New Yorker prioritizes abortion over reproductive justice (Yeni Alvarez)

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Transcript:

Okay, The New Yorker published “Did an Abortion Ban Cost a Young Texas Woman Her Life?” They published this in January of 2024. I didn’t have time to make content on it when it came out, but it has bothered me so many times since then, I just decided to do it now. This is the story of Yeni Alvarez. She died at 31-weeks pregnant in rural Texas, and The New Yorker spends 59 paragraphs trying to argue that this was primarily or largely because of Texas’ abortion ban.

That’s a pretty bizarre claim to make because it’s clear throughout the entire narrative that Yeni very much wanted her daughter Selene. In fact, if you make it to paragraph 58 of a 59-paragraph article, they talk about how Yeni told her mother Leticia that if a doctor had to choose between saving her or saving her daughter, that her daughter should be prioritized. So, to be super clear, Yeni said that even if she would die, she wanted her daughter to live.

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Yeah, The New Yorker tries to take this particular story and make it about how if she had just known that she should have gotten a life-saving abortion, she would’ve aborted, but nobody told her because everyone in Texas is afraid of life-saving abortions, which requires like three or four layers of assumptions that don’t bear out.

Yeni had hypertension, diabetes, and a history of pulmonary edema, and she knew from seven-weeks onward that she was having ongoing problems with breathing and with high blood pressure. Doctors told her if she doesn’t get these kinds of things under control, she’d be at the risk of heart attack or stroke, yet the same article tries to argue later that no doctors really informed Yeni of the danger she was in.In fact, the doctors told her that they thought she should be hospitalized for hypertension, but she couldn’t afford to take off work and she didn’t have insurance, so it was a major economic problem.

She also lived in a rural part of Texas where the local hospital wasn’t really equipped for any kind of complicated obstetric care, and they talk about this being a problem with lots of women with their pregnancies regardless of abortion laws.

[Read more – Nevaeh Crain’s family says her death is being used for politics]

Yeni got so frustrated with repeated doctor visits and hospital visits without much change that she eventually just quit responding or going to see them when she was having problems, and her problems got worse. She also had medication for hypertension and The New Yorker documents more than one time where she wasn’t taking the correct dosage or wasn’t taking it regularly. She said the side effects from it made it harder for her to work.

This woman very much wanted and loved her unborn daughter. She died because she lacked the proper economic and healthcare support for a safe pregnancy. These are serious problems, in Texas and in other parts of the country. The United States’ unusually high maternal mortality rate for a first-world country is a serious problem.

But abortion advocates don’t care about addressing the actual factors that are making this a problem. If you read Yeni’s story, it’s about things like having better access to health insurance and having better access to high-quality healthcare in rural areas. Instead, they see a low-income woman, undocumented, uninsured, who very much wants her baby, and they rework her story after her death to be mostly about advocating for abortion.

If your first thought when you see low-income women who need more help with their wanted, loved children is to try to say they should all be getting abortions, you’re not advocating for reproductive justice. You’re just advocating for abortion.

Tweet thread:

(Originally posted January 2024 on X here.)

Yeni needed better economic & healthcare options, not abortion. She died without those options, and you exploit her death to push more abortion. This woman wanted her daughter’s life prioritized, but you don’t care what she wanted. You care about abortion.

Keep in mind somewhere between a third and half of women in the US oppose abortion. This isn’t just a preference; it’s often a deeply held foundational worldview. We see abortion as the exploitation and lethal destruction of our children, as a grievous horrific violation.

Women who oppose abortion are often ignored and erased or, if acknowledged, we’re treated as foolish, stupid, weak, servile, or self-hating. It is not lost on us that the crowd that has dubbed themselves “pro-woman” alternately ignores or despises millions of women who disagree.

So it’s not surprising that the same crowd would care not at all about whether a given individual woman would have wanted her death—from a wanted pregnancy with a daughter she already loved and strived to protect—to be used to advocate for abortion.

The side that barely remembers or acknowledges women who revile abortion, the side that can’t wrap their minds around why offering (or repeatedly offering) abortion to us would be anathema, can’t consider the possibility that a mother who died might not agree with their advocacy.

You’ve dubbed yourselves the saviors of women, whether we like it or not. You are blind.

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