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Title: Abortion Struggles Beyond Voting
Author: Spencer Beswick
Date: August 30, 2022
Language: en
Topics: abortion, anarchism, feminism, women’s liberation, dual power
Source: Retrieved on 9/12/2022 from https://hardcrackers.com/abortion-struggles-beyond-voting-womens-liberation-reproductive-care-and-dual-power/

Spencer Beswick

Abortion Struggles Beyond Voting

At recent pro-choice demonstrations, we have been told that the only way

to protect abortion is to vote for Democrats in November. Yet the

Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade under a Democratic president, house,

and senate. The Democrats appear more interested in fundraising off of

Roe and attacking grassroots activists than they do fighting the

right-wing assault on abortion. But reproductive rights were not won by

electoral means, and that is not how we will defend them. The historical

experiences of feminist abortion struggle between the 1960s and 1990s

offer alternative strategies for building power and transforming

society.

Women’s Liberation and Reproductive Freedom

Why did the Supreme Court originally pass Roe v. Wade in 1973? The

ruling did not come from voting or legal struggles. Professional-class

health advocates—primarily doctors and lawyers—had spent decades

fighting legal battles to expand exceptions to abortion restrictions.

Like today, many focused on relatively rare cases based on health

concerns, rape, and incest, rather than the fundamental right to bodily

autonomy. These legal tactics accomplished very little.

Instead, the right to abortion was won through militant mass struggle

over the course of only a few years. Beginning in the late 1960s,

feminists in the Women’s Liberation Movement spoke out publicly about

their own abortions and organized consciousness raising groups across

the country. They discovered that their personal issues, including

reproduction, were deeply political. Instead of relying on politicians

and professionals, these feminists built power from below and took

control of their lives and bodies. They marched in the streets,

disrupted male-dominated medical spaces, and built underground networks

to provide abortions—including the Chicago Jane Collective, which

performed over 10,000 abortions between 1969–73. Feminists took

reproductive care into their own hands and built a mass movement to

fight for the repeal of all abortion laws, rather than tinkering around

the edges.

These mass movements forced the Supreme Court to act. Faced with

militant mobilization and widespread public disobedience, the Court

calculated that the easiest way to respond while preserving its

legitimacy was to codify limited abortion rights into law. This history

of struggle has largely been erased. Instead, we are told a narrative of

enlightened liberals pursuing legal strategies that convinced the

Supreme Court to protect the constitutional right to privacy.

After Roe, the Right launched a concerted attack on reproductive freedom

and on the Women’s Liberation Movement more broadly. First came the 1976

Hyde Amendment, which prevented many poor women from receiving care by

forbidding the use of federal funds for abortion. In the 1980s, a

growing anti-abortion movement pressured the government to impose

further state and federal restrictions. As Reagan and the New Right

attacked women from the heights of the government, right-wing extremists

bombed clinics and assassinated abortion providers. Operation Rescue,

founded in 1986 by Randall Terry, advanced the slogan “If you believe

abortion is murder, act like it’s murder” and tried to physically shut

down clinics.

Much of the feminist movement retreated and conceded ground to the right

by framing the struggle around “pro-choice” activism rather than

fighting openly for abortion rights and women’s liberation. The radical

conception of reproductive freedom, autonomy, and liberation was

subsumed into a liberal framework that regarded abortion as an

individual choice and as a right for the state to protect. Liberal legal

strategies laid the basis for the Supreme Court’s 1992 ruling in Planned

Parenthood v. Casey that substantively upheld Roe v. Wade but opened the

door to further restrictions provided there was not an “undue burden.”

But not all feminists accepted this retreat.

Clinic Defense, Feminist Infrastructure, and Dual Power

Anarchists (anti-state socialists) within the movement rejected voting

and legal reforms in favor of radical grassroots activism. Following the

example of second-wave feminists, they framed abortion once again as a

question of bodily autonomy and women’s liberation. Anarcha-feminists

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.

The first task was to defend clinics from Operation Rescue, who

regularly harassed patients and blockaded clinics. Anarchists introduced

militant street tactics—including the use of black bloc and the

anti-fascist street fighting practiced by Anti-Racist Action—to the

broad feminist and queer coalitions who mobilized to protect clinics.

Feminists in Anti-Racist Action argued that anti-abortion militants were

a key component of contemporary fascism and they resolved to bring

anti-fascist street tactics to bear on Operation Rescue. Activists used

these confrontational tactics to successfully protect clinics in NYC,

Minneapolis, San Francisco, and across the country.

In 1993, Operation Rescue tried to host a summer training camp in

Minneapolis. They wanted to repeat the success of their 1991 “Summer of

Mercy” mobilization in Wichita. Unlike in Kansas, however, anarchists

defended clinics from them, blockaded them in their church, vandalized

their materials, and ultimately 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.”

In addition to defending clinics, anarcha-feminists built reproductive

care infrastructure to perform abortions outside the reach of the state.

Anarchists 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.” Instead of the slogan

“we’re pro-choice and we vote,” anarchists often marched behind a banner

reading “we’re pro-choice and we riot!” Rather than petitioning the

state to protect abortion, Love and Rage argued for reviving

“women-controlled health care and abortions” along the model of

Chicago’s Jane Collective (which disbanded after Roe v. Wade).

While anarcha-feminists supported abortions provided by accredited

doctors, their focus on women’s autonomy and critique of the

male-dominated US healthcare system 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.” They sought to build autonomy

on their own terms by organizing self-help groups in which, San

Francisco activist Sunshine Smith explained, “women learn the basics of

self-cervical exams, do pelvics on each other, and learn how to do

menstrual extraction.” Anarchists thus sought to develop the knowledge

and skills necessary to induce abortions on their own terms and provide

their own reproductive care.

If women controlled their own bodies and institutions, they would no

longer depend on the state to protect their rights. Establishing

reproductive healthcare infrastructure is a key component of feminist

dual power that challenges the rule of the state and capitalism.

Inspired in part by the Zapatistas, anarchists sought to build

grassroots infrastructure along with the capacity to defend it from the

violence of the state. This kind of infrastructure prefigures—and

concretely establishes—a new world defined by mutual aid, solidarity,

and autonomy.

Grassroots reproductive infrastructure laid the foundation for further

revolutionary action. 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.”

---

With parallel strategies undertaken in the courts and in the streets,

feminist activists successfully defended abortion from both the Supreme

Court and anti-abortion mobilization during the 1980s-90s. Yet abortion

activism has remained on the defensive since reproductive rights were

first won nationally in 1973. The framing of “pro-choice”

activism—rather than women’s autonomy or the right to abortion—reflects

a retreat from the strategy of women’s liberation.

The anarchist and feminist traditions of mass mobilization, autonomous

health infrastructure and grassroots struggle offer alternatives—or at

least a radical complement—to voting. Reversing Roe v. Wade will not

stop abortions; it will only make them more dangerous and less

accessible. As anarcha-feminist Liz Highleyman argued 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.”

That time is now.