have been busy
watching my society collapse.

— Plague Poems (@PlaguePoems) June 23, 2022

~

And an article that I read a few weeks ago, and that is (alas) now very relevant:

Inside the secret network of women who performed abortions before Roe
A conversation with the filmmakers behind The Janes, a new documentary about a harrowing era of illegal abortions.

This part really stuck with me:

Q: What did you learn from the Janes about organizing this clandestine health care network that most surprised you?

Tia: I was surprised by the involvement of the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion. These were men and women of the cloth who morally were opposed to the denial of reproductive rights to women, and they did something about it. They facilitated women’s access to abortion care whether in Chicago or abroad. That’s a story that hasn’t really been told. That was surprising.

Emma: One of the other things that really impacted Tia and me was the septic abortion wards. We focused on one at Cook County Hospital because our story focuses on Chicago, but they were all across the country. It was a 40-bed ward and it was full just about 100 percent of the time, as it was told to us. The doctor we spoke to, Dr. Allan Weiland, described being on that ward as a young medical student, and the eerie quiet of that ward because women were so gravely ill. They’d come there because of botched back-alley abortions or self-inflicted abortions. He said he called the morgue once a week, when somebody had died. Within a year of Roe passing, that ward closed. It became obsolete because it was something we’d created by criminalizing abortion. That’s a very hard thing to know and sit with, as we watch everything that’s happening now.