Everyday Practices,Unaffordable Rights,Radical Liberation: Reproductive Justice Direct Service Activism

Abstract

In post-Roe America, access to reproductive care is rapidly dwindling, with the criminalization of abortion on the rise. Yet, in these frustrating and perilous times, organizations, activists, and volunteers facilitate access to care every day via digital direct service activism. This article is a meditation on the transformational nature of direct service praxis in the contemporary reproductive justice movement. To document my own ongoing transformation, I include autoethnographic reflections on my experiences as a direct service volunteer from August 2021 to December 2022. Practices such as distributing abortion funding and peer counseling on an anonymous talkline have transformed my understanding and experience of liberation work. I want to draw attention to these quiet actions and exchanges that often go unnoticed in our loud, neoliberal capitalist context. These communions of care and connection help forge the future now, in small, radical, and tangible ways.

This article is a call for additional scholarship about everyday, digital, direct service practices in the contemporary reproductive justice (RJ) movement. As abortion and other reproductive health services become more difficult or dangerous to access, direct service activism is playing an increasingly central role. There is a long history of direct service activism in the RJ movement (Drovetta, 2015; McReynolds-Pérez, 2017; Poirot, 2014; Silliman et al., 2004). Yet, beyond popularly celebrated examples like the Janes, ¹ many of these practices are obscured by the shadows of grander narratives.

In a time where social media and neoliberal capitalism ask us to be visible and loud, there are quiet or unnoticed technological practices that directly facilitate access to reproductive human rights every day. Beckerman (2022) argues the platform domination of our lives means, beyond engagement with social media, “we’ve stopped thinking of any other means through which the world can be changed” (p. 9). However, the everyday, direct service practices I reflect on in this article utilize personal technologies in discreet, nimble ways that help “carve a path beyond our current cacophony” toward something that feels closer to liberation (Beckerman, 2022, p. 271).

brown (2017) says we will “grow the future through relatively simple interactions” (p. 11). The practices I have witnessed, learned from, participated in, and write about in this article represent this kind of interaction. Repeated over and over, these everyday practices constitute what brown (2017) calls a fractal, or the repetition of a “simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop,” which establishes a larger pattern of systemic change (p. 25).

In this article, I hope to draw attention to the granular to understand the grand. I argue for the radical possibilities of direct service activism. I begin with an excerpt from autoethnographic reflection. Next, I discuss abortion criminalization in post-Roe America, and the significance of everyday, direct service RJ practices in this context. Then, I return to autoethnographic reflection about my experiences using personal technologies to participate in everyday and unobserved, yet radical and transformational, direct service in the RJ movement.

March 10, 2022, Starting My Shift, “I Call a Voicemail Box.”

I give my face a half-assed massage with my left hand while my right clings to my phone. I want to look away, but I don’t want to miss anything. There is so much to know, so many stories to track, a shifting legal landscape to memorize.

I read, frantically tapping from tab to link to tweet to news story. I have been sitting on my phone for a while. I consumed NPR’s home page, New York Times stories, anything my algorithm fed me. There is dwindling abortion access, increasing maternal mortality, a formula shortage—nonstop obstacles, endless pain.

My eyes flick up to the time in the corner of the screen. I notice I’m nearing the hour mark. I begin to swipe away my dozens of internet tabs. I go to my settings, disabling various notifications while turning others on. I swipe up and back to my home screen, lock the phone, and stretch in my chair.

I step into my sandals and walk from the living room to the kitchen, setting my phone on the dining table. I pull my laptop towards me and hit power, waiting for the whirring noise to signal life. The screen lights up. I log in and open an internet browser. I walk to the sink to fill a glass of water from the tap. I sit down, take a few gulps, drag the laptop closer, and open the “call log” bookmarked tab.

I pick up the phone and see it’s one minute past the hour. I call a voicemail box. “You have three new messages. To listen to new messages, press . . .”

The Ongoing Criminalization of Abortion

As digital networks of RJ organizers, activists, and volunteers work tirelessly to help people understand and access reproductive care, abortion criminalization is on the rise in the United States. Huss et al. (2022) found that in the United States, from 2000 to 2020, there were “61 cases of people criminally investigated or arrested for allegedly ending their own pregnancy or helping someone else do so” (p. 2). That is three cases per year, which disproportionately affected people of color and those living below the poverty line (Huss et al., 2022, p. 3). From 2006 to 2020, the U.S. National Advocates for Pregnant Women (2021) also counted 1,331 criminal cases “in which being pregnant was a necessary element of the crime” (para. 2). That is an additional 95 criminal cases per year.

More recently, I was living in Texas when SB 8 went into effect on September 1, 2021. SB 8 was the nation’s most restrictive and successful anti-abortion bill at the time, enabling private citizens to “sue abortion providers and anyone involved in aiding or abetting an abortion” after six weeks of pregnancy (Bohra, 2021, para. 4). With SB 8 in effect, Lizelle Herrera was arrested in April 2022 in south Texas and charged with murder for a “self-induced abortion” before the charges were dropped two days later (Kitchener et al., 2022, para. 1). Four months later, in August 2022, after Roe fell, Jessica Burgess and her teenage daughter were criminally charged in Nebraska for ending her daughter’s pregnancy through the use of pills. Facebook messages in which Jessica gave her daughter instructions on how to take the pills were used as evidence in court (Associated Press, 2022, para. 3).

While organizations scramble to provide abortion access across a patchwork of state-level rights in post-Roe America, abortion criminalization is poised to spread further. For example, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) published a “Post-Roe Model Abortion Law,” which is intended as a template for states to adopt. The model law criminalizes any actions “aiding or abetting an illegal abortion,” including “giving instructions,” hosting a website that “encourages or facilitates” abortion, or providing referrals for abortion resources (Bopp et al., 2022, p. 6). If states adopt similar laws, as South Carolina attempted to do (Zakrzewski, 2022), many services rendered by RJ networks would become criminal acts. As criminalization looms, it feels increasingly frustrating and dangerous to help ourselves and others access reproductive services.

Everyday Practice, Everyday Liberation

Yet, people still need care. In the summer of 2022, immediately after Roe fell, queries to Aid Access, an organization that provides abortion pills via mail, “tripled to about 3,600 a month from about 1,200” (Bazelon, 2022, para. 40).

To keep access to abortion and reproductive care accessible, RJ organizations and volunteers carry out everyday practices of direct service. Direct service practices provide assistance, such as funding, resources, or counseling, directly to individuals affected by an issue (Shepard, 2015). Moreover, these direct service practices are “everyday,” in that they are compatible with the rhythms of daily life and are “used as building blocks to construct a hoped-for future in the present” (Chatterton & Pickerill, 2010, p. 476). In stolen moments, people use personal devices and digital applications to talk privately on hotlines, coordinate abortion funding, communicate in real time with fellow volunteers, phone bank from home, and edit clinic data for online abortion-finder tools.

Marginalized communities and on-the-ground RJ organizers have long been partaking in mutual aid and direct service activism, using agile networks and available technologies to help people navigate shifting barriers to care. Even when Roe was law, the “right to choose” never secured the right for every pregnant person to access affordable, convenient, and compassionate healthcare. The use of “choice” in the Roe decision positioned reproductive freedom not as a human right, but as a “chosen consumer good or lifestyle—albeit a very expensive one” (West, 2009, p. 1409). The “choice” framing of reproduction further “reifies and masks the structures of white supremacy and capitalism” underlying reproductive decision-making (Smith, 2005, p. 120). Perhaps every person had the same right in theory, but only some people could afford to access this right in practice. RJ organizers, steeped in intersectional Black feminism and a belief in radical collective care, have long explained the right to an abortion is “meaningless if [people] cannot have abortions due to lack of providers, financial reasons, or any number of other barriers” (Jaworski, 2009, p. 106). Thus, everyday practices directly connecting people to care is a long-standing tradition in RJ activism (Kline, 2010; Morgen, 2002; Ross, 1993; Silliman et al., 2004).

Mohanty (2003) argues these “everyday feminist, antiracist, anticapitalist practices” have historically been less documented, less analyzed, and less celebrated (p. 4). Our cultural focus on charismatic leaders and inflection points socializes us to “understand that constant growth, violent competition, and critical mass” are the most effective ways to create change (brown, 2017, p. 10). Furthermore, “hyperactive” social media platforms act like a “loud cocktail party,” allowing for the spread of ideas but not necessarily the long, immersive societal simmering necessary for sustained action and radical change (Beckerman, 2022, p. 4).

Yet, online loudness and charismatic competition have not been central to my experience in the contemporary RJ movement. Instead, I have witnessed and learned from radical “practices of care, cultivation, encouragement and generosity” that do not “demand to be seen and heard” (Pottinger, 2017, p. 217). I watch these everyday practices work to change the world, transforming my own understanding of what is possible. So, like the quiet activism of Pottinger’s (2017) seed-saving activist gardeners, the “quiet power of small, everyday, often overlooked actions” is where I want to draw attention (p. 216). To that end, I offer reflections on my participation in everyday, direct service practices in the contemporary RJ movement.

Autoethnographic Method

While my experiences are not definitive of or even central to the RJ movement, Taylor (2017) cautions that scholarship about liberation that is separate from lived experiences “becomes abstract, discourse driven, and disconnected from the radicalism that made it powerful in the first place” (p. 17). Furthermore, Mohanty (1984) tells us liberation “must be forged in concrete, historical and political practice and analysis” (p. 339). Thus, I ground this article in my concrete, lived experiences of radical practice. I am a straight, White woman of reproductive age who has lived in two states where abortion is illegal. This article is informed by autoethnographic reflections across a 17-month span of direct service volunteer work in the RJ movement.

The specific excerpts included revolve around moments of my own fear and frustration as direct service practices shifted in response to changing abortion legality. The time period of reflection begins in Texas in September 2021, in the final days before SB 8 went into effect, and culminates at the end of 2022, when I wrote this piece after moving to Missouri.

In these 17 months, I volunteered repeatedly with four organizations, and attended meetings and training events with two others. I completed eight volunteer shifts on an abortion funding hotline, 15 shifts on a peer counseling talkline, and five volunteer shifts updating clinic data for an online abortion-finder tool. I also participated in 26 meetings, trainings, gatherings, and collaborative art events, acting as a facilitator or mentor for fellow volunteers at eight of those meetings.

Again, I offer my experiences not as definitive examples of volunteering, activism, or RJ work, but rather in honor of Grace Lee Boggs’s truth about everyday practice—that you must “transform yourself to transform the world” (brown, 2017, p. 29). I believe the everydayness of direct service disrupted my complacency through its generative, healing, and transformational nature. Direct service practices in the RJ movement are each day “cementing new kinds of social relations based on care and affect” (Shepard, 2015, p. 2). My volunteer experience has radically altered my self-awareness and shielded me from isolation and despair, allowing me to tap into “the potential goodness in each of us . . . growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists” (brown, 2019, p. 13).

Finally, we know autoethnographic writing exists at the intersection of the “felt improbability” of our lived experiences and the “known impossibility” of expressing them (Goodall, 2000, p. 7). Yet, autoethnographic methods are ideal for longitudinal reflections on everydayness, and personal accounts can offer alternatives to “dominant, taken-for-granted, and harmful cultural scripts” (Adams et al., 2017, p. 3). While they embody and display my own imperfect thinking, I hope my accounts contribute to the ongoing, collective dismantling of scripts about social change and technology. Scripts that suggest radical change is driven by visible grandiosity, or that public platform posts are the most effective or accessible way to leverage personal technologies for social change.

What follows is eight excerpts from my reflections on digital direct service volunteering. In particular, I chose excerpts that encapsulate important moments in my own liberation journey—refocusing repeatedly to my own and others’ miraculous humanity in the midst of discouraging, dehumanizing discourse around abortion and reproduction.

Reflections From Everyday Direct Service in Dangerous Times

September 1, 2021, SB 8 Goes Into Effect, “What Now?”

We got the email that abortion funding would pause for now while Texas state law is being examined.

I have always felt good and more like myself when I took abortion funding shifts. I was giving people money to directly help fund their access to a human right. It helped me recognize radical kindness feels better than judgment, better than shame ever could. And I wanted to be better—to be radically kinder.

Suddenly, it’s gone. I was helping callers pay for their entire procedures just two weeks ago to the day. Now, we can’t do that.

Five years of life-changing calls. What now?

April 19, 2022, Talkline Counseling After SB 8, “Like a Game I’m Playing With Them.”

I’m on the talkline today, and like usual, I’m saying to people, “Make whatever decision is right for your body and your family. I trust you.”

And if they say, “You know what, I do want an abortion. I feel empowered.”

I think to myself, “Great! That’s great that you feel empowered. Now, how are your finances? You may need to travel 5 to 10 hours across state lines, pay for travel out-of-pocket, get an ultrasound, do a waiting period that is not based in science, get the abortion (also out-of-pocket), and then you can go home. And here’s a list of organizations that can maybe help you with funding or childcare or rides once you’re there—but I’m not sure if they are operating due to changing state laws.”

It feels like a game I’m playing with them. I want to play a part in empowerment—people feeling however they feel and making whatever decision they want. But then, if it comes to abortion, I’m like, “I don’t know. I don’t know the best next step anymore.”

And we know people are going from south Texas to Mexico or up to Oklahoma, which is ridiculous. But now with SB 612, they can’t go to Oklahoma either, so I don’t know where the fuck we will go next—all the way to Colorado. People in Texas are gonna drive through a lot more deserts, get on a lot more planes to New Mexico.

I mean, it’s just working so well. All this anti-abortion legislation is frustrating and fragmenting our networks. Organizers are working to keep up. And I’m just a volunteer, but I feel crazy. These hotlines are meant to shatter stigma and directly help, and then if somebody wants an abortion, maybe I’ve walked with them through that thought process to an abrupt and cruel end, “At this point, at that many weeks, it could be an almost impossible feat. Good luck.”

May 2, 2022, The Dobbs Leak, “Before Things Change.”

Tonight, before things change federally to whatever they will be, I want to remind myself that for the past five years—in different ways, using different technologies, being very resourceful—I have known people were helping others, helping each other. People helped others pay for and get to their abortions. I have firsthand helped people pay for their abortions. People have had loving, nonjudgmental conversations. I have had conversations with strangers about their pregnancy, infertility, adoption, parenting, abortion—their big feelings, their need for resources or encouragement. People have talked softly with strangers, over and over again. They have listened to the pain, the stigma and fear, the loneliness and hurt, and held a quiet space. They have helped strangers feel human, and felt human themselves in return.

June 26, 2022, Reflecting on the Fall of Roe, “How to Live in the Dark?”

After weeks of waiting, last Friday, June 24, 2022, I was standing under the bell tower of Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. It was the last day of our trip. We were touring the campus.

“Wait, they have Wi-Fi. Let me check . . .”

Tears flow.

“In 6-to-3 Ruling, Supreme Court Ends Nearly 50 Years of Abortion Rights.” ²

What would happen now? Who was calling the hotlines today? Who was answering? We started walking so I could feel my body. We walked all over Dublin, back to the Oscar Wilde statue, back to Saint Stephen’s Green. We took Polaroids, ate gelato, and enjoyed the one evening of gloom we finally got to end the world’s sunniest trip to Ireland—a place with more reproductive rights than home now. ³

It had only been seven years, nearly to the day, June 25th, 2015, that same-sex marriage was legalized in all 50 states. I was standing outside the Supreme Court that day. Things seemed to be marching, both slowly and suddenly, toward love, kindness, open-hearted ok-ness.

The Dobbs ruling was painful. Which manuals should we use for this? “How to live in the dark?” Russia is attacking Ukraine. The planet burns. There is a formula shortage. More women die giving birth in the U.S. than should be scientifically possible. We send people home with babies and hospital bills, letting their blood clot, saying, “You pay for this, in every way.”

August 3, 2022, Kansas Protects Abortion, “This Arbitrary Border.”

Last night, a bright spot. Kansans voted “no,” as in, not to remove the protected right to abortion from their state constitution. I cried the moment I refreshed and saw the AP had called the race.

To me, Kansas represents quintessential flyover White Americana. There are no major airports, no major cities, no major league sports teams. I look at the New York Times coverage by county. In Ford County, the home of Dodge City, 34,000 people, way out west Kansas, 52% voted yes, but 48% voted no. In Pratt County, where 9,000 people live, 54% (1,526 people) voted yes, and 46% (1,282 people) voted no (“Kansas Abortion Amendment Election Results,” 2022). While the Kansas City suburbs and Lawrence went largely “no,” there is no obvious “blame the progressive cities” narrative. Those towns, those individual folks—1,282 in Pratt County—showed up to protect abortion and each other.

Only one week after the fall of Roe, I moved from Texas to Missouri, both states where abortion is now illegal. Both states are trying to figure out how to make going out-of-state or “aiding and abetting” an abortion illegal, too. Yet, I moved to Kansas City and rented a house blocks from State Line Road. At State Line, Kansas begins, and abortion remains legal until 20 weeks—or 21 weeks and 6 days, according to local clinic pages. Most days, I walk my dog to State Line Road, a residential street in my neighborhood, and zigzag from one side to the other.

I walk to this arbitrary border after talking to a caller in middle Mississippi, with no abortion access at home or in any neighboring states. I cross and recross state lines in my city, looking for a physical boundary for metaphysical pain, looking for a tangible touchstone that hope and humanity remain close.

August 23, 2022, Updating the Abortion-Finder Tool, “Similarly-Minded Liberation Folks.”

I volunteered to help update the abortion finding website again last weekend. It feels good to have a video chat room open with people doing the same work as you (phone banking and being cussed at together for the Kansas “Vote No” campaign, editing clinic info in real time).

It’s imperfect. The tech is individual, and we are physically alone, but we are also able to fit this work into our lives, find community, feel fortified. I can go online on my lunch break, connect with similarly-minded people, and work together.

September 3, 2022, Post-Roe Hotline Volunteering, “It’s Their Soul I’m Wrapped Up In.”

State legislation is all over the place, but we received training on the new legal parameters for the funding line in Texas. I did a shift with Texas callers yesterday. Due to SB 8 and the Dobbs decision, we can’t pay for abortions right now. I talked to four people going to clinics in Houston, or in New Mexico where a clinic from San Antonio relocated. We’re going to send money directly to the clinics. It’s $100, $150, $200. It pays for their ultrasound or an IUD. The money is legally earmarked, and we have to make sure callers understand that it will only be applied to the items specified on the voucher (ultrasound, prenatal counseling, IUD insertion).

Being able to talk to folks again, there was goodness, but in moments, I hated it. We used to say, “Here’s money to get an abortion. There’s nothing you can do or say that would make you more or less deserving. You already deserve this—you deserve care.”

It was the most radical and liberating work, and eventually it became mundane. But just getting to do that. Just getting to say, “You need money right now, so here’s the money you need—or part of it. Let us know if you have any issues. Take care of yourself, ok?”

Doing that over and over was so anti-capitalist, anti-neoliberal, anti-racist, feminist. It made me feel free. Through doing, I became.

The act of talking to someone, realizing, “Even with all our personal hang ups, dealing with the oppressive system inside and around us, it doesn’t matter. I’m putting it aside.”

And I don’t care to wade into, “But, where does life start? What about a soul?”

We don’t get to know. We don’t get to know, cosmically.

What we do get to know is what this person looks like, or what they sound like, or the color of their eyes. It’s their soul I’m wrapped up in.

If I can’t see them, when they’re right there, because they’re a woman, they’re poor, they don’t speak English, they’re Black, they’re queer. If I can’t hear a trans person speak vulnerably and respond only with, “I trust you,” how could I expect another human to genuinely respond that way to me? How could we ever love each other, or ourselves?

In this capitalist society that is racist and misogynist and ableist and heteronormative, we know narratives are pressing on us. The system is built for us to distrust each other, and to question each other’s merit.

But I won’t bite. I will not question your deservingness. I will not question your value.

I know there’s misogyny masked as love, and we look at a pregnant person and think of a baby and connect them—blurring out the pregnant person entirely, especially if they’re poor or undocumented or sexualized. I know it’s convoluted and confusing.

But when people think about that pregnant person, I hope they think about their eyes. That is who you are seeing. That is a human being. They are a miracle.

And there was one way I could always practice this. I could see through it all for a moment by giving someone money earmarked for an abortion. “Have this, take care.”

Saying to them and myself, “I don’t need to know why. If you want to tell me or you feel alone, I’m here, but I don’t have to hear why you are seeking an abortion. I don’t need to know why you need money.”

Through this act, over and over, I was telling myself, “I don’t need anything to know they deserve care and love. I don’t need anything to trust them.”

And now we can’t quite do that.

Through being responsive to the changing legal system, organizers are taking care of their people, keeping the organization operating, offering the community whatever is legally possible, taking care of me as a volunteer. ⁴ But now we have to ask people if they are recording our conversation, or say, “This money will only be used for legal healthcare. This money cannot be used for an abortion. We are not liable for your decisions.”

It is so stigmatizing. It feels like distrust and distance.

I follow the new parameters carefully. I want to protect the organization that protects me, and the most vulnerable people are the most visible organizers.

But the person calling is also vulnerable, maybe feeling scared or hopeless, and I feel like I hold them at arm’s length now. “You deserve compassionate abortion care, but I’m sorry, we can’t help you pay for it.”

November 28, 2022, Reading, “People Who Have Abortions Are Full Human Beings.”

I am flipping through Choice Words (2020), Annie Finch’s anthology of abortion in literature. Finch (2020) has several wishes for her readers, but one stands out to me: “May this book bring you closer to understanding that people who have abortions are full human beings” (p. 8). What a simple thing. An understanding of humanity my volunteering helped me realize I lacked.

I read the words of Jennifer Hanratty, who had to travel to England to terminate a wanted, nonviable pregnancy in 2018, when abortion was still illegal in Northern Ireland.

I gasp softly on the last page: “My overwhelming thought is that we have left him. We left him alone” (Hanratty, 2020, p. 204). She is referring to her son, Linus, and his fetal remains at 14 weeks. Linus’s remains legally had to stay in Liverpool, rather than return home with her to Belfast.

Her anguish is palpable. I am reminded of what happens when punitive laws shape lives, make people travel for care, and question the dignity and autonomy of pregnant people—tempting us all to question them, too.

I think of Wiederhold’s (2014) description of witnessing a person walking into a clinic as protestors and escorts swirl around them: “She looks scared and sad. And everyone around her is so preoccupied with a performance that simultaneously includes and excludes her. She is a prop, not a character. She has no lines in this script, but she is necessary for the action” (p. 742).

Our own humanity is lost when we disregard or overlook a fellow human–thingify them, make them a prop in our self-serving narrative. The magnitude of the cultural narrative of abortion repeatedly asks us to forget each other.

Closing Thoughts and Future Directions

These eight excerpts illustrate how everyday, direct service RJ praxis has been transforming my understanding and experience of liberation work. These practices continuously redirected my thinking from large-scale cultural scripts, which largely serve to benefit me, back to lived, everyday human experiences. While everyday practices often go unnoticed, they can be radically transformational and healing. These practices connected me to the humanity at the heart of the RJ movement, and back to the humanity in myself. RJ is a “human rights-based approach to organizing” (Silliman et al., 2004, p. 17). If we believe and participate in this comprehensive approach, we believe any indignity suffered by an individual is a “blow against their humanity,” and against our own (Ross & Solinger, 2017, p. 10).

All the while, neoliberal capitalism demands we focus on ourselves, as this intensely individualist framework stresses “self-reliance, self-management, self-responsibility, market choice, consumer sovereignty, and difference” (Gray, 2013, p. 784). Yet, direct service provides opportunities for awe and connection in ways not readily celebrated or accounted for in neoliberal capitalism. Direct service helps me practice moving beyond White cultural narratives and capitalist self-obsession, bringing me closer to something resembling self-transcendent emotions, or emotions that “encourage individuals to transcend their own momentary needs and desires and focus on those of another” (Stellar et al., 2017, p. 201). Emotions like compelling compassion and humbling awe reinforce “social bonds when they can be the most easily eroded by self-interest,” like in the context of judgmental capitalist meritocracy discourse (Stellar et al., 2017, p. 205). Self-transcendent moments help individuals form deep, committed collectives across difference and individualist pressures.

The point is not to promote self-aggrandizing savior behavior, or to seek sentimental stories about abortion and suffering, but to believe in the power of quiet human connection. The reminder that no one is free until everyone is free, and that my humanity is irrevocably bound to yours. Everyday, digital, direct service practices in the RJ movement fight quietly for liberation, while the loudness of late capitalism repeatedly overshadows their radical existence. They deserve documentation and close analysis.

However, platform surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) complicates the continued use of personal technologies to work for contentious efforts like abortion access. The direct service practices in this article used an array of digital technologies, platforms, and programs, which allow for varying degrees of both nimble organizing and user surveillance. This complication also warrants further analysis in future scholarship about digital, direct service liberation work.

In conclusion, abortion and reproductive care remain unaffordable and increasingly inaccessible for many. Yet, organizers, activists, and volunteers continue to participate in direct service RJ activism every day via largely digital means. While neoliberal capitalism coaxes us into forgetting each other in favor of saving ourselves, everyday practices of connection and care remind us we are only fully human when we honor the humanity of another. As we work toward liberation, we should marvel at quiet exchanges where we realize another person is, as Martin Buber (1970) would say, “no thing among things” (p. 59). Through directly engaging with individuals—my peers and community—seeking stigmatized care, I have stolen fleeting glances at liberation in practice. There is societal rage around reproduction, and capitalist pressure to individuate others’ pain. But, time and again, through quiet everyday volunteer work, I have been reminded that it takes practice to access “the aliveness and awakening, the gratitude and humility, the joy and celebration of being miraculous” together (brown, 2019, p. 16).