Ok, so the last post was all about things that helped get me plugged into the creative zone. You know what does not help me plug into the creative zone? Disaster preparedness. I’m a bit of a prepper, so when I hear—as we have been hearing, relentlessly, all week—that there is a “potentially catastrophic” winter storm on the way, my nesting gene kicks in. All creative energy is diverted to imagining and anticipating everything I could possibly need in order to survive as comfortably as possible. I’ve been shopping, fortifying, charging, and clearing out for days now and I think I have probably done all I can—Christ knows, I have enough food. Prepping is my coping strategy when anxiety kicks in: anyone who’s traveled with me knows this. Also anyone who’s looked in my pantry. Or my hall closet. It’s not just that I worry I won’t have something I need for an emergency: it’s also that there is a highly specific strain of joy that I experience when something happens and I have the exact right item to meet that moment. Whether it’s a week’s worth of electrolyte solution, a dose of Plan B, or this funny little combination multi-screwdriver-allen-wrench thingy, being able to rummage through my suitcase/closet/purse and pull out whatever will solve the problem at hand is deeeeeeeply my thing. Hermione Granger’s beaded bag is my actual heart’s desire.

So I’m ready, if also somewhat disappointed. I had fun plans this weekend with an assortment of friends, and almost all of it has been scrapped as a result of the incoming snowpocalypse. But this morning, I was helpfully reminded that there are worse things than having to give up your group sauna, or a snowy night bundled up under blankets with somebody you like to snuggle. Because there is a whole cohort of people out there right now for whom this storm might mean not just a few days’ worth of inconvenience, but an actual radical alteration in the course of their lives. 

Specifically, I’m talking about people who are going to miss their abortion appointments.

About a year ago (note the timing), I joined the board of a local abortion fund; if you don’t know what that is, it’s a nonprofit that raises money to help people pay for abortion care. I love everything about this development in my life: the people I work with, the work we’re doing, the new experiences and opportunities it’s bringing me. A few months ago, I decided to also become an intake volunteer, which is one of the people who responds to calls to our warmline from people who need help paying for their abortions. After the first training, I explained to my daughter that pretty much the whole job is calling people to tell them you’ve got them covered, and then sending money to clinics. 

“So you’re basically like an abortion Santa Claus?” she replied. 

“Abortion Oprah,” I retorted. “YOU get an abortion! YOU get an abortion! YOU get an abortion!”

But the reality is, we are much more like your abortion concierge.

Now that Virginia is the last remaining southern state with abortion access up to 27 weeks, the logistical arrangements required to access care are ridiculously (and intentionally) complex. About a third of our callers are now traveling hundreds, even thousands of miles just to access a procedure that takes less time to perform than it may have taken them to get pregnant in the first place. (Seriously: a first-trimester surgical abortion takes about 5 minutes.) Add to that the fact that, if a person is calling an abortion fund for help to pay for their abortion (typically between $600-$1000), there is a very good chance that they don’t have the sort of job they can easily take time off from to spend on multiday travel for medical care. They might not even have a car. Even if they do, the cost of gas for two thousand miles roundtrip is steep. They might also need someone to go with them, because you can’t drive yourself home after an abortion if you had sedation—so that’s a second person who needs to be able to make this journey, or else lodging for the night and Ubers back and forth to the clinic. And if the caller already has children at home—as the large majority of abortion-seekers do—then arrangements need to be made for them as well. 

As a result, the logistical planning required to get a person in, say, southwest Florida the abortion they need will only just begin with making a pledge of funding to the clinic where they’ve scheduled their appointment. That part—paying for the abortion—is the easiest part of the process, and if that’s all they need, the whole interaction might take ten minutes, tops. But what good is that money if the caller can’t actually get to the clinic for the procedure? Our intake coordinator recently had a caller for whom she had to book flights from Alabama to Florida to Virginia; she arranged lodging in Virginia and transportation from the hotel to the clinic, and then, of course, the caller’s travel home. We’ve paid three-figure Uber fares to get people from rural Maryland up to Baltimore for abortions. We CashApp money for childcare. We’ve worked with nonprofits that provide free air travel for people who need reproductive or gender-affirming care that’s illegal in their home state. Sometimes you make all these arrangements to get a person from one state to another for their abortion, and when they arrive at the clinic, they learn that they have a medical complication, or the gestational age is wrong, and that clinic can’t perform the procedure. Now we have to figure out how to get that patient to the right clinic for what they need—and take care of them while they’re there. And remember, all of these arrangements are time-sensitive. We don’t just offer financial support for getting there or getting the abortion; we help people pay for food while they’re on the road, for heating pads and ibuprofen, for the second dose of misoprostol and the maxi pads they’ll need for after. And on a weekend like the one we’re headed for, when we have callers who are unhoused and in need of care, we will pay for them to stay warm and safe in hotels until the storm has passed. We are absolutely, as my father always loved to say, doing the Lord’s work—and he would have said it about this, I’m certain, because even though he was an evangelical Christian who personally opposed abortion, he was also an old-school Republican who told me many times that abortion was between a woman and her doctor, and none of the government’s business. 

Would that such Republicans still existed.

Clinics will keep their doors open for as long as they can, but there are a lot of people with appointments in the next few days who aren’t going to be able to get there—and when accessing abortion requires this level of planning and coordination, you can’t always make all those details line up twice in a row. Chances are, there will be people for whom having to stay home means having to stay pregnant. And that is a heartbreaking reality in a country that loves to tout its family values, but it is also entirely on purpose. The politicians and activists who oppose reproductive rights want everything about seeking an abortion to be as difficult and degrading as possible in the hope that they can shame some segment of people out of their procedures. They do this while proclaiming their protectiveness and respect for women, but pregnancy and childbirth raise a person’s risk for a whole host of life-altering complications, including death by domestic violence and an assortment of medical conditions. No one who doesn’t want to take on that risk should ever be forced to, just as nobody who doesn’t believe in abortion rights should ever be forced to have one.

So this weekend, if you are cozied up in a warm place with people you like (or happily alone) and power for your wi-fi, ask yourself whether it matters to you that every American has autonomy over their own body and freedom to choose their own life. If the answer is yes, and you (somehow) have a few extra bucks, consider donating them to an abortion fund where you live, or the one I work for, or to the National Network of Abortion Funds; support your local Planned Parenthood or some other clinic; or go to Plan C and order abortion medication to have on hand in case you or someone you care about needs it. And I will take a minute to be grateful I’m not traveling two thousand miles this weekend with the storm of the century on my heels.