Abortion Gang

Last night, PBS aired MAKERS: How Women Made America, a three-hour look at the history and evolution of the women’s movement in the United States. If you missed it, the whole thing can be viewed online.

It’s difficult to distill 50 years of diverse, rapidly evolving, and (necessarily and often productively) contradictory feminist history, work and ideas into a documentary format at all, even if given an almost unprecedented amount of airtime to do it in. It’s important to note, right off the bat, that MAKERS relied heavily on stories told by and about the women whose identities and concerns — white, cisgender, documented, and able-bodied — have and continue to be privileged by mainstream feminism. While the film featured noted women of color and queer identified activists, their role was mostly presented as “challengers” to racism and homophobia within the mainstream feminist movement, rather than as an integral part of building that movement, now and then, to serve more people better. And it is outright shameful that MAKERS eliminated trans* folks from the history of feminism, especially since the movement and some its leaders both borrowed from trans* women’s organizing in their tactics while at the same time tearing down those women and their organizing.

But here is why I am grateful that MAKERS exists, not as the definitive version of feminist history but as a first step toward reappearing women into mainstream history: the film was, without a doubt, a more comprehensive and thoughtful look at the history of the women’s liberation movement than most US students ever learn in school — and now it exists as a resource to be used by educators who’ve either been unable to use existing resources (“too radical” or “not approved”) or simply did not know about them. There is a tremendous opportunity for the film to be paired with additional resources in classroom settings at all levels that expands upon the content in the film and introduces some of the work and leaders who were not featured on the screen.

I’m also pleased with how MAKERS contextualized the work of the women’s movement specifically as organizing. One of the most annoying forms of backlash is the myth that the feminist movement consisted of a bunch of women getting ragey and their collective rage just magically changed the world. Yes, women got ragey en masse, but many of those enraged women were organizers, coming out of the labor, civil rights, trans and queer liberation movements and there was (lots of) strategy that led to the changes, alongside raw emotion. It’s important for younger feminists to see that we are part of a long line of strategists who were also figuring out when to act, when to hold your fire, how to deal with the media narrative, and how to most effectively message the work.

The most disappointing part of MAKERS, to me, was, well…me. The final hour focused on the younger waves of feminism and its tone was epitomized by anti-labor leader Michelle Rhee speaking about her desire to cook and do laundry as an example of how younger women don’t believe they need feminism anymore. I was the sole “young feminist” — as in, under 35 — featured in the broadcast and my one line was about not caring if young people call themselves “feminists” or “turtles” as long as they are doing pro-equality work, which we are. The segment also featured Letty Pogrebin providing the tired “if they lose their rights, then they will wake up” warning about and to younger women.

First, I’m not the face of young feminism. Not that there can be one, or that one representative of a movement is ever an effective strategy, but literally, I — a white, cisgender, middle class, documented, able-bodied, educated woman living in New York — am not representative of the wonderful, broad, diverse and complicated movement of my generation that I call the Forth Wave. The younger feminist movement that I know and love is being led by radical women of color, indigenous, queer, and trans* folks of all genders, in all parts of the world and we must insist that these leaders, not those that look like me and have my privilege set, are centered in conversations about the current state of and future of feminism.

Secondly, my praise of the film’s coverage focus on the organizing of the 2nd Wave is what was missing from its look at young feminism. As Jill Filipovic points out at The Guardian, there is an entire generation, ours, that’s been radicalized, working, and movement building online. Blogs and social media are our consciousness raising groups and the spaces in which we are hashing out the diverse ideologies and strategies we use to win gender justice. But to focus solely on the online aspect of young feminism misses the other radical work that’s being done, like abortion funds run by young feminists literally fulfilling Roe’s promise of the right to abortion with access to it, and young people using their bodies to shield patients from anti-abortion protesters as clinic escorts.

Yet, for all its flaws, I liked MAKERS because for the first time I was watching a historical film in a mainstream space and thinking, “THIS. This is my history. This is my legacy, my work, and my responsibility.” It was an “I’m not alone!” moment comparable to when I discovered feminism and that’s the reaction of a women’s history nerd who honestly didn’t learn much new history — I can only imagine what it meant and might mean to people who don’t know most of that history at all.

I’m also comfortable supporting MAKERS because it’s not the end, but the beginning. The press, viewership and online conversation around the premiere demonstrated a hunger for more explorations of women’s history and a mainstream audience for them. In light of this, we should and must push for more historical women’s programming that centers the stories marginalized, minimized, and erased in this one.

We must also, as young feminists, start intentionally recording the history of our own work as history. It took 50 years to get this one made and a lot of what influenced this movie is who is still around to tell the story and who has enough power and privilege to decide what matters and how much time it gets. I’d like to see my generation not make that mistake. As a start, Steph Herold and I co-founded the Feminists of Generation Now pinterest board to highlight the broad scope of organizing being done by young feminists. I’ve already seen and taken part in conversations since the film aired last night about films, books, and shows focused on and led by the Forth Wave and I can’t wait to see where those projects go.

If the measure of a successful television is viewers asking, at the end, “what’s next?’ then MAKERS was a success. And it’s the young feminists who are here, angry, and organizing that are living out the answer.

Every Friday, the Candies Foundation puts out a #FridayFact on Twitter. This week, it was the photo below:

Now, before I begin, I want to point out that the Candies Foundation has always been an organization that advocates an abstinence-only approach to sex education and that they have a history of shaming teens for choosing to parent, especially poor young people and young people of color. (Remember that Bristol Palin ad in which they have her say, basically, if you’re not rich and famous, your life as a teen mom is awful and you’re an equally awful parent?) The Candies Foundation is not, by self-definition or any judgment of their work, a reproductive justice organization.*

With that said, let’s examine how this particular tweet exemplifies how, in all ways imaginable, the Candies Foundation is doing it wrong.

First, their focus is on “teen pregnancy prevention” rather than preventing unintended pregnancy. Reproductive justice is about supporting all reproductive decisions that all people make and the fact is that not all teen pregnancies are unintended. Some young people decide to start a family at an early age while others are in situations where parenting young is the cultural norm. Others get pregnant thinking it will be an avenue to escape loneliness, depression, abusive households and parents, forced marriage, or to cement a relationship. What value judgment you place on these reasons matter not a single iota if you really want to support teen parents. If you really want to support teen parents, you ask them what factors contributed to their decisions to parent and you provide resources to assist them if they ask for them. Period.

But the Candies Foundation doesn’t actually want to support teen parents. In fact, they see them as the “failures,” to be used only to scare teens who are not yet pregnant or parenting into remaining abstinent until marriage in order to avoid becoming a tragic, sad statistic. This approach effectively contributes to the already devastating stigma associated with teen parents. The teens who saw that #FridayFact are being primed to bully and/or ostracize their friends who are pregnant and parenting. That tweet tells pregnant and parenting teens that their lives literally suck, discourages them from seeking assistance if they need it, and loving themselves and the choice they made. (If they made it – remember there is no such thing as “legitimate rape;” some young people  have their choice taken away and are forced into pregnancies by an act of violence.)

Shaming and fear don’t prevent teen pregnancy. Remember all the years in which abstinence-only was the official policy of the US government? The US was still at the top of the list in teen pregnancy statistics despite this approach. Just say no didn’t work with drugs and it hasn’t worked with sex, either. What does work is teaching teens how their reproductive systems work, how to use safer sex methods, and how to negotiate their naturally burgeoning sexuality and relationships in healthy ways. What does work is looking at the factors that contribute to unintended teen pregnancy – poverty, depression, abuse, and lack of solid sex education – and tackling those, rather than the teens impacted by them. Then, you educate young people about the options they have once they are pregnant – abortion, adoption, or parenting – without judgment and you help them access those options.

Finally, being a teen parent doesn’t mean that your life is over, or that it sucks, or that you made an awful decision. While society, with the help of well-respected organizations like the Candies Foundation, likes to scream about the awful results of teen pregnancy, many young parents are great parents who love their children and are happy with the choices they’ve made. Yes, it is hard to be a teen parent. It’s hard to be a parent in general. But shaming someone after the fact, as demonstrated above, does absolutely nothing at all to help anyone.

Personally, I think the Candies Foundation does more harm than good and we’d all be better off if they weren’t around, pretending to care what happens to young people. They get a lot of corporate money and big celebrities to scare, blame, and shame young people without making a single effort to provide real sex education or real support for pregnant and parenting teens. Sadly, I doubt they’re going away anytime soon. But if you too were upset by their #FridayFact, please tweet your displeasure at @CandiesOrg. Tell everyone you know that they are NOT to be trusted messengers to young people. After all, if you’re not part of the full, comprehensive solution, you are part of the problem.

*If you want to see how a reproductive justice organization works responsibly and effectively with teen parents, please check out the Massachusetts Teen Pregnancy Alliance.

And doubters in the pro-choice movement should never again be given airtime or column space to say that online organizing isn’t real organizing or that young people aren’t invested in the movement. We just united – younger and older, online and offline – to play offense and we just won.

This time of year, my life is cluttered with dispatches de la surreal. This email reports that a fetus is testifying in a committee in Ohio’s state legislature. That tweet says Mississippi is going to prosecute women for miscarrying and this next one is asking me to speak out against making it legal to kill abortion providers (??!!!). And, to borrow from the great Nina Simone, everybody knows about South Dakota, goddam!

Besides drinking barrels of whiskey, what’s a pro-choice activist to do while the extremists do their springtime waltz? I don’t claim to have all the answers – and would love your suggestions in the comments – but here are a couple ideas to keep up the fight and keep it together until the elected misfits slink back to their small town law firms:

Bowl for Choice. We, and the anti-choice factions, know all too well that a legal right to abortion is meaningless unless all women can access abortion care. Enter National Network of Abortion Funds, which works with organizations across the country to provide money to women who need abortions but would otherwise not be able to afford them. The Second Annual National Abortion Access Bowl-athon is rules the month of April when pro-choice activists in 25 cities will be hitting the lanes for reproductive justice. Start your own team or give to an individual bowler – like me or our blog mistress Steph or our friend @ClinicEscort, who has vowed to tattoo #prochoice (the Twitter hashtag for abortion rights news and activism) on her body if she raises $3000 for the Women’s Medical Fund.

Take the fight to the Feds. Sometimes I feel like my home state of Texas is in a battle with other states to see who can hurt women more  – and is winning because of the huge conservative majority there. That’s when I turn my activism back to the federal level where we have an extremely hostile, anti-choice Congress but some hope because of the (theoretically) pro-choice Senate and White House. Turns out the GOP is making redefining rape, allowing hospitals to let women die, and auditing women who’ve had abortions, a top priority this session. This can only mean it’s time for us to take up the banner on the national level. Sign this petition to stop the IRS from forcing women who’ve had abortions to recount their reasons to IRS agents and, if you can make it to DC, join NARAL for a national lobby day on April 7^th.

Stop fake clinics in their tracks. Austin, Baltimore, and New York City have all passed groundbreaking legislation that requires crisis pregnancy centers – ideologically driven establishments that pose as health clinics to lie and shame women out of having abortions – to post notice that they do not have medical personnel on staff and do not provide abortion services or referrals to clinics that provide these services. Start a petition on Change.org to lobby your city council to introduce this legislation in your city. If you’re in college, join the Feminist Majority campaign to expose fake clinics and get them and their advertisements off campus.

Become a clinic escort. On any given day in the United States, women and men go to reproductive health clinics to get birth control, get tested for sexually transmitted infections and, yes, have abortions. And on any given day there are people who stand outside to scream threats at these people for making the choices that are best for them at the time. Clinic escorts bravely stand between the patients and the screamers, using their bodies to shield the patients and their voices to let them know someone is on their side. Go here to find out how to get training to become one of these pro-choice heroes.

Start a freakin’ riot. 1 in 3 US women will have an abortion. And despite what you may have heard, more than half the country supports abortion rights. So let’s be LOUD and PROUD about being pro-choice. Planned Parenthood has launched a bus Truth Tour to rally support in communities across the country – check here to see if the big pink bus is rolling into your town.

Prepare to run. For office, of course! EMILY’s List, an organization dedicated to electing pro-choice people to all levels of government, is training candidates to run and supporting them with the funds to win. If you can’t attend one of their trainings, try The White House Project, which prepares women to take the elective reigns. Remember, change starts at the local level and some city council elections are won by under a hundred votes. If you don’t think you’re a candidate, look at some of the buffoons who are serving right now!

Here’s a toast to the pro-choice majority out there fighting the good fight all year round. Sling one back in “honor” of all the extremist cocks puffing their feathers in state capitals across the country and then let’s get back to work!

Ever since reading feminist techie extraordinaire Deanna Zandt’s fantastic book Share This: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking, I’ve been thinking about the nature of pro-choice activism on social networking sites like Twitter and how it fits into the larger framework of the reproductive justice movement. Zandt’s thesis, with which I heartily agree, is that social networks are revamping both the definition of authority and the nature of power and if we want to be involved in both we have to be out, in force, on these sites.

Out in force, I am. I tweet, a lot, and I follow almost 2000 others who also tweet about feminism, reproductive justice, and politics. One of the most lively and informative streams to follow are those tweets with the #prochoice hashtag – a twitter tradition that marks a tweet as about a certain topic and part of a larger conversation. As in on-the-ground organizing, there are a variety of styles of doing pro-choice activism on Twitter and each one contributes differently to the goal of making abortion safe, legal, and available to all women everywhere.

The Debaters: As in the offline world, anti-choice people are the minority online but make significantly more noise than those who think bodily autonomy is a basic human right. These squeaky wheels also spew the same lies about abortion as their offline counterparts, functioning for the sole purpose of making women scared of and ashamed about abortion. Also as in “real” life, there are a collection of brave pro-choice souls on Twitter who take on these people and their ridiculous arguments head on, day after day, calling out the misinformation, misogyny and hypocrisy. I laughed out loud the other day when @ProChoiceGal noted that being “brown/Arabic” and pro-choice defies the limited, bigoted logic of her anti-choice sparring partners. Abortion Gang contributor @KushielsMoon also makes quick, witty work of the deluge of anti’s who think “baby killer” is an original or effective epithet. These Twitterers do the necessary work of getting into the trenches with the enemy to expose them and surely change undecided minds by dishing out facts in a rational, respectful manner. They serve to remind everyone, women who’ve chosen abortion especially, that there are allies out there who respect and honor their choices. (more…)

There are days as a pro-choice activist that I close my computer, go sit down on my bed, and cry.

Truth be told, there’s nothing the anti-abortion movement can do that really surprises me after eight years of doing this work. I know how it feels to have “baby killer”  screamed menacingly from across the parking lot and to wade through protesters with gruesome signs to give a speech about sex education. I know what it’s like to hide my trembling hands in my pockets and look calm and resolute for the cameras as I evacuate a pro-choice meeting because of a bomb threat. I’ll never forget what it’s like to cry with a room of advocates, gathered to celebrate a woman’s lifetime of service to the movement, after learning that yet another doctor had been gunned down for trusting women.

I know the more political ins and outs, too. I know that after the anti-abortion movement figured out that America really is a pro-choice nation and it would be harder than they thought to overturn Roe, they turned to chipping away at access state by state. TRAP laws. Parental notification and 24-hour waiting periods. Legislating the denial of access to reproductive health services for poor and military and Native women. The list goes on and on.

So no, I’m never surprised anymore. But that doesn’t mean that each and every time, it doesn’t make me overwhelmingly, incredibly sad.

The particular instance that set off the waterworks recently was hearing that Louisiana became the 13^th state to pass a law mandating ultrasounds before abortions – paid for by the woman. This one stipulates the ultrasound must be performed even in cases of rape.
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On Tuesday, Double XX editor Jessica Grose posted a misguided, finger-wagging analysis of the recent Reclaiming Virginity conference held at Harvard, at which I spoke on a panel.

As Jessica Valenti noted, via Twitter, Ms. Grose took in the Rethinking Virginity conference as “lady bloggers rethinking their slutty ways.” Grose spends most of her post laying out conference organizer Lena Chen’s past as a sex blogger, including the slut-shaming she endured at the hands of fellow students and print and online publications. It’s obvious she views Chen’s decision to give up her blog (for the moment) and identify herself as a “Third Wave Marxist feminist” as a defection to what she describes as ‘Generation Scold’ – “deeply conventional and traditional” millenials determined to stamp out sexual promiscuity.

In what I can only call a lapse in journalistic ethics, Jessica Grose leaves out both the actual and political context in which the Rethinking Virginity conference occurred. In service of her completely off-base attack on the generation directly before her own, she leads the reader to believe that Lena Chen pulled the money out of Harvard to have a day-long conference – including speakers from other cities, programs, food, etc – to absolve herself of her past and warn other young women of the dangers of sex. Nowhere does she mention that Harvard has become the newest hotbed of abstinence-only-until-marriage activism in the form of a group called True Love Revolution, which has made headlines for, amongst other things, condemning gay sex as a sin and calling on GLBQ students to remain celibate for life to avoid the fires of hell.
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Aw, it’s always nice to get some “love” from Jill Stanek and her crew. (Note: Ms. Stanek’s staff has shockingly bowed to reality and put Steph as the rightful founder of the blog. However, I think they chose to quote me for a reason, explained in the response below.)

Quote of the Day 3-31-10

Calling ourselves an Abortion gang means that we are committed to destigmatizing not only abortion care work but also reproductive justice activism. We are dedicated to showing that young men and women care about our bodies, health, and rights. We won’t take anti-choice bull**** no matter how many different ways they spew it.

..I hope that you’ll let us challenge you and that you’ll respect us enough to do the same..

~ Shelby Knox, “self proclaimed Christian” and creator of The Abortion Gang, March 31

The only problem: I didn’t start the blog. It would have taken one minute for Ms. Stanek and staff to do the research to find that out. But as per the anti-choice playbook, facts are casualties to one of several predetermined narratives, this one being that “real” Christians believe forced pregnancy is next to Godliness.
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