beckeramanda

You Must Stand Up by Amanda Becker is an excellent account of the period immediately after the Dobbs decision while also showing how we got there and how we feel about it.

I want to start by commenting on another review I saw and clarify what I am afraid some people may take from it. The reviewer loved the book largely because it is an excellent example of data journalism. And I agree. She also mentioned the book's focus on statistics, which is also a valid point but, I'm afraid, could be show more misinterpreted. I am worried that some may read that and think this is a book of statistics. It isn't. This is data journalism, which means using data but, as journalism must do to be effective, telling a story (or stories). The strength of this book is how the data, the statistics both medical and demographic, serve to enhance the stories of those trying to provide valuable healthcare while resisting the faction of the population, and government, that cares more about asserting their personal ideology on everyone else rather than letting medical professionals make medical decisions. So if the idea of a book full of statistics sounds dull to you, don't worry, this book isn't like that. It offers the data to support the journalism and the journalism to personalize the data.

While this is about those fighting the battles for reproductive freedom and body autonomy, this is also about the country as a whole and where the people largely stand on the issues. And this is not, within the larger picture, a single monolithic issue. For many of us who have protested and done what we could (for me, dating all the way back to the time of Roe) it is several issues that together make up a larger issue, but for many it is strictly some specific aspect, some specific issue. Maybe someone who mostly just believes in more exceptions to a softer ban can't abide by the draconian measures currently being employed is side-by-side with those who believe every potential childbearing individual should have the right to decide for themselves whether to carry or not. Then there are those who believe, against science, that a human life has begun when conception occurs, even against a long history within their own so-called religion (life used to start, for them, when "life was breathed into them").

You can read this as a current affairs book to better understand where we are and why we're here. You can read it more like a history book even though a lot is very recent history. Or you can read it as a call to action using the information given to better prepare counter movements and an informed activism.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less

You Must Stand Up is journalist Amanda Becker’s almost real-time account of the impact of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision. It begins with the Court’s release of its decision and follows several leaders who fought back and figured out ways to offer women healthcare in the aftermath of the decision.

This is Becker’s first book. Currently a journalist with The 19th, she has “been on the beat” for almost 20 years working for Reuters and other news groups covering presidential show more and congressional elections, Congress and the Supreme Court. She writes in the Author’s Note at the beginning of the book that as she scanned the draft decision for Dobbs (that had been leaked in May) she knew that the seismic change the pending decision would unleash would be “the most important story I’d ever cover as a journalist”.

Over the course of the next year her book takes us across the country as she relates stories from Colorado, Alabama, Maryland, Arizona, Louisiana, Kentucky and elsewhere. Her stories show people fighting to protect their rights, how they learned to adapt, and the hardships they faced because of Dobbs. There are setbacks and quiet victories.

On the one-year anniversary of Roe, Becker takes us to a rally of antiabortion groups at the nation’s capital. The rally headliner was Republican former Vice President Mike Pence. He told the group that “we’ve not come to the end of this cause”, but rather “the end of the beginning”. These groups were trying to work out where to go and what to do next, and “fetal personhood” was a goal they all shared.

Fetal personhood is the idea that a fetus, from the moment of conception, is a person with full legal rights. This idea also applies to fertilized eggs that are a result of in-vitro fertilization (IVF), some proportion of which remain frozen in storage at fertility clinics and may or may not ever be called for.

Mary Ziegler, abortion law historian, is quoted in the book as telling the Guardian newspaper that fetal personhood “has the potential to establish that abortion is always illegal and potentially to expose women to punishment…” The potential for criminalizing bad pregnancy outcomes like miscarriages and still births would be very real in a world where fetal personhood was the standard at law.

At the end of the first year of Dobbs Becker concludes that the way forward in the fight for abortion and reproductive rights will be long and hard. We could well be in for a multiyear fight that may require amending the Constitution. At the least, Dobbs will become a litmus test for future Supreme Court nomination hearings, just as Roe was for close to 50 years.

You Must Stand Up nationwide story looking at the impact of Dobbs in its first year. Well-researched and compact, this book is a worthwhile survey of the post Dobbs fight for reproductive rights, a fight which may take many years before we get back to the set of rights enjoyed under Roe v. Wade.

NOTE: I read an advanced reviewer’s copy of the book provided by NetGalley and the publisher, Bloomsbury. show less