This is not an article about a specific person.

This is an article about the Hyde Amendment.

In 1976, Congress passed the Hyde Amendment as a rider to an appropriations bill. It barred federal dollars from going towards abortion care in any capacity. It was modeled after the Helms Amendment, passed three years earlier, which similarly banned coverage of abortion in U.S. foreign spending. In practice, these two amendments mean that anyone using Medicaid, or insurance they otherwise get from the federal government (like members of the Peace Corps), and people receiving foreign assistance from the United States cannot get coverage for abortion care.

What this means is that pregnant people sometimes die because they cannot afford the procedure.

Rep. Henry Hyde and Senator Jesse Helms are, together, credited with the deaths of uncounted poor people.

Both the Hyde and Helms Amendments have been reauthorized every year by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. This is because, for much of modern politics, the Democratic party was much more willing than it is today to accept anti- and mixed-choice members in its ranks.

“Mixed-Choice” is not a common phrase outside of national reproductive rights organizations. It refers to a position on abortion rights that is most commonly held by Blue Dog Democrats, like Senator Bob Casey, and “moderate” Republicans like Senator Susan Collins or former Senator Mark Kirk. Mixed-Choice politicians are typically opposed to things like total abortion bans and defunding Planned Parenthood, but support things like Hyde and Helms, parental-notification laws, and restrictions on later abortions.

Those who consider themselves “personally opposed to abortion” often fall into this camp. They often pick and choose the easiest positions to hold, and we often reward them for it.

“It’s not like they want to send women to jail for having an abortion.”

What am I supposed to do with that? Call Norwegian Parliament and tell them that we have a last-minute addition to this year’s Nobel laureates? That is the easiest and most uncontroversial position you could possibly hold on this issue, and it means absolutely nothing to me that you are, at base level, not an actual fascist.

This is a problem that has plagued mainstream Democratic politics for years. It shouldn’t be a problem in socialist politics.

Free, unfettered access to abortion is an issue of class justice. Let me lay this out as clearly as I can.

A low-income person finds out that they are pregnant. Most people find out between 5 and 10 weeks gestation, depending on a number of factors, including stress and how regularly they get their period. They decide to terminate the pregnancy, and learn that they will not be able to use their Medicaid to cover the procedure.

Abortion, while extremely safe at any stage, becomes more complicated and more expensive as a pregnancy progresses. For a low-income person, this becomes a compounding problem. The longer it takes to save the money, the more money they will need.

Many states have few or only one abortion clinic. This places a significant burden on rural poor people. In addition to saving the lump sum for the procedure, they have to account for travel to-and-from the clinic. Oh yeah, and most of these same states have a mandatory waiting period, meaning that people either have to take multiple trips, or pay for lodging in the city.

Don’t even get me started on if they accidentally go to a Crisis Pregnancy Center.

If we want to talk about inequality, or health justice, or any sort of radical transformative social policy, we have to start with the Hyde Amendment.

When we start there, we reach the uncomfortable conclusion that the “I’m personally opposed to abortion but publicly pro-choice” line is a lie.

There is nothing “publicly pro-choice” about only denying abortion care to poor people. There is nothing radical or progressive or leftist about only denying abortion care to poor people.

I consider myself very lucky to have been able to do work in many different capacities across this wide field. If I have learned one thing from the breadth of my experience, it’s that you have to be specific.

You can’t take people at their word when they say that they are “publicly pro-choice.” It’s a meaningless term that allows people to slither out of uncomfortable confrontations about their politics.

Remember Hermano Tim Kaine? For an entire Summer, we were fed the line that he was “publicly pro-choice.” That he was a quiet radical, that he cared deeply for the most marginalized of us. Then right after the convention came the kicker: he still supported the Hyde Amendment.

In this movement, labels are meaningless. But the policies speak for themselves. You have to ask people specific questions about what they support.

Do they support the Hyde and Helms Amendments? Do they support parental notification laws? Do they support restrictions on late term abortion?

As a side note, I really didn’t think I had to say this, but you should never, under any circumstances, refer to someone seriously as being “pro-life.” Like, never. Stop giving that term more power. Stop cementing it in the debate.

This just really isn’t hard. We want health justice. We want economic, racial, and gender justice. We cannot have these in a world where policies like Hyde persist.

The Mixed-Choice position may be good enough for Democrats but it cannot be good enough for a better, alternative vision of the future. The victims of Mixed-Choice policy — poor women, young women, trans and nonbinary people, indigenous people and people of color — are not an acceptable tradeoff.

My question is this: why the hell are we still inviting Lena Dunham to events where she has the potential to ruin our collective lives for 2–3 weeks?

I won’t dwell on the time she sexually harassed Odell Beckham Jr. and Michael B. Jordan or her musings on molesting her younger sister. Not because they’re not still relevant to a discussion of why she’s the worst, but because the former is exhausting and the latter, as the older sister of four perfect young girls, makes me want to vomit.

Let’s instead take a closer look at two of her fuckups — her confounding stance on sex workers and her desire for an abortion — and think really, really hard here. Why on EARTH are we still amplifying her voice when it so clearly comes at the expense of other women!?

Ms. Dunham is a vocal opponent of a proposal made by Amnesty International that would decriminalize sex work. The proposal would, among other things, allow sex workers greater opportunities to seek help and protection when abused by clients. While lauded within much of the sex worker community, this proposal just didn’t sit right with Dunham. She takes the position that sex work isn’t real work (a position she shares with feminist icons like George W. Bush), and refuses to listen to actual sex workers who tell her otherwise.

Dunham supports a model of partial criminalization known as “The Swedish Model,” which is not without its proponents. But Dunham didn’t seem to have asked any of them. She could have taken the opportunity to amplify the voices of trafficking victims or even experts, like Vidyamali Samarasinghe, a former professor of mine and a leading expert on trafficking in South Asia, who has argued in favor of The Swedish Model. Instead, she did what Lena Dunham does: categorically denied the voices of those she claimed to represent, and spun all disagreement with her as personal attacks. Here, we see a strategy which is not only rhetorically maddening and unproductive, but serves as a constant fodder-mill for conservative media. Three dominant forms emerge:

1. The “well that’s just my opinion” approach. When faced with criticism, Dunham retreated, calling decriminalization, “something intelligent feminists can disagree on,” effectively silencing the debate. The problem with this is that, for sex workers, decriminalization isn’t something for BKNY feminists to noodle over, it’s their lives.
2. The Pantsuit Nation approach. “It’s not helpful to attack white feminists.” Ah yes, the sisterhood. This is the deflection du jour for said white feminists whenever they’re asked to, you know, stop being racist/homophobic/transphobic/ableist etc. Dunham is uncanny in her ability to invoke some sort of shared, romantic feminist memory as a buttress against any admission of wrongdoing.
3. The Strawman approach. Dunham, like some sort of basement-dwelling Twitter egg, has found her favorite logical fallacy and boy does she use it. Sex workers ask her to please factor in their lived experiences? Strawman. Odell Beckham Jr. doesn’t want to have sex with her? He’s obviously fatphobic. People express concern at the idea of her putting rocks in her baby sister’s vagina? They’re just not being sex-positive. Not only does this strategy completely invalidate anyone’s criticisms of her, it makes it a lot harder to challenge actual biases.

All of these feed directly into the conservative notion that liberals are whiny, self-absorbed babies who can’t hold a conversation, let alone a fruitful debate. They prop Dunham up as a representative figure precisely because she’s so easy to knock down. She is, to the right, what Tomi Lahren or Sarah Palin is to the left. She’s a never ending stream of clicks and shares at the expense of the other side, a veritable gold mine who churns out blunder after blunder for them to transpose onto the rest of us.

I’ve never been a fan of Dunham for that reason. But when she made her myopic and across-the-board offensive comments about abortion, I took it personally. I run a student organization dedicated to ending the stigma around abortion and contraception. Dunham’s comments put us, and many groups like us, in a tough spot. There’s a thin, but clear, line between “I don’t regret my abortion(s)” and “I want to have an abortion.” Not only did she cross it — she left it, smudged and warped, behind for us to clean up. As moderates struggled to refute Dunham’s claims, many used tired, inaccurate, and damaging tropes to do so. They talked about “agonizing, painful decisions” and “difficult, emotionally troubling” abortions. All of it’s bullshit. So let’s break it down:

It’s absolutely true that no one wants to have an abortion. But not because it’s an “agonizing, painful, emotionally-scarring” decision. The vast, vast super-majority of people who’ve had abortions did not regret them or find it a particularly difficult decision. What is agonizing, however, is the actual process of getting an abortion in the United States. Many states have an inadequate number of abortion clinics, or none at all. People may have to drive hundreds of miles to the nearest abortion provider. They may have to wait multiple days to actually have the procedure. They may have to endure threats, harassment, and violence from clinic protesters. All of this means taking days off of work, finding child care for the children they already have, or making excuses for abusive or otherwise non-understanding family. Even if you’re lucky enough to avoid all of these hurdles, abortion is still expensive as hell. I live within walking distance of a pristine abortion clinic in Washington, DC. But I don’t have four-hundred dollars for a medication abortion (Thank god for IUDs). For Dunham, a wealthy white woman, to express her desire to have an abortion is to completely flout the unbelievable obstacles faced worldwide to accessing safe and equitable abortion care. And for what? Her fucking brand? Bite me.

There are plenty — seriously, plenty — of women and people with uteruses out there telling their abortion stories. Ms. Dunham, ostensibly, knows how to use the internet. She could have used her platform to amplify the voices of women like Amanda Williams or Renee Bracy Sherman, women of color who have dedicated so much of their lives to sharing their abortion stories and providing honest, real portrayals of abortion care. Yet petulant, self-aggrandizing White Feminist Lena Dunham decided that her almost-narrative of her almost-abortion was more important than the stories of these women or literally anyone who’s actually had an abortion. But she didn’t just steal their narrative, she gave it back tattered and bruised, marred by her carelessness and disregard for anyone but herself. She left it for them and women like them to clean up after her, to make the case for their humanity in spite of her.

As if that wasn’t enough, she left us a final, steaming Christmas turd, pristinely wrapped and tucked away in our stockings in the form of a quintessential Dunham apology:

“My words were spoken from a sort of ‘delusional girl’ persona I often inhabit.”

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Not only does she absolve herself of any responsibility for her actions, she drops a nice fat deuce on mental health advocates. Merry Christmas, motherfuckers!

I’m not (necessarily) saying we go full-vaudeville and yank her offstage with a sheephook. But, frankly, Lena Dunham just got on the mic and said she wanted to have an abortion IN A YEAR WHERE WOMEN ARE SITTING IN PRISON FOR ATTEMPTING AT-HOME ABORTIONS!!!

Cut the mic, pull the plug on her show, even give her the ole’ hook. I don’t care. Lena Dunham is a fucking cancer on the progressive movement.

However, I must say that something good came out of this. I have never seen more non-partisan cooperation post-election than today as I watched liberals, conservatives, and everyone in between all agree that she was out of line. It’s like the setup to a bad joke: a Hillary supporter, a Trump supporter, a Bernie supporter, and a Johnson supporter all walk into a bar. “Wow, what an untenable, bleating moron,” they say in unison.

“I want pizza. We’re going to Comet.”

I sat down, somewhat begrudgingly, at our patio table under colored lights. After a muggy few days in the district, the air had cooled considerably; the checkered tablecloths dewy as a breeze rustled through the bamboo shoots encircling Comet’s kitschy outdoors.

“Do you want to split an appetizer?” My boyfriend asked casually as he perused the drink list. An innocuous question for most, I knew that this was his way of offering me an olive branch. I took it, and soon we were chatting over roasted cauliflower as the idea of being upset with him became a distant memory. We laughed as a sudden bout of rain forced us to rush our pizzas inside. We fed each other dessert. We mused on the patrons around us. Was that couple on a first date? Was the waitress in my world politics class freshman year? I think so. We held hands as we watched the families around us. Kids in soccer uniforms, teenagers chastised for texting at the table. We shared marinara kisses after he roundly beat me in 4 straight ping pong matches. We sprinted home in the thunderstorm and fell asleep on the couch, our arms wrapped around each other, our love for each other refurbished by pizza and hard ciders.

Comet Pizza is many things. It’s a place for couples to get over dumb fights. It’s a place for the parents of Northwest to take kids after school plays or science fair nights just as much as it’s a place for them to share a bottle of wine on the rare night they can get a sitter. It’s a place for American University students to go over-budget on pizza and beer so they can take photos with the “Guy Fieri Ate Here” logo emblazoned on the storefront. It’s 100% not the epicenter of a goddamn sex trafficking ring forged by Hillary Clinton and John Podesta.

Let’s call #Pizzagate for what it is: a tired and damaging trope that conflates homosexuality with pedophilia. Whether they are school teachers or proprietors of a fucking ping pong-themed pizza restaurant, the homophobic right is so desperate to exclude gay men from society that they invoke child protectionism whenever one veers dangerously close to success in his field. It’s a brilliant strategy, really, because who doesn’t want the best for their children? Against gay men, one allegation is all it takes. For an openly-gay man like James Alefantis, any evidence of “deviation” is more than enough to brand him forever as a child predator.

The problem is that the facts just aren’t there. From the Southern Poverty Law Center:

“According to the American Psychological Association, children are not more likely to be molested by LGBT parents or their LGBT friends or acquaintances. Gregory Herek, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who is one of the nation’s leading researchers on prejudice against sexual minorities, reviewed a series of studies and found no evidence that gay men molest children at higher rates than heterosexual men.”

It’s a careful game of confirmation bias. When Donald Trump admitted on-air to sexually assaulting women, followed by at least 13 allegations of rape, his supporters were unconvinced. The timing seemed too coincidental, the victims too opportunistic. Yet in the court of public opinion, which now flies a flag reading “Make America Great Again,” emails about a handkerchief and an eccentric instagram post were more than enough evidence — the jury was set to hang. When more than a dozen women all said that Donald Trump assaulted them, it was obviously fake. The LameStream Media was reaching, trying to see a story that wasn’t there. But when Alefantis posted a photo of him holding a child while wearing a yellow necklace, it was damning. After all, a yellow necklace is SIMILAR to a yellow bracelet, which, according to urbandictionary.com, SOMETIMES refers to a sex act (even though the primary definition refers to “a hug”). “Chicken” also according to the popular website for 13-year olds to look up their friends’ names, can also refer to anal sex with young boys. Certainly the only reason to refer to it in a restaurant setting, if you ask me. When Donald Trump literally said that he liked to grab women’s’ genitals, an act defined by the Department of Justice as rape, it was “locker room talk,” whatever the fuck that means. When Alefantis made a reference to the once-popular and still-hilarious “What What in the Butt” video, it was all the evidence anyone needed to be 100% sure that he was running an INTERNATIONAL SEX TRAFFICKING RING with John Fucking Podesta and Hillary Goddamn Clinton.

It’s the logical culmination of a campaign year in which literally anything can be true if you say it enough times. When the media wasn’t reporting on #PizzaGate, it was OBVIOUSLY because they were trying to protect Clinton and Podesta’s depraved trysts. When the media was reporting on #PizzaGate, it was OBVIOUSLY because they were trying to discount the incontrovertible evidence outlined by reddit user DeplorableLuvr420 in a series of MS Paint decoupages. When a man entered Comet on Sunday and fired his automatic rifle, it was OBVIOUSLY a false flag by the media to paint the totally-rational #Pizzagate “investigators” as violent. When someone inevitably dies at the hands of this insane fucking conspiracy theory, it will OBVIOUSLY be the fault of Alefantis, the “MSM” and those pulling the “invisible levers of power” in Washington (read: the Jews, somehow).

2016 is the year of the Russell’s Teapot. If you have a twitter account and access to rudimentary photo editing software, you can say literally whatever the fuck you want and the burden is on everyone else to prove you wrong. If you decide that there is a secret sex dungeon under Comet Pizza and James Alefantis does not personally let you take a sledgehammer to his restaurant’s foundation to prove otherwise, you’re correct, and he’s lying.

So here’s my teapot. Donald Trump still hasn’t picked a Secretary of State, despite the fact that pretty much the whole GOP establishment wants it to be Senator Bob Corker (R-TN). So why hasn’t he picked Corker yet? OBVIOUSLY it’s because, for years, Senator Corker has been stealing literal jaguars from the Amazon Rain Forest, starving them, and pitting them against kidnapped street urchins in the basement of the Dirksen Senate Building. That’s right, old-style Gladiatorial combat between homeless youths and hungry jungle cats, right here in the nation’s capital. It makes sense. Why haven’t they renovated Dirksen yet? It looks like shit compared to the other Congressional offices. It’s pretty clearly because the terrace level of the building is devoted to a massive, bipartisan cat-fighting scandal perpetrated by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Look at this picture. Corker shaking hands with the committee’s ranking member, Ben Cardin (D-MD), or the two hedging bets as to who will survive tonight’s feline battle? You decide.

Boom.

You can’t prove me wrong because the assertion I’ve just made is so ridiculous, there’s almost no way to refute it. And I flat-out refuse to be persuaded. It’s brilliant. I’ve invented by own reality, one in which I am free to filter out any sort of information that challenges me. Talk about a bubble, huh.

The Truth About Comet Pizza was originally published in Extra Newsfeed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Wednesdays are my hardest days; I have class from 8:00 to noon, and then I get straight on the bus and head to my internship downtown from 1:00 to 5:30. After about two hours of clutching my lower abdomen, I managed to roll out of bed, spritz my hair with dry shampoo, gargle, and pencil my eyebrows. I threw on a sweater, wool skirt, and my tall boots and was out the door. With each step, I could feel those hammy fists, shaking and grabbing at my flesh as if the Birds had just thrown another interception. I sat through my two classes with my head in my hands, nodding my head through our exam reviews.

“I cannot afford to feel this way right now,” I kept telling myself.

Everyone was telling me I should call a doctor or go to the Emergency Room. And they were right: if you are in so much pain that you cannot walk, you should go to the ER. Except, that’s not really the case when you’re A) a woman and B) your pain is femme-specific. Women just aren’t as believed when they say they’re in pain, especially when it’s emanating from their vaginas. The first time I went to the Emergency Room for an ovarian cyst, they wasted FIVE HOURS scratching their heads and telling me they couldn’t figure out what was wrong because, despite my insistence, they refused to consider that my pain was pelvic. When I finally got an ultrasound, the technician told me he knew cyst rupture could be “uncomfortable,” but that I should try to calm myself down. After an entire night in their care, the staff discharged me with no answers, no recommendations, nothing. When I told my regular doctor that I was having these episodes monthly, where I would wake up in the middle of the night in so much pain that I couldn’t move or speak, she didn’t seem at all concerned.

I knew I needed help, but I couldn’t afford to spend half a day in triage only to come away empty-handed. So I called Planned Parenthood and asked to speak to a nurse. I explained to her my symptoms and that I believed there was an infection causing problems with my IUD. The soonest she could get me in for an exam was the next day.

“Why are you waiting a whole day if you’re in that much pain? You have insurance, just go to the doctor.”

At this point, I knew I was coming off as hysterical. My well-meaning friends and family were just giving me what should be the logical solution to my problem. But I refused to subject myself to the misery and infuriation of not being believed again. So I waited.

In my dream, a man was sitting on me, digging into me with his bony hips, crushing me under his weight. I woke up at 7:43 am on Thursday morning and there was no man, just pressure. I texted my boyfriend again.

“At least you’ll get an answer today.”

I made it through my two classes and again got on the bus, and then the metro, for the hour-long trip to DC’s Florida Avenue neighborhood just on the other side of N. Capitol Street. I had given myself extra time so that I could collect myself and try to relax. I stopped into Union Market and bought a #13 arepa — my usual — adorned with black beans, plantains, and queso fresco. I sat for twenty minutes and watched a new mother try to corral her twin boys back into their car seats. Then I ordered a large Americano and walked out in the rain towards the brand-new clinic.

As I neared, I saw one of those vans with all the gory fetus pictures on it, emblazoned with “Repent!” over and over. I took a deep breath. I deal with these kinds of men all the time, yet it never gets easier. One told me he would pray for the baby I was killing, another was already praying. They droned on about their disgust that this particular Planned Parenthood neighbored a school. The irony of them holding banners of disemboweled (albeit fake) fetuses in front of said school was not lost on me.

I made it inside and was greeted by a rush of warmth. Even the security guard was a beautiful woman, welcoming me and complimenting my nails. The lobby was immaculate yet cozy, like the leasing office of an apartment building I could never afford to live in. I wanted to come back with my laptop and a dirty chai and do my homework or instagram a picture of my breakfast. Framed outlines of condoms and IUDs lined the walls, with stone details and a yellow accent wall. I was tempted to ask for their decorator’s card.

Within minutes of my arrival I was in an exam room as a nurse took my temperature and asked me intake questions, cooing at my visible pain like she would if I were her own child.

Before my Americano had even gotten cold I was receiving the pelvic exam I was so sure I needed. My doctor, who had not once doubted me, confirmed what I had thought. A previous infection had not totally cleared up, and had now traveled further into my vagina. She assured me that she understood just how much pain I was in, and thanked me for coming in so soon. She lamented that many women delay reporting their pain, often leading to more serious complications. Infections like mine, unchecked, can cause scarring of the uterus and Fallopian tubes, often necessitating surgery. Luckily, I was not at that point, and because I was able to get the care I needed quickly, I should be fine with a strong course of antibiotics and a follow-up next week.

I probably could have gotten the same answer in the ER, but it would not have been worth the hours, the frustration, or the copay. The staff at Planned Parenthood trusted my instincts and respected me enough to believe my pain. The care I received was warm and deeply personal, without feeling casual or unprofessional. I had arrived at 3:15 and by 4:30 I was already leaving with a treatment plan in hand — and pain medication, which no doctor has ever even so much as offered me for a similar complaint before.

I have great insurance. I live in a large city with great hospitals and doctors a short uber ride from my apartment. But I’ll be schlepping on the Red Line all the way to NoMa-Gallaudet from now on for anything that concerns my vagina. Hell, I’ll go to one of the locations in Maryland before I ever go to a general practitioner again for femme-pain. Being believed is worth it.

Why I Chose Planned Parenthood Over the ER was originally published in Healthcare in America on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.