Linda was a woman I grew up seeing as my mentor in my Evangelical church in Western New York. I had not talked to her in seven years. She wrote me a letter after seeing me “soliciting funds for a woman’s clinic online.” She wrote: “Whatever criteria we use to determine the value of life inside the womb will eventually be the criteria we use to determine human life outside of the womb.”
The first time I heard the word “abortion” I was 13, and the first time I protested for the pro-life movement with my church, I was 15. I held a sign that said “stop killing innocent lives,” I screamed at people and told them I would pray for them to make better decisions.
“Abortion-seeking woman”: The term we used for someone walking into the clinic. Was she walking in for an abortion? Probably, given that one in four women will have an abortion by age 45, or given that this was, in fact, a clinic that offered abortions.1
I don’t actually know when my perspective changed; I don’t know when I left. Over time, I just knew that the things those around me were saying and doing was not something I wanted to be saying and doing. It started when I thought about how I was the reason women had to volunteer just so they could escort other women into the clinic. And I was the reason there needed to be police cars, threatening the lives of the women of color walking in, outside of the clinic. I was the reason a woman needed counseling and an ultrasound before even receiving a medical abortion. I was the reason that there are people whose life’s mission is to overturn Roe v Wade, even if they do not know what the Supreme Court case actually states.
I was the perfect candidate for a pregnancy “scare”: Sexually ignorant and inexperienced, I was told that birth control was not an option, told that the men around me owned my body, could tell me what to do with it or take advantage of it. It could have easily been me; It could have been my life; it could have been my body and womb being argued over without my consent. I saw countless women being ignored, chastised, and judged after they had the children we fought so hard for them to keep. Being pro-life was not even a choice for me growing up, but I felt as if I had to repent for my wrongdoings by jumping over to the other side. I’m so glad that I did.
In her ethnographic study of the pro-life versus pro-choice movements, Faye Ginsburg describes the divide between pro-life and pro-choice as a contested social domain, where both sides argue for a preservation of nurturance and against the sexist elements of the “system” in different ways.2 But people do not often realize the complexity of the pro-life movement; it has always been both violent and non-violent, institutional and grassroots at the same time.3 This means that abortion access cannot only be defined through laws that get created from the top-down. Like many movements for “change” the pro-life movement works from the ground up, with both women holding rosaries and silently sobbing to doctors being killed in their homes for performing abortions.
I am a clinic escort in the South, working with independent clinics that provide abortion care. I am on the “other side.” I am standing with people who are constantly having to negotiate the violent words of protesters and graphic signs. I am walking with mostly Black women who need life-changing procedures. I am, mask on and hand out, reaching for the door to usher them in with a small creasing of my mask and raised cheekbones standing in for a smile. Why do I have to stand outside? I see myself in the face of every woman who stands outside of the clinic with a sign and a Bible. But I also see the judgment on the faces of those who hear me talk about how I believe that it doesn’t matter when life begins; women should be able to have abortions no matter who they are or however and whenever they want.
"Abortion is a concept, filled with meaning through the actions of those who defend and detest it. It is also a legitimate and important medical procedure. Power is an unstable field of relations; there is no power from above controlling us like most of those in the pro-life movement might believe."
But often, on the other side, we defend Planned Parenthood by arguing that “they don’t actually do that many abortions!” We feel the need to say that “science is real” when talking about the progression of Western notions of “life” –the same science that has sterilized and destroyed entire populations simply to prove a fetus is not a living person? Why do we moralize abortion as a necessary evil that can only be legitimated through the scientific gaze? Foucault describes power as coming from a variety of places; not top-down, but all around us and in constant flux.4 Why do we both only rely on and condemn institutions for safe, fair, and choice-based access to abortion and reproductive healthcare when we as individuals- in progressive movements -reproduce the very discursive formations that vilify abortion in the first place?
Abortion cannot be defined by laws; we cannot allow that to be the crux of our struggle over reproductive health and justice. Abortion access is determined by laws created by the discourse of the anti-choice movement. But we must go beyond this view of “law-versus-abortion-access” when we think about reproductive rights. We must stop talking about abortion as if it is a “necessary evil.” And, like Linda, we are trying to make mental leaps, rationalities, and moral arguments about something that should not be this complicated.
Abortion is a concept, filled with meaning through the actions of those who defend and detest it. It is also a legitimate and important medical procedure. Power is an unstable field of relations; there is no power from above controlling us like most of those in the pro-life movement might believe.5 We have, instead, created a world where we are able to control each other through the naming of technology, morality, spirituality, and “life” as inherent rights and goods.
As someone who once was a part of the pro-life movement, I urge those who have always believed in “choice” to think differently about this seemingly vague concept of abortion. The pro-life movement is not about the fetus, about moralizing what individual women can do, or attempting to create a Handmaid’s Tale dystopia. Rather, it is about biopolitics: the power over bodies, populations, and the realities we create through discourse. Neither side should be framing abortion as a thing, a practice, or a principle to be debated in the first place: it is a shame that we have to do so.
Works Cited
1 Guttmacher Institute. “Induced Abortion in the United States.” September 2019. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-united-states
2 Faye D. Ginsburg, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community, Updated ed., with a new introd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
3 Karissa Haugeberg, Women against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century, Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2017).
4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vintage Books ed (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
5 Foucault, The History of Sexuality.