The morning after the terrible news broke about the draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, I called my homebirth midwife, Ingrid Andersson. Ingrid is my hero. She helped me in the home births of my three daughters. No one is more dedicated than she is to women’s health and bodily autonomy, to creating a warm, nurturing environment for children and families, and to fighting like hell for reproductive justice.
Imagine a world in which not just pregnancy and birth, but also raising children, were supported—a world that accommodated the needs and desires of parents and young children.
I wanted to talk to someone who knows that defending abortion rights and caring about babies and children are not opposing values. Contrary to the anti-abortion billboards that I’ve seen popping up everywhere recently—including one near my kids’ school featuring two little girls nuzzling a cute newborn sibling—the people who want to force us to give birth against our will are not guardians of family values and loving bonds between parents and children.
Closer to the truth is Laura Bassett, who reports in Jezebel that Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion striking down Roe relies heavily on a seventeenth-century English judge who had two women executed for “witchcraft.”
Bassett digs into a treatise by Sir Matthew Hale, cited approvingly by Alito, calling abortion a “great crime.”
In the exact same text, Hale also wrote a ringing defense of marital rape: “For the husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract.”
The modern anti-abortion movement, Bassett concludes, “is an outgrowth of many centuries of virulent misogyny and violence against women.”
Ingrid, whose work is part of the long struggle for reproductive freedom, agrees.
“It’s a sad day,” she said when I reached her. “But it’s saddest for people like my parents.” In the 1960s, Ingrid’s mother sought an illegal abortion in Chicago—a procedure she could have accessed legally in her country of origin, Sweden. But she couldn’t afford to fly home. “It turned her into a political activist for life. And I inherited that,” Ingrid says.
Her parents, now in their eighties, were grief stricken when they heard about the Supreme Court’s draft decision. It feels to them as though a lifetime of work fighting for reproductive justice is going up in smoke.
But Ingrid has a different take.
“I’m not grief stricken,” she says, “because I know it’s not all lost.”
For the last several years, Ingrid has been dividing her time evenly between her homebirth practice, her poetry, and the nonprofit group she helped found, Pregnancy Options Wisconsin: Education, Resources, & Support, Inc, or POWERS.
The group is an alternative to the crisis pregnancies centers that are really stealth anti-abortion propaganda outfits. POWERS, a coalition of doctors, nurses, midwives, activists, and doulas, has been helping Wisconsinites access abortion services in an increasingly restrictive environment since 2019.
Together with other groups, it helps connect patients with housing, child care, transportation, and money to help them access abortions.
“We’ve all been collaborating,” Ingrid says. “We saw this day coming.”
In Wisconsin, as in nearly half of all states where laws currently on the books make providing abortion a crime, Planned Parenthood will stop providing abortion services on the day Roe is overturned. Staff will pivot to helping patients cross state lines to states where abortion is still legal—and to helping with the expected surge in those states, by offering non-abortion reproductive health care services to people from the states that are overwhelmed by those seeking abortions.
POWERS will offer logistical support for people in Wisconsin who need it to get a speedy abortion in Illinois or Minnesota, states where abortion will remain legal after Roe falls.
“But what’s really going to happen in big numbers is pill abortion,” Ingrid says. Medication abortion, self-administered at home, now accounts for more than half of all U.S. abortions, according to a recent report by the Guttmacher Institute.
Abortion pills that can be ordered through the mail from the group Aid Access have changed the landscape, Ingrid says. She credits the Dutch doctor Rebecca Gomperts, who founded Women on Waves—a nongovernmental organization that provided abortions on a ship moored in neutral waters near countries that lacked legal abortion services. Gomperts also founded the international nonprofit Women on Web to make safe abortion services available through telemedicine worldwide.
While pill abortion through the mail is still not legal, patients who choose to use the method anyway can go to any Planned Parenthood clinic in Wisconsin to seek follow-up care after a self-managed abortion. Self-managed abortion is not medically distinguishable from a miscarriage, and Planned Parenthood will take a “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” approach to treating patients, even if the group no longer provides abortion.
“You don’t need to worry about being turned in—even after the ruling comes down,” Ingrid explains.
Unfortunately, she adds, that’s not true for your average hospital emergency room.
POWERS, says Ingrid, has taken many calls from people who went to the hospital when they had a miscarriage and were questioned as if they were criminals. “There’s a lot of suspicion and distrust,” she notes. “Talk about rubbing salt in a wound.”
Ingrid’s work as a midwife pushes back against the idea that women’s bodies must be policed and controlled by medical, political, religious, and judicial authorities. So it makes perfect sense that her mission, over time, has expanded to include helping women who choose to end their pregnancies—particularly low-income women and women of color who are at a great disadvantage as abortion access disappears.
It’s been years now since I started my journey toward homebirth with the help, as Ingrid described it, of midwives who see themselves as “the guardians of normal”—meaning they did not view the normal process of labor as a medical emergency or a scary ordeal.
Imagine a world in which not just pregnancy and birth, but also raising children, were supported—a world that accommodated the needs and desires of parents and young children.
That’s not the world Republican abortion opponents want to usher in. Punishment, shame, hardship, and wage slavery without hope of adequate health care or time off are more their style. In this live-and-let-die capitalist dystopia, there’s no mercy for the weak, the powerless, or the undercapitalized.
Don’t let those billboard pictures of cute babies fool you. The judges who signed onto the sneering dismissal of fifty years of precedent in Alito’s draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade do not support paid family leave, universal health care and child care, or access to birth control which decreases the necessity of abortion in the first place. Quite the contrary. It’s a harsh, brutal world into which they want to force unwilling parents to bring babies with no support—just more fear, pain, and shame.
Fortunately, in many ways, it’s too late to go back. The Republican fantasy that our diverse country can be brought to heel and turned back into a white, straight, Christian male-dominated nation is just that: a fantasy. Public opinion is not with them and they know it. Blocking democracy, preventing people from voting, pushing retrograde policies through a court stacked by a President who lost the popular vote—those tactics cannot succeed in the long term.
Meanwhile, the availability of easy, safe, at-home abortion has transformed women’s options, whether Republicans and conservatives like it or not. As self-administered abortion becomes the norm, authorities will have a harder time regulating women’s bodies. Ingrid counts that as a win.
All of the callers she has spoken with when she staffs the POWERS call line “know what they want,” she says. “No one says, ‘I’m undecided.’ ” Most say they need help finding funds to travel or other logistical help to get an abortion. And they have been made to feel bad—not about their decision, but about themselves. “Guilt is the common denominator,” Ingrid says. “That’s what this divide is really about.”
In her gentle, supportive way, Ingrid relieves some of the guilt and shame that causes so much pain and damage. “Most people choosing abortion are mothers,” she says. “They want someone on the other end to not judge them.”
Ingrid sees empowering possibilities in the rise of safe, self-administered abortion. “That’s the biggest difference between now and the pre-Roe v. Wade era,” she says.
She compares home abortion to homebirth. “You are in your place of comfort, on your timeline and in a body-led way. It’s not a process that’s done to you by someone with tools and technology.
“We can do so much better in the clinic, too,” she adds. POWERS helps supply abortion doulas. “It can be very supportive to have someone experienced, who can tell you what’s normal and what’s not,” she says.
“Access to abortion is still going to happen,” she concludes. “It’s just going to look different.
“I feel a lot of hope.”