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.”
Since the leaked document that surfaced last week of the Supreme Court Justice’s vote to strike down Roe v. Wade, many have rightfully declared that a ban on abortion will not stop people from having abortions. Indeed, history has shown that even under the most violent and oppressive conditions, before modern technology existed, women had knowledge of the reproductive body, of herbs, plants, and other methods to induce abortion and prevent pregnancy. Across cultures and communities, mainly women were the keepers of this knowledge, specialists in the field, whose gifts provided reproductive health services to women in their community. They were midwives, nurses and counselors.
Activist and Marxist scholar Silvia Federici is perhaps best known for the Wages for Housework campaign launched in the 1970s, which demanded payment for domestic labor in an attempt to make a critical intervention in the capitalist exploitation of women.1 Like most of her work, Patriarchy of the Wage emphasizes “reproductive labor,” labor that does not directly produce profit for the owning class, but instead reproduces and cares for the laborers whose work creates that profit.
In this book, Federici analyzes various forms of reproductive labor to generate new understandings of Marxist theory, and new possibilities for socialist organizers. Ultimately, Federici argues that understanding reproductive labor and its gendered nature is necessary for building a strong socialist movement, and an equitable world where everyone can thrive.
Chapters 1 and 2 constitute a defense of the Wages for Housework campaign against critique from other socialist activists. Federici argues that many leftists depict waged la- borers as the protagonists of socialist struggle while marginalizing unwaged laborers such as housewives, to the detriment of both women and the socialist movement. These leftists position domestic work as a natural act of love and care that would occur even without the organizing presence of capitalism in workers’ lives. Federici argues that this narrative serves the owning class by separating reproductive labor from waged labor, when in fact both are necessary for profit generation. The Wages for Housework campaign demands payment for the “real length of the workday,” which extends beyond the time spent directly laboring for a wage into the time spent caring for the bodies, minds, and children of workers (20). In these chapters, Federici connects the patriarchal positioning of women as natural domestic labor- ers who deserve no wage to low wages in feminized professions, arguing that once women become “used to working for nothing,” it is easy for employers to justify low wages in fields like librarianship, nursing, and teaching (15). The central argument here is that true working- class solidarity requires valuing all labor, including reproductive labor.
Federici moves from socialist practice into socialist theory in chapters 3 through 5, arguing that classical Marxism is incomplete without the feminist critique that unpaid reproductive labor is central to capitalist exploitation, and thus an important site of working class struggle. These chapters are very much part of a conversation between Federici and other Marxist theo- rists and may be of less interest to readers with little grounding in this discourse. However, library workers may find much of value in chapter 4, “Marx, Feminism, and the Construction of the Commons.” Federici argues that one of the flaws in Marx’s analysis was his belief that industrialization would build the conditions necessary for socialist revolution by increasing productivity and reducing scarcity. Federici incorporates the work of ecofeminists who argue that while industrial advancement may increase productivity, it also devastates the planet and creates new demands for reproductive labor required to sustain human life in increas- ingly damaged ecosystems. This chapter calls for a shift away from Marxist communism toward a politics of the commons, focused on building a society modeled on “spaces [such as community gardens] that are self-organized and both require and produce community” (67). While libraries are not named in this chapter (nor are they typically self-organized), I found myself thinking about how they serve as a commons, providing space and labor that supports a variety of productive and reproductive communal activities.
In the final two chapters, Federici discusses the history of two categories of feminized laborers: housewives and sex workers. The central argument of both of these chapters is that as capitalism shifted into heavy industry in the late nineteenth century, workers’ bodies required more care so they could handle the physical demands of the labor. Workers also needed to be replaced more often. This led to the development of the family wage and the housewife required to care for a male worker’s body, as well as to bear and care for children who would serve as future laborers. This duty to reproduce led many married women to resist sex and created the need for another kind of reproductive laborer: the sex worker, who could serve men’s need for sexual pleasure when their wives would not. These are interesting argu- ments, but I wish these chapters had been longer and contained more supporting evidence for Federici’s historical claims. The history of sex workers, the history of housewives, and the complex relationship between the two in the context of patriarchy and capitalism is simply too much to cover in two short chapters. These chapters would also have benefited from more analysis of race and how it intersects with dominant views of housewives and sex workers. Patriarchy of the Wage offers an important feminist intervention into socialist practice and theory, and I admire Federici’s commitment to addressing both at once. This book has much to offer for anyone interested in socialist praxis that accounts for reproductive labor and the environmental toll of capitalism. While some of its arguments are underdeveloped, it is particularly strong when laying out Federici’s politics of the commons, pulling in arguments from Marxist and feminist theory, and examples from feminists and socialists struggling in a variety of contexts. Library workers will value this book for contributions to theory about reproductive labor and feminized professions, and for the possibilities it offers in viewing li- braries as sites for building a politics of the commons.
Note 1. Federici frequently uses the word “women” to refer to cisgender women whose bodies are capable of producing children. I believe she does so because this artificial conflation of sex and gender is fundamental to the systems of oppression she is exposing in her work. Capitalism and patriarchy position “women” as a biological category destined to engage in reproductive labor because of the assumed reproductive capacities of our bodies. Federici’s arguments in this book would be stronger if she had engaged critically with this use ofthe word women and its power to reinscribe the gender binary and reinforce patriarchy.
When conservative legal provocateur Jonathan Mitchell published his 2018 law review article laying the groundwork for Texas to ban most abortions, some of the ideas he outlined were so far-fetched that they read more like thought experiments than legitimate legal theories. One was that state legislatures could give private individuals, rather than government agencies, the right to enforce abortion restrictions and other controversial statutes—a “bounty hunter”-type mechanism he claimed could make such laws all but impossible to challenge through the usual legal processes.
Another of Mitchell’s theories was even more radical: that courts don’t have the power to strike down old laws they think are unconstitutional—for example, Texas statutes first enacted in the 1850s that made it a crime to help “procure” an abortion or furnish “the means” for it. Judges can only stop those laws from being enforced, he claimed. Unless legislators actually repeal them, America’s old laws never really die; instead, they linger in a kind of limbo, automatically springing back to life if a future court issues a new, contrary ruling. They can even be enforced retroactively, he argued.
At first, Mitchell’s ideas generated little attention outside conservative circles, where some of his own ideological allies were incredulous at the notion that overturned laws might rise from the grave like zombies and be used retroactively to lay waste to the foundations of contemporary American society in a legal version of “The Walking Dead.” The University of Chicago’s Richard Epstein, Mitchell’s former teacher and one of the most eminent legal scholars on the right, told a Federalist Society panel in 2018, “Jonathan always puts the fear of God in me, because God forbid he should be right on this particular question.” Epstein added, “I think most people would say that this is an enormously dangerous-type situation.”
“Jonathan always puts the fear of God in me, because God forbid he should be right on this particular question. I think most people would say that this is an enormously dangerous-type situation.”
Undeterred, Mitchell worked with the Texas legislature to enshrine his theories in Texas Senate Bill 8, also known as the Texas Heartbeat Act. The measure not only bans abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, but it also takes the extraordinary step of giving private citizens the right to sue anyone who helps someone obtain one.
Now, seven months after Texas’ law became the most restrictive abortion statute to take effect in the U.S. in almost 50 years, the real-world impact of Mitchell’s ideas is becoming much clearer—as well as more urgent. Even as the effort to empower vigilante citizens alarmed legal experts across the ideological spectrum, an additional—and relatively unreported—aspect of the law was gaining adherents, with implications far beyond the elimination of abortion. Most legal experts and lawmakers still haven’t understood the full scope of Mitchell’s vision for remaking American law, but as reporting from Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting shows, it’s already being adopted by legislative leaders and being tested in court.
In a series of legal proceedings, threatening letters, press releases, and social media posts, Mitchell and his allies are arguing that the 1850s statutes that made it a crime to help someone get an abortion in the state—the laws overturned by Roe v. Wade in 1973—were never actually repealed and thus are still in force. And they claim that grassroots abortion funds, which raise money to help Texas patients pay for the procedure, are breaking those old laws and should be prosecuted. Ditto for ordinary citizens who’ve donated to one of those groups.
Last month, Republican state Rep. Briscoe Cain, a lawyer and joint author of the House version of SB 8, showed just how far anti-abortion lawmakers are willing to push the idea that helping someone in the state pay for an abortion is a crime. Cain issued cease-and-desist letters to abortion funds across Texas, claiming that they are “criminal organizations” under the pre-Roe statutes and that their employees face two to five years behind bars for breaking those laws. He sent a similar letter to Citigroup, demanding that the banking giant rescind its new policy of paying for its Texas employees to travel for abortion care outside the state and warning that it will face prosecution if it continues to cover abortions in-state under its employee insurance plan.
Cain himself doesn’t have the authority to bring criminal charges, but he claims local prosecutors do. In a press release, he said he plans to push for legislation allowing them to prosecute these cases even outside their own jurisdiction. Meanwhile, saber-rattling is itself a core element of Mitchell’s legal strategy. In his law review paper, he notes that “the mere threat of future prosecution” could be enough to “induce substantial if not total compliance” with pre-Roe laws.
Supporters and opponents of the Texas Heartbeat Act demonstrate in front of the US Supreme Court in November.
Drew Angerer/Getty
Some of the most powerful conservative groups in the country have joined Mitchell’s cause, including the America First Legal Foundation, which helped defend the Texas law before the Supreme Court last fall and is now also targeting abortion funds. The new foundation was created by former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows; Stephen Miller, the architect of former President Donald Trump’s family separation immigration policy; and other members of Trump’s inner circle to “oppose the radical left’s anti-jobs, anti-freedom, anti-faith, anti-borders, anti-police, and anti-American crusade,” according to its mission statement. In a press release, Miller’s description of why America First Legal has gotten involved echoes the “tough-on-crime” language that the Trump administration made a hallmark of its often-authoritarian policies: “We will maintain the rule of law,” Miller is quoted as saying.
Mitchell’s ideas could have vast repercussions for more than reproductive rights, legal experts warn. The notion that old laws don’t go away and can be resuscitated is “awfully curious in a country where old law legalized segregation, slavery, sexual abuse and rape of wives,” said Michele Goodwin, a legal scholar at the University of California, Irvine, who focuses on issues at the intersection of gender and race. Many of these old laws, she pointed out, “subordinated people who were not white males.” If Mitchell and his allies were to succeed, she said, the result would be to resurrect a version of the country as it existed 200 years ago, when “White men controlled every branch of government in every state.”
Mitchell declined requests to be interviewed on the record for this article. But he has made it clear that he also wants to roll back decades of progress for LGBTQ rights. Over the past several years, when he wasn’t litigating abortion cases, he was filing lawsuits aimed at undermining same-sex marriage and affirming the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people in housing and the workplace. Mitchell’s culture-war campaigns converged in an amicus brief he wrote in the Mississippi abortion case that the U.S. Supreme Court will decide by this summer. His ominous warning: “Lawrence and Obergefell,” the Supreme Court cases that legalized sodomy and same-sex marriage, respectively, “are as lawless as Roe.”
A courtroom illustration shows Jonathan Mitchell arguing in front of the Supreme Court in 2014, when he was Texas’ solicitor general.
Art Lien
Mitchell honed his ideas in some of the most elite institutions in the country. After clerking for late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, he taught at the University of Chicago and Stanford University law schools, served as the Texas solicitor general, and volunteered on the Trump transition team, reviewing future executive orders.
Just when he seemed likely to win a more permanent role under Trump—heading the Administrative Conference of the United States, a little-known federal agency that issues recommendations on how the government can work more efficiently—his nomination was scuttled because of his role in coordinating a sprawling, multistate attack on public-sector unions. The lawsuits filed in California, New York, Minnesota, and other states were funded by a shadowy litigation finance group based in Chicago that wasn’t disclosing its backers. “If he is a clandestine operative of the same powerful ultraconservative special interests out to cripple unions, he is not fit to serve in this post,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., told The New York Times.
By then, Mitchell’s law review article, which was in prepublication review and bears the wonky title “The Writ-of-Erasure Fallacy,” was already making waves. Written in 2016 and published two years later, it was based on his experiences representing the state of Texas in court, where he saw how the legislature often enacted statutes that were easily blocked—including laws that sought to ban abortion. One of Mitchell’s goals, he has said, was to prod anti-abortion lawmakers out of their “learned helplessness” by empowering them with clever strategies that would make their ideas harder to defeat in court.
That’s where the “bounty hunter” idea came in.
Geoffrey Stone, former dean at the University of Chicago law school who taught Mitchell two decades ago, nodded to the “brilliance” of the idea but condemned it as “totally obscene.” The brilliant part, Stone said, is that in order to block a law in court, you typically have to sue a government official. But if only private individuals are empowered to enforce a law, there is no government official to sue—and opponents of the law are left with their hands effectively tied. The ultimate goal, Mitchell acknowledged in his paper, was to develop laws that could circumvent judicial review. But the real-world impact, Stone and other legal scholars have suggested, is that even a blatantly unconstitutional law opposed by the vast majority of citizens and courts would still be allowed to take effect.
Mitchell then made another argument that struck at the foundations of American law. He contended that court rulings—even those issued by the U.S. Supreme Court—are far less sweeping than mainstream legal experts believe. According to his “Writ-of-Erasure Fallacy” theory, courts don’t have the power to broadly “strike down” or “erase” laws they think are unconstitutional. Even more radical, he claimed that a law could be enforced retroactively against people who violated the statute during the time period when it had been blocked.
Stone took issue with the entire premise of Mitchell’s theory during a recent Federalist Society event at the University of Chicago. The law professor—who was a Supreme Court clerk when Roe was handed down—said in an interview that his former student’s strategy “simply fails to understand the critical legal concept of precedent” that “our whole legal system is based on.”
“For this theory to take hold and become commonplace would be a complete undoing of constitutional jurisprudence in the 20th century.”
Jennifer Ecklund, an attorney who represents the abortion funds targeted by Mitchell, found the retroactivity idea especially troubling. It “undermines the entirety of our system of constitutional justice. And that’s not hyperbole,” she said. “For this theory to take hold and become commonplace would be a complete undoing of constitutional jurisprudence in the 20th century.”
Legal historian Mary Ziegler, author of Abortion and the Law in America, pointed to how retroactivity might be used if a conservative state passed a law that criminalized sodomy and the Supreme Court upheld that new law, overturning its 2003 decision that made such sexual acts legal. “Then, in theory, that criminal sodomy law could apply not only against people who committed sodomy…after the new Supreme Court decision, it would, in theory, apply before, too,” she said.
But there was one audience that was extremely receptive to Mitchell’s legal theories: anti-abortion lawmakers and activists in Texas. Starting in 2019, Mitchell and his allies worked with more than 40 communities to pass local ordinances that created “sanctuary cities for the unborn.” Those ordinances not only banned abortion outright but also declared it to be “murder.”
Then, working with Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes, Mitchell embedded his ideas last year into SB 8, a variation on the “heartbeat bills” that had passed in about a dozen other states, only to be blocked by the court after court for flouting Roe.
Like those other bills, the Texas version banned abortion after fetal cardiac activity could be detected in an ultrasound, around six weeks’ gestation. But as Mitchell had predicted, the law’s “bounty hunter” mechanism—giving private citizens the right to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion for $10,000 per violation plus legal fees—made it extremely difficult for abortion rights groups to challenge the law in court, especially in those packed with conservative judges who shared his anti-abortion views.
But providing a way to help the Texas law withstand a court challenge was only part of Mitchell’s plan. A second goal was to explicitly revive the 1850s laws that had once made abortion a crime in the state. To that end, Mitchell and his allies inserted another provision that was almost entirely overlooked amid the firestorm over the new statute: a legislative finding that the pre-Roe laws in Texas had never been repealed.
Then they went to work.
Protesters gather for the Women’s March and Rally for Abortion Justice at the State Capitol in Austin, Texas, in October.
Sergio Flores/AFP/Getty
The Heartbeat Act isn’t the only recent Texas law that seeks to criminalize abortion, nor is it the most draconian. For example, a so-called trigger law, also enacted in Texas last year, would outlaw abortion completely and automatically if Roe is overturned; doctors who violate the ban would face up to $100,000 in fines or life in prison.
The earliest that statute could take effect is this summer, when the Supreme Court is set to rule on the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization abortion case out of Mississippi. In the interim, Mitchell and his allies, impatient to halt as many abortions as possible as soon as possible, have turned to the 1850s statutes and the writ-of-erasure language in SB 8 to try to accomplish the same thing by targeting groups that help patients pay for abortions.
References to criminalization started cropping up in court proceedings even before the heartbeat law went into effect in September. In one hearing last summer in a lawsuit involving the Austin-based Lilith abortion fund, Mitchell told a Texas judge that such grassroots groups are “criminal organizations” that are “committing crimes under state law,” even if they’re not being punished for their crimes right now.
In a major ratcheting up of their campaign this winter, Mitchell and five law firms filed petitions demanding the right to take depositions from leaders of the Texas Equal Access Fund and Lilith Fund for allegedly violating the heartbeat law. But the press releases cited the pre-Roe criminal statutes. Kamyon Conner, executive director of the Texas Equal Access Fund, said she was at a retreat with fellow reproductive justice activists when she learned about the attempts to force her to turn over information about employees and donors. “The people in the room saw my expression change and they were like, ‘What’s wrong?’ ”
For Conner, the tactic felt like an attempt to scare and shame her. Far from being intimidated, however, she and her fellow abortion fund activists decided to fight back, filing lawsuits in mid-March against America First Legal, the Thomas More Society law firm—another conservative legal group in the case—and two Texas women represented by Mitchell. The suits ask courts in Texas, Washington, DC, and Illinois—where the Thomas More firm is based—to declare the heartbeat law unconstitutional.
Thus far, donors haven’t been intimidated. Conner said the Texas Equal Access Fund has seen an uptick in what she called “rage donations,” though some check-writers are taking the precaution of blacking out their identifying information. The Lilith Fund has seen a tripling of its budget since last year—enough to begin covering the entire cost of abortions for people who need them.
Meanwhile, anti-abortion activists and lawmakers have started taking the writ-of-erasure criminalization language nationwide. In July, the National Association of Christian Lawmakers unanimously adopted a model bill that features, verbatim, the heartbeat law’s finding that the state “never repealed” its pre-Roe criminal laws. Lawmakers in at least one state with a pre-Roe statute still on the books, Arizona, have introduced legislation with this language.
Mitchell’s ideas about reviving these pre-Roe criminal statutes could become all the more relevant if Roe is overturned. In the meantime, by challenging the right of grassroots groups and private donors to help pay for abortions, he and his allies have opened a new front in the battle over access that is likely to spread well beyond Texas. Abortion funds see this as a sign of their growing significance in a landscape where access to the procedure depends on having the means to pay for it.
“I think it is very telling that the (anti-abortion activists) have caught on to us and understand us as a threat, because we are,” said Amanda Beatriz Williams, the Lilith Fund’s executive director. “We are a threat to them. We are a threat to their movement.”
Students and staff at UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center and Investigative Reporting Program contributed additional reporting: Gisela Pérez de Acha, Brian Nguyen, Emma MacPhee, Leah Roemer, Taylor Graham, Alex Harvey, Eleonora Bianchi, Eliza Partika, Elizabeth Moss, Anabel Sosa, Rhia Mehta, Brittany Zendejas, and Sophie Hoblit. Reveal fellow Grace Oldham also contributed reporting.
This summer, the Supreme Court is expected to hand down a decision that could weaken or overturn Roe v. Wade. Already, states across the country have passed more than 1,300 restrictions on abortion since it was made a constitutional right; nearly 90 percent of U.S. counties lack a clinic that offers abortions. For a new cover story in The Atlantic, Jessica Bruder reports on the covert network of community providers who connect women to the services they need. This network existed before Roe, and it never entirely disappeared. Now, with the right to an abortion expected before the Court, it is poised to take on new prominence. “Its ranks include midwives, herbalists, doulas, and educators,” Bruder writes. “When necessary, they are often willing to work around the law.”
Bruder, the author of Nomadland, makes her debut in The Atlantic with “The Abortion Underground,” a deeply reported story on the individuals preparing for a post-Roe future. She traveled across the country to understand how people are providing assistance to women who lack access to legal abortions, meeting with a variety of groups and reporting from inside their grassroots efforts. Her story offers a bracing portrait of what the country will look like if abortion ceases to be a constitutionally protected right and women and providers are forced into the underground.
In the opening scene, an activist named “Ellie” demonstrates the construction of a Del-Em device, a homemade abortion tool composed of everyday parts including tubing, a rubber stopper, and a mason jar that is easy for anyone to make and suitable for ending pregnancies during most of the first trimester. Though more symbolic than pragmatic—today, pharmaceuticals can end a pregnancy safely and reliably—Bruder writes that the Del-Em represents how practical knowledge can be shared even as the legal landscape shifts. “Whatever the laws may say, history has shown that women will continue to have abortions. The spread of pills and devices like the Del-Em—discreet, inexpensive, and fast—could, if nothing else, help ensure that abortions are done safely and, because of their accessibility, on average earlier in a pregnancy than is the norm today.”
Bruder describes how such knowledge is transferred, with a focus on the acquisition and use of effective and medically safe abortion pills. Already, pharmaceuticals account for more than half of all abortions in the U.S. And as Bruder writes, “More autonomy is coming, at least eventually—both in places that attempt outright bans and also where abortion remains legal.”
As she did in Nomadland, Bruder tells of the Americans who rely on one another in difficult circumstances. She shows how women are supporting one another—practically, without resorting to alarm or fear—as services become scarce. But even as these networks ramp up, they acknowledge the challenges ahead. Three states have banned self-managed abortion outright. Would-be providers fear for their safety. And some women who seek abortions won’t know where to turn. If the Supreme Court allows states to ban or even more severely curtail abortion, women’s lives will be at risk. “Statewide bans on abortion would cause a rise in maternal deaths—of women with complicating health issues and of women who resort to dangerous methods,” Bruder writes. “Maternal deaths will also rise because women who want an abortion can’t get one—childbirth is far riskier than ending a pregnancy.”
Bruder’s piece is joined by an extraordinary roster of stories in the May issue that will publish over the next two weeks, including:
In “Tour Guide to a Tragedy,” writer Ko Bragg travels to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where in June 1964 three civil-rights activists where brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. The activists had been working with the Freedom Summer campaign, which aimed to combat racial discrimination by registering Black Americans to vote. While the local museum ignores the murders, town residents, including Ko’s stepfather, have taken on the task of educating visitors through private tours. “I can understand why people don’t want to talk about this history. It’s disturbing and painful, as the truth can be. Learning this history is like taking bitter medicine,” Bragg writes. Publishing April 7.
In “After Babel,” author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that social media has dissolved the mortar of society over the past decade. He likens our confounding times to the fall of the Tower of Babel, as recounted in the Book of Genesis: “The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.” Though platforms such as Facebook and Twitter promised to bring us closer together, instead they have riven society, undermined institutions, and corroded thinking on both the left and the right. But Haidt also offers a possible way forward: “We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.” Publishing April 11.
In a feature essay, staff writer Helen Lewis talks to “The Shadow Royals,” descendants of dethroned or exiled monarchs who believe they might have a role to play in their home countries. Aristocrats from Albania and the former Austro-Hungarian empire discuss their current duties as pseudo-diplomats; Lewis also explores our global fascination with monarchy, even in the United States. “Monarchy speaks to a deep need in people—the need for a connection with the past, and a sense of continuity across time. Less wholesomely, it also suggests a widespread desire for fixed, unarguable hierarchies and a lingering opposition to the idea that jobs should be distributed on merit. These are strong currents in the human psyche, and they are resistant to change,” she writes. Publishing April 13.
In “There Is No Liberal World Order,” which published last week, staff writer Anne Applebaum argues that the invasion of Ukraine has shown that if we value democracy, we need to fight for it. Applebaum pushes liberal democracies to defend themselves together, while also naming the challenges we must prepare to meet. We must “take democracy seriously,” she writes. “Teach it, debate it, improve it, defend it.”
The Atlantic’s May 2022 issue launches today, and will publish online over the next two weeks. Please be in touch with questions or requests to interview our writers about this reporting.
Contact: press@theatlantic.com
What Use Is An Empty Weapon?
An Amazon theorist once said that “women need a world view.” As I exit the dogmatic so-called “Maoist” movement in the United States and grapple with a clear eyed feeling of disillusionment, I’ve never been more convinced of the truth of those words. The last several years of my life have been spent, to one extent or another, in men’s communist organizing, culminating in my involvement in a small but well known amerikkkan Maoist party building project. In this movement I met some of the most militant women I’ve ever known, and I watched as, one by one, they were slowly ostracized from the organization and disappeared from my radar.
The problem I have consistently run into in this and other organizing projects is the immense pervasiveness of patriarchy. Somehow, contrary to every Maoist people’s army we were drawing inspiration from, we never developed a women’s department and never consciously developed women’s leadership and participation, the bare minimum required to be politically relevant. The question of women and other gender oppressed people’s leadership and involvement was brushed off in much the same way the question of colonized people’s leadership was (even by colonized cadre): politics, not identity, must be in command. To these paper Maoists (to borrow a phrase from Sakai), who was in charge didn’t really matter so long as they had the right politics. There is a wiff of legitimacy to this, but it is only a fraction of the picture, and ultimately this line has allowed men to creatively use proletarian feminist language to normalize their domination. I coined the now popular slogan “proletarian feminism is the weapon” during my time with this wannabe party and I would like to say once and for all that I consider the term, in amerikkka at least, completely co-opted by pigs and their apologists and politically worthless.
What those sycophants representing Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (which is definitely the highest stage of men’s revolutionary thought) in the first world fail to realize is that if they had their heads on straight politically, if politics was really in command, then they would have at least developed colonized, gender oppressed leadership in their organizations. Not as token leaders (as the dead-eyed men’s vanguard in Nepal did with Parvati) but as the systematized building of oppressed people’s power. Maoists in amerikkka can’t see this though, because at the end of the day, for all their proclaimed militancy, they’re working from an incorrect class map. There is an unstated assumption amongst Maoist men that classes are evenly divided by gender, but this is not only not true now but never has been. Butch Lee and Red Rover state in their groundbreaking work, Night Vision:
“Our primary question is, who is the modern proletariat and what role does it play as a class? The answer is simple: it is primarily women, children, and alien labor. Those who are colonized. The modern proletariat or industrial working class, which is both among the most oppressed and the most productive class that supports the structure of capitalist society by its labor, is not and has never been gender-neutral or nationally self-contained. No matter how indignantly some men may scream at these words, this is a matter of historical record, of fact.
In its infancy, the first English factory system of the 18th century was like a chain of prison workhouses, whose semi-slave laborers were primarily women and enslaved children. English men, no matter how poor, resisted giving up what independence they had to become ‘like women.’ A class attitude using gender, race, and nation in a way that the dominant values of the British ruling class encouraged. British historian Christopher Hill reminds his reader that being a factory worker was so disrespectable a position back then that it virtually placed her outside society, as an alien, a non-citizen (the word ‘worker’ today is supposed to make us think ‘him,’ the blue collar unionized man in heavy industry, so we misunderstand economics and class).”
Bringing this analysis up from 1993, Bromma says in a 2020 interview:
“But the really key underlying question I’m always trying to clarify is: on a global scale, what is the social base for socialist revolution today? I think that a transformed, modernized proletariat, centered around women, is beginning to take the stage as capitalism’s direct antagonist. This is partly a result of the destruction of traditional rural patriarchy by neoliberal capitalism. Large numbers of women are being pushed and busted out of private family life, and channeled by the tens of millions into very large scale, highly exploitative global industries, including globalized manufacturing, transnational service industries and factory farming. They are crossing borders, meeting lots of other proletarian women, becoming skilled with technology and participating in cosmopolitan world culture. I think we should orient our politics to this reality. Which requires decisively breaking with both worker elite mythology and male leftism.”
To the young men fashioning themselves as revolutionaries these words mean nothing, likely because Chairman Mao or Gonzalo didn’t say them. To them proletarian women and other gender oppressed people belong to their class, that is to say the men of their class (to paraphrase Monique Wittig), when in reality it’s entirely the opposite. The red boys’ club will happily quote their favorite patriarch on the need to unleash women’s fury for revolution (only to inevitably re-leash women again later on) but turn away from any analysis of how class is gendered on a global scale. Like parodies of actual revolutionaries they’ll robotically repeat that “women are not a class,” pointing to the class differences between the masses of settler women and the masses of the oppressed nations. We do not claim such a simplistic view, as any class analysis that puts settler women in with gender oppressed New Afrikans is miles off the mark. What we do claim is that, on a global scale, the proletariat has always been made up primarily of gender oppressed and nationally oppressed people. On top of this we see that gendered oppressions are racialized and vice versa, keeping colonized (primarily Black) men from achieving the status of “true men” and relegating colonized women (also primarily Black) to neither man nor woman in the eyes of the settler colony. As such gender oppressed people do not “belong” to the proletariat, but the proletariat belongs to gender oppressed people in a very literal sense, as they make up the vast majority of the proletariat and other oppressed classes. It is the relatively few proletarian men who will have to follow along, have to see their interests as inseparable from those of the gender oppressed proletariat, not the other way around. Maoist men ignore this, contenting themselves with building a strawman and tearing it down in one line so as to maintain settler and neocolonial domination of their patriarchal vanguard.
As an organization we accepted the settler-colonial contradiction as primary in amerikkka, putting us miles ahead of the most dogmatic US Maoists and miles behind anyone in revolutionary nationalist circles when J. Sakai’s Settlers was published in 1984. We failed to put any of the lessons from Settlers into practice and never even considered the theoretical line that Settlers inspired that has been further developed by authors like Butch Lee, Bromma, Sanyika Shakur, and numerous others. We did not consider the way that the settler-colonial contradiction is a gendered contradiction, and we frequently relegated patriarchy to the ignorable status of “secondary contradiction.” Aside from one collective in Portland who founded a short-lived revolutionary women’s group, there was no national effort to organize gender oppressed and colonized people at all. Instead, our Neocolonial Feminist leaders insisted that imperialism was in crisis, and tacitly claimed that a politics that acknowledged national and gendered contradictions but did not act against them could replace actually organizing the most oppressed in favor of organizing settler men.
Even when the organization did give mind to organizing women, the women to be organized were assumed to be white and cis, even when so many of us were trans women. No analysis of transmisogyny or misogynoir was synthesized or even worked on, despite many of our assertions that trans women were among the most oppressed within their specific nations and that New Afrikan trans women were the most oppressed of all. One man suggested that the org contain a “proletarian feminist” committee and a colonized committee that would then debate and compromise over issues. He was baffled that anyone would suggest that women and other gender oppressed people also have different national and class interests. To this comrade gendered oppression and national oppression were two distinct issues rather than inseparable aspects of one oppressive system. This was simply a more insidious way of looking to the settler nation for political answers, just without saying so. If this is the content of proletarian feminism in amerikkka (and it is) then I’m not surprised that so many of my sisters dropped out unceremoniously, I’m only embarassed it took me so long.
There Is No Gender Neutral Politics
Amongst revolutionary-minded men things like Marxism-Leninism-Maoism don’t represent any one gender. If a sister questions why a supposedly revolutionary movement is named after three men the wannabe patriarchs dressed as revolutionaries will dismiss her as a shallow identitarian (I once published a piece criticizing a misogynistic line in the Gonzaloite wing of amerikkkan Maoism and was lambasted as an “identitarian bitch” by the exact men I was criticizing, a badge I wear with pride). This question is important though and deserves actual attention. You’d be forgiven for thinking that, as communists, we would oppose great man worship and maintain a materialist analysis of individuals. Marx would certainly not be who he was without his wife, Jenny von Westphalen, who aside from discussing his work with him was also the one who pawned the family’s belongings between support checks from Engels. Neither would Lenin, nor the entire Soviet education system, be what they were without Nadezhda Krupskaya, frequently referred to simply as “Lenin’s widow.” Augusta La Torre, more commonly known as Comrade Norah and better known as Chairman Gonzalo’s first wife, is known for being the one who pushed Gonzalo out of the armchair and into the people’s war. She’s also credited with pushing for the involvement of women in the Peruvian revolution, and it was women guerrillas who took Sendero Luminoso nearly to the seat of power. But she hanged herself under mysterious circumstances in 1988, so she doesn’t get a thought named after her.
So why do the local Maoists insist on naming their thought after the Great Men in these historic movements? If we’re honest with ourselves, like really, brutally honest, we’ll find that it’s because these movements wound up serving neocolonial men as a gender-class. Alexandra Kollantai was one of the brightest and most clear-eyed Bolsheviks of her day, and she’s often acknowledged as such, but all her intellect and revolutionary experience was eventually brought to heel by Stalin’s patriarchal order and she was forced to give up her views on women’s liberation, going from anti-marriage revolutionary to repeating the misogynistic party line that proletarian women’s role was to support her proletarian husband (I can’t tell you how many misogynistic leaders have shut me down for noting that Stalin regularly preyed on women and girls many years his junior). Women’s advances in China were the first to be reversed by the counter-revolutionaries after 1976, but why were they so fragile to begin with? Because the Chinese revolution, like the Russian revolution before it and subsequent Marxist-Leninist (Men’s) revolutions, maintained a bourgeois feminist line of simple gender “equality” (despite denouncing all feminism as bourgeois, how’s that for irony). They didn’t pick up a true revolutionary feminist line that, as Butch Lee put it, demands the overthrow of capitalist property relations and its attendant sexist, racist, and colonialist oppressions. Communist men, mostly settlers and neocolonial tokens as they are, can’t get anywhere close to that line because to do so would mean abandoning their class power, committing class suicide as revs used to say.
The barbed, poisonous point in all this is that there is no gender-neutral politics. Just as politics serve specific nation-classes they also serve specific gendered classes. Marx, Lenin and Mao etc were all impressive thinkers to be sure, and there’s much we as revolutionary feminists can take from their work and experience, but we cannot ignore that their politics have, with two important exceptions in India and the Philippines, ended in shipwreck after shipwreck (the Indian and Filipino communists are more and more dominated by women and will have to contend with the history of betrayal of communist women by communist men). There’s no shame in this and the revs who fought and died in those revolutions weren’t wrong, as Butch Lee would say, but we would be wrong to try to follow their paths without avoiding the rocks where they met their end. As women we can’t afford to keep fighting and dying for men’s parties and revolutions and nations. We know how it ends: with women disarmed and crushed again under the boot heels of the men we fought and died to lift into power.
Anarchists too refuse to shirk their patriarchal origins in Bakunin and Proudhon. Let’s take an example from recent history. Anarchists were broadly involved in the 2020 uprising, and in majority white cities represented the most militant edge of the uprising (nationally the bleeding edge of the uprising was Black proletarian youth). That’s all well and good, but we’re interested in what happened after the uprising. Anarchists and other radicals were inundated with fresh blood, people who were radicalized by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor who were looking for something, anything they could do to help. The anarchists, the most visible revs around, as well as us Maoists so desperate for relevance, pushed them into so-called mutual aid work, and thus radical charity flourished.
Little attention was paid to the class background of the new recruits, even less was paid to their political development. Petty bourgeois settlers were tossed into collectives alongside lumpen/proletarians of the oppressed nations. No emphasis was placed on political education, no attention was paid to the positions of people of different genders and nations, no discussion of class suicide was had at all. On top of this, the anarcho collectives were frequently dominated by men, but the actual mutual aid workers who were doing the cooking and distribution were predominately women and other gender oppressed people. This too was ignored, prompting one such woman to tell a sister-comrade of mine that the collective they were cooking for was “proof that anarchy doesn’t work.” No influence was taken from important but defeated anarcha-feminist groups through history and nothing was learned. So on the Left women and other gender oppressed people really are rootless, to repurpose that old term that the Soviets used to mean “traitor” and “Jew.”
This is not as simple as picking up the empty weapon of lesbian separatism or second wave feminism. Though those movements began as movements for women’s liberation, they too turned into their opposite and served the interests of settler men (just as their heirs in amerikkka today, AF3IRM, have used the fight against the sex industry and the language of proletarian feminism to increase the Hawaiian police budget). Things were never as simple as “men bad women good,” and we can find women — settler women especially — crawling all over the amerikkkan genocide machine. This is why we distinguish between new classes of neocolonial men and queer men of the oppressed nations who do experience gendered oppression. The big thing we missed entirely in our little party building attempt is that settler-colonialism and patriarchy are not and have never been separate contradictions. The entire patriarchal gender system was imported with euro-settlers. Settler women, as such, are more like settler men than we are like New Afrikan or Indigenous women, women who have kept genocide at bay for generations. We’re nothing like those women, not right now anyway. Women’s liberation could have split settler women from settler men, could have transformed us through protracted armed struggle against our bourgeois nation, but instead our foremothers bought into the lie of their own innocence and demanded a seat at the table of genocide, becoming even more just-like-settler-men than we were before.
In this new period where revolutionary sentiment is sparking up all over again (led now by New Afrikan trans women) we must be wary of those who would have us repeat the mistakes women made 50 years ago. The answer isn’t in any of neocolonial men’s old decayed movements and organizations, however new they may seem. We settler women have to commit to the long and difficult process of building our own politics, a women-centered politics, that fractures the settler nation through armed struggle and a new revolutionary outlaw culture.
Gender Outlaws in the Wilderness
If settler women and gender outlaws were set loose of patriarchal and capitalist restrictions today we’d just rebuild them again. They’re all we know, all we’ve known since our independent peasant leaders were crushed during the centuries long euro witch hunt. No, we have to actively overthrow them through protracted, revolutionary armed struggle, our 40 years in the wilderness. In the old bible story when Moses and the Hebrews came to the promised land and found it full of giants, many of the former slaves panicked and wanted to return to Egypt, return to bondage. As such Moses proclaimed that they were not fit to enter the promised land and must spend 40 years in the wilderness becoming a new people. Same with us. If we don’t want to reproduce settler-colonial patriarchy then we have to break with settler men and build our own culture and political-military theory.
But what about taking leadership from colonized comrades, I hear some of my sister-comrades saying. I was in this boat as well until recently, it’s why I became a Maoist in the first place and it’s an understandable place to be, but as Tani and Sera say in False Nationalism, False Internationalism, we cannot hitch a ride on Black liberation. Referring to the Revolutionary Armed Task Force and the May 19th Communist Organization they specifically say:
“The grassroots of the New Afrikan Nation has never asked for and has never supported these alliances of New Afrikan men and settler women. No matter how well-intentioned, such distorted alliances have both sexist and neo-colonial aspects. The May 19th Communist Organization, which was primarily women, recreated the customary male-dominated movement only with New Afrikan Men instead of white men. There was a pattern of such alliances in the 1960s and 1970s, in many solidarity committees and anti-imperialist groups, as radical white women broke with white men but not with patriarchal ways of seeing the world.”
It’s not on the New Afrikan or Indigenous or any other nations to hold our hands through our revolutionary development, and revs of the oppressed nations have been telling us to organize our own people for decades. We must build our own political-military leadership and wage war against our own nation. We have a responsibility to ourselves and to everyone subjugated and genocided by our nation to leave the table and build our own women’s theory, women’s culture, and women’s army. We must build a revolutionary autonomous feminism, autonomous in the literal sense of autonomy from settler men and their politics, not in the 70s Autonomist sense, and we must do it without hesitation or fear of mistakes (mistakes are, after all, how we learn).
The old political modes are dead and it seems like everyone has moved on except us. Neocolonialism and modern revisionism have hollowed them out and left them by the side of the road. We can’t keep trying to pick them up and insist that this time we’ll use them correctly. The problem wasn’t that last generation’s revolutionary men did it wrong; the problem is that when crisis time came those theories could only serve new classes of men. Consider revolutionary Vietnam, that brave nation who defeated both French and amerikkkan imperialism by mobilizing the entire country, women and men, against them. What happened when the war ended though? Vietnamese women were told to return home, go back to their old lives where their revolutionary leaders said they belonged. This isn’t simply because those revolutionary men didn’t have the right politics, and gender outlaws cannot wait idly for men with the right politics to come along. Everyone from New Afrikan revolutionary nationalists and Black anarchists to gender oppressed Mayan revs in Chiapas to Dalit women in Chhattisgarh is adapting to the new neocolonial world (which has been “new” for over 35 years), it’s time for us to finally catch up.
We have to start by going to the lowest and deepest members of our diseased nation, to the ones with the least to lose by splitting away. This means lumpen/proletarian trans women and other transmisogyny affected people. The US is ramping up its attempts to systematically annihilate trans women, with Texas as a testing ground for this neocolonial genocide. We as settler trans women have a historic obligation to begin the process of breaking the settler nation apart. No more debating our status as oppressed women with those who want us dead, we need to find each other and begin building a new revolutionary outlaw culture, begin waging war on settler-colonial patriarchy and all its attendant evils. Our existence proves once and for all that gender isn’t about biology but about class, is class in drag as Night Vision says.
As trans women we know deep in our guts that settler-colonial patriarchy is poison to us. Many of us deny it, push the feeling down, worm our way into little niches in white world, but instinctively we know they’re coming for us eventually, we can see it in the dead eyes of our sellout sisters. Even still we’re caught up in it. Black genocide’s most pointed and obvious form is the near-constant murder of New Afrikan trans women. It’s so obvious that even settler news needs to report on it. We settler trans women get killed too, of course, but dialectically we are also responsible for the deaths of our New Afrikan sisters. Until we break from settler-colonial patriarchy that’s on us as much as it is the famous transmisogynist author or homophobe down the street. Our culture is built on it, is a form of genocide culture, and we badly need to detox.
There are landmines to avoid here. Historically in amerikkka white revs working on their own or in neocolonial formations have allowed their lines to degenerate into settler opportunism. In order to prevent this two things must be done. First we cannot claim that our specific fight is the universal fight for liberation. Rather we are one small but important aspect of the coming revolution. Second we must avoid the hoarding of resources beyond those necessary for our organizational reproduction. To do so would simply reproduce settler parasitism within the revolutionary movement. If the pinnacle of white third worldist praxis during the last revolutionary wave was the Danish Blekingegade Group, that group of communists who for years anonymously expropriated banks and armories and sent the money and weapons to third world revs (primarily the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) then our praxis must necessarily contain a fourth worldist element (the fourth world referring to migrants and internal colonies in amerikkka). This is to say that the bulk of the resources we acquire in hypothetical future expropriations must be funneled to New Afrikan and Indigenous trans women and their revolutionary formations. In this way we connect two struggles while remaining autonomous and without recreating settler parasitism.
If it feels like I’m hammering the military point home especially hard it’s because I am. Frequently revolutionary women’s observations are used but our praxis and military theory is ignored. Whether it’s Monique Wittig, Butch Lee, Silvia Federici or Bo Brown, men will happily either ignore our contributions or try to jam them into their narrow patriarchal frameworks. Our material reality doesn’t conform to their old theories, and those theories certainly aren’t doing anything for us. It’s still taboo to talk about women’s war, but every woman followed home by a strange man or abusive ex, every trans child under investigation in Texas, every houseless sister hiding out in a shelter has keenly felt the need for a women’s army. Armies aren’t built by words alone, but the harder we hit this point the more seriously women looking for political answers will take it, and until we take it seriously we remain tools of settler amerikkka and its genocidal men.
“Socialism or barbarism” was an apt call in 1919, but we’ve been enduring barbarism for a generation now. Now the call must be autonomy or death, communism or extinction, and settler and neocolonial men can only give us the latter.
Towards 40 years in the wilderness.
-Val Travesti
Postscript
I began writing this before learning of Butch Lee’s passing near the end of 2021. What began as an attempt to write out my feelings of disillusionment with amerikkkan maoism now reads more like a eulogy for her via her work. Her influence is all over this piece, unhidden and completely obvious. I never got the opportunity to meet or correspond with Butch, but I hope my sister-comrades and I do her justice in our work and struggle going forward. Her preferred slogan, “which will you be, hammer or anvil” is still an important guidepost for aspiring Amazons and I’m certain that her work will continue to help light the way forward for us. Rest easy, Butch, thanks for everything.
Laurie Penny’s Sexual Revolution offers an eclectic argument full of inconsistencies, while omitting any understanding of how class underpins oppression, argues Elaine Graham-Leigh
It used to puzzle me that so many feminist books deal in literary criticism. Mary Wollstonecraft takes on Rousseau, Simone de Beauvoir attacks D.H. Lawrence, Shulamith Firestone spends several pages on a story by Herbert Gold, and Kate Millett pulls apart, well, everybody. Freud is a target, for blaming everything on women, as is Marx, for forgetting them. Couldn’t arguments for women’s liberation be mounted in themselves? Why perform the work of dissection when you could be proposing some more irresistible vision of the world?
When Silvia Federici came to the United States from Italy on a Fulbright scholarship in 1967, she was much more interested in what she could do than in how she could argue. In her research, she came across the work of Selma James, who had proposed a simple but startling idea at the third National Women’s Liberation Conference in Manchester, England: that women be paid for housework. “I was really inspired,” Federici remembers, and on a trip home to see family in 1972, she went to Padua to visit Mariarosa Dalla Costa, who had recently written a paper with James. The International Feminist Collective was formed at that meeting: They would mount a campaign to ask governments for wages for housework.
Federici helped set up the New York branch of the campaign (their first public action was to hand out flyers saying “No More Work for Free” in Prospect Park on May Day 1974) and wrote a pamphlet titled “Wages Against Housework.” Her version of the argument was subtle but boldly expressed: “We are seen as nagging bitches, not workers in struggle.” The work that goes on in the home—the cooking, the cleaning, the childcare, the elder care, the gardening, the shopping, the fixing, fetching, wiping, and carrying—wasn’t seen as work, but as something women did for love. This made it hard to refuse, or to share; it made what women did difficult to value, and even to see. But if a price was put on that work, wouldn’t that be the first step to changing it? And if we recognized that the work wasn’t in fact love, well, then “we might rediscover what is love.”
Although Federici speaks of capital and labor, class and wages, she doesn’t mention Marx by name in that first pamphlet, which has become a touchstone for feminists since the crash of 2008 and the Occupy movement. When she disentangled love from work, she laid the groundwork for arguments, recently mounted by Melissa Gira Grant and Juno Mac and Molly Smith, to recognize sex work as work. When she suggested care work was worth payment, she staked a claim for the type of collective care that abolition feminists such as Mariame Kaba hope will replace the carceral system. The coronavirus lockdowns also brought about a small revival of Federici’s ideas, as the work done by day-care centers, schools, and care homes as well as (in the homes of the upper middle class) cleaners and nannies fell back onto the family, and the simmering care crisis that Federici had identified in the 1970s reached a boiling point.
Over the last decade or so, PM Press has been reissuing 50 years of Federici’s work—collecting her housework writings in Revolution at Point Zero in 2012 and updating the idea in a new volume, Patriarchy of the Wage. Beyond the thrilling provocation of wages for housework, Federici has been addressing one of the most irritating gaps in Marx for feminists: the fact that he didn’t seem to notice women’s unpaid work, limiting his comments on it to footnotes. She uses Marx’s analysis of the relation between the worker and the boss in Capital and the Grundrisse to supply the gap, and leaves us with ideas that challenge the way things are, even in a world heating up and breaking down.
Born in Parma, Italy, in 1942, Federici grew up in a household not dissimilar to millions of others across the West. Her father went out to work—he was a professor of philosophy—and her mother stayed home. In a preface to Revolution at Point Zero, Federici remembers her mother “making bread, pasta, tomato sauce, pies, and liqueurs, and then knitting, sewing, mending, embroidering, and attending to her plants,” and realizes belatedly how painful it was for her mother to be “so often taken for granted,” dependent on Federici’s father “for every penny she spent.”
During her graduate studies in the early 1970s, Federici encountered a pamphlet by Mariarosa Dalla Costa that marked the start of her life as an active feminist. In “Women and the Subversion of the Community,” Dalla Costa argued that “women must completely discover their own possibilities—which are neither mending socks nor becoming captains of ocean-going ships.” Dalla Costa wanted a route to women’s liberation that didn’t look just like men’s. By the time Federici had reached the last page, she writes, “I had found my home, my tribe and my own self.” When Federici got in touch with Dalla Costa, she was just in time to contribute to the Wages for Housework campaign. She began organizing the New York committee with Nicole Cox in 1973, and it was her pamphlet “Wages Against Housework” that would become the most accessible and enduring formulation of the idea behind getting paid for doing dishes.
The campaign sparked furious exchanges in the left-wing journals of the time, and was misunderstood by everyone from liberal feminists to Marxists themselves. Some thought that women were just greedy: They were happy as they were, but wanted more money. Others thought that an idea dreamed up in Italy couldn’t hold in the United States, where more women worked outside the home. (In the 1980s, Angela Davis would suggest that more women joining the traditional workforce, and fighting for robust social services from that position, was a better way of tackling the problem.) Still more thought the love shown in the work of making a home was one of the few activities capitalism hadn’t tainted and should stand inviolate. And should the government pay for these wages? Why not businesses? Why not husbands? The New York wing of the Wages for Housework movement organized marches and teach-ins at laundromats and supermarkets. They held table-top sales where you could buy Wages for Housework pot holders. But Federici’s “militant” phase, as she has called it, ended in 1977 when the chapter crumbled.
Then came the arguing: Federici wanted to look back to the beginnings of capitalism in order to trace the ways women were exploited, excluded, and mystified out of economic power. In her efforts to understand these processes, Federici turned to literature, specifically the story from The Tempest of Caliban, the island native, and Sycorax, his mother, who had been exiled from Algiers for her witch’s ability to control the moon. Sycorax taught her son to appreciate and channel the power of the land and its waters. As queen, she raised him as the rightful heir to the isle that is, as Caliban tells two drunken courtiers who wash up on its shores, “full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.” When Prospero arrives on the island, he seizes power, enslaving Caliban and abolishing his mother’s customs. In the transition from their government to his, Federici saw an analogy for how patriarchy established a stranglehold over society.
In her 2004 book, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, she looks through the archives for real-life versions of Sycorax and Caliban, beginning in the Middle Ages. Federici tells us of Gostanza, a widow who was tried as a witch in San Miniato, Tuscany, in 1594. She lived in an all-female household—with a niece and two other widows—and worked as a healer, receiving people in her home but also traveling “to ‘mark’ an animal, visit a sick person, help people carry out a revenge.” She used oils, but also “devices apt to cure and protect by ‘sympathy’ or ‘contact.’” As Federici notes, she was “very popular, everyone would go to her to be cured, to have his or her fortune told, to find missing objects or to buy love potions.” Like Sycorax, she was punished for seeming to have too much power. Federici also writes of a number of young English settlers in seventeenth-century Virginia, who were executed for living among Native tribes. They had formed an alliance against the colonists, which Federici sees as similar to the alliance Caliban forms with the drunken courtiers against Prospero.
Federici even suggests you can glimpse what a Sycorax-ruled island might have looked like by examining the way women worked under feudalism. Female serfs worked the fields as well as cooking, spinning, and keeping an herb garden at home, drawing no great division between work done inside and outside. And as women washed, harvested, and tended animals collectively, their work became a source of “intense female sociality and solidarity” that allowed them “to stand up to men.”
Housework hasn’t gone
away: In many ways,
it has become even more
important.
In Federici’s reading, witch hunts were a way of limiting female freedom, and pushing women back into the home. Witches didn’t fly on broomsticks; they earned their own living, slept with whom they wanted to, and cared for the vulnerable. It took several hundred years of terror, persecution, and torture to stop women living independently and cooperatively, and even then the efforts didn’t fully succeed. Ever harsher penalties for infanticide, contraception, abortion, and midwifery, up to execution, were needed to make it clear that women’s allotted (and safest) role in society was to bear and rear children.
Caliban and the Witch was published by Autonomedia, a tiny left radical press run as a collective, but has grown in influence and was republished as a Penguin Modern Classic last year. It’s an attractive argument in much the same way that Wages for Housework is: It takes an aspect of women’s lived history and re-situates it as a source of power. A single woman living in a city apartment building might feel less lonely if she saw herself as part of a tradition of resistance to capitalism that began in the sixteenth century, just as a frustrated housewife in Brooklyn 50 years ago could find a movement in which her work was finally valued.
After a long period of neglect, Federici’s ideas were in circulation again, and her next book, Revolution at Point Zero, reprinted and repopularized her writings about housework, care, and social reproduction. By the 2010s, a whole generation had come of age expecting to build careers outside the home, largely thanks to the advances of the 1970s. But they hadn’t been able to shed their work inside it. As Arlie Russell Hochschild identified as early as 1989 in her book The Second Shift, many women were working a second job when their nine-to-five was over: doing the full-time work of taking care of their homes and families in the evenings and early mornings, on top of their paid work. Housework hadn’t gone away: In many ways, it had become even more important.
The essays in this new volume, Patriarchy of the Wage, written from 1975 to 2020, return to the premise of Wages for Housework and see what it can offer feminism today. Federici goes right back to her first pamphlet, and tries to explain again why she uses wages to show the value of housework. A wage is more than a sum of money every month; it’s a way of appeasing the worker just enough so that the boss can keep the profit. One of Marx’s biggest questions is, what does waged labor hide? Wages hide things like the coal miners’ commute George Orwell describes in The Road to Wigan Pier: To get to the coalface takes at least an hour a day, half-bent in the dust-black air, and isn’t paid. The miner’s work starts, as far as his employer is concerned, when he is stood in front of the glittering black wall of coal with his pick. That hidden hellish commute, and all the other things a worker does in order to be ready to claim his wages, are part of what eventually become the boss’s profit.
What else do wages hide? Federici notices that a father’s wages hide a mother’s work. The mid-century ideal was the “family wage” with its expectation that a male breadwinner should earn enough to keep a wife and children, who are concealed from capital. What would happen, Federici asks, if you didn’t hide that work? In asking the government for a paycheck, as well as for more social services and free social services, Federici and her peers were asking society at large to see them, to recognize their work, to negotiate. They were questioning what wages are for, who they reward, and how they operate. As you ask these questions, you find that all wages start to look strange, the premise they’re based on arbitrary and confusing.
“The struggle for the wage is at the same time a struggle against the wage, for the power it expresses and against the capitalist relation it embodies,” Federici writes in the opening essay to this volume, a 1975 piece titled “Counterplanning From the Kitchen.” When people who are not paid for their work start asking for pay, they’re often told there simply isn’t enough money to meet their demands. What becomes clear is that neither private businesses nor public entities can afford to pay for all the unpaid work done in society. If the system operated logically, it could not stand. The demand for a wage reveals, too, that no one’s wages are adequate for the work they do, that no one’s life should be sacrificed to work. “We have always belonged to capital every moment of our lives,” Federici writes in italics, “and it is time that we make capital pay for every moment of it.”
Whereas early essays such as “Wages Against Housework” and “Counterplanning From the Kitchen” were combatively purposeful, later ones collected in Patriarchy of the Wage are measured, almost dry, in tone. With their footnote-deep intimacy with Capital and the Grundrisse, they not only borrow from Marx but constantly return to his silence on domestic work. There are historical reasons Marx didn’t write about housework (not least that, in the mid-nineteenth century, plenty of women and children worked in factories, too), and there are political reasons (Marx had to start somewhere), but it plays on Federici’s mind. Why wasn’t Marx interested in the processes by which workers were born and brought up? “Our work produces the most precious product on the capitalist market: labor power,” Federici observes. Marx chose to focus on industrial labor and thought that mankind should dominate the earth. Federici tracks some of the ways Marx’s thought developed later in life, and wonders if, in time, he “may have also understood the importance of feminism, which he often dismissed as a struggle for bourgeois rights.”
I sometimes wondered why Federici seemed so disappointed in Marx for being, though a genius, a nineteenth-century man who was married but slept with his housekeeper. Federici’s inquiries lead her to the limits of Marx’s thought, and those limits in turn become a spur to her own ideas. Marx, for instance, wanted mechanization and other efficiencies to free the worker for afternoons fishing at the lake and evenings debating at dinner, but Federici counters that the work she’s interested in cannot always be done by machines. “How can we mechanize washing, cuddling, consoling, dressing and feeding a child, providing sexual services, or assisting those who are ill and the elderly and not self-sufficient?”
It is not as if we haven’t tried mechanizing care. During the pandemic, when care workers couldn’t run dining clubs for older adults, New York State’s Office for the Aging gave robot cats and dogs to their charges. Although the owners often forgot their pets were electronic, their loneliness persisted: Katie Engelhart wrote in The New Yorker of the way an interviewee would keep her on Zoom at the end of their conversation, asking her questions about the weather where she was.
Instead of lovebots, nursebots, and electric cats, Federici points to the potential of experiments in collective childcare; to efforts to expand the nuclear family, such as alloparenting, in which friends and neighbors share the work of running a household; and to the creation of “reproductive commons,” which can be seen in fisheries in Maine where lobster fishers have agreed on rules to protect breeding waters at informal, local, state, and federal levels and thereby made their fisheries some of the most sustainable in the world. One of Federici’s examples of commoning is the establishment of collectively run urban gardens across the United States, which have become, over time, “places where people come together not just to work the land, but to play cards, hold weddings, have baby showers or birthday parties.” You can walk past the edge of Marx’s thought and into a tomato patch, where the vines are for everybody. Commoning doesn’t have to be utopian and out of reach: Federici most often detects it in grassroots responses to injustice. From Cambodia to Senegal, women set up “money commons,” where they gave small loans on trust, in response to the shaming tactics of the World Bank; when inflation was out of control during the 1980s in Chile, and households couldn’t afford to shop and cook singly, they turned to communal kitchens.
Wollstonecraft, De Beauvoir, Firestone, Millett, and Federici—all used arguments with their intellectual fathers to work out what they didn’t want their worlds to look like. But as much as feminism was sharpened through these literary-critical encounters, it has always drawn strength from the life experience of its mothers. Federici sees her own work renewing and revitalizing Marx as the making good of her mother’s invisible work. “What often saves me when I cannot protect myself,” she wrote in June 2011, “is my commitment to protect her work and myself as the child to whom it was dedicated.” It is this that makes emotional labor, care work, social reproduction, whatever you like to call it, different from other work. It is an investment in a person for its own sake, a debt that can be considered paid not at clocking-off but on returning the investment in the same spirit. It is our first recognition that we must rely on one another to get through life, and our first intimation of how the relying and the getting through might be done.
On December 1, The U.S. Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments in Dobbs v. JacksonWomen’s Health Organization, a case that seeks to overturn Roe v. Wade. The case is set to determine the so-called constitutionality of a 15-week Mississippi abortion ban. Most observers suspect that SCOTUS will rule in favor of the ban, ending abortion rights in the U.S. as currently conceived, which are already alarmingly limited. If the Supreme Court effectively overturns Roe, existing abortion bans in 26 states could go into effect.
This looming crisis has been forecasted by those fighting hardest for safe and legal abortion for decades. Unfortunately, liberal organizations that position themselves as being “on the front lines” of abortion access have disempowered some of those most willing to fight for abortion rights. In this piece, I will argue that the corporate dismissal of abortion clinic defenders has contributed to the precarity—and in some cases, absence—of abortion rights. I will make the case that abortion providers and advocates need to end their complicity with law enforcement and other oppressive institutions and, instead, engage in campaigns of active resistance and civil disobedience to defend abortion access. Rather than leaving the sphere of public protest to forced-birth zealots, we must mobilize to claim abortion as a fundamental human right and a positive moral good.
The battle outside abortion clinics
Since the legalization of Roe, as a result of the cowardice, capture, and racism of the American medical establishment, abortion has been marginalized in medicine, forcing the majority of abortion care to be provided in freestanding abortion clinics. And for the entirety of their existence, abortion clinics have been on the receiving end of right-wing extremist terror. In 1977, only four years after Roe v. Wade, an abortion clinic in Long Island, NY was attacked by anti-choice arsonists. After that event, clinics began seeing more regular attacks, with bombings and arsons occurring almost quarterly over the next six years (29 total). In the mid-eighties, the Right began formalizing, escalating, and becoming more efficient and effective in their violent organizing.
The National Abortion Federation (NAF) has been tracking violence against abortion providers since 1977. Their most recent report (released in 2020 with data up to 2019) indicates that, in total, there had been “11 murders, 26 attempted murders, 42 bombings, 189 arsons, and thousands of incidents of criminal activities directed at abortion providers.” Since I began drafting this article, there has been a clinic-destroying arson in Knoxville, TN–the second time this clinic has been attacked in less than a year–and a clinic blockade in Fort Myers, Florida. Even more concerning than the total numbers are the recent upticks in reports of violence, with clinic invasions more than doubling and death threats increasing almost 60 percent between 2018 and 2019.
Often overlooked when we consider violent clinic terror is the day-to-day presence of anti-abortion extremists in the streets or on the sidewalks in front of clinics. Forced-birth advocates all over the country routinely show up to abortion clinics to intimidate patients through performative prayer, the sharing of religious handouts littered with disinformation, offensive signage, and so-called “sidewalk counseling” in which they attempt to coerce patients to continue their pregnancies. In some cases, these efforts lead to the blocking of clinic entrances or the invasion of clinics. It was only in 2012 that NAF started tracking incidents of obstruction of health care facilities, which has increased year after year. (In 2018: 3,038. In 2019: 3,387.) Picketing also increased in 2019, with more than 100,000 incidents reported.
Anti-abortion extremists’ ongoing attacks and routine presence at the site of health care delivery have contributed to the success of the anti-abortion movement. First, the oft-unchallenged voices in front of clinics have normalized extremist positions and increased abortion shame. Over time, these activists have claimed the moral high ground in their obstruction of health care. Their rhetoric, persistent and unchallenged, has defined the grounds on which the battle over abortion has been waged.
In response to the anti-choice charge that abortion should be considered shameful and immoral, many liberal feminists who support abortion have slinked away from offering a passionate defense of abortion. Instead, they typically elevate “good” abortion narratives in their advocacy (rigorous but failed birth control efforts, pregnancies that are the result of rape or incest, late pregnancy discovery of fetal anomalies), use euphemisms to refer to abortion care, or ignore abortion care altogether in their rhetorical defense of abortion providers. (See, for example, this wildly popular tote, which does not even mention that one of the essential services Planned Parenthood provides is abortions). Joe Biden, throughout his entire first year in office, has yet to utter the word abortion despite calls to do so by reproductive justice activists. Even on the 49th, and likely the last, anniversary of Roe, the administration used euphemisms like “privacy” “choice” and “reproductive health” to refer to abortion rather than taking an unapologetic, let alone urgent, defense of abortion care.
Many people to the left of center have now accepted the narrative put forth constantly from the front of clinics: abortion is evil or distasteful and should be avoided. We were, famously, to keep abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” The rare part was entirely driven by a loud minority of anti-abortion extremists, and centrist feminists adopted it, accepting that there was, perhaps, something morally questionable about abortion. With the narrative of abortion’s objectionable nature in place, Democrats then made the argument about political expediency, claiming that progressives would never find a broad class coalition unless they dropped abortion rights as a “litmus test” for determining support. And just like that, coalitions formed based on the denial of fundamental human rights.
The “mainstream” plan to counter clinic harassment and violence
Another effect of the regular, unopposed presence of anti-choice zealots showing up in the streets week after week is the opportunities it has provided for anti-abortion organizing and coalition building. Clinic protests offer gathering space and purpose for like-minded people and people-powered, decentralized anti-abortion action. These foot soldiers have been putting anti-abortion ideology into practice week after week, month after month for decades. They recruit, build, reflect, and learn how to be more effective in their action.
By contrast, the so-called “pro-choice” establishment encourages supporters to respond to these attacks on abortion rights primarily through institutionalized channels: donating (to Democrats, to abortion-providing corporations, to legal organizations who will eventually “save” abortion in the courts) and voting (for Democrats, who have by and large fallen short of their promise to protect abortion rights). If there are concerns about “safety,” given the escalation of violent attacks at clinics, establishment institutions encourage supporters to rely on the police for protection and order.
Through these institutional channels, the Democrats won their main mechanism of clinic “protection”: legislation (enforced, in theory, by police) to protect clinics and clinic entrances. In 1994, the federal government passed a piece of legislation called the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which prohibited intentional property damage and the use of “force or threat of force or … physical obstruction” to “injure, intimidate, or interfere with” someone entering an abortion clinic. In some places, the FACE Act has been more or less replicated on the state level. Other states have enacted “buffer zones” around clinics to prevent protesters from coming within a certain distance of the clinic property or entrance. The latter of these protections has been challenged in courts. In 2014, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down a Massachusetts law that established a 35-foot buffer zone around clinic entrances. Buffer zones were then challenged in other states, with mixed results.
In some cases, establishment liberals have ignored the need to protect clinics. Take Mississippi: less than a decade after Roe v. Wade, there were thirteen clinics that provided abortions in Mississippi. But, as a result of right-wing terrorist violence, the number of these clinics shrunk to eight in 1992 and eventually to one by 2006. Mississippi-based reproductive justice activists have argued that abortion rights advocates in other parts of the country have ignored the crisis there, characterizing the state as “backwards” or disposable. They argued that what was happening in Mississippi, and in the South more generally, could happen anywhere and that what happened in Mississippi could impact the entire country. They were right, of course: Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the one remaining abortion clinic in the state (known as the “Pink House”), is the clinic involved in the Supreme Court case upon which Roe currently depends.
Pro-choice protesters rallied in December as the Supreme Court began to hear oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that could potentially overturn Roe v Wade. Credit: Miki Jourdan, Flickr.
It is important to recognize that those warning about the realities of inaccessible abortion and about the narrowness and shortfalls of the purely institutional focus on winning abortion rights were generally Black and Brown women, and those that were controlling the narrative and the strategy (from their seats at the tops of large nonprofits or within legislative bodies or in influential academic centers) were generally–and continue to be–white upper-class people. This pattern underscores why abortion access is an issue of racial and economic justice.
Clearly, the liberal establishment’s approach to protecting abortion patients, abortion providers, and abortion rights against an activated Right–a Right that is fueled by activism in the streets–is failing. As captured by the NAF data cited above, violence, harassment, and obstruction of clinics have persisted or surged over time. Anti-abortion extremists win gerrymandered and voter-suppressed majorities at the state level and then introduce and pass abortion-restricting legislation. The Right has fueled a battle over federal funding for abortion rights that has led both Republicans and anti-choice Democrats to repeatedly pass the Hyde Amendment year after year since 1977, prompting anti-choice Democrats to hold up passage of the Affordable Care Act until Obama agreed to exclude federal funding for abortion. Anti-abortion extremists have influenced the rule-making process at the FDA, limiting access to medication abortion through onerous regulations. The Right pushes for and wins the strategic appointments of radical Federalist Society judges. At the same time, Christian fundamentalists have codified the right of private organizations to deny healthcare on religious principles, and Catholic Diocese has taken over hospital systems, defining the care that can and cannot be provided there.
[P]erhaps the strongest evidence of the success of right-wing tactics, and the concomitant failure of the liberal establishment’s approach, is that despite overwhelming public support for legal abortion, there is no mass movement organized to take to the streets to protect abortion rights in the face of the potential fall of Roe.
These anti-choice efforts have made abortion (and other reproductive healthcare) practically inaccessible for many or most people in the U.S. And right-wing efforts have reached beyond U.S. borders as well, such as the Mexico City Policy, often referred to as the “global gag rule,” which bans federal funding of foreign non-governmental organizations that counsel or refer for abortion. It has been instated and reinstated during every Republican administration since 1985.
But perhaps the strongest evidence of the success of right-wing tactics, and the concomitant failure of the liberal establishment’s approach, is that despite overwhelming public support for legal abortion, there is no mass movement organized to take to the streets to protect abortion rights in the face of the potential fall of Roe.
Clinic defense
As long as there have been clinic protesters, there have been people willing to challenge them. Over the years, clinic defense has taken a variety of forms, from clinic-employed or volunteer patient escorts to counter-protesters who engage rhetorically with anti-choice zealots to clinic defenders who put their bodies between terrorists and patients. In many cases, clinic administrators and/or clinic owners discourage clinic defenders from showing up. They claim that the presence of clinic defenders creates chaos in front of clinics and causes patients confusion and distress. Some have argued that clinic defense more intensely activates anti-abortion protesters and brings larger and larger crowds to the clinic. Instead, many clinics opt for hiring private–oftentimes armed–security guards, or they call the police on protesters, relying on racist, misogynist, violent institutions to “protect” patients.
Clinic defense is a grassroots, often militant tactic of interrupting radical anti-abortion extremists from harassing abortion clinics, staff, and patients. Perhaps the first example of a nationwide clinic defense campaign was in 1992, when pro-abortion activists opposed Operation Rescue’s plan for a multi-clinic, multi-week campaign to blockade and occupy clinics and to harass abortion providers, staff, and patients in Buffalo, NY. (The year before, a similar campaign in Kansas had forced clinics to close for days.) Pro-abortion activists came from around the country to oppose Operation Rescue, shutting down the protest and keeping the clinics open. Again, national pro-choice groups initially refused to endorse the nationwide action, but later admitted to reporters that the strategy of clinic defense works. Since then, and despite this acknowledgment of its value, clinic defense and clinic defenders have been marginalized, scolded, and shamed by large, mainstream abortion providers.
But, as clinic protests have grown in number and aggression, clinic defense has reappeared in pockets across the U.S. from Seattle to Chicago to New York. In New York City, where I provide abortion care, NYC for Abortion Rights (NYC4AR) has been working to counter the protesters from a local church who harasses patients once monthly at a busy clinic in Manhattan. The defenders wield signs with supportive messages, sing songs of liberation, and chant pro-abortion messages while slowing the harassers’ procession from the church to the clinic. Typically, NYC4AR defenders are wildly outnumbered: there are sometimes hundreds of forced-birthers compared to dozens of clinic defenders. NYC4AR’s continued presence in the street has offered an opportunity not only to protect patients and staff, but also to learn about the systems which uphold and perpetuate clinic and street harassment.
A successful defense campaign
NYC4AR’s campaign to protect NYC abortion clinics from protestors escalated last May, when clinic invader Fidelis Moscinski, announced he would lead harassers in four of the five boroughs in what they called a “Witness for Life” event. Over the course of the next few months, NYC4AR counter-protested in Brooklyn, forcing the procession to slow and delaying their arrival to the clinic (sometimes by hours), using tactics learned from years of defending the Manhattan-based clinic. In August, after the Archdiocese of NYC launched a PR campaign of National Review op-eds and lobbied the NYPD publicly to come down hard on the (wildly outnumbered and nonviolent) counter-protesters, the cops showed up in full militarized gear and arrested two members of NYC4AR, charging them with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and obstruction of pedestrian traffic. The next month, NYCFAR announced that they would continue to show up to defend clinics. In response, the church announced:
Due to the 20th Anniversary of 9/11, the police who normally accompany us during our prayerful Witness for Life in Brooklyn on the second Saturdays of the month will be unable to join us, and so the Brooklyn Witness has been suspended this Saturday and will resume again on October 9.
The counter-protesters showed up on the day of the canceled protest, flyered the neighborhood with information about how the church harasses patients, and collected signatures for a petition to have the church stop hosting the “Witness for Life” events. Less than two months later, the church and Fidelis Moscinski announced they would no longer dedicate efforts to harassing patients at the Brooklyn-based clinic. An NYC4AR email announcement explains, “we were told that the church got tired of all the attention.”
Activists with NYC for Abortion Rights celebrate after successfully getting the Witness for Life event cancelled through clinic defense. Credit: @nycforabortionrights
This short example of clinic defense resulting in a victory clearly highlights the police’s alignment with the Church in working to control reproductive lives and reproductive labor. Policing in the U.S. is tied inextricably to white supremacy, and more specifically works to promote white supremacist heteropatriarchy.
Consequently, the state cannot be relied upon to protect reproductive autonomy. On the contrary, the state has proven concretely harmful, particularly for those at various intersections of oppression. Jane Doe, an unaccompanied minor jailed at a so-called “immigrant detention facility” in Texas, was prevented from accessing legal abortion care for weeks as lawyers and judges considered if she should be able to access care at all. And the state’s complicity in denying reproductive rights is not exclusive to abortion, as demonstrated by the cases of those in ICE custody who were forcibly sterilized. When the state is insufficiently able to control bodies, it relies on legalizing anti-abortion vigilantism as it has in SB8, forcing thousands of Texans to flee their state for care elsewhere and impacting abortion access in surrounding states in a ripple effect.
[T]he state cannot be relied upon to protect reproductive autonomy. On the contrary, the state has proven concretely harmful, particularly for those at various intersections of oppression.
When clinic administrators and spokespeople tell clinic defenders to stay home and that the police will provide safety, they fail to acknowledge that police pose a threat to the well being of their Black, Brown, immigrant, queer, and/or poor patients and staff. It is far more likely that police will be activated against a patient of color or a disabled person who becomes agitated in a waiting room or against a clinic defender than to interrupt street harassment or clinic attacks. And, when they are called, it is more likely that the police will use the tools of the state against a patient than against an anti-choice harasser.
Creating our own safety
Clinic defense offers a strategic alternative to the failing liberal approach to protecting abortion, and indeed, to protecting reproductive autonomy at large. With the explicit goal of guarding clinics against the Right and taking back the space in front of abortion-providing health centers, clinic defense also allows an opportunity to reclaim the moral high ground and to reject, in word and deed, the stigma and shame assigned to abortion. Perhaps most importantly at this particular moment, the infrastructure required to build clinic defense networks could be the basis upon which our movement might activate currently disengaged abortion supporters, providing opportunities for the kind of community-building and praxis-based political education required to mobilize masses.
On any given day, upon my arrival to work, I am likely to see a handful of individuals handing out packets to patients and staff as they enter the clinic. I often wonder what it might look like if those handouts weren’t filled with hateful misinformation or messages intended to invoke shame and doubt. I wonder, what if those standing outside the clinic weren’t harassers at all, or if the forced-birthers were too outnumbered to stand in front of our door? Or what if we routinely showed up en masse outside so-called “crisis pregnancy centers”–the fake clinics masquerading as abortion clinics–to tell the truth about the lies peddled inside and to direct patients to appropriate care providers? I wonder what it would be like if our movement was so overwhelmingly powerful that we not only reestablished abortion as a legal right, but also contributed to the reintegration of abortion into mainstream medical, even primary, care.
But while right-wing terrorism still plagues our clinics, while our legal rights continue to erode, and while institutions actively threaten reproductive autonomy, we must not rely on the state or its tools of enforcement for our own safety. The police have and will always support vigilantism (legal and informal) aimed at repressing the rights of people exercising reproductive autonomy. Pro-abortion and Prison Industrial Complex abolitionist movements must work in support of one another to–among other goals–uplift the safe provision of abortion care without relying on the police.