Migration is not just happening across national borders; it is also a risky move forced on women within the United States. I am referring to migratory practice related to the need to have an abortion that some women face. In an assessment published at the beginning of 2018, The Guttmacher Institute, a leading research and policy organization committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights in the United States and globally, stated that “After new restrictions enacted in 2017, 29 states have adopted enough abortion restrictions to be considered either hostile (6 states) or extremely hostile (23 states) to abortion rights.” To put that in perspective, “58% of American women of reproductive age lived in a state considered either hostile or extremely hostile to abortion rights in 2017. Only 30% of women lived in a state supportive of abortion rights.” This is just one of several reasons that it could be useful to start looking at this rather broad issue through a feminist lens.
Issues surrounding reproductive rights has been the topic of numerous films, both fictional and documentary. Most, such as Tony Kaye’s Lake of Fire, or Dawn Porter’s Trapped, explore the politics and polar opposite views of the pro-choice and pro-life arguments. In recent years, though, there has been more and more discussion in the media about the actual physical barriers to getting an abortion in the U.S., where it is technically legal. One of the major barriers, and one that is highlighted in The Guttmacher Institute’s assessment, is distance. In rural areas of states such as Montana, Texas, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas, women are forced to travel close to 200 miles for abortion services. This trip is also not a simple trip to and from the clinic either, since most clinics require multiple visits, and do not provide an abortion until a certain amount of hours or days have passed.
Migration across state borders happens for many different reasons, but it is frequently necessary, often because an individual or group is in danger or is in need of resources that are not available to them at home. Abortion services can and should be looked at as a medical resource. Lucia Before and After is a short film, produced by the women-centered digital-media platform, Refinery29, and written and directed by Anu Valia. In the short, the cash-strapped protagonist goes on a road-trip to get an abortion. The film is not particularly dramatic. There is a slowness to it, that makes perfect sense, considering the landscape that Lucia is traveling across, the waiting that she must endure in order to have her procedure, and most importantly the internalized processing that she is doing throughout.
The film was first released in January of 2017, and it is unsurprising that Refinery29 would commission a fiction film to live online and facilitate discussion about reproductive rights. In so many ways, the internet has enabled and encouraged fiction as a meaningful method of handling tough and timely subject matter. So much of the forward momentum of American culture can be connected to media, and to fictional media at that. A compelling fictional narrative has the ability to connect with a wider audience, more so than non-fiction or news media. Sure, Lucia Before and After is not providing facts or statistics, but it is asking viewers to relate or sympathize. People in middle America, who identify as pro-life, may not relate to pro-choice values but they might sympathize with Lucia’s economic situation. Perhaps they have had to travel long distances and endure uncomfortable or dehumanizing situations in order to obtain other types of resources.
As the title suggests, Leah Galant and Maya Cueva’s Texas-based The Traveling Abortion Doctor is about the same medical resource-driven migration, but in Texas both patient and provider are traveling long distances. The film was released less than year after Lucia, in December 2017, and it focuses on Dr. Shannon Carr. Carr flies from New Mexico to Texas every week in order to provide abortions in a state that is, in the words of Dr. Carr, “so hostile and so cumbersome in their laws.”
The film starts with Carr leaving New Mexico, to go where her work is needed most. And in the film we see Carr explaining to patients the complicated web of laws that keep patients from choosing options that are the simplest, most economical, least emotionally and physically invasive options. For example, there is a moment when she must explain that even though it is medically proven to be safe and effective for patients to opt for the abortion pill up to 10 weeks into a pregnancy, the state of Texas puts a cap at 8. Therefore, the doctor is legally obligated to unnecessarily perform a more complicated and invasive procedure.
There are moments where Dr. Carr asks if the patients have anyone with them, and like Lucia in the Refinery29 film, they are alone. More abortion clinics have reopened since this film was made, but at the time of filming, Carr was working at one of just seven clinics. So, it can be assumed that these women were traveling far for this service, and were doing so for survival. In one scene, Carr is seen having a phone conversation with a patient named Stacy, who is about to travel about 150 miles for her procedure. Later in the film, the viewer is given access to Stacy’s journey. She talks at length about her personal circumstances and reasons for choosing abortion, as she drives across a desert landscape. Maya Cueva, one of the filmmakers, also has a podcast, with an episode devoted to the abortion debate in Texas. In that episode she explains that there is even an 1800 square mile region in the Rio Grande Valley that has just one clinic. So, Stacy’s journey is likely quite common.
The viewer is given access to Stacy’s journey, and she talks at length about her personal circumstances and 
reason for choosing to have an abortion, as she travels across a desert landscape.
About halfway through The Traveling Abortion Doctor, we also meet Lorena Karpen, the owner of a Texas clinic that was forced to close due to the new regulations. She talks about the women who are non-English speakers, that often don’t have drivers’ licenses, who show up for an abortion, thinking that the clinic is still open, only to be told that abortions cannot be provided anymore. She describes the chaos after the laws went into effect, where providers scrambled to find a clinic to transfer their patients to. She also mentions the unsafe, illegal abortion options that populations like the one that Karpen served will be forced to take, because they simply cannot make the trek to a legitimate provider.
Wiping out this important healthcare resource is forcing women to sit with their feelings and thoughts for extended periods of time. Making someone wait 24 hours to have a procedure is one thing, but forcing them to travel half a day in one direction as well seems excessive. Maybe that is the point, though. Maybe those who created these TRAP laws mean to force introspection on patients. What they aren’t counting on, though, is that abortion procedures are an essential resource, and women will travel for them or worse, they will seek unsafe alternatives. Lucia Before and After and The Traveling Abortion Doctor both make one wonder if the purpose of these laws, of making this so difficult, is just to inflict whatever kind of pain they can on women. This may be obvious, but women don’t make these decisions lightly. Forcing them to sit with the decision an extra couple days isn’t ever going to be effective at stopping abortions. Those who don’t have the ability to get to one of the seven clinics in Texas, whether it is because of the money or the distance, are likely the ones who need this option the most.
There are no hierarchies of oppression . . . Audre Lorde
Two news reports appeared recently — one in The Washington Post (March 1, 2018)1 and the other in The New York Times (March 4, 2018)2 — with the headline in the former: “Questions linger about how Melania Trump, a Slovenian model, scored the ‘Einstein visa.’” Three days after, The New York Times published a follow-up, quoting directly the Post’s story and featuring the headline “Did Melania Trump merit an ‘Einstein visa’? Probably, immigration lawyers say.” There, the process of getting the EB-1 visa for groundbreaking work in a specific field was dissected to reveal that Ms. Trump might have won it fair and square due to her prominent and profitable modeling career.
The investigation made by The Post was legitimate and relevant. Due to Melania’s status as a public figure and the necessity to discuss her husband’s hypocritical immigration policies, it is important for the public to know how she got to the United States. However, the way The Post chose to do it shows a problem that evokes two different oppressed identities Ms. Trump has to deal with: she is not only an immigrant, she is also a woman. As Audre Lorde famously said, there are no hierarchies of oppression. All discourses of dominance are intertwined and should always be seen as such. The attacks on Ms. Trump are simultaneously an attack on women, who are constantly deemed as incapable of taking care of their own lives (so what if she is a model?), and on immigrants who are portrayed as a mischievous, ambitious “other.”
There are at least 25 books in American literature, ranging from Mariana Zapata’s “The Wall of Winnipeg and Me” to Billy London’s “Kissing the Canvas,” and twenty high-ranging audiovisual narratives about an immigrant marrying a citizen for a green card. In all of those, the immigrant’s initiative comes from a place of despair that eventually develops into marriage – sometimes, they even trick their spouses into proposing!
Whenever a Washington Post reporter decides to tell a story about the second non-US born first lady (and may there be many more), it is a very political choice to infer that she tricked the system because of who she is and not based on evidence against her. Despite showing additional research during the story, the clickbait title of the news points at a damaging image that affects immigrant women far beyond Ms. Trump. Whoever laughs at Melania Trump’s status and how she really did everything for a green card dehumanizes all immigrants, in all situations, and could be quick to think someone they know did the same.
What I’m discussing here is not Trump himself, or the events behind Ms. Trump citizenship process, but the hypocritical attitude of groups mobilized for democracy who do not take into consideration the psychosocial consequences of talking bluntly of members of groups they apparently defend. An Immigrant is also a daughter or son, a friend, a brother or sister, a professional, and assumptions of guilt can affect these relationships.
Below the Washington Post’s logo lies, as recently as February 21st, the phrase “Democracy dies in darkness.” If democracy lives in light, it is a media maker’s responsibility to bring a range of narratives to the surface, especially when it comes to a targeted minority such as immigrants.There are cases of marriage fraud and of manipulation of innocent Americans, for sure, but they do not compare to the number of beautiful love stories the majority of immigrants and non-immigrants have to tell.
Every case should be looked at closely and carefully and even those who committed a crime in the eyes of the law should be heard – for every time someone risks everything to move away from their home, it is a testament that that system failed. Our will to punish a person should not be bigger than the will to, in the most human way, understand why they did it.
When media portray, through fiction or non-fiction, the immigrant as one desperate “alien,” someone gives a one-dimensional view of the immigrant experience, and most times they will not hesitate to use other stereotypes to maintain such concepts. Cases like Ms. Trump’s convey the idea that a citizenship status relies on a woman’s partner and it is a tale of misogyny and xenophobia walking hand in hand. Irresponsible coverage like the initial response of the Washington Post are a positive reinforcement of most fiction that has been written about immigrants. Both of them are part of the sub romcom genre of “green card romances” and should follow the recent flow of classic romantic comedies. If it does not reinvent itself, it really should just die.
Something can be categorized as systemic when it is an inescapable encounter. It affects a social body generally, even – and especially – if certain parts of the system do not notice its presence. A society is a system, and something is socially systemic when it invades both private and public spheres of life. The non-place of immigrants consists of persistent inescapable encounters. It resides even in the most intimate of territories, as a shadow – a weight that can hunt you even when it seems that there is nothing to carry.
From friends and non-friends, movies, tv shows and the internet, the idea that it is trivial for a non-citizen to do anything, including entering into a relationship, for the sake of gaining US citizenship is a common imaginary with concrete consequences. The scenes that play in most people’s heads when marriage to immigrants is the topic reveal aspects of systemic oppression against foreigners that are reinforced by media daily and have been centralized lately in Melania Trump’s case.
Ms. Trump is the second first-lady born outside of the United States, marrying just 208 years after London-born Louisa Adams, wife of sixth U.S. president John Quincy Adams. Just as in the case of her predecessor, Melania’s relationship to the president is constantly questioned and publicized. In Ms. Trump’s case, her independence and ability to make her own life choices is frequently underestimated and the mere suggestion that she participated in a scam to get the “Einstein visa” was accepted as fact by the public faster than you can say “green card.”
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/questions-linger- about-how- melania- trump-a- slovenian-model- scored-the- einstein-visa/2018/02/28/d307ddb2- 1b35- 11e8-ae5a- 16e60e4605f3_story.html?utm_term=.7f45bd085acc
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/us/melania-trump- einstein-visa.html *Photo by U.S. Army Sgt. Kalie Jones