All The Words We Used

In 2022, after the Dobbs decision, every reproductive justice client I worked with was scrambling to form a strategy, to put out ads and content, that would persuade moderate voters to protect abortion access at the state level. I was living in Kansas City at the time, and Kansas had an election coming up that would determine the care me and my friends would be able to receive. Working in progressive politics, I felt steeped in the language of this — repeating words over and over again, hoping they would work. The most common phrase was “with no exception for rape, incest, or the life of the mother.”

This book, All The Words We Used, is about language as data. This records the approved language; this is all the words we used to protect abortion access at the state level in Kansas. This, somehow, worked.