The New Fight for Abortion Rights Can Be Won
Roe v Wade is about to be overturned, but lessons from the Second Wave show how we can win abortion on demand this time around.
If a resurgent feminist movement in the US is at all possible at this historical moment, it will emerge from groups like Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights rather than Christian nationalist-affiliated groups such as Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) and Women’s Declaration International (WDI USA.) Rise Up calls for mass actions to demand “abortion without apology” - and not a moment too soon, with the leaked draft yesterday of an initial majority opinion indicating what we knew was coming; the evisceration of Roe v Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the United States.
Ahead of the expected decision, Rise Up began organizing for a “green wave” of mass protests, with activists wearing green bandanas to emulate abortion rights activists south of the border, where women in Mexico and Argentina have successfully agitated for legalization. (The fight continues in El Salvador.)
Rise Up’s uncompromising demand for “abortion without apology” recalls the heady days of the women’s liberation movement in the US. In 1969, during a New York city health department hearing on abortion, where male doctors, clergy, lawyers, and psychologists were debating exceptions to New York’s abortion law, Redstockings activists disrupted the event, demanding that women, “the real experts on abortion,” be heard.1
In her excellent book, Without Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now (2019), Jenny Brown describes the position of the Redstockings:
Kathie Sarachild, who led off the disruption, recalled:
We were counseled that to oppose abortion reforms - to press for… total repeal of abortion laws was asking too much, but we just knew that we didn’t want to fight at all if it wasn’t going for what we really want - that abortion reform was just more insult and humiliation for women.2
The “reform” movement, Brown writes, had advocated for decades for “exceptions” to abortion bans without achieving any real progress. Abortion strategist Lucinda Cisler, says this was, in part, because:
Proposals for “reform” are based on the notion that abortions must be regulated, meted out to deserving women under an elaborate set of rules designed to provide “safeguards against abuse”... Repeal is based on the quaint idea of justice: that abortion is a woman’s right and that no-one can veto her decision and compel her to bear a child against her will.3
Exceptions allowed by reform “are tragic,” Cisler says, “but they affect very few women’s lives, whereas repeal is compelling because most women know the fear of unwanted pregnancy and in fact get abortions for that reason.”4
The radical call for a total repeal of abortion bans galvanized activists and created pressure on the Court that led to the Roe decision. Judith Brown, a women’s liberation founder and lawyer, observed:
Even the most mundane, establishment-oriented law schools routinely teach that important legal cases lag far behind the social movements that create them…
Supreme Court cases bob along behind social reality like little rowboats towed behind huge gun-ships… When we celebrate Roe v Wade we celebrate - not the legal opinion of nine men in D. C. - but the thousands of women who forced a change so that what was once illegal became legal.5
Without Apology author Jenny Brown argues that such a strategy should be pursued today. Brown, long-time writer for In These Times, co-editor of Labor Notes, co-author of How to Jumpstart Your Union, and of the Redstockings book Women’s Liberation and National Health Care: Confronting the Myth of America, author of Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight Over Women’s Work, and a leader in the grassroots campaign to make the “morning after pill” available over-the-counter in the US, knows something about social movements, women’s liberation, and what works.
Brown cautions against “choice” as an argument for abortion rights. “Choice,” she writes, “makes it seem that parents are indulging a personal whim by having children rather than making a valuable contribution to the ongoing existence of society.”6
Instead, activists should frame the issue as a necessary, but not sufficient, requirement for full female participation in society and address the conditions under which we are expected to do reproductive labor; e.g. universal health care, paid maternity leave, living wages, and so on. Further, we should understand the roles white supremacy and the demands of capitalism play in “coercive pronatalism.” She cites black abortion doctor Willie Parker:
The thing all too many white anti-abortion activists really want, which they can’t say out loud, is for white women to have more babies in order to push back against the browning of America.7
Conversely, the policing of women’s bodies that accompanies abortion bans falls heavily on women of color. Witness the recent jailing of Lizelle Herrera, accused of a self-abortion when she miscarried.
Additionally, the need of capital for ever more workers and consumers also drives the contemporary push for coerced childbearing in the US. Brown notes that when birth rates were high in the US, the “power structure” could accommodate abortion rights. But once it became clear that falling birth rates were here to stay, they “started coming for our reproductive rights.”8 Brown cites a number of formerly socialist and communist countries, (Romania excepted), that adopted pro-natalist policies when their economic systems reverted to capitalism.
Brown argues convincingly that when the movement was led by radicals, “women’s liberation was wildly popular,” with books and anthologies published for the mass market selling well and women’s liberation making the cover of a number of mainstream, high profile periodicals such as Time, Newsweek, Life, and the Atlantic.9
[T]he argument from women’s liberation was a winning strategy and could be again. It was massive feminist mobilizations, fueled by women publicly discussing what was once secret and stigmatized, that won us the abortion rights we have. The movement brought hundreds of thousands into the streets, won abortion on demand in New York State, and in just four years forced a reluctant Supreme Court to legalize most abortions across the country.”10
The lesson of the movement in the 1960s, and ‘70s Brown observes, is that Roe was won “not by wise justices suddenly seeing the light but by a mass liberation movement shaking the foundations of male supremacy.”11
As gender identity issues have hogged the limelight in recent years, women outraged by trans-identifying males in women’s shelters and prisons, and being allowed to compete in women’s sport, have been told by prominent members of self-described “feminist” groups fighting these policies that we must set aside our differences with the religious right and work with Council for National Policy network groups such as Concerned Women for America (CWA) and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). The primary issue we are expected to set aside in order to work with these Christian nationalist groups is abortion rights.
WoLF special advisory board member Kellie-Jay Keen has consistently downplayed the importance of reproductive rights and insisted through her popular youtube channel that we set those concerns aside and focus on opposing gender identity language in policy and law. In a 2020 podcast the day before the US presidential election, in which she advocated for Donald Trump, Keen said:
I think if it comes down to reproductive rights for women, or the right to say who we are and what we are, I think the latter is far more important. I think you can win reproductive rights back. I don't even know if there's a general appetite in America to take them away.
Even when her acolytes express interest in talking about the issue, she shuts them down.
We sometimes see it in the chat, that some people want to talk about pro-life abortion debates. I just implore you, whatever side of that particular debate you're on, park it. Put it aside; fight about it later.
WDI USA refused to support the Women’s Health Protection Act, pending federal legislation which would grant abortion rights, because of gender identity language in it, such as “people with the capacity for pregnancy.” On the day the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that is set to overturn Roe v Wade, the self-described “unapologetically radical feminist” organization Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) had nothing to say about abortion rights. No statement on their website, no post on their Facebook page, not a tweet, nor a murmur.
The US chapter of WDI (then Women’s Human Rights Campaign) also remained eerily silent on the subject. However, WDI USA president Kara Dansky was quite vocal during the Supreme Court hearing on the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson, a judge who would have been favorable on abortion rights in future cases. (Jackson was too recently appointed to have a say in Dobbs.) Dansky fed a no-win question, (in the context of gender identity politics), to Republican senators on the committee: Will even one Senate Republican ask Ketanji Brown Jackson what she thinks a woman is?
After a Republican senator asked the question, Dansky excitedly reported it on Twitter, setting off a tweet-storm mocking the judge, and giving right-wing media the opportunity to run with the narrative.
WDI USA today issued a verbose statement on the leaked Supreme Court decision, in which they claim they “will never stop fighting for women’s complete reproductive integrity, including the right to abortion on demand,” yet remained uncompromising about the Women’s Health Protection Act. How, exactly, one wonders, does a group “never stop” in a fight it has yet to begin?
WoLF and WDI USA deserve not one iota of feminist support. They continue to work with anti-feminist Christian nationalist groups, which likely inhibits any serious effort by WoLF and WDI USA to support abortion rights, and most certainly gives support and cover to organizations dedicated to obstructing reproductive freedom such as CWA and ADF.
We should, instead, turn our efforts to grassroots groups advocating for women’s liberation based on principles that have worked in the past. The task is urgent; lives are at risk, not just from illegal abortions, but also from ideology that prioritizes fetal rights over women’s rights, safety, and health. Katherine Stewart has written eloquently of the problem of Catholic hospitals refusing to treat women miscarrying until the fetus is deemed dead, per Ethical and Religious Directives. These directives “restrict a number of miscarriage-related procedures that fall within (or close to) the directives’ definition of abortion.”
Consequently, women in their care have been left to develop sepsis or bleed out -(Stewart lost 40% of her blood during a miscarriage in a Catholic hospital) - to comply with these fetal rights directives. With Roe overturned, we may expect anti-abortion advocates to press for similar policies in other hospitals.
State laws that ban abortion, some already passed, will hold women hostage to men by allowing males who impregnate them to make a claim on the fetus and a woman’s reproductive capacity. Women sexually assaulted will be forced to put not just their physical health, but also their mental and emotional health, at risk by coerced bearing of a rapist’s child. Girls made pregnant by rape or incest, some too young for safe childbearing, will be further traumatized by coerced maternity.
So, it’s time to get to work. Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights has a week of actions planned beginning May 8th (although with the leak of the draft of the SC opinion, they are mobilizing earlier with a walk-out from school and work planned for Thursday, May 5th.) Check out their website for groups and actions near you. I highly recommend Jenny Brown’s book Without Apology, cited throughout this post. Brown is thoroughly knowledgable about social movements, second wave feminism in the US, and reproductive rights. She provides history and strategy in a compelling and concise account; you can read the book in an evening. Then order your bandanas and hit the streets!
Note to readers: When I originally published this post, the last paragraph was cut off! I had a hard time even getting the post to publish on May 3rd; kept getting the notice “post out of date” and a failure to post. I’m guessing when it finally worked, what was posted was an earlier draft of the piece.
GREAT NEWS! Without Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now by Jenny Brown (quoted liberally in this post) has just been made available FREE as an ebook. Download here.
Brown, Jenny. 2019. Without Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now, p1. Verso, New York
Without Apology, p2.
Without Apology, p102.
Without Apology, p6.
Without Apology, p98.
Without Apology, p125.
Without Apology, p180.
Without Apology, p174.
Without Apology, p98
Without Apology, p2.
Without Apology, p106