Et tu, Karrie?
I see you, Mama!
I unfollowed Karrie Locher when the draft opinion leaked and she said nothing about it. I did it in a burst of unfollowing several baby Instagram accounts that stayed similarly silent.
I mentioned in my last newsletter that I watched a lot of videos in preparation for childbirth. I also started following a lot of Instagram accounts about birth and parenting. At the time, this felt very convenient. Why read the baby books when I could simply digest the same information in little squares while also looking at recipes and home decor ideas? Work smarter not harder, I say.
Among those accounts was that of Karrie Locher, a postpartum and neonatal nurse from Missouri (we’ll come back to that) who gives tips about postpartum healing, breastfeeding and newborn care. I’m not going to link to her account, but you can look her up. She posts things like how to trim a baby’s nails (with an affiliate link to a gadget, of course). She also sells newborn care courses on a separate website, but on her Instagram she’s amassed about half a million followers, has had various brand deals, and is currently selling baby pajamas she designed as a collab with someone or other. She’s also been featured on Good Morning America as a parenting expert and recently wrote a guest column with some basic breastfeeding information in the Washington Post.
I kept going back and forth about if the appropriate place to channel my rage is at one particular momfluencer. I mentioned before that many of them have said nothing. It’s surely not the most productive place. Donate to abortion funds! But because Karrie is a nurse, because she lives in a state that just enacted a trigger ban that puts lives immediately at risk, because her entire bubbly, pink, ‘70s-throwback-smiley-face brand is built around being a support for mothers, because in my darkest postpartum days I may have found one or two of her mostly eminently Googleable tips helpful, her betrayal stings.
The day the opinion came down, Karrie was in Palm Springs, doing some kind of photo shoot. I assume she had her phone on her, since she kept posting stories until noon her time. This was the last one until she went quiet:
About four hours later, she posted a link to a video from @SharonSaysSo, Instagram’s deliberately neutral civics teacher. Along with the video, Karrie wrote (ten hours after the opinion on a day when she was posting stories and was presumably receiving DMs from her followers), “Just getting back and hearing about today’s news. @sharonsaysso always breaks it down perfectly if you need a deep dive into what this means.”
That was it. Nothing else. There’s been nothing else since. I’ve kept checking.
The video was Sharon McMahon reading Alito’s opinion aloud with the occasional very mild, very apolitical—almost to the point of being willfully ignorant of the implications—annotation. We can talk about Sharon and her neutrality on a different day. Today we’re here to talk about Karrie because her niche is healthcare, parenting, childbirth and babies. And in my mind that that is the last person who gets to be neutral about abortion.
My support for abortion is central to my parenting philosophy. Pregnancy is taxing at best, dangerous at worst. Birth is painful at best, deadly at worst, especially so for Black and Hispanic people. Raising a child is hard under the most supportive circumstances this country offers, circumstances that are essentially nonexistent for most people. So, for me, being pro-abortion is a baseline for anyone dishing out baby advice. We should all come to parenthood willingly.
Is it possible that Karrie is simply anti-abortion? Sure. As long as her anti-abortion stance extends beyond her own individual body, that’s not a person I’ll be taking advice from. Why would I give any credence to the advice of a healthcare provider who lives in a state that will force people, including children, to give birth and has nothing to say about that? It’s like how I also don’t take parenting advice from people who hit their kids. We have very different ideas of what human rights are.
It’s also possible that she’s pro-abortion, but does not want to alienate her followers. I think that’s even worse? Actually I don’t know what’s worse. They’re both bad. And for that reason, I’m out. Getting to read baby advice from “neutral” people is a luxury I can no longer afford in post-Roe America.