Archive for category: Feminisms

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Long-time anarchist organizer Suzy Subways discusses the struggle against Operation Rescue and the lessons it leaves us with today in a post-Roe world. Originally posted to Hard Crackers. Listen to an interview with Suzy Subways on IGD here.

by Suzy Subways

In the early ’90s, anarchists and other feminists defended clinics with our bodies and taught each other how to do abortion techniques such as menstrual extraction safely. As the Christian Right bombed hundreds of clinics, killed health care providers and patients, and mobilized its base to swarm clinics and shut them down, grassroots reproductive freedom activists stood against this terror, building a powerful and exciting movement. But liberal feminist nonprofits rejected this grassroots mass movement, choosing to rely on the police and courts for protection. Since then, the Christian Right has continued to attack and harass people at clinics, mobilizing its own grassroots activists to shame people getting health care and shut down clinics one by one. Their local, bottom-up strategy took the long view and is now winning at the highest levels of government. If today’s movement for reproductive freedom is to win, it must return to the grassroots.

The militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue was founded in 1986 to mobilize thousands of people to physically block and shut down clinics across the country. This well-funded and well-staffed organization presented an image of the Christian Right as peaceful activists guided by a deep moral outrage, although some of its leaders had signed a pledge defending the assassination of abortion providers and were active in the right-wing militia movement. Reproductive freedom activists, led by people with the capacity to get pregnant, mobilized to protect clinics with our bodies. On the ground, Operation Rescue was aggressive, and sometimes the space in front of clinics erupted into hand-to-hand combat as anti-abortion activists shoved people and tried to crawl through their legs.

Clinic Defense: Using Our Bodies to Protect Our Lifesaving Spaces

I did clinic defense a few times, when I was 18 and 19. As a student at Antioch College in 1992, I went to Columbus, Ohio with some friends on a few Saturdays. We’d wake up super early and stand in formation in front of the clinic with dozens of others to protect it. We saw these health centers as precious places. People going through trauma after sexual assault and through abusive relationships, very young people, and married women trying to keep their lives from getting unmanageable were taking control of their health despite their vulnerability in those moments. As protectors we took our role seriously and we bonded with each other as we stood against the enemy. This was the source of the passion that grew a powerful movement from below.

My dear friend Kathy became a legend at Antioch one day for her response to a vile Christian Right protester who harassed her for hours outside the clinic. Kathy was a hot butch lesbian who grew up on a farm and didn’t take shit, although she was quiet most of the time. This man kept telling her, “You should be married and having children,” until finally, she pulled out her bloody pad, put it in his hand and said, “Put this in your petri dish and grow it!”

This was the vibe at clinic defense. We were taking back our power and control of our bodies, and the energy this ignited in us as a collective body grew exponentially. There’s something about being there when your life-giving space is under attack, being able to defend it successfully, and doing it together. Using our bodies to defend our bodily autonomy.

Operation Rescue targeted my hometown of Philadelphia during the summer of 1993. With at least a hundred people on our side—maybe hundreds—we kept the clinic open. Operation Rescue had about half as many people and stood on the sidewalk across the street. I remember following a crew of badass anarchist lesbians whom I admired around the corner and a few blocks away as they chased a male leader of Operation Rescue, yelling at him and surrounding him. They got in his face, and he cowered. Our power took a visible, audible, unstoppable form: Get out of our town.

Back outside the clinic, I saw a friend on the other side of the street, with the anti-abortion activists. She had been the first to welcome me to my new school when I’d moved to Philly. I felt my face get hot and looked away. I almost felt remorse for the confrontation along with my disappointment. Should I pretend I didn’t see her?

I decided to cross the street and say hi. Sheepishly but warmly, she returned my friendly greeting. It looked like she was there with a church group. A woman standing next to her cast me some snide vibes, saying, “Shouldn’t you be over there?” My friend and I ran out of things to say and I went back, but I felt better knowing she hadn’t rejected me. Decades later, we reconnected on social media, and she is living happily as a lesbian with a wife and kids.

Thinking of that day reminds me of the value of my brilliant, late comrade Joel Olson’s favorite saying, “Peace to the villages—war to the palaces.” A little kindness goes a long way with people we can win over, but we can’t let politeness and decorum get in the way of wielding our power against those who would take our power away.

A Betrayal: Liberal Feminist Nonprofits Tell Defenders to Go Home

In 1995, I moved to New York City and joined Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation. In the August/September issue of our national newspaper that year, Laura from Bay Area Coalition for Our Reproductive Rights (BACORR), wrote:

Fight Back Network members from BACORR, Refuse & Resist Minneapolis, and Love and Rage went to LA May 25th-28th to try to keep the clinics open and to blast OR’s efforts to define themselves in the media as non-violent-peaceful-baby-lovin’-Christians. BACORR had been in touch with WAC LA (Women’s Action Coalition) and a Southern California NOW chapter that welcomed our support and involvement.

Unfortunately, the Fund for the Feminist Majority, a national nonprofit, was in charge at the scene. As reported by Laura, the Fund had put a lot of resources into electing Bill Clinton as president and lobbying for a law that passed in 1994 to make it a federal crime to block clinic doors. The Fund had decided to let Operation Rescue and a group calling themselves Missionaries for the Pre-Born shut down the clinics in LA that day, in order to bring the FACE law into the courts as a test case. Laura continued:

Saturday, the day of the hit, hundreds of pro-choicers were at the clinics around LA. Many had followed the OR caravan from its church meeting-point earlier in the morning. The Fund’s “official leaders” made it clear from the get go that they would offer no resistance to OR if they rushed the door, and were depending on the police to move the anti’s away and level federal charges.

In a nutshell, the anti’s were permitted to sit down in front of the doors, creating the image of non-violent anti-abortion protest. They kept the clinic shut down for two hours. The Fund’s main office lied to BACORR and to Palm Springs NOW, who they knew was working with BACORR, about OR’s whereabouts—telling us they had lost the caravan and had no idea where it was. … A local reporter told us that she had interviewed pro-choice people who were standing at the door when the hit went down who were told not to stop the anti’s and to move away from the door.

Operation Rescue got their dream media opportunity, and police beat and injured Laura and a friend after Fund staff told police they had nothing to do with the official pro-choice response. The Fund didn’t alert legal support that Laura and her friend had been arrested, and they implied to the media that the two had deserved it. Operation Rescue and Missionaries for the Pre-Born were arrested gently at their sit-in, creating a widely broadcast spectacle of peacefully praying dissent, but they were never even charged under the FACE law.

How the Christian Right Won

While the Fund and other liberal feminist nonprofits ordered clinic defenders to stop protecting clinics and simply hold a “Keep Abortion Legal” sign on the sidelines, the Christian Right supported and honored its grassroots movement. They energized large numbers of people, and they inspired many, many more who followed their actions. While the pro-choice establishment dismantled our movement, grassroots activists of the Christian Right have never stopped protesting outside clinics. Even in major liberal cities, they harass and shame people who are just trying to get health care. This grassroots, on-site shaming campaign has made abortion something people feel like they need to be ashamed of, feel guilty about, and not talk about—in contrast to the first decade after legalization in the U.S., when people interviewed about their abortions mostly talked about how relieved they felt. This grassroots movement in local areas across the country has grown stronger over the past three decades, getting clinics closed one by one, winning at the state level and now at the national level, proving to us on the Left what we already knew: Power comes from below.

Since the 1990s, any time there’s an upsurge in support of abortion access, it’s been brief and felt kind of abstract. Young people need an inspiring, direct-action movement to jump into with all their heart and their bodies—they won’t be inspired by getting told to carry a sign through the biggest street in their town. Maybe once or twice, but then it dies down. It’s hard to build a base when you’re not at the place where harm is being done and able to stop it, or at the place where lives are being saved and able to protect it.

There’s an honest argument to be made that health clinics should never have to be battlegrounds, that patients in moments of vulnerability shouldn’t have to walk through such a war. But they’ve been walking through a gauntlet of shame all these years anyway, because clinic defenders haven’t been there to shield them from the hate. And in the ’90s, clinic defenders used our creativity and joy as a buffer between patients and attackers. The Church Ladies for Choice brought their drag queen brilliance, and our queer kiss-ins outside right-wing churches freaked out the Christian Right activists to the point they would avoid getting near us.

As a strategy, anarchists and other revolutionaries in the reproductive freedom movement have consistently—as in for more than 50 years—demanded the repeal of all abortion laws. Not more state involvement from the police and courts, but a removal of all state power in our reproductive lives. We call it “reproductive freedom” because it’s about more than abortion. it’s about the history of forced and coerced sterilizations of Black, Latinx, and Native American women and other people with the capacity to bear children. It’s about the population control tactics used against poor people and those who use drugs.

People don’t have the ability to “choose” whether to have a kid or not when wages are too low, childcare is not accessible, and the rent is too damn high. Medicaid hasn’t paid for abortions since the Hyde Amendment in 1977. Giving a baby up for adoption—or being adopted—can be deeply traumatizing, especially under our current, unsupportive system. And it’s worse for children of color adopted by white parents. But “choice” has been our battle cry since the 1980s. Why? This “choice” versus “life” debate has allowed the Christian Right to control the narrative and make it about their idea of morality. It’s been a successful wedge strategy from the Right, dividing people who could be united in coalitions.

Can We Still Win Now?

If the Christian Right won by building their grassroots movement and letting its power grow across the decades, so must we. If our power is strongest at the location of our bodily autonomy—in the places where we are able to exercise our reproductive freedom—then we must build our movement there.

Abortion pills and menstrual extraction (which can be done in our homes by trained people who don’t have to be medical professionals) allow us to take care of ourselves on our own territory. This is our strongest position strategically and what the Right fears most. They are using surveillance by state power and vigilantes to track, hunt down, and punish whoever provides and receives these medications and treatments, because they can’t just rely on hospital and doctors’ records. Every home could be an abortion clinic. It’s a scary situation, but it also makes clear our advantage.

So it seems clear that the reproductive freedom movement’s strategy now is to protect these sites of health care and resistance by building powerful, anti-racist and queer-positive coalitions involving hundreds of thousands of people. We need as many people involved as possible in order to keep the most vulnerable safe and also to make this health care accessible. If it’s limited to those in the know—people who are already activists and people who are able to find out about the support networks they need—that will exclude the people who need it most.

Some of these coalitions and support networks need to be underground, and some need to be above ground. Some need to be sharing information with people who need abortions about how to get abortion pills and what to say if they need to go to the emergency room (“I think I’m having a miscarriage”—don’t mention abortion). Some need to be driving people to appointments, providing emotional support, following up and making sure people are OK. Some need to be talking to the media and educating, agitating, and organizing in our communities and workplaces. Some will need to fundraise for legal support and organize demonstrations in solidarity with reproductive freedom’s new political prisoners. This work is direct action, because you’re meeting a basic human need in defiance of those who’d prefer that we die.

photo: Edson Chilundo – (CC BY-ND 2.0)

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I am humbled by your invitation. Argentinian feminists have many lessons for us in the United States about how to rebuild struggle for abortion rights and for full reproductive justice. I also want to thank my comrades in the Tempest Collective and the socialist, Black, and Indigenous feminists who have helped orient me in this dismaying moment.

I’ll start with the grim accounting. Since the Supreme Court overturned its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which constitutionally affirmed a right to abortion, more than half the states in the country have banned or are expected to ban nearly all abortions. Most of these bans prohibit abortion after the sixth week of conception—a de facto total ban since most people don’t yet know they are pregnant and the scarcity of providers even before Roe’s overturn makes it difficult to secure a surgical or medical abortion within this window.

Many states with exceptions for rape or incest require filing a police report, which victims of sexual violence are often fearful to do. Clinics in states that do not require a police report are nevertheless telling pregnant women and trans and nonbinary people to go to another state for abortion care because providers don’t want to risk a prison sentence.

In Indiana this past week—a state where for the moment no ban has been enacted—the attorney general announced he is opening an investigation into the doctor who performed an abortion for a 10-year-old rape victim from neighboring Ohio, an abortion-ban state. Montana’s Planned Parenthood clinics now require proof of residency for anyone seeking medical abortion. In states that allow for an abortion to save the pregnant person’s life, we are already hearing reports that urgently needed care for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies are being delayed until a hospital’s lawyers can weigh in—or denied altogether.

Today, Marie Solis writes in We Organize to Change Everything: Fighting for Abortion Access and Reproductive Justice, a fetus is granted more rights than the person carrying it. In this hellscape, Camila Valle warned in a recent Tempest forum, people will die not only from taking desperate means to end their pregnancies but also from being forced on the perilous path of continuing a pregnancy and giving birth.

The United States does not have a national guarantee to health care; what system we have is rife with racial disparities in access and in the kind of care provided. As a result, the U.S. has the highest maternal death rate among industrialized nations, especially for Black women, and unlike nearly all countries around the globe, our maternal death rate has climbed in the last decade.

Roe’s overturn has repercussions for rights beyond abortion. Our constitution’s 14th amendment, which ended slavery in the U.S., was interpreted by earlier Supreme Courts to also guarantee Civil Rights for African Americans and other marginalized communities and to affirm rights to interracial marriage, contraception, LGBT marriage, and same-sex intimacy. In overturning Roe, rightwing justices have foreshadowed and even voiced their intent to upend a host of hard-won rights for oppressed groups.

So long as the erosion and elimination of abortion rights in the U.S. is seen as a project of the Republican party alone, the Democratic party will continue to cynically fashion itself as “The Resistance,” and national organizations…will continue to divert would-be abortion-rights activists into getting out the vote rather than organize clinic defense.

The crisis I am describing has been many decades in the making. The forced birthers scored their first victory in 1976 when antiabortion Democrats, including then Senator Joe Biden, joined Republicans to vote for the Hyde Amendment, prohibiting the use of federal funds for abortion care and thus closing the door to affordable abortion for poor women. In subsequent decades, opportunistic Democratic candidates have promised to repeal the Hyde Amendment and to enact federal legislation guaranteeing the right to abortion. But, notes Stephanie Attar, even in the ten years when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency, they failed to do either. As a candidate, Barrack Obama pledged to introduce a federal Freedom of Choice act in his first 100 days in office. As president, he said Freedom of Choice was no longer a priority—even though Democrats held the majority in Congress for his first two years in office.

National reproductive rights organizations have also failed to defend abortion access on the ground. In the 1990s, for instance, when the Supreme Court ruling Casey opened the door for states to restrict abortion, large organizations like NARAL-Pro Choice America prioritized national elections, lobbying, federal court filings, and supporting Democratic president Bill Clinton to the neglect of local and state-level abortion defense. Under the eight-year Clinton presidency and beyond, state restrictions have piled up: shrinking the time frame in which abortions are permitted; requiring parental permission for children and teens; multi-day waiting periods; and more. For working-class people and for those living in vast rural states with few providers, abortion has long been unaffordable and inaccessible.

How has this happened in a country where a clear majority of people—more now than in 1973—support the right to abortion? For many people, taking their lead from liberal feminism, it is a matter of common sense to point to a conservative Christian agenda. At rallies and on social media, women have latched onto the iconography of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale and an underlying argument that our otherwise stable and just democracy has been hijacked by religious zealots organized through the Republican party. Argued Chrissy Stroop in Open Democracy, “The Republican Party is poised to impose a Christofascist theocracy upon all Americans.”

Images of uniformed handmaidens from the filming of The Handmaid’s tale at the Lincoln Memorial.“The problem with focusing on the Christian Right alone, however, is that it ignores the role of Democrats as handmaids in undoing abortion rights.” Photo by Victoria Pickering.

Certainly the patriarchal and misogynist Christian Right has raised a mighty army to turn back the clock on women’s and LGBTQ rights. The problem with focusing on the Christian Right alone, however, is that it ignores the role of Democrats as handmaids in undoing abortion rights. In the 1990s, for example, when I went to a Democratic party headquarters in Nebraska to ask how I could support pro-abortion candidates, they responded that their sole goal was to campaign for Ben Nelson, even though he was a member of and endorsed by antiabortion groups. When elected to Congress, Nelson championed the federal ban on late-term abortions. Also voting to criminalize late-term abortion was Democratic party Senator Patrick Leahy from the ostensibly liberal state of Vermont. Nevertheless, the NGO NARAL-Pro Choice America gives Leahy a 100-percent rating for supporting reproductive rights. Most recently, President Biden responded to Roe’s overturn with a toothless executive order and also by nominating an antiabortionist for a lifetime federal judgeship—that is, a federal judge who would oppose the “steps” Biden’s executive order only suggests be taken. Sickeningly, it was not outcry from Congressional Democrats but from Republican Rand Paul—no friend of abortion and LGBTQ rights—that convinced Biden to drop this nomination. So long as the erosion and elimination of abortion rights in the U.S. is seen as a project of the Republican party alone, the Democratic party will continue to cynically fashion itself as “The Resistance,” and national organizations like NARAL and Planned Parenthood will continue to divert would-be abortion-rights activists into getting out the vote rather than organize clinic defense.

Another widespread misconception is that Republican or Democrat, lawmakers are catering to their conservative base, pushed by ordinary people to enact restrictions and bans. As Marxists, we know that any society’s ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. We have only to look at the moneyed power of justices like Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett to see that antiabortion ideas come to us top-down, not bottom-up. We can also follow the money. Antiabortion organizations and lobbyists are not largely funded by working-class evangelicals and Catholics but by large investment funds and corporate foundations such as AT&T, Bank of America, Fidelity, GE, JP Morgan Chase, and Pfizer. To fight for reproductive rights, we need to know who our chief enemy is: not the U.S.’s working-class majority but its minority ruling and corporate class.

This begs the question of why so much corporate and political power has been marshalled to control the bodies of women and deny the existence of trans and queer people. One view on the Left is that the ruling class seeks to force birth to increase the labor supply and suppress wages. There’s some evidence for this: right-winger Paul Ryan calling for “more babies” to reverse the declining birthrate; the head of the Conservative Political Action Conference heralding abortion bans to ensure U.S. white supremacy; a footnote in the leaked draft of the recent Supreme Court decision lamenting that for adoption the “domestic supply of infants … has become virtually nonexistent.” But as Paul Heideman points out, this narrow economistic position overlooks that other countries such as Norway aims to assure a next generation of workers by increasing social supports for working women who also want a family.

I part company with Heideman, however, when he writes that we don’t have such supports in the U.S. because “capitalism tends to reinforce women’s social roles as caregivers.” Neoliberal capitalism does not just “tend” to reinforce traditional gender roles but utterly depends on it. Consider: To emerge from the deep economic crisis of the 1970s and further crises, including in 2009, the capitalist class and its parties—in the U.S. both the Republicans and the Democrats—have sought to destroy unions, suppress wages, intensify production, and impose austerity, including by offloading the costs of childcare, eldercare, education, and healthcare onto women in particular through unwaged or low-waged labor and through privatization and mounting debt. Notably, it was a Democrat, Bill Clinton, who ended the major U.S. Welfare program Aid to Families with Dependent Children in the name of “personal responsibility.”

The offloading of carework has been facilitated not only by the rhetorics of “personal responsibility” and “family values” but also by rhetorics of resentment and blame for anyone viewed as not living up to the new gendered, sexual, and racial order. Hence neoliberalism’s expanding hold has been bolstered by racist epithets about “welfare queens,” fears of “job-stealing” immigrants, and fairytales of women who abandoned elite careers to relish in the joys of stay-at-home motherhood. In sum, to succeed in such a massive reordering of the terms of production and a massive reduction in social supports, writes Tithi Bhattacharya, neoliberalism has needed to “re-craft gender identities and recirculate certain ideologies regarding the working-class family.” Foremost among those ideologies is the supposed “naturalness” of the bread-winning dad and baby-producing, child-rearing mom even as working-class families have scrambled to cobble together multiple low-wage job plus housing, childcare, and transportation to stay afloat.

So it isn’t just that the toxic brew of sexist, racist, and xenophobic ideologies is a byproduct of neoliberalism. Neoliberal capital has depended on these ideas; it has cultivated its devotees from the Right to Life foundation to the Army of God, from the Chicago Boys to the Proud Boys. And in the place of a state that provides social supports, we have what John Clark and Janet Newman in The Managerial State dub the “watch tower state”: policing and criminalizing communities of color; banning the teaching of this country’s racist and genocidal past and present; charging with child abuse parents supporting their transgender children; and regulating the lives of anyone with a uterus.

The enemy, then, is capitalism, and we can’t vote our way out of it, especially given that in the United States we have only two major parties, both dedicated to continuing this history, in one form or another, of exploitation and oppression.

A framework of social reproductive feminism, which I have only very briefly sketched, reveals that our fight is not only for “choice”—the right to choose abortion if one has the means to pay for it—but for full reproductive justice: articulated in theU.S by feminists of color and scholars such as Dorothy Roberts as the right not to have children, the right to have children, and the right to healthy and safe environments for parenting. With its reliance on policing, imprisonment, forced birth, and denial of health care rights and other social supports, neoliberalism clearly violates every tenet of reproductive justice. So have all forms of capitalism from the era of slavery and child labor to the continuing racist practices of Jim Crow and the export of U.S. military occupation, dictatorial rule, and economic shock to countries throughout the Global South. Indeed, the United States was founded on slavery and genocide; our society today is undemocratic and violent because our institutions and constitution were designed for continuing service to exploitation, oppression, and dispossession within and beyond U.S. borders. The enemy, then, is capitalism, and we can’t vote our way out of it, especially given that in the United States we have only two major parties, both dedicated to continuing this history, in one form or another, of exploitation and oppression.

To be clear, there are some legislative and judicial initiatives I do support: locally, for example, Vermont’s Reproductive Liberty Amendment. If passed in November, this amendment would not only enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution but also prohibit forced sterilization—a critical protection in a state that led the nation’s genocidal eugenics movement. And a defeat of this measure will embolden antiabortionists. Yet as the history of the Fugitive Slave Act tells us, alongside the chilling threats of prosecution faced by abortion providers and mutual-aid networks in all states, none of us can safely and freely seek abortion until we all can. Needed is the kind of constitutional crisis called for by the revolutionary rock band Rage Against the Machine which has begun playing under the banner “Abort the Supreme Court.” It is a constitutional crisis that our comrades in Chile have created and that were created in the United States with the Civil War and, a century later, the escalating and increasingly militant Civil Rights, LGBTQ, and women’s movements.

Creating a constitutional crisis in the U.S. today can seem like an insurmountably tall order given that the movements of the 1960s and early ‘70s were crushed by massive state repression or pacified by the Democratic party’s siren call. And creating such a crisis will be impossible if the Left does not articulate a strong socialist feminist alternative to the dominant stream of liberal or corporate feminism whose elite leaders will always be able to secure an abortion if they want one or employ a black or brown woman to nanny their children. But we can start—and are starting across the U.S. in grassroots organizations and collectives—by learning about the mass mobilizations and civil disobedience that won U.S. abortion rights in the first place and by building, participating in, and defending networks of mutual aid to provide women and trans and nonbinary people with abortion pills or to transport them to states where surgical abortion is available.

I have some hope that, despite the considerable repression already being marshalled against us, such local initiatives can grow into a national strategy and mass movement. The same generation that is organizing Amazon, Starbucks, and other workplaces is not going to take the denial of abortion and trans rights nor the continuing degradation of Black lives and the environment without a fight, and this new generation of working-class warriors seems more likely to strike than to line up behind the corporate, imperialist, Islamophobic “feminism” of a Madeleine Albright or Hillary Clinton.

Beyond hope, I also feel a grave sense of obligation to our sisters and comrades in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Ireland and beyond lest the United States export its antiabortion movement and undo the considerable reproductive rights you have so recently won. I’ll end where I began: We have much to learn from you. More, we have the responsibility to put the lessons into practice.

Featured Image Credit: Photo courtesy of wikimedia; modified by Tempest.

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Anecdotal reports indicate that more people have been undergoing permanent birth control procedures
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By Greg Woodfield, June 24, 2022

“Pro-abortion ‘terror group’ Jane’s Revenge – which has vowed a ‘Night of Rage’ over the repeal of Roe v. Wade – is most likely a loose-knit assembly of ‘anarchist’ cells, according to a security expert.

The shadowy group relies on inciting people to vandalize and torch pro-life clinics and facilities through calls to arms on its website, says Kyle Shideler, director and senior analyst for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy, a Washington, DC-based think tank.

Jane’s Revenge has already firebombed crisis pregnancy centers in the wake of the  the Supreme Court draft opinion leak last month that revealed the court planned to overturn a woman’s constitutional right to have an abortion.”

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It’s time to examine alternative ways of living and loving found in other cultures and LGBTQAI+ communities
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The imminent overturn of Roe v. Wade, coming on top of decades of what many activists consider to be an overly cautious abortion rights movement, is having ripple effects in reproductive rights organizations and clinics, according to Emily Likins-Ehlers, who’s with the group ReproJobs, a worker empowerment center recently highlighted by The Intercept. “People are just trying to grab control where they can,” Likins-Ehlers said. “Making sure that they have a severance when they lose their job in two weeks or whatever has been on the forefront of most workers’ minds that I’ve spoken with. They just want to pay their bills after Roe falls.”

ReproJobs is a nonprofit run by two anonymous organizers who work in the reproductive rights field, as well as Likins-Ehlers. The group has widely followed and influential Instagram and Twitter accounts focused on workplace organizing and discontent inside reproductive rights workplaces. Likins-Ehlers offered to do an interview about the group and its role, which was mentioned in our story on the implosion of the progressive nonprofit world in Washington, D.C., adding that the two co-founders are continuing to remain anonymous.

“I don’t envy anyone who has to manage an organization right now, particularly, but I think they would find that they could actually find more resources if they were willing to ally themselves with the union, by accepting the union into their space,” Likins-Ehlers said, though they agreed with the executive directors cited in The Intercept article that a generational divide and a culture that encourages callouts have made organizations more difficult to manage. Turmoil in progressive organizations generally, and reproductive rights groups specifically, isn’t explained by the presence of a union drive. Some organizations going through upheaval have been unionized for decades, such as NARAL Pro-Choice America or the Sierra Club, while others, like the Guttmacher Institute and Groundswell Fund, are seeing fresh union drives.

There’s a fear, Likins-Ehlers said, that many organizations will soon shut down and blame the union. “That’s what a lot of these reproductive justice orgs will do,” Likins-Ehlers said, referring to a previous organization they had worked with that did just that. “They’ll say, ‘Roe fell, and this became too hard. And I’m too scared of getting arrested. And I guess the union was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and now we have to close.’”

At the same time, Likins-Ehlers said, things have not been going well under the current and former executive directors. “If the managers feel like the conditions are becoming unworkable, that means that the workers are doing a good job disrupting the system. And I think that most of these workers right now know that it’s toast. We’re fucked. Roe is going to fall any day now. And we are going to have to set up bail funds.”

Likins-Ehlers said they work as a part-time contractor for ReproJobs. The two anonymous founders go by the pseudonyms Hermione and Luna. The budget for the operation, ReproJobs said, is around $275,000 this year, and the major funding began around 2019. “If they feel like they can’t rise to this challenge,” Likins-Ehlers said of the managers at nonprofits, “they can get out of the way and let somebody else rise to this challenge. Because there is a generational gap, and more people are unionizing now than ever before.”

“If the managers feel like the conditions are becoming unworkable, that means that the workers are doing a good job disrupting the system.”

Likins-Ehlers said that they had recently been in a webinar with one of their movement heroes, Loretta Ross, an author, activist, and reproductive justice pioneer. Ross, who was featured in The Intercept’s article, has been publicly advocating against callout culture in progressive organizations for several years.

“I really respect Loretta Ross and everything she has to say, and she sort of gave me the business during a webinar a few weeks ago, where she told me that when she was a young organizer, you were lucky to have a sleeping bag on the floor of a church when you went to a protest. Things were different. There weren’t jobs in the movement 50 years ago; this is a new industry that is just forming,” they said.

“Loretta has a book coming out that sort of disrupts callout culture in a really powerful way, and so I think that there’s been a lot of calling out that’s happened in the organizing efforts — specific executive directors have been targeted and have been ousted from their positions of power — and when I speak to workers, I don’t encourage that kind of calling out because I don’t feel like it builds collective power. I feel like it will simply give you a new figurehead to the same dynamic. So when we create a union, we’re simply trying to disrupt the power dynamic in and of itself and say, ‘This isn’t about you, as a leader, or you as a person necessarily. This is about a system, a structure.’”

Likins-Ehlers said that there are indeed examples of employees who lean too heavily into callouts of management over issues that should be handled differently, but that it’s important to separate those instances from the worthy goal of improving workplaces generally. “Loretta Ross said to me that she had an employee that called her out because the employee’s cat died, and she wanted time off to mourn her cat, and Loretta was unwilling to give her time off to mourn her cat or something like this. And that was Loretta’s example of the kinds of conflicts that are happening with the unions, and I had to kind of shrug because I was like, yeah, if a worker came to me with that story, I would tell them to deal with it personally. That’s not what we’re talking about. We are talking about living wages, we’re talking about parental leave. We are talking about the right to have a real job and not a temporary job that can be pulled out from underneath you at any moment. We’re talking about the right to work-life balance.”

Likins-Ehlers added that there were also cultural issues at work, recalling a previous boss of theirs who behaved transphobically. “Our executive director would deadname people,” they said, adding:

So just because you are the director of an abortion clinic doesn’t mean that you are respectful of transgender people. So I’m not saying that Loretta is wrong or that any of these leaders are wrong. They’re right also. But why don’t they just join us? They really aren’t the boss, they are employed by a board of directors. All of these executive directors are just an employee, just like us. Just like the rest of the workers who are trying to unionize, they have a boss, but their boss is a volunteer board of directors instead of an individual. So it’s harder to target. But that is really who runs these nonprofits. It’s not the EDs. The boards are the ones, and these are often people who are wealthy or work in other industries or are high-powered lawyers — like Planned Parenthood has these, like, super high-powered, amazing lawyers who could be spending their time strengthening the movement but instead spend their time fighting the unions, when really the only thing that anybody wants is just a formal contract.

Most of these employees, when they come to me, they’re like: “I don’t want my clinic to shut down. I don’t want my organization to be burdened. I’m not looking for a raise.” They literally just want a formal employment contract. Because we all feel so insecure in this job economy, like you said. So I don’t know. There’s just, I think, cognitive dissonance because, like, I’m holding Loretta Ross’s book, right here, “An Introduction To Reproductive Justice.” And she says, specifically, quote, “Reproductive justice explains that indeed, poverty creates poor conditions for mothering, because it shortens lifespans and increases rates of infant and child mortality and lower birth weights.” So if we’re talking about poverty wages, that’s what a lot of these reproductive justice workers are making in their cities: poverty wages. I made way more money as a busser at a pizza place than I made at the clinic. So for them to question our loyalty to the movement feels really rude.

The cautious politics of many of the leading abortion rights groups, Likins-Ehlers said, also helped bring about the catastrophe the movement is now facing. “When I started in the abortion movement back in 2012, they told me that I wasn’t allowed to use the word abortion as I advocated, that we could only say ‘a woman’s right to choose’ — that saying the word abortion was too radical and too leftist. And I got put on a list, like, ‘Emily’s not allowed to talk to people because she’s too radical about what she says.’ So I’ve always been a disrupter, everywhere I’ve gone. You can ask anyone who’s worked with me, I’m a pain in the fucking ass,” they said. “I felt this moment coming for so many years. And I feel like the movement has — we have been failed.”

The post ReproJobs’ Emily Likins-Ehlers: Overly Cautious Organizations and Imminent Roe Overturn Are Driving Staff Dissent appeared first on The Intercept.

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I can’t be the only Black girl who’s sat in a room with a group of white people and thought you know what, I’m not sure why this is racist, but something about this feels pretty damn racist.

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Before Roe v. Wade, women set up referral networks to help each other access abortions. One referral coordinator was Carol Giardina, who connected her college classmates to safe abortion providers even though it was illegal. The time for such bravery has come again.

Protesters raise their fists during a mass demonstration against New York State abortion laws in Manhattan on March 28, 1970. (Graphic House / Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

The recent leak of a Supreme Court opinion draft suggests that Roe v. Wade will soon be overturned — and that for millions of people across the country, abortions will become illegal.

For those who came of age before Roe was decided in 1973, the stakes of this rollback are clear. They’ve already lived through a time when getting an abortion meant breaking the law, seeking medical care in secrecy, and risking your life to maintain control over your body and your future. Those who were active in the movements for abortion rights and women’s liberation know the fundamental threats to personal freedom and safety that the pre-Roe era posed — and why we can’t go back.

One such activist is Carol Giardina, cofounder of Gainesville Women’s Liberation and advocate for abortion rights. As a college student in the early 1960s, she created and ran a referral network to help fellow students and community members obtain safe illegal abortions. Jacobin sat down with Giardina to discuss the state of reproductive health care before Roe: how she built the referral network, what options were available to abortion patients, and what a new generation of organizers needs to know as abortion bans take hold across the country.

Piper Winkler

Prior to Roe v. Wade, when people experienced unwanted pregnancies, what were their options, and what was the likely outcome for them?

Carol Giardina

Whenever you went out with your girlfriends — went out shopping, or for a walk, or to lunch — you wouldn’t get more than fifteen minutes into whatever you were talking about before somebody would say, “Oh my God, Jane’s period is late,” or “Oh my God, my period is three days late.” It might be one of them, or their roommate, or somebody we all knew, but it was always there in the conversation. It was that pervasive.

You would worry, and then you would get the word that her period came, and everybody would be like, “Oh, thank God.” But in the meantime, we would try to prepare for whose period might not come. It was just a part of life, like washing your hair. It was that much around you. You always had at least one or two friends who feared that their periods were late; it was there at all times.

You had basically two choices in 1963 and in the whole period before Roe v. Wade. One option was to have the child, which means you were not going to finish college. You would go home. Your parents would be mortified. You would be the talk of the neighborhood. You would bring shame upon your family. And you would either give the kid up for adoption or raise it. Your whole life would be changed in an irrevocable way.

She was blindfolded and taken out into the countryside. When they took the blindfold off, she was in a very poor person’s country shack.

The other alternative was to get an illegal abortion, which meant risking your life. Women died from illegal abortions; they got torn up from them; they got blood poisoning.

These were your two choices. Have this child, get thrown out of school, shame your family, and change your life. You either give it up or you keep it, but you’re in bad trouble. The other choice is to risk your life to get an illegal abortion. This choice hung over the head of sexually active women before Roe.

You saw women disappearing from the freshman class, and you knew they had gone home to have a baby. And they don’t come back, either. This did not happen to the guys in the freshman class, or anywhere along the line. It took a toll on women getting a college education.

Piper Winkler

How did you become connected to the referral network, and what did it look like when you started?

Carol Giardina

My roommate, Linda, was pregnant. She was my first roommate. I grew up in Queens, in New York City. I was something between a beatnik and a hippie. It was 1963. I knew people in New York who had gotten abortions. I was living in the girls’ dorm at the University of Florida in Gainesville. My parents sent me away to get me out of the city, because they were afraid I was becoming a beatnik and a protester, which, of course, I was. The civil rights movement was rolling in.

Linda was a good Southern girl, with a deep accent and blonde hair. She said to me, “My mother will commit suicide if she finds out that I’m pregnant.” I said, “Well, Linda, I might know somebody; maybe I could help you.”

This is how it started. I didn’t choose to become the dorm abortion referral counselor. If you had sat in a room of ten of us and asked somebody to volunteer, I wouldn’t have done it. But there it was: my roommate was pregnant. She was desperate to have an abortion, and she probably would have done harmful things to herself.

We raised money quite publicly: the guy who became my boyfriend brought me his whole scholarship check. We robbed the washers and dryers in the laundry room. We took bottles to the recycling. We got money from donations, from friends. We raised money in a very public way.

So Linda went to New York and got an illegal but safe abortion. When she came back, women started coming to our dorm room: they’re afraid they’re pregnant, and can I help them? So I tried. And it began that I was making referrals for illegal abortions. I got a bird’s-eye view of the girls in the dorm and the freshman class. If you got pregnant, you got thrown out of school, period. They came to me dreading that they were pregnant.

One choice was to risk death, and your other choice was to drop out of school, go home, and have a kid. These were wretched choices.

[After her abortion,] Linda was okay. Two of my other friends were not. One got some pills from somebody who told them, “Take all these pills. You’re going to miscarry.” Nobody knew what these things were; you just took them. She was on my dorm room floor, and she said, “I’m going to go in the shower. Don’t come in there with me. I’m going to stuff a washcloth in my mouth so that I don’t scream.” And then she had been instructed to pick up everything that came out, put it in a plastic bag, and take it somewhere, so they could make sure that everything had worked.

She was lying on the shower floor in a pool of blood, with this washcloth in her mouth, with the water falling down on her to wash things away. This was a very close friend. She didn’t die. She made it. But what a nightmare.

Another friend was not so lucky. She went somewhere because she knew somebody who knew somebody; she was blindfolded and taken out into the countryside. When they took the blindfold off, she was in a very poor person’s country shack. This was the South in 1963. If you were poor, you didn’t have a sanitary place to do this, but you needed the money.

I don’t know what they stuck into Mary, but the fetus didn’t come out, and she got blood poisoning. She came back to Gainesville, and the police found her. By this time, she had a fever and blood poisoning, and she was basically collapsing. The police took her to jail instead of to the hospital. They wanted to know: Who set this up for you? Where did you go? Who did this?

She didn’t even know. She knew one person who told her where to go, and somebody else picked her up. She didn’t give them any information. She was half dead. They took her to the hospital. She had a doctor who didn’t believe that women should get abortions; they were trying to save the life of the fetus and not her life.

She did survive, and she managed to miscarry. These are two women who survived; not only did they survive but they didn’t tear up their insides. According to Howard Zinn’s The Twentieth Century: A People’s History, one-third of the women having illegal abortions had to be hospitalized for complications.

A lot of people think, “Well, a lot of women didn’t get abortions. They didn’t have to worry about it.” But it wasn’t remote. It was right there in your face. It was a part of your everyday life, and it went with you. One choice was to risk death, and your other choice was to drop out of school, go home, and have a kid. These were wretched choices.

Piper Winkler

What kinds of abortion patients did you work with? What did you learn about them and their experiences?

Carol Giardina

They were just everyday people. They were everyday students. They were just like my roommate: they had unprotected sex, which I believe most people at one time or another have probably done. I don’t think there was any pattern to what kind of people they were.

We would make arrangements with the network of people who were going to help them get there. It was a nurse in Miami, a doctor in New York. I didn’t have any back-alley people in my contacts.

And I’ll tell you another thing: nobody regretted it. Nobody. I can tell you that much. That is true of all of them. Nobody regretted it. They felt relief. That was the major mental health outcome.

I’ve lost track of most of them. I still see my friend Carrie. She raised a kid; she went that route, and he grew up to be a nice kid. But she went on welfare. She quit school, she went on welfare, and, many years later, she managed to return to school, but she became a welfare mom for a while.

The only common characteristic among those women [who had abortions] is that they felt relief afterward.

Piper Winkler

How would you make a referral for a patient, and what steps would she take to get the abortion?

Carol Giardina

By the time they came to our dorm room, they already knew that they wanted an abortion. They knew they had put some money in a pot for Linda, and they knew that she had come back, that she was alive. And they knew that’s what they wanted to do, because they didn’t want to leave school and have kids. I didn’t have to do a counseling session. That was what they wanted to do.

I was keeping a card file by this time. We just looked at their schedule. When were they going to have exams? How much money would it cost? How could they get the money? They would fish around and figure out how they could get the money. And then we would make arrangements with the contacts, the network of people who were going to help them get there. It was a nurse in Miami, a doctor in New York. I didn’t have any back-alley people in my contacts.

Piper Winkler

You recall being nearly thrown out of school for your referral work. How did pro-choice politics fit into the political terrain of your campus?

Carol Giardina

Can you imagine going back to your apartment to find three women standing there, and they look like they’re scared to death and they want you to help them, and it’s illegal? I nearly got thrown out of school. The dean kind of knew what was going on, but she didn’t want a scandal. Back then, universities acted in loco parentis, in place of your parents, and they basically advertised that your child would be safe here. They really didn’t want it to get out that this was happening and that women were getting pregnant, so they didn’t throw me out. And my mother stuck up for me.

You were banned from using science and medicine to not have to become a parent every time you had sex. The science was there, and we couldn’t use it.

There wasn’t a pro-choice presence in the whole town until we organized Gainesville Women’s Liberation in the summer of ’68. Right away, a woman had been arrested. Her name was Shirley Wheeler, and she was a townsperson. We were part of a defense for her in 1971. Then there was a pro-choice presence there, and it was us; it was kids with Women’s Liberation.

We talked about abortions and who had had them. We did consciousness-raising. I don’t remember how we got involved in Shirley Wheeler’s case, but she had been arrested, and they were trying to get information out of her, which was the typical thing that happened.

Piper Winkler

After your abortion referral work in college, how did you get involved in the national women’s liberation movement?

Carol Giardina

We started Gainesville Women’s Liberation, which is the mother group of National Women’s Liberation and the first women’s liberation group in the South. We met up with the women who would form Redstockings at the first Women’s Liberation conference, and then we all went to protest the Miss America beauty pageant in 1968.

We all shared our experiences, because we were doing consciousness-raising; this was our organizing method. It wasn’t to have catharsis or to be close to your sisters. It was to see that things in your personal life were caused by external conditions, that they were political things. You weren’t just a slut who screwed around with too many guys. You were banned from using science and medicine to not have to become a parent every time you had sex. The science was there, and we couldn’t use it. We’re about to have that happen all over again.

Redstockings decided that instead of just doing consciousness-raising, they were going to have a speak-out. This came after they went to an abortion reform hearing with a bunch of legislators — all men and one nun. They said, “Women are the experts on this. We should be part of making these decisions.” Well, they wouldn’t let the women talk.

They were on the news, and they decided that they would give their own testimony to the world. By this time, Women’s Liberation Movement was producing a newspaper, Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement. So the event was written up in the Village Voice and in the Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement.

It always aggravated me when people would say, “The Supreme Court gave us Roe v. Wade.” Like, thank you! [As if] these guys just saw the light, woke up one day, and said, “Let’s pass a law.” And it didn’t happen that way at all. Here were Redstockings breaking the law, getting up one after another, and telling stories like the stories of Linda and Mary. One of them had had a baby and had to put it up for adoption.

I was really disappointed. We wanted to go all the way. We thought Roe was a big compromise.

An article about the event was written for Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement. It went across the country, through different local women’s liberation groups, which by early 1969 had sprouted up all over the place. In towns all over the country, women’s liberation groups are having speak-outs, because they had learned about the one in New York. And it seemed to be a powerful way of organizing.

Sarah Weddington was one of the two women attorneys who brought the [Roe v. Wade] case to court. And she was really the one that carried it all the way. She had an abortion in law school at the University of Texas at Austin. But she didn’t want to get up and testify about it, so she sat quietly and thought, “What can I do?” And she thought, “I’m going to change the law.”

She graduated; she began to do research about the law. Everybody was doing underground abortion referrals. Jane, the big network in Chicago, did maybe ten thousand referrals. But all over the country, people like me, people like the women in Austin Women’s Liberation, were trying to help women get abortions. Not because we were charitable souls, but because it was happening to people that we knew.

And if you didn’t have beatnik friends in a big city, there was the Clergy Consultation Service. They were rabbis and Methodists. And they were religious leaders who thought you should get help, instead of half killing yourself by trying to do it yourself.

Sarah found Norma McCorvey, or Jane Roe, and they brought the case forward. She pushed it for a couple of years. Finally, it got to the Supreme Court, where the women’s liberation movement gave the court the opportunity to learn about it and to do the right thing. I don’t think they would have just woken up and gotten the right idea.

Sarah Weddington herself, the attorney that brought the case to the court, was at the Austin Women’s Liberation Speakout, a child of the New York Speakout, the first one in the country. She knew she had had an abortion herself. She didn’t want to come forward and talk about it. And she got it into her head that she could change the law.

This story illustrates that the Supreme Court is not something in an ivory tower. It changes things after social conditions have changed, and after a movement has arisen to make something happen. The Supreme Court codifies reality in some way. The story of Roe gives you a different understanding of how and why the powers that be do what they do. It’s a lesson for us now, and for the strategies that we might use now.

Piper Winkler

Do you remember finding out that Roe had been decided? What was your response to that news?

Carol Giardina

I was really disappointed. We wanted to go all the way. We thought Roe was a big compromise. The state had a voice in the second trimester. Cindy Cisler, who was in Women’s Liberation in New York, referred people and had an abortion herself and did a lot of writing about it. She said, “Here I am, I feel like Cassandra, but this law is no good. It’s got its own seeds of destruction; it’s based on privacy. And it doesn’t give women the power to really make the decision.” And she was right.

We bought earplugs for the patients. We bought a bulletproof vest for our doctor.

Roe was a relief, but it was not what we had hoped would happen. Cindy used to hold up a blank piece of paper: we were for repeal, which meant no law. It should be like going to the dentist. She would say, “This is what we want: no law.” It was a blank piece of paper, leaving things completely in women’s hands. We viewed Roe as a minor relief.

Piper Winkler

You cofounded the first women’s liberation organization in the South. What unique challenges and demands do Southerners face in women’s liberation and pro-choice organizing?

Carol Giardina

They face a more virulent opposition. We used to do clinic defense. Two friends of mine, in the year after Roe, opened the first abortion clinic in town. I think it was the second one in the state.

The born-again folk would come outside that clinic. Two abortion doctors in Florida were killed. We bought earplugs for the patients. We bought a bulletproof vest for our doctor. He used to go in on the floor of the car. We would drive him in, covered by a blanket, in a bulletproof vest. The clinic was threatened with bombings on a constant basis, and you could not get the police to do anything, even though there were threats against it all the time. These were not idle threats, like, “God might hurt you one day,” or something. It was like, “We’re going to come and firebomb your clinic.”

The police wouldn’t come. Well, we had a very active Veterans for Peace chapter — Vietnam veterans against the war. They were up for anything. So they said, “We’ll come and guard the clinic,” after we couldn’t get the police month after month and more places were being bombed. An ex-boyfriend of mine was head of this Vets for Peace chapter. They’d go into the parking lot, armed to the teeth with all the guns they were allowed to bring back from Vietnam.

They would fan out around the parking lot. Some of them would go inside the clinic. We’d bring them food, and they would call the local police and say, “Hi, we’re Vietnam veterans. And we are guarding our local clinic here. Why don’t you come down here and do your job?”

They did that for quite a few weeks and months, off and on, and guard the clinic. The police were really afraid of them. They were Vietnam vets, and they really would guard you. I’m quite sure that one of the main reasons we didn’t get firebombed was that people knew they were there, because we certainly were threatened.

Piper Winkler

What advice would you give to a new generation fighting the reinstatement of abortion bans? What about that era should we be prepared to fight back against?

Carol Giardina

I feel very strongly that we need to go for free legal abortions — vacuum-aspiration abortions, D&C [dilation and curettage] abortions. We need to go for the moon, and we need to disrupt the hell out of the status quo. Honestly, that’s the way to do it.

I’m all for electing good candidates who promise to do the right thing. I’m not against that; I vote. But you have to make it more uncomfortable for the system, so that it’s not worth it [to ban abortions]. Whatever is on the other side, you have to tilt that balance.

The law changed in New York because the demand for repeal became so popular that it went all around the country. The New York law was the model for Roe, which came three years later. In 1970, abortion became legal in New York; half the country came to New York to get abortions, but they didn’t want to pass the law. Governor Nelson Rockefeller said to the state legislature, “If we don’t compromise here, we’re going to end up with repeal.” They bought off enough people with this compromise.

Whatever hangs in the balance now, we have to make it the lesser of the two evils by making a tumult. We believe in what we call the inside-outside strategy, which means you do everything. You bring lawsuits. We need a class-action lawsuit right now for all the women in states that have already passed these laws, saying, “We can’t get an abortion. You’re ruining our lives.”

We need to lobby and elect some good people. Then we need to disrupt the hell out of everything. We need fifty thousand people chaining themselves to the Supreme Court. You march; you do civil disobedience; you bring a lawsuit; you lobby and try to elect good people; you raise consciousness; you build a movement. You do all of it.

I think we need to do everything. If you do everything, there’s a place for everybody. If somebody just wants to contribute to somebody’s campaign, that’s fine. They can do that. If somebody else wants to sign a defiance pledge saying, “I’m aiding and abetting women to get an abortion,” they can take that further step. If somebody wants to march over the Brooklyn Bridge, they can do that. Everybody can enter at their own comfort level. It makes a place for everybody in the movement.

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A historical look at how anarchists in the 1990s mobilized against attacks on reproductive freedom and autonomy by taking direct action and building autonomous infrastructure.

By Spencer Beswick

As the Supreme Court prepares to reverse Roe v. Wade under a Democratic president, house, and senate, it is clear that action at the ballot box is insufficient to protect abortion. Reproductive rights were not won by electoral means, and that is not how we will defend them.

Anarcha-feminist traditions of grassroots struggle and autonomous abortion infrastructure offer alternative strategies. As the anarcha-feminist Liz Highleyman put it in 1992, “the day when abortion is again made illegal may come sooner than we like to think. We must be ready to take our bodies and our lives into our own hands.”

Anarcha-feminists were on the front lines of the struggle for abortion throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. They were convinced that Roe v. Wade would not last forever and that they could not depend on the state and the legal system to protect reproductive freedom. Anarcha-feminists took a three-pronged approach to abortion struggle: defense of abortion clinics, construction of grassroots reproductive health infrastructure, and an anti-state approach to building feminist dual power.

Defense of Abortion Clinics

Anarcha-feminists physically protected abortion clinics from the likes of Operation Rescue, which was formed in 1986 to act as anti-abortion shock troops. They assaulted abortion clinics and supported bombings and assassinations of abortion providers using the slogan “if you believe abortion is murder, act like it’s murder.”

Broad feminist and queer coalitions mobilized against Operation Rescue. Anarcha-feminists introduced black bloc tactics and a willingness to engage in physical confrontation. They used these confrontational tactics to successfully protect clinics in NYC, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and across the country.

When Operation Rescue attempted to host a summer training camp in Minneapolis in 1993, anarchists physically confronted them, blocked them in their church, disrupted their meetings, vandalized their materials, protected clinics from their attacks, and generally made them unwelcome. Although some liberals opposed these tactics, anarchists and other militants handed Operation Rescue a major defeat and ran them out of town.

Reflecting on the experience, a local anarchist named Liza wrote that “it seems like no matter how hard activists fight, we rarely win. Except this time we were victorious. We fought against these fascists … We saw the demise of Operation Rescue in the Twin Cities, partly due to our unprecedented aggressiveness and opposition, and partly because their movement is losing, big time.”

Poster distributed by anarchists in Minneapolis (Profane Existence 1993)

Construction of Grassroots Reproductive Health Infrastructure

Anarcha-feminists established autonomous infrastructure and self-help groups in which people learned to take care of their own bodies and induce abortions on their own terms. As one anarchist put it in a 1991 article, “medicine is something we must take into our own hands. Because how can you smash the state if you’re still walking funny from a visit to the gynecologist’s?”

Threats to legal abortion produced an urgent need, as Highleyman wrote in 1992, to “rebuild the network of feminist women’s health and reproductive resources that existed in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.” Anarchists called for the revival of groups like the Chicago Jane Collective that provided over ten thousand underground abortions before they were legalized. While anarcha-feminists supported abortions provided by accredited doctors, their focus on women’s autonomy led them to draw on alternative traditions of women-controlled health practices. This includes herbal and holistic methods which women have used “throughout the ages … to control their fertility and reproduction.”

Anarchists advocated expanding grassroots infrastructure and self-organization to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to perform their own reproductive care. They argued that this would produce true reproductive freedom and autonomy that was independent of the state and its laws.

Anti-State Approach to Building Feminist Dual Power

Anarcha-feminists did not appeal to the state to maintain abortion rights. They believed that the state was inherently patriarchal and was ultimately the enemy of reproductive justice. Thus, the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (1989-98) argued in its draft political statement that “our freedom will not come through the passage of yet more laws but through the building of communities strong enough to defend themselves against anti-choice and anti-queer terror, rape, battery, child abuse and police harassment.”

Anarchists spread this analysis in the feminist movement, including by marching in blocs at reproductive justice demonstrations. In place of the slogan “we’re pro-choice and we vote,” anarcha-feminists often marched behind a banner reading “we’re pro-choice and we riot!”

Anarchists supported struggles to maintain legal abortion but argued that we must be ready to act on our own terms in the fight for bodily autonomy and self-determination. Establishing reproductive healthcare infrastructure is a key component of feminist dual power that challenges the hegemony of the state and capitalism. This kind of infrastructure prefigures—and concretely establishes—a world defined by mutual aid, solidarity, and autonomy.

As Sunshine Smith remarked in 1990, forming self-help medical groups and abortion infrastructure in the Bay Area “has, in very concrete ways, made our struggle against the anti-abortion group Operation ‘Rescue’ and the ‘Supreme’ Court stronger and more effective. We have learned that if the time comes, we can and will do home abortions. We are becoming physically aware of the invasion the government is conducting into our bodies. We are now able to repulse the state from our uteri because we are gaining the knowledge that enables us to control our own bodies.”

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