Enter 2020, and some soul searching on the state of abortion rights
A special edition responding to a recent New York Times article dissecting the pro-choice movement
Hello! It’s Thursday, Jan. 2. Last week’s special edition of the newsletter fell prey to a holiday cold, but, in a way, I think this issue is better suited to today. Maybe you, too, are wider awake. So here it is. Your regular news roundup will return next Thursday.
This week, I’m going to respond to the New York Times’ story from early December on a “divided” pro-choice movement. It is, I think, a perfect foil to understand why 2020 could be so deadly for abortion access and rights, and, in a way, to explain why I write this newsletter in the first place.
We were watching, but how hard did we really look?
Three years ago, a few weeks after I immigrated to the U.S. from Canada, Donald Trump won the presidential election. I’d been writing about his campaign and the 2016 race as a columnist in Canada, and amid the national shock that followed, one thread came back to me: Trump’s claims that he would overturn Roe v. Wade and that women who have abortions should be punished.
During the reporting for a piece on Trump’s election and the future of abortion rights, I talked with Kathaleen Pittman. She runs the abortion clinic in Shreveport, Louisiana, a small town in the state’s north-west corner. At the time, she was the only abortion clinic administrator in the state who would talk with me (that has since changed). Also at that time, she refused to be photographed (that has also since changed). People who work at abortion clinics, especially in anti-abortion states, value their privacy. Many still won’t talk on the record. They’ve spent their careers fearing violence, or personal and professional ostracization or blowback.
Pittman is in some ways reserved (there were a few questions about the clinic she refused to answer, as is usual when I talk with her), but she’s also shockingly blunt.
“I think silence has not been our friend,” she told me. “Trying to take care of business and hope for the best obviously is not working.”
Hope Medical Group for Women, the clinic she runs, hasn’t exactly just been hoping for the best. Like other independent abortion clinics that make up the majority of abortion providers, especially in anti-abortion states, they’ve hung on where others have quit (abortion providers in Louisiana have dropped from 17 in 1992 to three). Hope has also filed dozens of lawsuits against Louisiana’s anti-abortion laws over the last few decades and they’ve long been part of pro-choice organizing in Louisiana. But in many ways, the statement contains a crucial truth.
This brings me to the Times’ story: How a Divided Left Is Losing the Battle on Abortion. In essence, the piece argues that the pro-choice movement bears some of the blame for this moment, when Roe v. Wade could indeed be gutted or overturned. National pro-choice organizations have outsized influence and power, and independent clinics, like Hope, have too little, it argues. Pro-choice groups headquartered in Democratic strongholds like California and New York (Planned Parenthood, especially) have been at times blind to or complacent about the pro-life movement’s gains, it says. The movement is further divided over how “extreme” a position to take on abortion rights, the reporters write, especially when Democrats need to win races in districts where supporting abortion rights still appears politically risky, or deadly, as in red states.
First, let me say it’s reasonable and appropriate for journalists to investigate the state of the pro-choice movement right now, as part of our efforts to understand the complexity of this moment in history. If there was ever a time for such a piece, it’s now—or ten years ago.
Second, I will note that many pro-choice groups took issue with the piece’s framing of a “divided left,” including Planned Parenthood president Alexis McGill Johnson, the National Abortion Federation’s president Reverend Katherine Ragsdale, and Abortion Access Front. Heidi Sieck, the CEO and co-founder of #VOTEPROCHOICE, on the other hand, largely agreed, and argued that internalized fear created by the pro-life movements has undermined the cause.
The piece describes a kind of blindness to the on-the-ground realities in anti-abortion states, and as I read it, I found myself marveling at one thing in particular: If it’s true, and there is truth to the claim that anti-abortion states with dwindling abortion clinics have born the brunt of the pro-life movement’s gains in relative obscurity, many journalists are no less complicit.
The kind of defensive strategy the story critiques the pro-choice movement for taking (fighting abortion bans, say, rather than creating pro-choice legislation, which it’s only now doing in earnest) is exactly the model that journalists have followed for decades, especially at national news organizations. You’ll find an outpouring of headlines when a new anti-abortion law passes, and paltry other reporting, especially investigative reporting, into how abortion access actually functions in these states, and how we got here. Anyone paying attention since 2010—hell, for far longer—should have anticipated this moment. Abortion rights activists in Louisiana have. But the shock portrayed in most national media over the last year suggests many journalists have suffered from the same blindness Planned Parenthood has been accused of. Perhaps it’s another function of simply not living here. When I moved to Louisiana, it appeared as a simple fact: This place has been forgotten.
I’ve seen some regional and local publications do excellent, detailed reporting on local pro-life and pro-choice organizations, clinic closure, clinic license disputes, and abortion politics, but those stories tend not to reach a wider audience. I’ve also seen local and regional publications take the national approach, which is to say, spend 800 words quoting from “both sides” on some new proposed law and call it a day.
Most often, I’ve seen the media treat the pro-life movement and its wins as a given part of the country’s religious fabric. The players, ideologies, and strategies of the pro-life or pro-choice movements have infrequently been the subject of longform investigative work. For example: State health departments have been unilaterally shutting down abortion clinics for more than a decade using a similar bureaucratic strategy, but my piece for Pacific Standard magazine was the first longform investigative story to document the phenomenon on a national level. And while many outlets have recently, and belatedly, done the important work of reporting on women’s efforts to receive health care, I think it is equally critical that we take a precise look at the structures put in place by the pro-life movement over the last few decades, structures built for the long game; to examine what has happened to hundreds of abortion clinics that have closed in the last few decades; to try and unwind the public’s complex views on abortion; to determine who, exactly, is most pleased to see, or most benefits from seeing, abortion rights walk the plank.
(A caveat, to note the number of important pieces looking past the end of Roe v. Wade to what the future might hold if/when it’s overturned; though it’s perhaps another journalistic quirk to reach for what’s next when we’ve not exactly excavated the present.)
What could be said of many in the media could be said of the public at large. Roe v. Wade has been treated as unassailable. Until Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment, the idea it could be overturned, as far as I can tell, was viewed with deep suspicion. Sure, pro-life activists were gaining ground in those Republican-controlled Southern states—but why wouldn’t they, since it’s their turf? Sure, the Republicans had constructed their party around a pro-life litmus test long before Democrats began to push for a pro-choice one, but we can blame that on religion (ignoring the many Christian Democrats in the process). Christians are pro-life, obviously (actually, they’re divided, especially Catholics and more progressive denominations). Religious beliefs about abortion are inherently strong (actually, they’ve been fomented for decades, see differing Christian views, or pro-choice Christian groups). Fewer journalists are asking about the historical, geographic, racial, wealth or otherwise cultural incentives for supporting, or at least not opposing, the pro-life movement in places like Louisiana.
I’m sure many of you will send me pieces that contradict this argument—and I’m not saying they’re not out there, or that I haven’t myself been trying to publish them. (This Mother Jones piece from 2001 is a prime example.) Or that I myself haven’t written the very stories that I’ve critiqued above. What I’m saying is that abortion is, generally, undercovered, and not especially well-covered. It’s not very well understood by the public. It’s not, as I’ve been told lately, something people really want to read about, or think about, at any length—even people who might consider themselves pro-choice. It is still swathed in secrecy.
Perhaps it’s like climate change, or immigration, or any of the number of other subjects that we often avoid so that we need not feel the feelings they will inevitably provoke. Perhaps it’s like many subjects that impact women, which we ignore because they’re more likely to impact women. Perhaps it’s like many subjects that impact people of color, minorities, and those with less money, which we ignore because they’re more likely to impact people of color, minorities, and those with less money. Perhaps it’s like other stories of faith, which we ignore because religion sans politics (and there are many interesting religious stories to explore around abortion beyond the white evangelical/GOP angle) hardly warrants an abundance of reporting. These are oversimplifications, but I trust you get my point.
I have to say that I do find this kind of astonishing, because there is something deeply fundamental and profound at the heart of abortion: Someone’s basic physical autonomy, and our very definition of life.
That’s why I started this newsletter. Once we begin paying a bit closer attention, where we are—facing a Supreme Court case that could gut the constitutional right to abortion and give conservatives an unparalleled victory—is no longer a surprise. We start to have questions far more interesting than “which state is it this time.”
Photographic interlude
Here’s something nice: The dock at The Hermitage.
The 2020 SCOTUS case
Your weekly dive into a pivotal abortion rights case will return next week.
Resources
For research on abortion and reproductive health in the U.S. and internationally, including abortion laws and regulations, see the Guttmacher Institute and Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH).
For information on abortion clinics and providers, see the National Abortion Federation, which has an incomplete list of providers nationally. Physicians for Reproductive Health works on policy, lawsuits and advocacy. The Reproductive Health Access Project helps primary care physicians provide complete reproductive care.
SisterSong advocates for reproductive justice for women of color, non-binary and minority folks. There’s also the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health.
The Center for Reproductive Rights and the ACLU fight reproductive rights lawsuits.
NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood Federation of America advocate for reproductive health and rights, and Planned Parenthood and its affiliates also file lawsuits on behalf of their clinics, doctors and patients.
(Let me know if you think you know a national organization that should be listed here.)