Overturning Roe, Processing Hard News, and the Path Forward: A Conversation for this Moment
By Kimberly Absher, Marketing & Communications Associate, Planet Women
Abortion Justice March in Washington DC en route to the Supreme Court in May 2022. © Gayatri Malhotra.
How are you doing?
Like many others, I’m grieving the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn our nationwide right to abortion. As a longtime advocate for sexual and reproductive health and rights, I’m processing what this decision means for women, people of all genders, our country, and beyond. As an American, I’m steeling myself for further threats to our civil liberties. I’m alternating between compulsively scrolling and swearing off the internet forever. I’m making myself go for walks, finding moments of peace among the trees.
After a few days of sinking, my natural optimism is slowly resurfacing, buoyed by incredible women—some of whom are close to me and some of whom I’ve never met, but whose wisdom and courage provide immense comfort.
One of these women is my colleague, Liza Keānuenueokalani Williams, PhD. As Planet Women’s Director of Cultural Transformation, Liza teaches environmental professionals how to align with their deepest values to promote anti-oppression and anti-racism in their organizations, teams, and communities. Liza created and facilitates a one-of-a-kind leadership training called Regenerative Leadership, as well as provides invaluable leadership on decolonizing organizational cultures and sustainable work practices.
Liza is a person you want to talk to in times of crisis. Her deep thinking, analysis of systemic oppression, and compassionate presence make her well-equipped to hold space during heavy moments. The morning the Dobbs decision came down, I called Liza and we talked about processing hard news, how abortion intersects with broader systems of oppression, and the path forward. We’re sharing the conversation with you in hopes it will offer you something in this moment, too.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Kimberly Absher: When you’re processing hard news, what does that look like for you and what have you learned that you need?
Dr. Liza Williams: Usually the first thing I do is watch and listen and read as many different sources on the topic as possible. I like to gather a full picture for myself of what the event is, what happened, who’s involved, who it’s affecting. Once I’m saturated with the information, then I need quiet time to think through my own thoughts and reactions, and what I feel and believe about the situation. So, I will journal or sometimes just sit and grieve, or do a meditation. I really try to give myself the space to let the emotions arise.
Is spending time with grief a way of turning the valve so pressure gets out?
Yes, some of the pressure gets let out, but it’s also a process I need to go through—the emotional part of understanding. When these things happen, like this morning with the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe, I feel so much immediately, and I think taking time to just feel it allows me to understand it. It’s like my body and my mind have to connect. I can’t just understand it in my head as this logical thing, it’s like an embodied understanding that I need to have to fully understand for myself what this means for us going forward as a people, as a collective, as a nation, as women.
I find that fascinating because many of us are trained to take in hard events intellectually and try to mitigate the emotional impact—shield ourselves from it. But you’re framing sitting with the emotions as part of how you understand something. Can you say more about that?
To me, understanding these events is about trauma and histories of oppression for a people. When we have a visceral reaction to rights getting taken away or to some sort of wrongdoing, we tend to separate ourselves from it to move through the motions—figuring out what we need to do next. But for me, being able to feel it allows me to figure out what I can do about it. It allows me to get clear about any actions I need to take in whatever direction the situation requires. For me, if I don’t connect the emotional part to it, it gets muddled up and clogs my thinking so I can’t figure out how to move forward, whether I need to write something, say something, or whatever action feels corrective in my life. So, I need to process that emotional part in order to get to the point where I can take action.
What would you say to someone who doesn’t want to feel hard things?
What I’m describing is my own process, but everybody has their own process. For many people their reaction is, “this is wrong, here’s what I’m going to do next, I’m going to make a sign and hit the streets” and that’s the corrective action for them. It’s okay if feeling into it is not comfortable for you. It’s important to have choice around how we take in this information, how we process this information, and what kind of action we want to take. We as human beings should have choice around all parts of ourselves.
Oof, that choice piece hits me hard today. Yes, the older I get the more I appreciate that there are lots of different ways of showing up and advocating depending on people’s skills and passions.
Yes. With my background in academia, often the academic response is very critical, intellectual, and it’s backed by the citing of research. There is a place for that, and we need that kind of information. But I absolutely agree that we need lots of different ways of responding and new definitions of how to respond as an activist. Not all of us want to be out in the streets. How do we rethink how we show up? How do we widen the definition of activism and taking action?
I don’t have the answers to that, but I love thinking about the question. I do know there are different ways to do this work. At this time in history, we’re living through a huge backlash against fundamental rights, so I think it’s even more important than ever to think about new ways to engage these issues.
I’d like to ask you about how restricting and banning abortion intersects with systems of oppression more broadly, including ways that humans oppress the earth.
For me it’s very simple. At the heart of it, abortion is about a woman’s choice for her own body and how she wants to proceed with what happens to her body. Because it’s centered around the issue of choice, restricting abortion echoes what happens to people when they go through trauma, because trauma is about the taking of choice.
When systems and states decide what happens to a certain demographic of people and says, “we have the right to make that decision for you and we’re taking that choice away from you,” it opens the door for other ways that the state and the institutions might take away choice. And I think that’s the dangerous and scary part. It is about abortion. It’s also about opening the door to other rights getting taken away.
In terms of how that’s related to the way that we relate to the Earth, there are many communities around the world who don’t have choice around what happens to their land. They don’t have choice about big corporations and institutions coming in to decide how the resources are going to be mined or used in a certain place. And again, all of it—the trauma, histories of colonialism, oppression, women’s rights—centers around choice. Choices like: how do we want to live? How do we want to create community? How do we want to relate to the land? And if we take away a woman’s choice for her body, it echoes the choices being taken away from communities about what to do with their land and resources, especially for Indigenous people who have experienced this historically.
Do you think experiencing choice being taken away in one area, like bodily autonomy, has a similar emotional texture to experiencing something like not being able to decide what happens to the land you live on? Is there a similar felt sense of choice being taken away, regardless of the situation?
The experience of choice being taken away are vastly different for different people, and there’s a whole spectrum of feelings and reactions that happen when choice gets taken. Depending on their histories—people, communities, families, and societies all respond to trauma in different ways. I think there are overlaps in the sense that your autonomy gets taken, but I think the response to your autonomy getting taken differs widely and can affect people in different ways based on who they are. Differences in race, class, gender, sexuality, and more change how people are affected, and I would think that those differences also change the response.
And differences in power and proximity to power.
Yes, exactly. How much power you have changes your experience and what you’re able to do in response—what actions you can take. In this situation with Roe being overturned, there are several states that are going to ban abortion. But to limit people’s choice even further, some states want to make it illegal to travel to another state where abortion is legal. So, when one choice gets taken within systems, it usually dominoes into other choices being taken and that’s the dangerous part, and the heartbreaking part. It doesn’t stop at one right being taken away.
Anti-choice folks have worked to establish themselves as being motivated by morality, claiming they are “protecting life” despite all the evidence to the contrary. I believe with every fiber of my being that the actual legislative motive to ban abortion is to gain power and control by disempowering the masses, pushing people into crisis and keeping marginalized people in survival mode physically, emotionally, mentally, and economically. Does that seem true to you?
I think it’s all about power—gaining power and keeping power on the backs of disempowered individuals. I think if it were truly about nurturing life for all people, then it’s really a no-brainer that women and anyone who can get pregnant should make choices about their own bodies, because taking away their choice is taking away their ability to create the lives they want and live on their own terms.
Taking away a person’s power to consent is saying, I have more power than you because I decide what happens to you. I think the moral argument, which is we’re trying to protect life, is just a way to hide the motive to have power, stay in power, and be dominant. The power is then reinforced by not acknowledging what it’s really about.
How do we counter that?
I think we counter it by saying the truth. Uncovering the motive, speaking the motive, speaking what it’s really about.
With your scholarship and work focused on our internal and external spaces—do you have an intuitive sense about what might be effective in moving us forward? At Planet Women, we sometimes talk about a paradigm shift, a new vision of what’s possible. Anything you want to speak to around that?
I think there are a couple of important things to think about with Roe getting overturned. We can’t become complacent even after rights are granted. Like with gay marriage or even contraception, we think we’re done fighting for these things [once they’re protected], but now that Roe has been overturned, there’s talk of rolling back these rights as well. The fight is never over. We’re seeing that we need to buffer our institutions with community strength and not take things for granted. Even when safety measures have been put in place, we need to continue revisiting our plans to see how to make these protections even stronger for everyone.
I hear you on needing to maintain and strengthen the gains we do make. I wonder how we keep up the fight in a way that feels sustainable?
Great question. I think it would take many people at many different levels of institutions and systems coming together to think of new solutions. That’s hard because it’s not how our world is working now. I really think if we had more people at the table instead of just people at the top making decisions for people at the bottom, we could break that hierarchy down and have people at all different levels coming together to figure out solutions. We would have a more holistic way of thinking about and solving problems. Unfortunately, our systems don’t support that right now. I think the only way to get at that, is to create collectives in the community where these issues can be talked about and addressed within the circle or a group of people who are like-minded and who care about the same issue.
With community collectives and conversations, can regular people without advanced communication skills create spaces where healthy conversation can flow? What is required for community collectives and conversations to work?
I think that it calls for strong facilitators, that’s the heart of it. Communication needs to be done in a way that creates safety and trust, for sure. These issues can be charged, and people are going to have different opinions. That’s what we see in our main culture right now; we see divisiveness because people aren’t respectful of other people’s thoughts. Some things that people say hit deeply at the core of who we are, and it feels so hurtful that the conversation can’t get past that hurt. I think it’s about having deep respect for one another and committing to that in the conversation. It also requires very strong facilitators and people who can create a safe space and ground rules for people to adhere to when having these conversations. Then, each person needs to be responsible for themselves within the collective and say, “I want to move forward together more than I want to be right.”
I’m always trying to find a silver lining. I feel like this Supreme Court decision, along with the many other heartbreaks we’ve experienced over the last few years, has enabled many more of us to realize the powers that be aren’t going to give us the future we want. More of us clearly see that our struggles are interrelated. These realizations are chipping away at the strong individualist culture of America, which we need to transform in order to take care of ourselves, each other, and the Earth in new ways. I think the silver lining is that our collective consciousness is growing, and that’s the only way we will survive and thrive.
Silver linings are important, and we know there are solutions that exist. We can’t be defeatist. We need to continue finding new ways to take care of each other and bring funding to communities where it’s needed. I’m a mom, I have two daughters that I raise, and I can’t possibly allow myself to think that we’re creating a world that’s more restrictive for them and a world where we are taking away fundamental rights from people.
I think that we need to continue to fight, that’s the bottom line. We must do what we can when we can where we can, to push back on the pushback. We have to. That’s how progress is made. Progress is never handed out, it’s always fought for, unfortunately. It’s the way that the United States has unfolded for the last couple hundred years, it’s always about struggle. So, we keep moving forward. We keep trying for the world that we want to create. Even when there’s major backlash.
Do you think there’s beauty in that struggle?
I love that question. I absolutely think there’s beauty in that struggle because that’s how we create communities and it’s how we come together. It’s how we collectively voice what matters to us. I think the glue is justice and protection, and in justice and protection there’s love. For me, it’s about creating a world that’s fair and just, and full of love.
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Dr. Liza Keānuenueokalani Williams is Planet Women’s Director of Cultural Transformation. She leads Planet Women’s efforts in anti-oppression and antiracism so that we can transform the way we work and live to heal ourselves and heal the planet. She is an indigenous Hawaiian writer, scholar, activist, healer and solopreneur. Read her full bio here.
Kimberly Absher is Planet Women’s Marketing & Communications Associate. She manages Planet Women’s communications channels, bringing compelling stories to our social media, newsletters and blog. Personally and professionally, Kimberly is passionate about using the power of communication to create a healthy, creative, joyful world where all people have self-determination. Learn more here.