Some news: From this writing until after Yom Kippur (September 21), this Substack will come out every other week. If there are any abortion-stigma related emergencies/news, I’ll report in a timely fashion.
This week: abortion access in the Midwest, underneath Carmen de Monteflore’s “Four Women,” at the Whitney Biennial.
As of late July, abortion seekers in the Midwest have another option when it comes to receiving abortion care, when Springfield, Missouri’s Planned Parenthood began offering the abortion pill (but not procedural abortions). Before this, southwest Missouri had had no abortion provider since 2005.
The folks who receive care at the Springfield clinic also have a wider range of options when it comes to pain management post procedures such as IUD implantation, screenings, biopsies, and more, sedation via IV is now available (although at clinics in other parts of the state, your options include local anesthetic via injection, and oral prescription medication, as well as sedation). In 2025, ACOG released updated recommendations regarding pain management, responding to the CDC’s call for health care professional to do more to help patients cope with the pain of IUD insertion.
Women’s experiences with pain are often dismissed or downplayed, especially the pain of Black women, and so providing more and better options for pain is progress. And at the same time, there is a persisting idea that pain incurred for purposes of obtaining abortion and/or birth control is somehow deserved. Ibuprofen should be enough to counter the pain of getting an IUD put in, and if it’s not, maybe she’s exaggerating, maybe she’s looking for attention, or maybe she is in terrible pain, and that’s okay, because if she’s going to thwart motherhood, she should hurt, as a reminder of shirking her responsibilities. It’s harder to fight back when you’re in pain, it’s hard to do anything, and so if we’re not hurting, if we’re free in our bodies, if we’re healthy, we’re in control, we’re dangerous.
Action item: Have you had pain management experiences when it comes to reproductive health? Were your concerns heard? Were they dismissed? If you didn’t bring them to your provider, consider why. If you’ve had positive experiences, what did that look like? Have you shared these experiences with anyone? Would you? If not, why?
Next time: TBD.