Ladies, Control Your Intake of Semen
And other dispatches from the post-Roe week
There’s really only one story in sex this week—the fallout from the Dobbs decision and attempts by people around the country to adjust to a country where abortion rights are not guaranteed. Of course, this story took many forms. This is by no means an exhaustive list, just a few of the many situations that caught my eye.
People Stocked Up on Birth Control
Individuals focused on getting birth control. Request for vasectomies continued to pour into doctor’s offices, and demand for Emergency Contraception Pills rose to the point that Rite-Aid and Amazon capped orders to three boxes. CVS initially did the same but lifted its purchasing limits last Tuesday because sales—which spiked right after the decision came down—had leveled off. There have also been stories shared on Tik Tok by women who said they had birth-control related appointments cancelled by clinics that no longer offered those services. (Like many things on TikTok, most of these stories are unsubstantiated but here is one out of Nashville that has at least been confirmed by the local news. It remains short on information, however.)
Corporations Tried to Show a Conscience
Many well-known companies announced that they would pay abortion-related travel expenses for employees who could no longer access such services in their home state. The CEO of Dick’s Sporting Goods took to LinkedIn to tell its employees—and everyone else—that the purveyor of shin guards and hunting rifles would provide up to $4,000 so employees could make the choice that worked best for them. Disney’s Human Resources department clarified that a benefit offering employees access to care in other states did extend to family planning, including pregnancy termination. Meta, which is what we’re supposed to call Facebook these days, said it was looking into the legality of the situation but would offer reimbursement if it is legal. While this is encouraging, there are privacy issues at play that make some experts nervous—there’s a reason that employers are usually the last to know about pregnancies.
Some commentators also questioned the motives of these big businesses and pointed out that some of these very same companies have supported anti-choice political candidates and many of them don’t offer paid parental leave and other policies that would support employees in their reproductive choices.
Most importantly, though, whether they have a conscience or not, corporations are a poor substitute for actual government-protected rights.
Users Deleted Period Trackers
Speaking of privacy, there has been a lot of talk in the last couple of weeks suggesting that menstruaters of the world delete the period tracking apps that have become popular in recent years. The fear is that these apps—which collect information about start and end dates of periods, ovulation, and early pregnancy—might be used against women who seek abortion or even those who have miscarriages.
While this may sound too Handmaids Tale even now, Danielle Keats Citron, a University of Virginia law school professor and author of the forthcoming book on privacy in the digital age, told the Huffington Post that:
“Hundreds of people have already been arrested and charged with crimes against their own pregnancies for things like having expressed uncertainty about their pregnancy and then having a miscarriage or stillbirth; testing positive for a drug; failing to protect themselves for abuse; self-managing abortions, etc. Arrests of this nature have happened in almost every state.”
The HIPPA laws that we are all forced to read about in doctor’s office literature do not cover these kinds of apps. In fact, according to Citron, “… when fetuses are considered people, health care providers are required to override patient privacy as mandated reporters.”
The makers of these apps—some of which have already been caught selling information like pregnancy status to advertisers—spent the week trying to reassure users. The Clue app promised it would not reply to any subpoenas or requests for information from U.S. authorities (though experts question whether that’s a promise they can keep). Elina Berglund Scherwitzl, founder and CEO of Natural Cycles, told CNN about the app’s anonymous mode “We are making sure that our anonymous mode at Natural Cycles will be impossible for us to connect the personal data and the sensitive data. This will be encrypted.”
Still, security experts remind us that information about our menstrual cycles is no more protected that data on our shampoo preferences. After reviewing the apps on the market, Consumer Reports recommended that users opt for one that only stores information locally on your phone like Drip, Euki, or Periodicial.
Planned Parenthood Promised Privacy
Planned Parenthood made a change this week to help ensure the privacy of people seeking information on its websites. Lockdown Privacy, a company that makes an app that blocks online trackers, tested the website’s privacy settings by walking through the process of searching for a surgical abortion “near me.”
It found that Planned Parenthood shared data during the search with third party companies including Google, Facebook, and TikTok. It’s not clear what those companies do with the information but it’s understandable why we don’t want that data out there in our new world.
In response to the report by Lockdown Privacy, Planned Parenthood said that it will remove the marketing trackers on its search pages related to abortion.
Alabama Used Ruling to Defend Ban on Gender Affirming Treatment
The Supreme Court decision declaring every right not specifically locked down in the constitution to be up for grabs came down on Friday. By Monday Alabama’s Attorney General had used that reasoning in a brief asking the court to lift an injunction on a law that made gender affirming care illegal in the state.
Earlier this year, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed a law that makes providing medication to minors to help with gender transition not just illegal but criminal and subject to up to 10 years in prison. The party of almighty parental rights—the one that won’t let us utter the word gay or birth control pill without a signed permission slip—has no problem with the state stepping on parents’ rights in this case, but a federal judge did. The judge issued a preliminary injunction in May preventing the law from taking effect.
Alabama was already in the process of appealing the injunction but now it has new ammunition in the form of the high court’s blessing. In a new brief to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the state quotes Alito’s assertion that rights not enumerated in the constitution must be “deeply rooted in our nation’s history” and argues that since gender care doesn’t meet this standard, the state has the right to ban it. There you have it folks, we are now legally and medically trapped in the distant past.
Republican Lawmakers Said Stupid Things
A Utah lawmaker is apologizing for defending abortion restrictions by suggesting that women can control “their intake of semen.” (And, no, she wasn’t talking about Kourtney Kardashian’s sperm drinking advice.)
At a press conference state Representative Karianne Lisonbee explained: “I got a text message today saying I should seek to control men’s ejaculations and not women’s pregnancies.” She attempted to flip that around by saying: “I do trust women enough to control when they allow a man to ejaculate inside of them and to control that intake of semen.”
She was instantly skewered in the press and forced to walk back the statement the very next day. Her apology focused on sexual assault survivors and the obvious scenarios in which women can’t control their semen intake. She told the Utah Tribune:
“Women do not have a choice when they are raped and have protections under Utah’s trigger law … My first statement in the press conference made clear the actions I have taken to pass bills that provide legal protection and recourse to victims of sexual assault.”
I do give Lisonbee credit for what sounded like a sincere apology:
“The political and social divide in America seems to be expanding at an ever-faster pace. I am committed to ongoing respectful and civil engagement. I can always do better and will continue to try.”
That said, I hate that the apology only focused on rape. Her comment essentially told women that they didn’t need abortion rights because they could just keep their damn legs shut. This is not just offensive to sexual assault survivors but to all women who have had or would like to have consensual, enjoyable sex.
Lisbonee wasn’t the only Republican to open her mouth and insert a foot. Yesli Vega, a sheriff’s deputy in Prince William County who is running against Democrat incumbent Abigail Spanberger for a Virginia House seat, was caught on audio saying she thought it was harder for women to get pregnant from rape.
Vega admitted that she worked one case as a police officer in which a young woman did get pregnant after being sexually assaulted and acknowledged that she didn’t understand exactly why it was harder but agreed with an unidentified young woman on the tape that it was:
“Well maybe, because there’s so much going on in the body, I don’t know. I haven’t, haven’t, you know, seen any studies but if I’m processing what you’re saying it wouldn’t surprise me, because it’s not something that’s happening organically, right? It’s forcing it.”
In response to the young woman’s assertion that the body shuts down, Vega added:
“Yeah, yeah, and then the individual, the male, is doing it as quickly, it’s not like, you know, and so I can see why maybe there’s truth to that.”
Oh, how happy the ghost of Todd Akin—the patron saint of that’s not how it f**king works—must be now. For the record, pregnancy is all about sperm and egg being in the same place at the same time, the body doesn’t know or care how the sperm got there.
Clarence Thomas Continued to be an Idiot
Fresh off his concurring opinion that put the contraception and same-sex marriage rights in peril, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion that proves he just doesn’t get it. The court refused to hear a case from health care workers challenging New York’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate which does not include a religious exemption. Thomas, who was joined in his dissent by Alito and Gorsuch, argued that the court should hear the case and decide whether such a mandate could ever be religiously neutral. He noted that the health care workers involved were religiously opposed to the vaccines because they believed the shots contained cells from aborted fetuses.
Sorry, Clarence, that’s not how it f**king works.
There are no fetal cells, aborted or otherwise, in our Covid-19 vaccines. Fetal cells were used in research testing the efficacy of the mRNA vaccines but are not used in the vaccines themselves. Moreover, while the fetal cells used in the research did come from elective abortions: these abortions occurred decades ago. The cell lines have been kept alive in labs for use in research.
It’s unclear whether Thomas believes this argument himself or thinks it’s enough that the health care workers believe it. It might not matter, however, as the Hobby Lobby case showed us that what the company’s owners believed about how contraception worked was more important that how contraception actually worked.
Clinics and Patients Struggled
The most important story, however, played out in clinics across the country as some had to stop providing abortion and others tried to make accommodations for patients from other states. One clinic in New Mexico continued to get an influx of callers from other states including Texas and Oklahoma. The once-quiet clinic is now booking procedure 4-weeks out which can change the types of procedure women are can get (medication abortions are only done until the 10-week mark and many women don’t know they’re pregnant until 6 weeks).
The most heartbreaking story I read this week, though, has to be about the 10-year-old girl from Ohio who had to travel to out of state for care when a child abuse specialist realized she was six weeks and three days pregnant. Ohio’s law bans abortion after a “heartbeat” can be detected, which usually happens at 6 weeks. While this patient was able to get care in neighboring Indiana, the next abused 10-year-old girl may have to travel even farther as Indiana legislators are coming back for a special session soon in which they will likely pass restrictive abortion laws of their own.
In the coming months and years, this story of Post-Roe America will continue to play out in medicine, the court system, and politics, but most of all it will continue to play out in real people’s lives.