Ya’ll,
The last week has been horrific, though not surprising, to watch unfold. It has left me feeling adrift.
In the coming days and weeks, The Agenda. will be releasing a transparency report, information on our privacy guides, and our plan of action, but before that comes out I wanted to connect with you.
I am coming to you as a Mother, Daughter, CEO, and human and this just freaking sucks. There is no way around it. Overturning Roe is a personal affront to our personhood, autonomy, and freedom. Under impending state abortion laws, folks with uteruses will have less say over their anatomy than the deceased (after all you cannot take organs from a dead person without their premortem consent).
Just putting these words on a page makes me want to SCREAM, cry, and quit. This feels like a bridge too far to cross. As I look at crisis after crisis that we have had to face in the last decade, it feels untenable. It feels hopeless.
The strategy of those who seek to take our rights from us ranges from hoping to make us give up, to fighting each other, and laying down our hope. They are banking on our exhaustion. They are playing to our fear and turning the notch up on hateful rhetoric. It is intentional.
What they forget is that we are the ones who survived.
We are the descendants who didn’t ask for permission and used nature, and the collective wisdom to “bring back” our own periods when things were “out of sync”. We have tools now to track and understand our own fertility for the benefit of ourselves. We get to plan our families, our careers, and our lives and do not seek anyone’s PERMISSION.
The internet and current technology can connect us and allow us to support each other in ways that the original survivors could never have imagined. We can turn the tide. In these dark moments where isolation feels like an appropriate response to this violence, I invite you into the community. Join us as we build a longer table and help spread resources and education to everyone who needs it. Lean in even though everything might be telling you to lean away. Take the time you need to rage and weep, but then join us as we build something new.
Alyx Coble-Frakes
CEO, The Agenda.