The Decision Before the Demand

The most transformational change has never arrived because someone finally discovered enough evidence. It arrived because someone decided enough.

Often the action after deciding enough is to demand more.

More respect. More from our government. More care, more time, more money, more power.

But none of us would ever get to enough if we didn't first come to realize that all the limits and all the rules are made up. 

We tend to speak of limits as though they're fixed, as though the walls of what's doable are load-bearing, structural, immovable. But most of the limits I encounter in the work; in funding, in building technology, in producing media, in coalition building, in what we're allowed to ask for — are perceived as load-bearing only because nobody has yet been willing to kick them.

Fascism forces lower gazes. It works by making the ceiling feel like the floor,  by convincing people that the distance between what is and what could be is not a political choice but a natural law. It shrinks the imagination before it ever touches the body. And one of the most radical acts available to us right now is to refuse that shrinkage. To lift our eyes. To keep insisting, even in the middle of the contraction, that we are allowed to want more. It calls for us to be, as Timothy Synder describes, "rebels in our own time". It means, "... demanding freedom, aiming for something radically better in the future."

Now.

In reproductive justice, refusal and demand has always been dynamics in the work. Not just advocacy within the terms of what's permitted, but a rejection of the premise entirely — the insistence that care is a right, that survival doesn't require permission, that the limits imposed by law or policy or funding cycles are a story, and stories can be rewritten. The most transformational organizers and providers in this space are people whose communities' lives depend on rejecting the premise of no. They are not waiting for permission to build abundance. They are building it.

Technology touches every single aspect of democratic life. One of the working groups I lead supports abortion providers and family planning researchers navigating AI, data, and how emerging technology and policies impacts implementations for care. Last week, preparing for an upcoming Rights x Tech forum, I spoke with Dr. Kristyn Brandi — an abortion provider who launched Luminosas Wellness Collective, a nonprofit BIPOC-led reproductive healthcare clinic. Their service list reads like a blueprint for what care should always have looked like: all-trimester abortion care, HIV support, gender-affirming treatments, and trauma-informed comprehensive gynecology with no socioeconomic barriers at the door.

Dr. Brandi built this in the middle of everything working against these freedoms; abortion bans spreading state by state, telemedicine restrictions tightening, surveillance of patients and providers intensifying, and philanthropy quietly retreating from direct service funding. She didn't wait for the political climate to improve or the funding landscape to stabilize. She decided that what existed was enough to begin, and she began. That's not optimism. That's a different relationship to limits entirely.

This is what it means to be a rebel in our own time, to lead without limits and beyond what the present conditions as possible...

"...for the republic to survive, it has to be better – we have to have liberation that includes schools, and health care, and justice, and opportunity, excludes mass incarceration, and concentration camps, and ethnic cleansing, and senseless, criminal wars. We have to be able to speak together rather than have our conversations determined by oligarchs and algorithms. We have to work together rather than allowing ourselves to be isolated."

Abundance isn't waiting on the other side of a grant cycle or a bipartisan negotiation or a cleared midterm election cycle. Abundance exists on the other side of a decision — someone deciding that what we have is enough to begin, someone deciding that the limits are a story– not the law.

Scarcity is constructed. And if scarcity is constructed, then so is abundance.

What would having enough make you brave enough to ask for?

Read

Rebels in our own time, speech and essay by Timothy Synder

The Beginning Comes After the End, a manual for coping with change

Rewind

Last newsletter, we got sold survival.

Upcoming

RxT: Reproductive Justice in the Digital Age with The Nation's Regina Mahone and Dr. Kristyn Brandi

Sabrina Hersi Issa is a human rights technologist committed to leveraging innovation as a tool to unlock opportunity and dignity for all. She does this through her work in technology, media, investments and philanthropy. This is her personal newsletter.

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