Daniel Kisslinger (Kiss): Welcome to One Million Experiments. A podcast from AirGo, Interrupting Criminalization and Project Nia, exploring how we define and create safety in a world without police and prisons. I'm Kiss.
Damon Williams (Dame): I'm Dame .
Kiss: We are back here on Episode 7, but of course we can't do this work alone. Anyone who's listened to the episode knows that we have a superstar collaborator, our partner in decriminalization, the one and only even a gal, is back with us today. Hello, Eva. [sound effect]
Eva Nagao: Hey, y'all, appreciate the sound effects as always.
Kiss: Of course. Eva, who are we talking to today?
Eva: Today we're speaking with Alicia Hurtado, who does comms and so much more at the Chicago Abortion Fund or CAF in Chicago, Illinois. CAF's mission is to advance reproductive autonomy and justice for everyone by providing financial, logistical and emotional support to people seeking abortion services and by building collective power and fostering partnerships for political and cultural change. CAF allocates resources, we talk about payment, affirmation, care for people who need abortions, including the funds and support needed for things like travel, childcare and lost wages for time.
They do this from their headquarters in Chicago but CAF services over 20 states across the nation and they're connected to abortion funders nationwide. You can reach their client service hotline at 312-663-0338. It is open Monday, Wednesday, and Friday between 6:00 AM and 2:00 PM Central, and you can leave a message at any other time. You can also find more information about caf@chicagoabortionfund.org.
Kiss: Yes. I think the only other thing that you need to know before we have hop is, in addition to their website having support for people seeking abortions, there's also a ton of material about how do you support people who are looking for that type of healthcare, what are the other ways to feed their advocacy work as well as donate to the fund in order to enable this important form of care to be available to people really all over the region and across the country?
Dame: Thank you again to all the folks at CAF for all the work you do and Alicia for this great conversation that you're about to hear and make sure you all stick around for the peer review where we chop it up some more and break down what we hear. With no further ado, let's get into it and hop into the lab.
[music]
Kiss: All right. We're back and we are here with Alicia Hurtado.
[laughter]
Alicia Hurtado: Hello.
Kiss: Hey.
Dame: Hello.
Kiss: We're going to warm up in our tradition and ground in this time. Your name being a listener, you know where we're going with it. In this time-
Alicia: I do.
Kiss: -how is the world treating you and how are you treating the world?
Alicia: Actually, I should do. Should have really prepared this one more because you do ask it every time but I was like, let me just do it in the moment because you got to ground yourself in that. The world's treating me okay, I am just at the tail end of a case of the so novel Coronavirus.
Dame: Definitely at this point-
Alicia: No longer novel.
Dame: Nothing novel about it.
Eva: Does not really feel novel. I would say treating me as well as you can, feeling a lot better, got to isolate, super grateful for, and at the moment I've just been recovering but hoping to get back into the world like I was pre-covid and got some abortions to fund, we're probably going to get into that but I've got some abortions to fund. Get back onto the helpline and just get back into the similar things.
Kiss: I'm going to take the risk here of saying it has moved from novel to textbook.
Dame: They've written the book in there.
Alicia: We're almost at the movie, the novel to movie version.
Kiss: It's adapted at this point.
Dame: It's redundant, is what it's, it's the redundant coronavirus.
Kiss: Thank you so much for-- in this time that you are recovering, spending some time with us to talk about this super important work. In this One Million Experiments sphere, we like to fumble through scientific metaphor of the operations of the-- see I'm already fumbling.
Dame: Scientific method.
Kiss: Yes, the scientific method we're fumbling through it and we are borrowing the notion of hypothesis. What is the hypothesis of the work of the Chicago Abortion Fund?
Alicia: I would have to start us off with like values. I feel like that's really where the Chicago Abortion Fund comes from. I've been with the fund for two years and I can really say that from the moment I started working with CAF, these values were kind of the core of everything that we do. First, I would say reproductive justice, I guess broad strokes definition would be framing as a human right, the ability to have bodily autonomy, to have children or not have children, and to parent those children in communities that are safe which safety is a loaded term but safe and sustainable. That RJ piece is super central to abortion and it's super central to CAF's mission. Now that I'm thinking, I'm like, "Should I take one step back and describe what's in Chicago-
Dame: …walks away back? You're good.
Kiss: Take all the step you do.
Alicia: Yes. The Chicago Abortion Fund, we provide financial, logistical and practical support for people who are seeking abortions. For us, we primarily fund folks that are coming to Illinois to get care or are in Illinois already, although the majority of our callers do come from out of state at this point. Funding an abortion can look like a lot of different things, so there's that I think more obvious transactional piece that people think of, that is us sending vouchers to clinics to directly pay for folks' abortions, but we also provide travel costs, childcare costs, support for lost wages if folks have to take time off of work. Within the last year, we've been providing mutual aid mini grants which are $50, just mutual eight grants for folks to cover food or help with bills because we know that the actual medical procedure of getting an abortion is not necessarily the only thing that's keeping our callers from being able to access the care that they need.
A huge piece of that is just believing that people should have access to abortions and people should have what they need to access that care. That is very connected to reproductive justice as a framework and then even beyond that, this idea, which is the second thing I was going to talk about of abortion is healthcare. Healthcare is a human right, everyone deserves to have access to healthcare and I think those two pieces, that reproductive justice framework developed by a group of Black women in 1994 in Chicago and those two values drive the hypothesis of CAF which is that we're going to do whatever it takes to get people to the abortion care that they need and whatever is in our capacity to get people to the care they need.
Kiss: Thank you for that grounding. Really throughout this conversation, we're going to get into, let's call it the methods or the nitty gritty of the work of the fund. I want to zoom out a little bit and ask you first, just in terms of the framing of this show, a really big picture question because I'm excited to have you here. I got to know you or see you through doing abolitionist work through the Care Not Cops campaign, also know you work with the centers and anti-militarism organizing space that is really valuable and important and shout out to the centers and Care Not Cops.
I want to just zoom out from your perspective and your analysis of, where do you see the interconnections intersections between reproductive justice and abortion access to abolitionists, ant-militarism groundings philosophy at large? You live it, you do that work, in yourself how do you see those interconnections and those connected framings?
Alicia: I think to me, RJ and abortion access are almost one in the same. It's true. My kind of organizing home started with abolitionist work really grounding myself in ant-militarism work and I feel like coming to CAF, I was able to use that as a framework to look at the sustained stripping of rights that I was seeing and also beyond just rights, the landscape of abortion access as I was bringing colors through it. I guess I would start by saying this framing of abortion is common in the mainstream discussions as a choice. People's right to choose abortion doesn't necessarily incapsulate, what it actually means to have autonomy over your body and over your pregnancy outcomes, being able to access an abortion is reliant on a question of access more so than choice, because you can choose or you can have the right to do something. That doesn't mean you necessarily have the ability or the access to do that thing. Even just on a base level, we can think about the ways that these abortion bans that are coming into place are criminalizing people's ability to access healthcare that they need on a legal standpoint. This is us still talking about this right.
First I'll step back and just talk about criminalization period. We're seeing these bans, we're seeing that this is not even necessarily just a question about abortion, it's about power. It's about exerting power over people's bodies. I think that that is something that you can see across calls to dismantle the prison industrial complex. We're thinking about control, we're thinking about power over people's bodies.
We're seeing people who are experiencing a range of pregnancy outcomes being criminalized and that is people who are having miscarriages being criminalized, or even on the other side of things, the ways in which Child Protective Services interacts with the carceral state and interacts with particularly Black families and kinship networks. That is all a part of back to those RJ tenants. How are we going to be in a situation where we can choose if and when we have children and then also be able to parent those children in safe and sustainable communities?
Like I said here when we're looking at the state of not only abortion access, but just let's like reproductive justice, temperature check, where are we at, is abortion bans that are being enacted the fact that with the fall of Roe, abortion's going to be criminalized in a lot more places. We also think about the ways in which people who are incarcerated are able to access healthcare period, but also reproductive care.
We think about connections to the way that youth are forced to interact with getting an abortion or having any sort of health decision about their body and their own healthcare. Even like extending that to trans-youth specifically who we see like bodily autonomy is constantly being attacked and even more so in line with a tax and abortion care. There are so many touch points that I can talk about. When we're even thinking about resource allocation, that's what I do for my job is allocate resources to folks who need abortion care. What if our money was going to getting people healthcare instead of police, instead of militarism?
I think this is a question in Chicago, we think about the CPD campaign, that's the whole thing, like let's move our money to things that are actually helping folks in our communities rather than policing them, surveilling them. That's all to say that there's so many touch points where reproductive justice, tactics and demands are intricately intertwined, but demands for abolition. It feels like so big but that's because this movement is big and abortion's one piece of this movement.
I think one thing I would like to say too is that I've noticed especially now, reproductive justice has become this stand-in for abortion access and people are using those things interchangeably, like, "Oh, we need to protect reproductive justice." I don't know if people are using reproductive justice as a stand-in for abortion because they're aversed to saying the word abortion or not practice in saying the word abortion or if it's this conflation that I think honestly flattens what reproductive justice is.
Abolition is reproductive justice. Trans' rights are reproductive justice. Workers' rights are reproductive justice, and abortion liberation is reproductive justice too. That's where I feel like being very specific about naming exactly what we're here for, exactly what we're doing is important rather than just subbing in a framework. Let's talk about abortion, let's talk about access to abortion, let's talk about what that actually takes and what that means. We can say it's linked to all these other different things because it totally is, but yes let's-
Kiss: Let's do it.
Alicia: -start using the words--
Kiss: Let's talk about abortion.
Alicia: Literally talk about abortion [laughs].
Kiss: I think that's specificity about abortion is helpful and the movement, conversation, advocacy side, but also in terms of providing care. People have to know exactly what you're able to offer them and what you're not. I think that's something we've really seen in all of these experiments is the practitioners coming up against the limits of what they can offer because we don't have unlimited capacity and unlimited scale.
If you were saying we can offer reproductive justice support, and someone's like, "Okay, I have this very specific need that isn't help getting transportation or support around an abortion," imagine what that would feel like on the line to receive, "Oh no, we don't do that," when that was what you're looking for. That type of clarity, I feel like it would build trust if I were the person on the phone to know the people who are offering something can actually offer it to me.
Alicia: It's a common thing to say that Illinois is a bastion for reproductive justice. Chicago is a bastion for reproductive justice. Let me give credit, because we do have some great laws on the books in terms of abortion in Illinois is protected in terms of when Roe falls, abortion will still be legal in Illinois. We have Medicaid coverage of abortion in Illinois, which has been so transformational for the work that CAF has been able to do both in Illinois and to help neighbors because we know that access to abortion changes based on these arbitrary state lines and arbitrary legislative jurisdictions. Beyond that, it's like, "Is Chicago a bastion for reproductive justice?"
Can we think about the ways that historic divestment, over policing and surveillance, this like wealth hoarding, the ways in which power is structured? Actually it says a lot about not only abortion access but reproductive justice whole scale is not defined just by abortion legislation. Abortion legislation doesn't necessarily mean access. When I was thinking about that question of, how does CAF's work relate to abortion? How does abortion and CAF's work? How does that all tie to liberation?
I was thinking the limitations of what it means to have Illinois be a bastion for abortion. CAF's work is a testament to that. We provide of support to get over that economic barrier. I can only do so much for a caller on my helpline that is experiencing homelessness, that needs support for bills, for food, who is in a community that has been divested from who is experiencing legislation that's not just about abortion, but is about systematically stripping away rights.
Even within the movement, you speak to people that are coming up with demands and they're like, "Well, here in Illinois we're good though," I'm always like, "Well, let's challenge that," because we definitely are fortunate in the many ways here in Illinois, but we have callers that still can't access the care that they need. Even point blank like CAF right now, we are supporting folks who live in Illinois, getting care in Illinois because abortions are expensive, it's not accessible.
Dame: It reminds me so much of in other types of direct actions support. Now six year ago, Freedom Square experiment or just whenever people have popup mutual aid or other types of direct action, there's within like sometimes hours, sometimes a couple days, you're always confronted with the reality of people not having what they need far beyond what you're able to provide in that moment. It's a lesson that I've watched get learned repeatedly the hard way.
People within movement, whether it's the beginning in movement, maybe they've been doing it for a while, like, "We're going to try to address this singular thing, so we're going to build this thing and as part of that we want to direct resources, food, books, clothing," and they set up, they do their thing and then within like sometimes hours the reality of like people having housing insecurity, the reality of people not having access to basic healthcare, the reality of addiction care and mental health, they're confronted with this reality instantly.
Often what happens is people shrink or it creates this urgency to try to address all of that when they actually weren't prepared to do that and then that burns out and then they take a step back and they feel like they failed. I think that's the danger of not having that understanding that you're just describing of, abortion care is part of healthcare. Healthcare is part of human care. Human care is part of caring for our communities and environment and there is no separation. This is just one site, one locus of that work. I just I've watched that pattern and I've experienced that of like, "Oh shit, we can't do this right now because we didn't think we had to do this."
Kiss: It's point of like you want to see the whole picture of the whole world, but there also has to be focus. That like leads us to maybe zoom back in to-- You started off by saying everybody might not even know what an abortion fund is. You're naming that there's a hotline, you're naming that it's expensive and there's financial support, but for folks who are interested or are learning but may have not had connection or any access to understanding this resource exists, can you explain what it is, how it operates and maybe we can distill some of the learnings you've had as somebody who's been on the other side of that phone?
Alicia: Yes, absolutely. Folks will know this because it's in the name. Chicago Abortion Fund. We fund abortions. That's what we do. We have it in the name so people know it, but I always tell folks whenever I'm explaining this, it might feel like it's just super transactional like, oh, we just send people the money. They get the money, they get the procedure. It actually takes a lot to-- Sometimes can take a lot to get someone to the procedure to get the care that they need.
The basic hypothesis, are we still on hypothesis? I don't know-- We might be on methods. Bread and butter. We have a hotline and that's our main program at CAF. Folks who are seeking abortions will call the helpline at this point. We're able to support 100% of the people that we reach on our helpline. Folks will call, they'll be connected with either a staff member of the Chicago Abortion Fund or we have an incredible, like huge shoutout right now to our volunteers who work on our helpline.
Either they'll be connected with a staff member, be connected with a case manager who will ask them just informational questions. At CAF we don't do any means testing. The questions are more, this is the information we need to know to get you to an appointment. How many weeks are you? How much did the clinic tell you it was going to cost? Where's your appointment? When is your appointment? Just things that we need to know to make sure we're getting you the things that you need when you need them and where you need them.
Once we have that logistics conversation, sometimes that can reveal other things that we can connect folks to. If you're a caller coming from Indiana, we can hook you up with the Hoosier Fund and you can see if you can get more support from them. Maybe through talking to you, we realize, oh, actually you are covered under Illinois Medicaid, by the way, this is going to be free 99. That is the best feeling in the entire world. Being able to tell someone that their procedure is actually completely covered by their insurance should be a thing that happens anyway for everyone. Unfortunately is not the case both for a lot of different states, for folks who are covered by their specific state Medicaid plan, but also with private insurance in Illinois, sometimes plans have loopholes where they don't have to cover abortion care.
Definitely, the best feeling to tell someone that. That's all to say. Sometimes there's some like, I don't know, patient navigation work that goes into the call. Anecdotally most calls don't just end right there. I think that's the point that I really want to emphasize because I don't know if people necessarily understand that. Once we're off that call, maybe we sent a voucher or maybe there's still a gap that we're working with the caller to address, whether that's a gap that we can collaborate with other funds to get covered, talk to national pools of funding, but the point is we're sticking with that person until we can make sure that they get to their appointment.
The thing to understand about CAF and the work that we do is that we're really working with our callers as whole people and be the whole time. We're standing alongside them until they get the care they need, until they are able to get where they need to be. I think that's really what to me, I guess grounds me in the fact that this is not charity. We're not just throwing resources people's way, not engaging. We're not suspicious of folks.
We're not like trying to grill people or ask for any traumatic details. This piece of a lack of eligibility requirements for the folks that we fund is not necessarily the norm.
Dame: It becomes a type of care rather than a type of charity, which even though they have the same root word in this instance, they're very, very different.
Alicia: I think that in terms of the care that I see on our helpline, and even just talking to other case managers about the work that we're doing, that piece is so important because when you're thinking about this wave of anti-abortion sentiment that is super pervasive, but not only are folks seeing this play out on a national stage. They're also experiencing very intimately the fact that the abortion care landscape as it is right now is super hostile. The fact that there are bans, first of all, but also other, we call them trap laws, but just laws that exist to make it more difficult to get an abortion such as mandatory counseling, mandatory waiting periods, restrictions on youth that entail like parental notification and parental consent.
All of these things are set up to make getting an abortion beyond the cost. We can talk about that too. It's like for an abortion before 12 weeks in Illinois, it's $480 easy or more. Then you think about Indiana right next to us, that same procedure can be upwards of $900. Who has that money just laying around?
Some people do, but I can bet that most people don't just have a cool 500 bucks ready to drop on a necessary medical procedure, which is what abortion is. But I digress. People are seeing this hostility on both a national level potentially in their communities as well. They're seeing it in the very fabric that the abortion landscape that they're being asked to navigate, just that being potentially a part of someone's abortion care experience that is affirming no matter what. That exists to make things as easy as they possibly can be even in the face of hostility and restriction.
That's super important. You can feel how powerful it is on the helpline. I'm not saying that to say that every case is difficult, that every caller is experiencing like X, Y, Z thing because the reality of it is that so many different people call our helpline, but what is the constant thing is that I know I will be there for the Chicago Abortion Fund team as a whole will be there to make sure that that caller gets the care that they need.
That reassurance piece, even in the face of a lot of uncertainty and that affirmation piece, even in the face of a lot of hostility, that's what care is. That's the way that we have to care for each other when the people in power right now clearly aren't caring for us.
Kiss: Thank you so much for walking us through that. I hear actually some really exciting seeds for how we need to think about healthcare at large. Particularly, how we need to transform our society away from this capital's dominated, really dehumanizing healthcare system. When we say abortion care is healthcare, it is also like the marginalized sector of the healthcare sphere.
It makes me think of the very true and very commonly used notion of our liberatory realities come from centering the margins. In the way that, until we center trans liberation, we will not be able to get to right relationship between human beings. Until we center disability justice, we will not be able to understand how to have an accessible space. Not only because from the moralistic human, it's just good to be good to all people, but also like centering those experiences that have had to survive, that have had to innovate, that have-- I don't want to over valorize resilience because people shouldn't have to be resilient.
Similar to Black liberation, there's a perspective of how the world can and should operate that until we include the most marginalized, we will continue to perpetuate those harms. I hear that parallel in abortion care as a marginalized notion of healthcare, but also creating new methodologies, new systems, new technologies of what healthcare should look like generally.
When I hear the Chicago Abortion Fund, not only is it meeting the financial cost, it's navigating through bureaucratic systems and then there's also aftercare. I think all health needs should get that. If someone is dealing with heart disease, if someone's dealing with asthma, anything that is happening within the realm of health care, it feels like the seed or the locus of what healthcare should be at large.
With that premise, what can we be learning about healthcare when we center abortion care as how we should approach all health?
Alicia: I feel like first and foremost in some ways the abortion access landscape is tied up in very specific stigmatization that some of our processes are meant to combat. Just process-wise, to be a case manager on our helpline, there's many processes that go into it. We have trainings, we have shadows, but throughout all of it, A, it's stress that this work is done in community and, B, values like I said before I feel like this work is really values-driven are made very clear.
That is we trust our callers, we move with trust, we are committed to being affirming and unlearning our own stigma around abortion care and abortions in general just like this baseline of what we call person-centered care. I think that's where I can start to make these connections with what we do on CAF's helpline and what my vision is as a whole for thinking about healthcare on a broader scale.
I know I have been on calls on the helpline in which folks who were talking to me were also struggling with their own stigmatization of abortion and they needed to hear affirmation and they needed to hear that, "I'm here for you. I understand what you're going through is normal, what you're going through is valid." I feel like coming into things as just another human being rather than I'm here to provide a service, I'm here to be one end of a transaction, just transforms what people might think of as not only healthcare, but also just like social services in general like getting aid, getting support in general.
On the one hand, we are checking in on people, meeting them where they're at, treating them like human beings when they're on our helpline.
Sometimes meeting people where they're at, they're like, "I want transaction. I just need money. Get me from here to here. Thank you so much for your service. That's all I need and that's totally fine." Sometimes people need a little bit more, sometimes people need affirmation, sometimes people need emotional support. I think often even just the words emotional support that can sound like whoa, emotional support, what does that mean?
Kiss: What are these big bad emotion monsters sneaking in here?
Alicia: I know. Well, and most of the time emotional support is just literally someone to talk to. I feel like in those cases you can really feel the effects of what it means to have healthcare that's stigmatized. You can really feel the trickle down impact which not to say trickle down I feel like that's so loaded in itself.
Kiss: We're going to reclaim the trickle down.
Alicia: When we're thinking of all of these big level policies, these blatant disregard for people's bodily autonomy, this smearing of a healthcare procedure by a White supremacist evangelical campaign. We also see that on a micro level on our helpline both with procedural lifts or logistical lifts or financial lifts, but also just this cultural piece of people don't know who else they can talk to.
I can think of many examples where people are telling me someone who they've just connected with on a phone call and we've been talking for maybe 10 minutes telling me like, "You're the only person I've told, this is the only space where I feel like I can talk about this." For the most part, emotional support is just listening because sometimes people don't have people that will listen to them.
I'm not trying to paint this tragic picture because that's not always the way it is, but I feel like that became very clear to me in doing the work. We've got a lot of different sides in which abortion access is being targeted and one of those things that we have to dismantle is just stigma. Stigma not only is just making people feel bad, it's having impacts on the support networks that people can connect to to get themselves to the care that they need. That means less support with logistical lifts, that's less support with financial lifts et cetera, et cetera.
My vision for this work as a whole would be something that is really acknowledging what people's needs are rather than prescribing those needs and I feel like that's what we're trying to do on the helpline. I think that the context is different, that's not because abortion is inherently different than other types of healthcare, literally it's different because there's a certain procedure whatever. It's because stigma and these constructed legislative restrictions have fucked up people's ability to access the care and the way that people think about the care. It's complicated, it's sticky, but it's not inherently that way, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
Dame: There are ways that I think that stigmatization plays out on other types of care that aren't legislated necessarily in the same way. You talked about just the act of listening and care and there's all those studies about doctors and healthcare professionals spend on average like 90 seconds listening to a patient before deciding what needs to be done. I think it ties in a lot to disability justice work of this stigmatization around even needing care and what that looks like, and to connect to even another level to some of the…stuff I think it's all tied in with this rugged individualism idea of if you are reliant that is weakness and that's not part of this national project to White supremacy, right? The values here are individualism and relying on other people and also of course tied into like rugged masculinity concepts in that as well.
I think that's part of why it's seen as so threatening is because the types of care that we all need are so anathema to the way that power is protected. I think the body whether that's in this type of care or in people needing help with all different types of physical support and psychological and mental support I think those stigmas operate on multiple levels there.
Alicia: Yes absolutely. Just a quick thing that that brought up. For me is the fact that this work cannot be individual, that's true of organizing period, it has to be in community or what are we doing here? I just think about especially as we're looking ahead to this post-Roe future, there's no way that the Chicago Abortion Fund can operate without the support of a national network of abortion funds without other folks who are doing work in our region.
This might be a bit of a tangent, but I do want to call up that this singular moment of Roe falling obviously is terrible, but it is also just like the culmination of years of stripping away abortion access. We've been seeing these bans pop up and been preparing for the fall of Roe since 2019. It's not a future that we didn't see coming and it's not a future that people aren't already experiencing because they don't have access to care. These national ties they exist.
We have been working in community getting people to where they need to go, we do warm handoffs of callers calling from other states, frequently we do solidarity pledges for folks who are traveling frequently. It's this community with funds from across the country that we are using to be nimble in the face of more large scale attacks on abortion access, so that is interconnected. Also the reduction of access to abortion as an individual choice plays into that, I think, in the fact that the majority of people who get abortions are parenting already.
This is already we're thinking about more than one person. This sounds so silly to say, but anything an individual does, more than one person's going to be impacted by it. It's impossible to talk about abortion without talking about communities, without talking about families, without talking about these units that are interconnected. Part of what we do is work with a person and that person may have a support network that's already supporting them. Now we're all working to try and get someone the care that they need.
That philosophy that we are working with our callers alongside support networks that people might already have and we ask about that, we're like, "What do you need right now? What can we be providing you?" Like I said, sometimes that's just sending over a voucher, sometimes it's with logistical support and sometimes that's with more, but I feel like starting at this like, "What's going on?" Let us not impede, but let us be helpful and let us work alongside you and alongside your people to get to where you need to go. From the first day that I started working with CAF. Our wonderful executive director, Megan Jeyifo, she told me we do this work so we can work ourselves out of existence, which I'm sure is a tenet that you had probably. In my dream future with abortion justice, first of all, healthcare is free. People wouldn't need to be stressed about finances when they're considering any medical procedure. Then also people have supportive communities that are people who they know very well, that are their people that can provide the logistical support, that can provide the emotional support.
That can provide any types of support that someone might need as they're going through any medical procedure. People like us wouldn't need us because at this point, we are standing in for a lack of care from those in power. We're also standing in to provide affirmation and provide love and provide care, because the reality is a lot of dominant narratives about abortion, not necessarily popular narratives. We know that the majority of people in the so-called United States of America do support Roe v. Wade and support access to abortions but there are some hateful dominant narratives out there.
We're here to counter that too. People have communities, they have networks of care, they have networks of support. Those networks are just under-resourced, and also people are living in a reality in which abortion is stigmatized.
Dame: I really want to get into the shifts in cultural consciousness and response to the dominant narratives. Real quick, just an aside, an offering for you and more for the listeners, there was a language conundrum that I felt that I've gone through a lot that I've worked or thought around that I just want to offer to folks. It's around that notion of individual. A lot of us radical liberatory-facing folks, like believe deeply in autonomy and agency and the beautiful uniqueness of every human life.
We want to like affirm that but we're also pushing against this western philosophical notion of individualism, which is undergirded capitalism and neoliberalism. This idea that a human being exists on by themselves and are separate from a collective. What I told myself just to challenge my individualism is like, I don't want to use the word individual anymore and so just like…
Kiss: Then of course I stopped using the word individual.
Dame: [laughs] It's not like to stigmatize or be dogmatic or say someone's like bad if they're using the word. We get what people are trying to say but for those folks who are struggling against individualism, the personal or unique has worked for me as a stand-in for one, why do I want to say that word so much? I feel like some of that is my conditioning. Talking about the personal politics and how the personal relates to the collective allows us to transcend the individual as this distinct separate entity that then can be antagonistic to its surrounding.
That's just my little word nerd offering of the episode but I really want to get to this deeper notion of, in these times of crisis, what we've learned in our study of movements is that the folks who have been doing the work are those who are prepared to steward the shifts, to steward the transformations, to step in in a place of collective leadership. I think CAF is an example of that. What are the disillusionments that may be occurring right now for folks that are really provoked or shocked by this political moment?
How and in what ways are you seeing folks being more radicalized by this moment? How are you seeing disillusionment and radicalization in this time? Or are you?
Alicia: I'm definitely seeing it. Chicago Abortion Fund, we have just ended by the time this podcast is coming out, our annual fund-a-thon. That is our largest peer-to-peer fundraiser of the year, it's a huge effort. We have a bunch of amazing volunteers that help us get it together every year. This year we shop for at the beginning of our planning the truly unprecedented goal of raising 250K for abortion access. It was something that whenever we said it, we were like, "Wow, that's a lot of money. We've never raised that much before, but you know what, we're going to do it."
Flash forward, after some tough months, we've been seeing need grow. In 2018, we supported less than 200 people through the whole year, but just this year from January to March supported 2,300 people from when I'm having this conversation right now in May. Just thinking about CAF's growth since 2019, when there was a huge upsurge in abortion funds in the news because of a systematic wave of bans that were popping up. From that point, a lot more people recognized what an abortion fund was, we were able to grow because of the resulting donations and mobilization.
That's the point where we were able to begin supporting 100% of the people who called us on our helpline in conjunction with a specific policy reality in Illinois, which is that there's mandated Medicaid coverage for abortion care which has allowed us to look at our budget in a different way and begin supporting people from outside of Illinois. Even folks going to states surrounding Illinois. We have over 55 clinics that we work with, so this scale of growth internally has been huge. It's been overwhelming, and yet we see people being activated.
Just the outpouring of support, people really mobilizing their own communities to put resources, tangible resources into Mutual Aid for Abortion. But even beyond that, just as a person looking at the way that people are now talking about abortion and larger discourse about the law, what does the law mean? Who's regulated by the law? All of that has been exciting and I think an opportunity for people to plug in with the folks that have been doing this work for years now. CAF has been around for, oh Lord, am I going to get this number right? 37 years?
Whatever, someone wants to run the math on since 1985. This organization's been around for a minute.
Dame: It's the 37th year.
Kiss: You nailed that math, by the way. That seems strong…
Dame: Bravo.
Alicia: Thank you.
Kiss: Didn't do good in math or science, but I think we got the subtraction right there.
Dame: I was pretty decent in algebra, I should admit that to the listeners who probably just think I'm a dropout, but nah. Algebra 2, I like got A+, like every--
Kiss: If you know you know.
Dame: [laughs]
Alicia: Seeing people be more excited about, and being activated and being angry is maybe not even the correct term. I think outraged and then not only outraged but moving their outrage to do something with it. For us that has been thinking about how can we mobilize people to shift their resources towards direct service. The vast majority of funds that are going towards reproductive advocacy or reproductive health are not going towards direct service. Whether that's going towards lobbying, whether that's going towards more general bureaucratic processes, it is important to me.
Just as someone who is thinking about like larger nonprofit industrial complex ills that we think about how to mobilize our communities to directly supporting people. Not to say that advocacy work isn't important, but how do we get money into the pans of people who have needs that need to be met today? When I think of CAF's work, that's the work. We're doing this crisis mode, getting people the care that they need in the system that's not ideal. Then also through advocacy work and through mobilizing people.
When we have the capacity to do so, it's okay, we're doing this crisis work, but ultimately this is not what we want to be doing. What we want is a future where people can access the healthcare that they need. What can we also think of in that vein? That's not necessarily stopping at legality. How can we go beyond legality? Because we know that these courts can do whatever the fuck they want. Clearly, they're walking back on our rights as we speak so how can we think about that longer-term project?
Kiss: How do we move it out of securing rights and into cultures and infrastructures of care?
Alicia: Exactly.
Dame: Just a little-- for the listeners, I just want to direct folks who are listening and interested if you have not already in our Through the Portal series. We had an episode with Dean Spade, who's a brilliant thinker on abolition, who talked a lot about naming how the law is not the space from which we will get justice. Like too many of our efforts actually revalidate an invalid institution. We have to move past these notions of trying to enshrine in the courts, even though the courts obviously in this current reality have very material impact.
Our ultimate view of justice can't be in this law-centered notion because the law is invalid in this settler colonial place. Check out the episode being Dean Spade to get some more of that conversation.
Kiss: I think what he offers is actually in direct connection to what you just said, which is, he was saying it in the context of these anti-trans, especially trans youth laws where people in states like Illinois or New York where those laws aren't coming up right now are sitting and wringing their hands and what is the state legislature of Florida going to do? There's nothing really you can do about that, but what he pushed people towards was there are people in your space who have those same needs that you can be directly supporting.
Then that feeds this work overall. Rather than the scarcity feeling of being on the outside of where this battleground is, this isn't a battleground, this is about caring for your neighbors. To that point I want to wrap with-- One of the features of a lot of these criminalization laws have to do with deputizing neighbors against each other. I'm wondering on our end, not using the language of deputizing, but in activating neighbors in addition to directing resources to abortion funds. What should we be activating ourselves and each other to be doing in this moment in our own spaces, do you think?
Alicia: This month there were actions across the country and CAF was able to participate in a Rally for Abortion Justice in Illinois, Chicago. We came up with some calls to action that I could say the general things that we brainstormed and came up with. Do what feels like in your realm of capacity. The first one is distributing resources, we covered it, distributing resources to abortion funds to independent abortion clinics who actually provide the majority of abortions in the United States. To folks who are doing on the groundwork, other practical support.
The next one is being an informed and affirming resource about abortion in your community. The Chicago Abortion Fund using resources from across a lot of different toolkits et cetera created a toolkit on how to talk about abortion within your community. That's bit.ly/sayabortion, but be aware of the fact that there are crisis pregnancy centers, which are fake clinics, and find the ones in your area. If you go to exposefakeclinics.com, you can see all of the crisis pregnancy centers that are around you.
If someone in your life is seeking an abortion or if, let's say you live in Illinois you know someone who's going to be traveling to Illinois to get an abortion. Make sure that you are making them aware of these fake clinics that exist, which I can get into all day about how terrible they are and how they are already stigmatizing and creating a very hostile experience for someone who's seeking abortion care. There's resources on counseling services, learn about self-managed abortion and what that means.
I think one piece that people might not know is that just because abortion is not legal doesn't mean that it's unsafe. I see a lot of rhetoric about, "Oh, we won't go back, we won't go back referencing 'back alley' abortions or what the reality was for people who needed abortions pre-Roe." While that history is definitely valid, it doesn't necessarily reflect a future without Roe. Thanks to people who were living under criminalization of abortion in Brazil in the '80s, now have medication abortions accessible. We know that they're safe.
They are something that can help people safely manage their abortions in their own homes up to 12 weeks. Actually, the danger that lies for most people who will be getting "illegal" because what is the law anyway, but "illegal" abortions post the fall of Roe would be criminalization. That's something that we need to be very clear about is that self-managed abortion or "illegal" abortions aren't necessarily unsafe abortions so, yes. Just making yourself knowledgeable about what that means.
There's the Repro Legal helpline, which provides counseling for folks and demystifies some legal rules about self-managed abortions. There's so much I could say about specifically being in a resource for abortion in your community, abortion access in your community. Some of these resources aren't on our website. I can share them as well if that is--
Kiss: That link will be in the description.
Alicia: Perfect. The last thing I would want to call out is just destigmatizing abortion, making it known that you can be supportive to people in your life who might need to access abortion care. Also literally just saying the word abortion, it's not a word that we need to shy away from. It is a medical procedure. Abortion is abortion and you should say it, you don't need to say choice, you don't need to say any gender language, a woman's right to choose, et cetera, etcetera. A, because we know that not only women are getting abortions, but B, Say the word abortion.
Abortions are liberating. Abortions are something that we can talk about freely and not have to feel shame or stigma about. To your point about looking at the Texas ban in which people are encouraged to criminalize their neighbors for seeking abortion care. Or really actually more accurately criminalize people who are helping people seek abortion care. A big common theme within de-stigmatizing abortion is just trusting pregnant people to make the decisions that are right for them. Listening and centering people who have had abortions supporting abortion storytellers.
Caring for the people in your life who are going through a process that is on a systemic level stigmatizing and being in the way that I try and do every time I get on our helpline at CAF. Being a force of love, a force of care, a force of affirmation in light of all of this hatred and complete disregard for people's autonomy and agency that is happening, surrounding anyone's decision to access abortion care.
Dame: First, thank you for your time and talking through us, but for your work and for stepping up for liberation in the way that you have. If you feel comfortable receiving it on behalf of everybody at CAF, like just high gratitude for the space for existing and for the impact that I've seen it have on community for a decade of my awareness, but obviously it has been going on much longer than that. I just have a deep appreciation and I don't know, just gust of this is some of the most important work happening period.
I just want everyone to recognize it for it to be legible and to support it. Thank you specifically, Alicia. I've seen you in multiple political spaces show up and the connections that you're making. I am grateful for your contributions to our movements into our world. Thank you for your time and enduring these conditions to have this conversation right now while you're in somewhat of a discomfort situation.
Alicia: Thank you.
Kiss: I have one last very specific appreciation, which is I appreciate the Chicago Abortion Fund's dedication to fighting the billboard wars. When I'm going out on 55 and I see the CAF billboard, I've always felt like the anti-choice folks have this lockdown on the billboard war, and y'all in your little way are fighting back. Every time I see it, get a little honk and then a car next to me gets mad at me and thinks I'm honking at them, but I'm like, we don't see that battleground. That is a space up on the billboard that we go.
I feel in your comms work and your outreach like that, I could imagine that choice and it is seen and appreciated and your graphics are just better.
Dame: Billboards and talk radio.
Kiss: The people with the most violent policies always have the worst aesthetics also, which is a pretty consistent thing I think.
Alicia: It's true. We're nothing at CAF if not slaying the Canva and graphic game. I would say.
Kiss: Absolutely. [laughs] Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us. We'll put all the links, but is there any other way that you would like you and the work of CAF to be found?
Alicia: Our website and then we're on all social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. If you just search Chicago Abortion Fund, you should be able to find us. You can also sign up for our newsletter. There's a link on our website for that as well, but that's the primary ways in which we put out calls to action.
Kiss: If people are looking for care is there a number for the helpline or something they should fill out first?
Alicia: Absolutely. If you go on our website, I can read out the number. I'm going to pull it up right now real-time. Wow. Under the abortion resources tab if you go to how we can help, our number is 312-663-0338. If you go on our webpage, it lists out exactly what to include in your message to our helpline.
Kiss: Thank you again. Wishing you a safe journey home.
Alicia: Yes. Sorry for going over. Also, I feel like it was a little long-winded.
Dame: No, we're great.
Kiss: We've had longer winded than that, I promise you don't worry about that.
Dame: Yes, by far.
Alicia: Right. Thank you so much.
[music]
Dame: All right. It's time for the peer review and we got you welcome back the super homey. Eva, what did you hear?
Voiceover: Hoping I don't offend all my peers.
Eva: We're so lucky, I think to grab Alicia right now. I just want to mention in the midst of all the work that they've been doing this period of really important fundraising, it was such a gift to have their presence and their knowledge in the lab. I think most importantly, I just want to touch upon something that Alicia said about the importance of this shift of money towards direct service, that their work is going to directly fund abortions. In this podcast series, we offer so many blueprints, so many models, so many examples of things that you can do.
A lot of times just pouring money into a problem isn't that thing. We talked about interconnectivity, we talk about building community, we talk about skills. This is one of those moments when pouring money into a problem is the thing. It's not the only thing, but it is the thing. This is a point of mobilization, and I just want to take a moment to say we do need to shift money towards direct service. Right now money towards abortions is key.
Dame: That's so true and poignant. It feels like a through thread through the whole series of building power for transformative change is going to happen in these direct service material resource, mutual aid driven-type entities. We do need folks to contribute their resources is just shifting the prism of where. I think that was one of the frustrations as happens with uprising and black organizations. Or you can go down the list whenever there is this provoking public moment that agitates collective consciousness.
How do we make sure that folks who have the desire to contribute are contributing to the work that's happening on the ground? That's not separate from political change as it sometimes gets categorized as like there's direct service over here and then there's political action and theoretical work that happens over there. It is, we will build the power, we will build the consciousness. We'll understand how to navigate and what type of systems we need to build when we contribute our resources to things that are rooted in communal work and tangibly connect to people's lives and have this mutual aid ethics.
I think that that's a really important takeaway that applies obviously to this moment and this crisis, but to all of the issues that make our people less safe.
Kiss: Yes. The solution isn't that less money gets moved. It's where does the money get moved to.
Dame: What's the ethic behind that?
Kiss: Exactly. Anything else for this peer review? What else jumped out from our conversation with Alicia?
Dame: I was just really moved or provoked by the consequence of the oppositional tactic of not just criminalizing abortions as an act, but particularly criminalizing those who step up and support this type of care. It reminded me of a historical abolitionist parallel that I want to make. We're talking about direct action and this state-to-state navigating law and legislation. There's a lot of parallel between that and the Underground Railroad. We think of abolition as just like of shadow slavery as just like some end result of the Civil War or some advocating.
Then that there was law passed or amendment but it was really a direct action decentralized network that provided housing. That gave people resources to travel that also was a part of the advocacy but then also was persecuted and it was a very precarious ground. It was not just enslaved people that were criminalized. Then the direct action and the support and the Fugitive Slave Act. Then criminalized helping people in need and creating this pathway towards a healthy resource.
I think one, just connecting that historical parallel is important, particularly for us looking through the abolitionist lens, but also should then inspire this work to the point of like grassroots and mutual aid type focuses. It was not big institutions that were, at the forefront of advocating for the end of child slavery. It was this interconnected but decentralized direct resource-driven entity that also took on a lot of risk and a lot of persecution from the state. We have to figure out how to readjust, strategize, protect ourselves, use fugitive strategies.
Figure out how to manipulate going between underground and above ground to be able to make sure that people have what they need.
Kiss: In addition to the historical analogy, it made me think of another area of liberation work right now, which is the types of direct support that are given to people crossing the US-Mexico border and the ways that that type of support is criminalized. Groups like no more deaths for listeners who are curious, who are going out and providing the tangibles of food and water to these guidepost locations throughout the deserts and throughout the spots where people cross.
To see the way the state is trying to not only maintain a militarized border, but is then bringing down the carceral hammer on those participants, on those "helpers". On those people doing that work of keeping people alive through this impossibly and unnecessarily difficult journey. Just in one of the other ways that all the pieces fit together, thinking about the ways that the abortion funds work renders obsolete state borders, the same way that that kind of work works to render obsolete national borders. Of course, that's connected to this larger abolitionist project.
Dame: Yes, mobility just keeps coming up.
Kiss: It's true. Thinking back to the Black Trans Travel Fund also, for sure.
Dame: Yes. Eva, I want to throw it back to you because I think Alicia did a really good job of pointing the interconnections of the focus of this show and of this project. Obviously, this violent trajectory and this attack on bodily autonomy is just wrong and just at large, but I think it could be easy for a lot of folks to miss the connections between carcerality and policing and reproductive access and abortion access. Does Project NIA, Interrupting Crim, like have any frameworks to help people see those connections or those intersections of these realities?
Eva: Oh, do we? Oh boy. I love.
Kiss: What are the odds?
Eva: Pick it up what you all are putting down today, we love history over there too. To our audience who I know that there are so many abolitionists out there who listen to this podcast in particular, this is an organizing point too. This is a place to bring people in. I'm going to quote heavily from one of our recent publications. Our amazing fellow Maria from our Beyond “Do no harm” Project edited and brought people together for this publication called Abortion Decriminalization is part of the larger struggle against policing and criminalization.
Our titles tend to be a little overlong, I see but read this. This is the companion piece to the podcast today. The bullet points that they make in this piece is that if you care about criminalization, then you must care about abortion criminalization and the reverse is true. If we care about reproductive justice, we must divest from the carceral state. I love what Alicia said about all of this work being interconnected and it being nimble, and because we love quotes. I'm going to bring in a quote today. Apologies to Miriam, I didn't have time to dig up one of Miriam's quotes, which I'm sure there are many that apply to this situation.
Kiss: We're allowed to quote other people…with the Bible.
Dame: I'm sure she's happy.
Eva: I'll put a dollar in the quote chat.
[laughter]
There's a quote that I love that many people love from Audre Lorde from the Learning from the '60s speech. Audre Lorde said, "There's no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." I think that comes into play when Alicia's talking about how direct service puts into play all the problems, all the stew of problems that we deal with on our daily lives. I think it comes into play when you think about any type of criminalization.
Abortion criminalization in that way is connected to all of the other types of criminalization that we talk about in this show.
Dame: Yes, that really resonates in talking about just the interconnected or struggle or for folks who see themselves as abolitionists or concern about carceral violence. Like a very common statistic that's been known for the last decade is the fastest growing prison population is Black women. It is clear and obvious that if we are going to project the potential violent futures of carcerality, limits to reproductive access, criminalizing abortion is going to be central to the expansion or the retraction of carcerality in our society.
For folks who need to see those connections that that is really at the forefront of the structural lens, but also what I appreciate about the conversation with Alicia and what the lessons of the direct resource of being actually on the phone, and seeing the spectrum of what people need or people's experience. Also breaking that myth that is traumatizing for everybody, or that is always a place of crisis, but for those who are struggling or who have felt alone or isolated, one thing she named is also the human cultural dynamic of how stigma affects. The notion that we all have a cop inside of us.
One of the things that she named is a small action we can do, is just using the language of abortion, of just talking about it in a way that creates the space and opportunity to reduce stigma. I think sometimes us radicals are really centered on structural change and impact can diminish the softer power of social-cultural dynamics or how just philosophical ideology impacts people's day-to-day lives. To the notion of-- here we go, here comes a Miriam quote of hope being a discipline.
Kiss: It's just true.
Dame: That is one of the practices of how we can become more hopeful is just using the language that affirmation is actually a powerful movement-building tool. I think sometimes we can diminish that as just something soft.
Kiss: Yes. If there's one place to learn that lesson, it's from the use of the word Voldemort and Harry Potter, just fucking say the word, we can't be scared of it.
Dame: [laughs]
Eva: Yes, that's so good. I'm going to regret saying this, so you guys reel me in if this is too far but real talk here. I went to a small liberal arts school in North Carolina. I'm friends with a lot of mid-30-year-old white women.
Kiss: What a confession live on the air.
[laughter]
Eva: A lot of people in my networks, and those aren't the only networks that I have, but a lot of people in my networks, are people who I am not actively trying to recruit into abolition but it might come up in conversation, it might not. When I think about the ways that I can draw that crowd into a conversation about care, about criminalization, about carcerality, reproductive justice is such a good opener. It is very hard to think about abortion criminalization and not think about state complicity and violence against all types of marginalized people.
Dame: Yes, I think that's really significant. It ties to what I was hinting at in the question I asked Alicia about, how do we see this moment radicalizing folks or pushing folks towards disillusionment? I think I saw from positions that I hadn't seen before, a deeper questioning of the judicial branch, of the courts and the court system, of then therefore the state itself. If you can see in real-time, oh, the law isn't explicitly moral. The law isn't even explicitly popular or democratic.
It is a method of control and most of it has been enshrining and perpetuating and expanding oppressive, harmful power. For folks who struggle with abolition, it is usually being illusioned by the reality or validity of the state, which I think for those of us on the other side, see it as invalid. I think this moment is really a provocation of, oh, if you can see in real-time how abortion and reproductive health is criminalized, then you can understand in real-time how vagrancy is criminalized.
How young people gathering is criminalized, how addiction was criminalized. If folks can then now see a dystopian future of folks who have been pregnant and or folks who have provided care for abortion, being incarcerated, or being surveilled, it then gives folks the lens to see those who have already been incarcerated surveilled through a different lens if they did not have access. Or even the heart, to challenge that within themselves. I think that is a really important moment of-- we say it all the time, all of our movements are connected.
All of the issues touch each other, but sometimes it can be hard to see. I think in this moment, in the way that from a black liberatory, abolitionist standpoint, we talk about the 13th Amendment, the fall and overturn of Roe v. Wade, I think is a consciousness shifter that is allowing more space for radically. When we say radical to the root, seeing the whole looking at the structure, if you believed in the mythology of the United States, it is very hard to say that then it should not have the power to enforce its laws.
If you see that its institutions are genocidal entities, it can get closer to, oh, well then maybe this space shouldn't be locking people in cages because this is how they get to that outcome.
Kiss: Just bringing a few more people into the dystopia.
[laughter]
it's one way to do it. It's not the cleanest fuel for a building movement, but it is effective I feel all right. I think we knocked this peer review out of the goddamn park, but listeners, we want to hear from you what stood out from this conversation, what's staying with you, what's moving you toward action? What's radicalized you about this moment, and anything else that you want to share with us, you can reach us on all of our socials, which will give you in a second. Then of course at Millionexperiments@gmail.com. Eva, where can folks find the rest of One Million Experiments as well as all the other work that I see is doing?
Eva People can head on over to millionexperiments.com and I encourage you to follow Interrupting Criminalization also at interruptingcriminalization.org on social, everywhere, and anywhere @interruptcrim but not TikTok yet.
Kiss: That is too big of an ask I think.
[laughter]
If you're a podcast listener and I feel this very strongly, we're doing a lot. Now I have to learn and do and care about TikTok. I'm bordering on a TikTok abolitionist at this point. We just lost all of our ambassadors.
Dame: That's…Yes.
Kiss: We're at AirGo Radio. We are also not on TikTok. You can of course subscribe to our regular, AirGo, A-I-R-G-O wherever you get your podcast We'll be back in the lab next month, sharing and celebrating another experiment in how we build a world without policing in prisons.
Dame: Much love to the people.
Kiss: Peace.