Some nice news: My Lilith piece on fighting for abortion access won an Honorable Mention at the 2026 Rockower Awards in the category of Excellence in Writing about Social Justice and Humanitarian Work.
This week: I am 100% not going to make this into a newsletter in which I summarize TikTok trends about abortion. However, there are some important conversations going on over there that are relevant to our interests, so let’s take a look, after this photo of Tiffany glass from the Met.
Conversation 1: Your Pets
I found this video about cat abortion, something that has crossed my cat-obsessed brain more than once. This creator talks about the importance of aborting fetuses in pregnant cats, followed by spaying them. It seems like a no-brainer, but it turns out there are vets in private practice who have ethical and moral objections to performing not only abortions on cats, but also spaying them. (Here’s a truly bananas Reddit post about one experience.) The conversation about feline reproductive health, believe it or not, involves some of the same questions as the ones about humans: What will the quality of life of the offspring be? What about the health and life of the mother? If this is relevant to you (it likely also applies to the dog owners among us), be sure you’re checking out your vet’s policy about spaying and neutering.
Conversation 2: Not Eugenics
This is part of a much longer conversation, so let’s start. There’s a creator I had not heard of named Jesse Ridgway who posts about his life on YouTube, and recently he revealed that he and his wife, Ashley, had decided to terminate her pregnancy after learning that the fetus had the chromosomal abnormality Trisomy 21, indicating that it would be born with Down Syndrome. It’s probably no necessary to say that when this video was posted, people lost their minds, declaring that this decision was an example of eugenics. Fortunately, others came forward to do the Lord’s work, explaining why, in fact, it is not. Anti-choice folks love to label abortion as eugenics, although it’s doubtful that they’d ever actually acknowledge something that is actually eugenics. (Watch the video below, and also this one, which Substack wouldn’t let me embed.)
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Action items: What are you noticing on social media regarding abortion? Did either of these videos surprise you with the POV expressed? Consider if you were ruffled by their content and why.
Next time: Eugenics? Maybe?
Congratulations on the award!