It wasn’t a protest, but a defense against a protest. For much of 1989, the year I turned seventeen, I would wake up on Saturdays, at around 6 A.M., and head to a local abortion clinic. The clinics in Buffalo, New York, where I lived, had recently become ground zero in the battle over abortion. Each day, anti-abortion protesters showed up, armed with signs showing images of what they claimed were aborted fetuses, and tried to blockade the clinic doors to prevent clients from entering. Our counter-protest aimed to get there first, and to form a moving picket that kept the protesters away and allowed clients to pass through.
By the end of the eighties, the war against abortion was in full swing. It had been revitalized by Reagan’s rise and the platform that his Presidency provided for a growing evangelical right. Gaudy televangelists decried “feminazis” and argued that abortion threatened women’s traditional roles as caretakers and mothers. A street movement of anti-abortion activists engaged in intimidation tactics, attempting to stop women from entering clinics. In upstate New York, the most prominent activist group was called Operation Rescue. Randall Terry, a former used-car salesman who became a born-again Christian in the nineteen-seventies, led it. Terry likened his crusade to the civil-rights movement and welcomed comparisons between himself and Martin Luther King, Jr. In an interview in 1989, he remarked, “The blacks were demonstrating for their own rights, and we are rescuing other people and standing up for babies’ rights. . . . There can be absolutely no compromise on this, any more than there was compromise on whether white southerners should have slaves.”
Failing to persuade women through conventional forms of protest, the anti-abortion right adopted increasingly violent tactics. In 1989, Terry said, “I believe in the use of force.” He added, adopting a more moderate tone, “I think to destroy abortion facilities at this time is counterproductive because the American public has an adverse reaction to what it sees as violence.” But the inflammatory rhetoric of Terry and the right in describing fetal tissue as “unborn babies” justified in the minds of protesters the growing use of force. According to Susan Faludi’s classic book “Backlash,” “between 1977 and 1989, seventy-seven family-planning clinics were torched or bombed (in at least seven cases during working hours, with employees and patients inside), a hundred and seventeen were targets of arson, two hundred and fifty received bomb threats, two hundred and thirty-one were invaded, and two hundred and twenty-four vandalized.” According to the Times, men opposed to abortion killed at least eleven people, including abortion providers, at clinics between 1993 and 2015.
A few months before my seventeenth birthday, my mother bought me a subscription to Seventeen magazine. It seemed an odd choice, given its conventional makeup ads and utterly normative portraits of white girls. I was in the midst of coming out as a lesbian and found the whole thing jarring. But, in the mix of ads and grooming tips, there were articles that captured my attention, including one about the erosion of rights for teen-agers. A small sidebar noted, as an example, that teen-agers were required to get parental consent before receiving an abortion. The issue struck me viscerally. I had been fighting constantly with my father and stepmother about curfews, smoking, and the socialists I was hanging out with. The idea that they might decide whether or not I had a baby was enraging, obliterating any notion of self-determination.
I had never thought much about abortion before, but I had thought often about pregnancy; my mother had said, almost in a whisper, that her grandmother had told her that, as soon as girls have their periods, they can’t let boys touch them. In Texas, where I had spent junior high, everyone knew that when some girls suddenly disappeared from school they were probably pregnant. During my freshman year of high school, a friend wore a coat every day until she, too, eventually disappeared. She had hidden her pregnancy for months before finally delivering a baby. It seemed to be only women and girls who suffered any consequence for pregnancy. Girls, not boys, disappeared from school. Girls, not boys, carried the weight of social stigma. Girls, not boys, had their entire lives turned upside down if they carried the pregnancy to term. It was terrifying; it was also radicalizing.
On those mornings in Buffalo, anti-abortion protesters trickled out of their cars wielding their grotesque signs. The protesters—white men accompanied by women and, in some cases, even children—yelled at patients who showed up for their appointments, saying that they were killing their babies. We chanted back, “Pro-Life, your name’s a lie, you don’t care if women die.” The clinic defenders, as we counter-protesters called ourselves, were a combination of campus activists, socialists, lesbians, and feminists—a motley crew of the Buffalo left. We had some inevitable tension with the owners of the clinic, who worried that our counter-protests might alienate patients, too. But, as the right escalated its tactics to shut clinics down, we came to feel that we were keeping the clinics open and allowing women to exercise a constitutional right.
The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has brought old feelings of astonishment and disgust back to the surface. The Court’s utter disregard for the rights of women and of trans and nonbinary people who have the capacity to become pregnant is shocking in the twenty-first century. In the text of the majority opinion—as, indeed, in the original 1973 Roe opinion—the rights of women as full citizens hardly seem to register.
Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote for the Roe-affirming majority in 1973, included a brief list of the potential detriments of forcing women to carry pregnancies to term:
In the recent majority opinion overturning Roe, Justice Samuel Alito makes the fantastical claim that a world hostile to pregnant women no longer exists. Alito contends that, in “many” cases, women now have access to maternity leave. (He doesn’t bother to mention that it is often unpaid.) He claims that medical care associated with pregnancy is covered by private insurance or government assistance. (He neglects to mention that many women must still pay large out-of-pocket expenses.)
Yet women should have the right to control their reproduction, not only because of the potential emotional or financial hardship but because it is a precondition to their full and free participation in our society. If women cannot dictate this most basic aspect of their being, then the Supreme Court has effectively consigned them to a distinctly secondary tier of citizenship. Alito rationalizes that the late arrival of civil rights for women makes those rights less real than if they had arrived earlier. He argues that the right to abortion, because it was enshrined only in the seventies, is not “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” He seems unworried that this might actually only serve to emphasize the profound misogyny endemic throughout American history; women did not even gain the right to vote until well into the twentieth century.
The original rationale for Roe relied on arguments about privacy. Blackmun, arguing that abortion should be permitted in the first trimester, wrote, “Up to those points, the abortion decision in all its aspects is inherently, and primarily, a medical decision, and basic responsibility for it must rest with the physician.” Of course, the right to privacy is crucial in mitigating the power of the state to interfere with personal decisions. But, beyond any notion of privacy, it is also important to protect the more fundamental freedom of women to control their own bodies. Even in the 1973 decision, women’s bodily autonomy goes largely unremarked upon. J. D. Vance, who is running to become a Republican senator in Ohio, recently argued, “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term; it’s whether a child should be allowed to live.” But the hard truth about the reversal of Roe is that women will be forced to bring a child to term. As Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” wrote, in 1969, “There is no freedom, no equality, no full human dignity and personhood possible for women until we assert and demand the control over our own bodies, over our own reproductive process.”
But Friedan’s vision of freedom was incomplete. Access to abortion was the bare minimum necessary for women to achieve equality in America. Real self-determination and equality could only be achieved by ending the socially and economically subordinate role of women in our society—a burden that fell heaviest on poor and working-class women of color. Women cannot be free so long as society perpetuates the expectation that they are the unpaid stewards of household labor: cooking, cleaning, child rearing, and keeping their husbands sexually satisfied. Working-class women, especially Black and brown women, were expected not only to perform this work inside their homes but to work outside their homes, too, to financially support their families. Freedom and equality could only be realized through fair and equal pay—for work at home and as part of the workforce. This also meant that society had to take seriously the provision of safe, sound, subsidized child care. Women’s rejection of their role as the central pivot in the reproduction of society put them in conflict with the rising religious right, and also with elected officials who rejected the growth of the state agencies and institutions necessary to relieve women from caretaking roles. The rising expectations of young women, fuelled by their participation in the civil-rights movement in the nineteen-sixties, erupted in the years that followed. Women demanded birth control, freedom from sterilization, and freedom to abort unwanted pregnancies. Those who seek to roll back the clock not only intend to strip women of the right to abortion but to undermine their efforts to be independent of men and the nuclear family as well.
In the twenty-first century, it is easy to be deluded that the increased presence of women, including women of color, in politics and business is evidence that women have achieved equality. The Mississippi attorney general, in arguing this year that Roe should be struck down, noted, “Sweeping policy advances now promote women’s full pursuit of both career and family.” In fact, women make up the majority of those who live in poverty in the U.S. Women make only eighty-three cents on the dollar that men earn. Broken down along lines of race and gender, the wage gap widens dramatically: Black women make sixty-four cents for every dollar made by a white man; Latinas make fifty-seven cents. Forcing women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term only adds to their economic burden. But the Supreme Court’s ruling, by ushering in a regime of forced births, will be devastating even among those who have some financial means. No woman can escape the cloud of inferiority that is necessarily attached to having no say over when and whether to be pregnant. Moreover, pregnancy itself is a physical and emotional burden that sometimes has deadly consequences. The U.S. has a higher rate of maternal mortality than Canada, the U.K., and eight other European nations. There is no equivalent medical condition imposed on men. This creates a disparity of experience and consequence in the law that is a perfect example of basic discrimination.
Life-altering poverty and potential death are, of course, the most extreme examples of what can go wrong when unintended and unwanted pregnancy is forced upon women. But the right to abortion should not only be tied to the most tragic outcomes. Newscasters trying to get anti-abortion elected officials to affirm their support of draconian restrictions even in extreme cases—such as when a “thirteen-year-old in Arkansas is raped by a relative,” an example presented to that state’s Governor, Asa Hutchinson—miss the point that abortion is a human right. The bans on abortion even in the event of rape or incest, or when the health of the mother is threatened, certainly betray the extraordinary misogyny that animates opposition to the procedure. But the right to abortion is an affirmation that women and girls have the right to control their own destiny. Without the ability to control when, where, how, and if one chooses to become pregnant or give birth, no other freedom can be achieved.
In 1992, the abortion wars came to a head in Buffalo. For months, Operation Rescue had been planning to lay siege to Buffalo abortion clinics during what they called the Spring of Life. The mayor, Jimmy Griffin, had invited them to do so, saying, “I want to see them in this city. If they can shut down one abortion mill, they’ve done their job.” It seemed like a clear indication that the police would not interfere with their efforts. Counter-protesters from around the country mobilized in the beleaguered Rust Belt city. In the end, we stopped Operation Rescue. Arrests of anti-abortion activists helped to publicize their cause, but we were able to keep the clinics in Buffalo open.
Eight years later, after I had moved to Chicago, I once again experienced the fear involved in being at an abortion clinic. This time, I was not a clinic defender but a client. In the spring of 2000, I became pregnant, after having sex with a male friend after a party at my apartment. I knew within a week that something was happening to my body: I was exhausted, and the spicy food that I usually liked to eat made me nauseated. A pregnancy test confirmed my fears. My friend and I decided to split the cost of an abortion, and my girlfriend at the time drove me to a Planned Parenthood office in Chicago. A year earlier, the office had received a letter with no return address oozing a mysterious liquid, and had been evacuated. I worried about going to the facility and being accosted by bigots and fanatics.
But, on a cold and rainy day in the middle of the week, only people working at the facility were there. The procedure was quick, not entirely painless, and then over. Driving home, I threw up on the side of the road. There was nothing tragic or extraordinary about my experience. I had unprotected sex with a friend and became pregnant. Neither of us intended to be in a relationship, let alone have a child together. I was gay and in my own relationship, and he was straight and single. We were both broke but not poor, and we were able to scrape together the three hundred dollars necessary. But, if I had been forced to carry that pregnancy to term, my life would have been forever changed. A key strategy in the fight for reproductive freedom has involved “abortion speak-outs,” or “shouting out your abortion”—an attempt to fight against the right’s contention that abortion is harmful, tragic, and always regretted. We should trust women, and others, to know what to do with their own bodies.
The Supreme Court’s reversal of the right to abortion has usurped the rights and freedom of people who have the capacity to become pregnant. But anyone—including lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people—whose freedoms are not directly enshrined in the Constitution could see their rights threatened. Justice Clarence Thomas minced no words when he argued, in an opinion he wrote concurring with the majority, that precedent-setting cases that used the right to privacy and due process to guarantee the legality of contraception, gay sex, and gay marriage should be next in the firing line. There is no doubt that, if Republicans gain a congressional majority and win the White House, they will try and impose a national ban on abortion. The recent flurry of attacks on trans youths’ access to prescriptions and medical care has helped to legitimize the power of the state to control the bodies of women and girls when it comes to pregnancy. We are quickly being thrust into a nightmarish web of authoritarian, theocratic rule. The right wants to assert control over an array of non-normative sexualities, family units, and ways of being in the world. And in allowing for some discrimination, largely against trans youth and athletes, the door to rank bias has now been kicked in, legitimizing all of it. Today we reap the whirlwind.
A generation ago in Buffalo, a wide range of ordinary people came together to protect access to abortion clinics. In that instance, it was clear to us how the right’s broad goals were knotted together. We understood that, if they were successful in shutting down Buffalo’s clinics through brute force, it would generate momentum for the rest of their agenda, which included attacking gays, Black women on welfare, single mothers, undocumented immigrants, and anyone else that did not fit in or conform to their narrow “family values” world view. This is a frightening new world, but we can learn from earlier eras. We can also use these renewed attacks to form the solidarity necessary to rebuild the movements that can and will challenge the right’s growing momentum. ♦
