You Must Stand Up: The Fight for Abortion Rights in Post-Dobbs America by Amanda Becker talks about the immediate responses following the Supreme Court’s decision against legal abortion. The book shows how different people attempted to address the challenges of access to legal and safe abortions, from individual citizens turning out to vote in smaller election, to organizers and medical professionals.
Good nonfiction can be successful because to helps to document and contextualize critical moments. This book is timely, describing current events and highlighting themes for current readers. And it’s also for the future — I know it will be cited as a useful contemporary source by future historians writing about these WTF years in the US.
You Must Stand Up came out just before the third Trump election, which points to even more threats to reproductive freedom.
Winx Health, which offers the emergency-contraceptive pill Restart, said bulk orders went up by 9,600 percent in the week after the election. Other women told me they were moving up their appointments for hormonal-contraceptive implants. Planned Parenthood said in a statement that nationwide appointments for IUDs increased by 760 percent the day following the election, and appointments for birth-control implants rose 350 percent.
Rushing to the Doctor Before Trump 2.0 — TheCut
You Must Stand Up also touches on the broader struggles around access to contraception and reproductive care. State laws limiting contraceptive access, combined with the closure of clinics, leave more and more people unable to obtain birth control and emergency contraception. (And wouldn’t easy access to quality birth control decrease the need for abortions?) Barriers to women’s health care disproportionately affect already marginalized communities, too. My highlighting these challenges, the book underscores how the fight for abortion rights is deeply connected to the broader struggle for equitable healthcare access.
So, I agree that good documentation is important, both to make a pro-choice point now and for future generations of researchers looking at how we late-empire Americans responded. But I still have to admit I found parts of the book a bit slow, and caught myself skimming a few times.
For readers looking to better understand the fight for abortion access, this is a clear and non-sensationalized account of individuals working to do what they can.
Thanks for the reference book. I am old enough to barely remember the time before Roe v Wade. Older people, men and women, have told me how dismal it was to seek chancy illegal services in the middle of the night, knocking on a door at the dark end of the street. It stunned me that not enough young people voted to stop the reactionaries. I say to them with horror – quite likely, it’s your funeral.