Trump’s return to the White House, accompanied by allies deeply hostile to anything related to reproductive and sexual health and rights, has sparked panic. As in late 2016 during the first Trump transition period, part of the problem is not knowing how far things could go. Checklists and tips are again circulating online, urging people to update the gender listed on government-issued identity documents, get an emergency supply of birth control pills or hormones, assemble an emergency folder of health documentation, buy a stash of Plan B, get an IUD before Inauguration Day. With access not only to abortion medication or hormones threatened but also a wide array of other drugs and vaccines, discourse over stockpiling medication—in case it becomes hard to access or is even taken off the market by a cowed Food and Drug Administration—has escalated, and in a way that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago.
This kind of preparedness looks nothing like the stereotype of predominantly right-wing preppers with their bunkers and wilderness-ready “bugout” bags: Rather than imagining you’re prepping for some last stand, alone but for barrels of potable water and ammo, prepping around bodily autonomy looks a lot more like the long-standing DIY scene, built on the value of sharing skills and resources. It is inspired by the harm reduction and indie women’s health movements. It’s also informed by community preparedness practices for climate change–driven disasters and mutual aid networks that ramped up with the pandemic and anti-LGBTQ threats. People are preparing for a scenario in which they could be criminalized or surveilled for seeking out reproductive and sexual health care, because that’s already happening and very likely will get worse.
Informed preparedness for assaults on sexual health and rights under a second Trump administration, those I spoke to said, rests on a few assumptions. First, despite efforts to ban abortion, gender-affirming care, and possibly contraception, no law can completely end access to any of these. Laws can only make access more difficult by intimidating people into refusing to offer a service or advertising or information about a service. Many, many people, in the United States and worldwide, have continued to have abortions even where it has been illegal. With or without access to hormones through the medical system, trans people have obtained them. Contraception was only decriminalized in this country in the later half of the twentieth century, and yet, contraception remained available. Even under total bans or full criminalization, people have and will risk their liberty for sexual and reproductive freedom. We know there is simply no way for everyone who would violate such bans to be arrested and charged. If law enforcement attempted to do so, the criminal legal system in the United States would struggle to keep up.
This matters because with prepping, there needs to be some sense of what scenarios are likely and what scenarios you are preparing for. People who already have prescriptions for hormones and birth control may be able to use that access to stock up on medication. Likewise, those with access to misoprostol and mifepristone, the two pills used in medication abortion, could purchase or otherwise obtain the pills in advance. But if any of these medications are fully banned or criminalized, all of the activities necessary to obtaining those medications will carry more risk of surveillance, arrest, or criminal prosecution. These are the risks that people preparing for the coming years are primarily addressing.
But we don’t need to navigate those risks alone, nor should we have to, as Kate Bertash of Digital Defense Fund has argued. Digital Defense Fund was founded in the wake of Trump’s first election, meant to support the abortion rights movement with their increasing digital security needs. Just searching online for information about abortion might feel intolerably risky to some people now, because of the digital trail of evidence that can leave behind—what Bertash has called our digital bodies. It can feel like the digital tools we rely on are putting our digital bodies at odds with our bodily autonomy.
In contrast, DDF views digital security and bodily autonomy as interconnected, one supporting the other. That makes the kinds of trainings and resources they offer—for free online and to organizations—quite different. “One of the things that’s been really critical for us,” Bertash told me over Signal messages earlier this month, “is to not fall into the traps that sometimes can come with being in the broader digital security world, which is to try and imagine this perfectly private, no-footprint protocol, where you could do everything possible to make sure that your abortion leaves absolutely no footprint on the world.” Not only is this not possible, but it also can lead people to not take very simple steps to reduce the digital footprint of an abortion. “We forget that it actually is pretty normal for there to be traces left across our devices and our experiences,” said Bertash. Mitigating the risks posed by those traces is part of protecting bodily autonomy.
Devices and digital tools do not come first in security planning, Bertash advised. “Start by assessing what’s going on with you and your life. Often we call this threat modeling and risk modeling.” Can you identify one person you can really trust? Likewise, can you identify people who might disagree with your actions or pose risks to you? What security measures you adopt will be shaped by your own situation. In some recent cases, it was someone’s current or former partner who reported their abortion to police, sometimes by obtaining physical access to their phone and screenshotting private messages. “It’s your right to have chats where [you] work out logistics,” Bertash emphasized, both before and after an abortion, or supporting others. People can continue to do so in a less risky way by using an app like Signal, which encrypts messages and allows users to automatically set messages to delete after minutes, hours, or weeks.
“I know it can sound a bit like a broken record when digital security people talk about Signal,” Bertash said. “I think that having Signal with disappearing messages on, you know you have this place where you can speak freely and speak clearly about exactly what you mean to say.” Having these conversations with those trusted people, “getting that practice at having consent-forward discussion,” she added, can also help expand your circle of trusted people. Building a network of people you trust is part of security culture, not just the tools those people use together.
Just like digital security, community preparedness is not an all-or-nothing practice. There’s a spectrum of preparations people might undertake, based on their own needs and the resources they already have. For some people, preparedness is refilling all of their prescriptions and building an emergency supply; for some people, preparedness will involve building a trusted network of people they can turn to if they need help getting an abortion. And for some, preparedness might be learning how to help others access abortion, including how to DIY medication abortion.
Self-managed abortion has only become more common since Dobbs, in which someone obtains and takes the abortion pills mifepristone and/or misoprostol themselves. But what if the pills themselves become impossible to access? Stockpiling Plan B and abortion pills has been a hot topic since the November election. One obstetrician specifically referred to the practice as “disaster preparedness” in an interview with USA Today. “The more of those medications that are out in the community, in people’s private medical cabinets, I think the better,” she said, while offering a caveat that after medication abortion specifically, follow-up care is needed for some. One provider I spoke with emphasized that, while it’s wise to procure a small emergency supply, especially with medications that need to be taken within a brief window of time, people should be aware of the shelf life for these medications: Plan B purchased during the panicked days of the first Trump administration has, at this point, likely expired.
At the most DIY end of the spectrum, the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, an anarchist group “enabling access to medicines and medical technologies to those who need them but don’t have them,” have been publicizing a DIY abortion project: “This Card Is An Abortion” is a paper business card infused with six separate misoprostol doses, so that people can self-manage an abortion by ripping off squares and placing them in their mouths. The idea is that these cards would be harder to detect via mail than pills are and “easier to manufacture DIY,” per the collective’s website. The goal is not for Four Thieves to produce and distribute cards themselves, Mixael Laufer from Four Thieves told me, but for people to learn themselves and distribute misoprostol in their own networks and communities.
If you’re in need of an abortion now, Four Thieves would prefer you turn to services that can provide pills directly. Their approach, instead, is about preparing for a scenario in which that’s not possible—somewhat similar to the strategy pursued in the pre-Roe ’60s and ’70s by the legendary Jane Collective, which didn’t just connect people with abortion providers but ultimately wound up training people to perform safe procedures themselves. Four Thieves are thinking of this intervention “from a community preparedness perspective,” where instead of individuals stockpiling resources for their own use, they are creating and sharing them within a trusted community. “It certainly makes a whole lot more sense to say, ‘Oh, you know, I know somebody across town with a garden, and yeah, there’s, there’s somebody who knows how to fix cars … and I’m the one who’s doing chemistry,’” Laufer said.
Approaching preparedness in that way requires a very different set of skills than amassing survival gear and aiming for complete self-sufficiency, as has been common in some disaster preparedness communities. Instead, this newer approach to preparedness involves learning new skills and sharing them, and helping to build a trusted network, whether by finding or founding one. That might feel overwhelming and difficult, both Bertash and Laufer agreed, especially given how isolated people may be. But prepping to protect bodily autonomy is not like prepping for doomsday. It’s for living through the everyday disaster of the American health care and criminal legal systems, the crisis we have already been in—and it’s one that many people have been preparing for.
