In 2021 (a year before the Dobbs v. Jackson decision), Texas passed SB8, a bill that allows private citizens to sue physicians who provide or induce an abortion after “the detection of a fetal heartbeat”.
To be specific, Section 171.208 of SB8 permits anyone who is not a government employee to file a lawsuit against a person who:
- performs or induces an abortion in violation of this law
- knowingly aids or abets performing or inducing an abortion in violation of the law;
Or
- Intends to do either of the above actions [italics mine]
In early November I attended a showing of Justice Hehir’s the wish: a manual for a last-ditch effort to save abortion in the United States through theater. Written by Hehir in collaboration with Dena Igusti, Phanésia Pharel, Nia Akilah Robinson, and Julia Specht, the wish— produced by The Fruit Fly Theatre Company and directed by the company’s cofounder Valentina Avila– is Hehir’s full-throated condemnation of SB8 and, more broadly, the state of reproductive healthcare in the U.S.
The two-hour play took place at Pluto’s Loft, a private Tribeca residence that hosts an array of productions and events open to the public. The loft is spacious and welcoming. Large swaths of colorful construction paper cover the walls, lending the space a child-like air. I was curious to see how this cheery wall-paper would mesh, tonally, with a play about the abysmal state of abortion access. The construction paper, I later found out, is taped to the walls in perpetuity and was not, as I had thought, an ironic set-design choice.
The opening lines of the play read as follows:
There’s a lot of things you could do with this
You could start a fire or read it or act it
Or use it for notes like big notes and epic letters
That say things like “i am in love with you” or “i’ve always hated the shape of your eyebrows” and “i’m sorry i was a dick when i was a child”
You could read it aloud to a lover
Or yell it at a horrible person
Or you could sing it
Which is all to say i don’t really care what you do with this.
I don’t know what it is. I just know i keep seeing red over and over and over
Whenever the abortion ban is alive in my head And it’s so often alive in my head SB8. Is it alive in your head? Does it hurt you?
Set on decoding confusing legal jargon, the play poises itself as …. a manual?
What will it take to save abortion in the United States? This is the first question the play asks, and its most important one. A major theme is the playwrights’ desire to ‘uncomplicate’ abortion laws and proceedings. As such, the wish is scaffolded around a handful of dry legal depositions. There are 13 performers in total, some of which take to the stage to explain a number of legal rulings and terms. Others are more theatrical, stringing the play together through various real (I’m sure) and fictionalized anecdotes. In combination, the wish embraces the impossibility of singular explanation or representation of what it looks like/feels like/means to navigate the state of reproductive healthcare in the U.S. today.
Characters Annie and Claire, played by Naomi Orange and Valentine Marie, deliver one of the play’s more ‘theatrical’ scenes; they talk about needing to mobilize cis men: “How many blowjobs would you give to make men abortion warriors?” asks Annie, to which Claire responds, “probably three.” They are two college-aged girls; we are let in on their private confidences, their imaginative blowjob-world-buidling. In this moment, I am reminded of the countless conversations I’ve had in the privacy of shared girlhood… a shared vision. Annie and Claire are young, uncertain, morally afflicted (does being scared of abortion make me a bad ally, Claire wonders): relatable. We certainly don’t want to be “sucking apathetic dicks,” as Annie puts it.
Other performances blur the line between theater and lecture. A character of a nurse, played by Thais Fernandes, finds in the wish an opportunity for edification and alters the play’s tone every time she appears, turning the loft into a classroom.
Fernandes asks viewers in the first row— “Do you know what the cervix is?” “Do you know what happens during the follicular phase of the menstrual cycle?” to which people respond timidly or sometimes shake their heads no. With a patience rarely practiced in real doctor’s offices, Fernandes writes down certain words—- or names, rather. For example, she writes down “mifepristone” and “misoprostol” in big letters on a white board. Taken in combination, mifepristone (which blocks a pregnancy from growing) and misoprostol (which helps to evacuate a uterus) are an effective means of medicated abortion up to 10 weeks of pregnancy. Medicated abortion is the most common, and least invasive, form of abortion. In Texas it is now an imprisonable offence for “a manufacturer, supplier, physician, or any other person” to provide a patient with any abortion-inducing drug by courier, delivery, or mail service. Physicians and medical providers are also subject to criminal penalties if they provide a medicated abortion to anyone whose pregnancy is more than 49 days of gestational age (7 weeks). One in three people discover pregnancy at six weeks’ gestation or later, and about one in five discover pregnancy past seven weeks. The criminalization of medicated abortion in Texas (and elsewhere) renders abortion access virtually non-existent for the majority of pregnant people .
In another of the nurse’s more edifying scenes, we are told that there is no true “point of conception”; that fertilization can take up to 24 hours. The language we use to talk about conception, pregnancy, birth, etc., is in many ways folkloric. ‘Julia One’, played by Yereni Valero, tells us that the Trimester framework was conceptualized by Harry Blakmun— not a medical professional, but the Justice who wrote the Roe decision. Blackmun’s trimester framework was imperative to his reading of the 14th Amendment. Because a fetus cannot survive outside of a womb during the first 6 months of pregnancy, abortion regulation during the 1st and 2nd trimesters would, according to Blackmun, be an infringement on an individual’s right to privacy as granted by the 14th amendment. While the trimester framework was imperative to the Roe decision, the wish reminds us that reproductive healthcare, especially as it pertains to abortion access, is legally manipulated through terms and concepts that have no biological or medical merit.
Nestled between two scenes addressing Texas’ total abortion ban, which makes no exceptions for rape or incest, a Witch played by Ivy Court, leads us through a ‘spell for compassion’: Perhaps mirroring the folklorish quality of reproductive terms, concepts, and rulings, the Witch offers a whimsical counter to the play’s drier moments.
Step 1: “imagine yourself at 14, in all of your chaos and terror. Imagine a classmate you disliked at that age.”
I close my eyes and think of no one in particular.
“(did they scare you? were they cruel? did they get on your nerves?)
Picture them as vividly as you can.
Remember their braces, or the smell of the copious amount of hair gel they used, or their ripped Jansport, or the Cheeto dust that clung to their fingers after lunch.”
…
Step 7:
“Sit in a cross-legged position. Watch the waves come in, and imagine that each one that crashes on the shore is carrying a part of that classmate you taught yourself to love.
Taste the salt on the stone as the waves bring you their braces,
their scuffed shoes, their toothbrush caked in a film of saliva,
their carefully collated homework, their secret film canister of skunk weed,
their knowledge of how to change the oil in their car,
their dreams of falling in love, their promises to their future selves,
their various shames, their capacity for growth.
Watch those qualities crash on the sand as the waves break.”
We are later met with her fury: “ It’s enough to make you wanna do voodoo shit!” she exclaims. This in response to people’s constant need [and compulsion] to ‘justify, justify, justify’ their reasoning for getting an abortion; “And not Incest, rape or poor people struggling to carry is enough to justify [according to Texas (and other) state law makers]. People who simply don’t want to be a mother.” We are reminded that ‘justification’ is often not a prerequisite for medical attention/care; when someone breaks their arm, for example, it doesn’t matter if they broke it falling off a mountain, pogo-ing, or slipping up the stairs. It doesn’t matter if they were cautious or in a state of adrenaline-fueled heedlessness when it happened. What does matter is that their arm is broken. So often, rape, incest, and poverty are invoked to ‘validate’ abortion access– a handful of grisly scenes, perhaps needlessly, remind us that vulnerable populations are especially in need of comprehensive legal protection; even in states that make ‘exceptions’ in the case of rape or incest, there remain substantial obstacles to obtaining abortion care; reporting your case to the police for one. That said, the wish takes the stance that, while the why and the how are imperative to holistic medical attention, how one gets pregnant and why they wish to terminate a pregnancy should not determine ‘to what degree’ an abortion is valid. A broken arm is a broken arm is a broken arm.
A huge part of the wish’s effectiveness can be attributed to the passion of its playwrights and performers. The top of the play’s script reads: “*a free, downloadable, highly informative and v funny play/book of spells/letter writing campaign about the fact that we might lose abortion holy fuck this is not a drill” [italics mine]. This is not a drill! This is a play! A very important play that offers as much catharsis as it does an opportunity to remind, to edify, to process, to uncomplicate.
What will it take to save abortion in the United States? A whole bunch of things, according to the wish. I leave Pluto’s Loft meditating on the play’s recurring missive: I am, we are, capable of understanding; of parsing truth from fiction, of critique.
the wish is a living document. A cumulative history of haphazardly written legal decisions and their material (and immaterial) consequences. It’s pure catharsis! It’s angry and smart. It’s a call for women, gender expansive folks, gay and straight men to become “abortion warriors”. It’s also a plea. An invitation and a plea, for people to ‘struggle’ (and sit) with complication. Perhaps it is, finally, and most simply, a much needed source of support, for “Plays like this tell you that…. if you go to https://aidaccess.org/ you can get a medication abortion after six weeks in Texas.”
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