Build a New Pro-Choice Movement

The right has been successfully chipping away at abortion rights for years, and today that effort has given us a country in which abortion access is a tottering structure, riddled with holes.

Jenny Brown is a longtime organizer with National Women’s Liberation, a feminist group, who has written two books about pregnancy and abortion. She says we urgently need to examine how we’ve fought the abortion battle in the past. For example, Brown said, after moving away from the successful street activism of the 1960s, advocates in the 90s took up a professional and legislative approach that focused on the rights of doctors to practice, rather than giving women the power to determine their own lives.

But all hope is not lost. I spoke to Brown recently about how to wage a more successful battle for reproductive freedom today.

You can influence the Supreme Court

“When we won Roe v. Wade, it was because we had a huge women’s liberation movement in the street, in addition to legal strategy, Jane Collective doing thousands of underground abortions a year, every campus had a underground referral service, clergy were doing referrals. It was entirely public pressure that made them change,” Brown said. She thinks that the Black Lives Matter protests have made the justices “very sensitive to the fact that they need to maintain their legitimacy in a society where the courts and legal system are coming under huge criticism from millions of people willing to risk life and limb protesting. So the court is shifting uneasily on its bench, and that’s why we’ve seen these unexpectedly pro-people decisions around DACA, LGBTQ rights, and abortion.”

Shout your abortion

Shout Your Abortion is an activist project in which people speak publicly about their abortions in order to show how common and important the procedure is. The group pushes back against the strategy of using “extreme” cases, such as pregnancy that results from rape or endangers a person’s health, to argue that abortion rights are necessary. “In the last ten years there’s been a groundswell of grassroots feminists saying that this apologetic strategy does not represent us … this is a service everyone needs access to to control their lives,” she said. Speak-outs were key to the ’60s movement, so it’s actually an old strategy that’s been made new again. “We can’t win if we don’t say what we want,” Brown said, “and we can’t win full abortion rights if we can’t say abortion.”

Make pills more widely available

The abortion pill mifepristone is heavily regulated, and you must receive it from a doctor licensed to provide it — you can’t pick it up at a pharmacy. But the pandemic has amplified demands to make the abortion pill more readily available. Some clinics have tried to use telemedicine to prescribe the pills.

There’s also misoprostol, which can cause an abortion in 85% of cases. According to Brown, “there’s a pretty vigorous underground movement in the US to provide misoprostol to those who can’t afford it. And that echoes another 1960s strategy which is to do it ourselves” rather than rely on government or official health care providers.

Right now, Brown said, there are a few projects trying to increase access to abortion online, including Telabortion.net, which is conducting a study of telemedicine for abortion, Plan C, which has a (limited) list of places to get abortion pills, and Aid Access, which is run by a doctor based in Austria who will do a telephone consultation and send you the pills. (The doctor is engaged in a battle with the FDA over the legality of this process.)

Defend the clinics and fight the fakes

Anti-choice harassment of clinics is common and the anti-choice movement has a long-standing terrorist wing that has attacked doctors, staff, and patients. Brown notes that abortion rights activists have quite literally battled anti-choicers who terrorize clinics, and this work continues today.

There’s also the issue of crisis pregnancy centers – fake clinics designed to divert people seeking abortions. Brown said these centers “have misleading names often similar to a real abortion clinic so people are often confused … even though it’s not a medical facility, everyone is wearing white coats.” Protesting at such centers has been very effective in Tallahassee and Gainesville, Florida, she said. The National Women’s Liberation group has published a guide to protesting crisis pregnancy centers here.

Expand social welfare

It’s worth noting that many people are choosing not to have children because they can’t afford to. “The birth rate is at a historic low in the U.S. and that’s a concern among the employing class – who are we going to sell our products to? But people are making decisions based on the resources they have,” Brown told me. European countries have tried to raise the birth rate by doing things like increasing paid leave, child care, etc. to encourage reproduction. “In the U.S. we have a cheap version of how to do this – making it hard to get abortion and contraception – which is coercive and nasty,” Brown said. “We need to pull the mask off the religious argument and see what’s happening in the economy that makes people want to control our rights to abortion and reproduction.”