Jenny Brown - Without Apology - The Abortion Struggle Now

The Jacobin series features short interrogations of politics, economics, and culture from a socialist perspective, as an avenue to radical political practice. The books offer critical analysis and engagement with the history and ideas of the Left in an accessible format.

The series is a collaboration between Verso Books and Jacobin magazine, which is published quarterly in print and online at jacobinmag.com.

Other titles in this series available from Verso Books:

Capital City by Samuel Stein
Four Futures by Peter Frase
Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant
The Peoples Republic of Walmart
by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
Red State Revolt by Eric Blanc
Utopia or Bust by Benjamin Kunkel

First published by Verso 2019
Jenny Brown 2019

Author and publisher gratefully acknowledge artist Suzann Gage and authors
Rebecca Chalker and Carol Downer, A Womans Book of Choices: Abortion,
Menstrual Extraction, RU-486 (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1992).

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-584-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-586-5 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-585-8 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brown, Jenny, 1965 author.

Title: Without apology : the abortion struggle now / Jenny Brown.

Description: London ; Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2019. | Series: Jacobin series | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019016599| ISBN 9781788735841 | ISBN 9781788735858 (UK EBK) | ISBN 9781788735865 (US EBK)

Subjects: LCSH: AbortionUnited States. | Reproductive rightsUnited States. | FeminismUnited States.

Classification: LCC HQ767.5.U5 B785 2019 | DDC 362.1988/800973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019016599

Typeset in Monotype Fournier by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

The first shot in the feminist abortion wars was fired in 1969 in a New York City Health Department auditorium, where a panel of male psychologists, doctors, clergy, and lawyers (and one woman, a Sister Mary Patricia) debated exceptions to New Yorks law forbidding abortion. They were discussing whether a woman should be allowed to have an abortion if her health was in danger, or if she had been raped, or if she had already given birth to four children.

A shout came up from a woman in the audience: Now lets hear from the real experts on abortion! Then, Repeal the abortion law, instead of wasting more time talking about these stupid reforms! Then, Weve waited and waited while you have held one hearing after another. Meanwhile, the baby I didnt want is two years old! More women stood to object and testify. Why are fourteen men and only one woman on your list of speakersand she a nun?

The committee members stared over their microphones in amazement, wrote Edith Evans Asbury in the New York Times. The chair tried to shush the women, arguing that everyone was really on the same side: Youre only hurting your own case.

But they werent on the same side. One side wanted to reform the abortion law yet still maintain control of women by restricting who could access an abortion and determining under what circumstances they could do that and when. This side is codified in Supreme Court decisions starting with Roe v. Wade that base their arguments around privacy and not freedom, strengthened by laws restricting abortion, and reinforced every time someone makes an argument that abortion should be legal because what about rape, incest, and cancer? On the other side were women who wanted to repeal the abortion law completely, the women who wanted full reproductive liberty. This is an opposition that continues to this day.

This book argues that the other side, the argument from womens liberation, was a winning strategy, and could be again. It was massive feminist mobilizations, fueled by women publicly discussing what was once secret and stigmatized, that won us the abortion rights we have. The movement brought hundreds of thousands into the streets, won abortion on demand in New York State, and in just four years forced a reluctant Supreme Court to legalize most abortions across the country. How did they do it?

That day in 1969, the women distributed a flyer:

We say, the only real experts on abortion are women! Women who have known the pain, fear and socially-imposed guilt of an illegal abortion. Women who have seen their friends dead or in agony from a post-abortion infection. Women who have had children by the wrong man, at the wrong time, because no doctor would help them. Any woman can tell you: Abortion laws are sexist laws, made by men to punish women Support Constance Cooks bill, repeal all abortion laws. Womens Liberation Movement.

Kathie Sarachild, who led off the disruption, recalled:

We were counseled that to oppose abortion reformsto press for total repeal of abortion laws was asking too much, but we just knew that we didnt want to fight at all if it wasnt going for what we really wantthat abortion reform was just more insult and humiliation for women.

The disruption continued for thirty minutes. Finally the chair moved the hearing to another room and locked out the public. The women who started the disruption, an action group within New York Radical Women that would soon take the name Redstockings, decided to hold their own hearing, with women testifying about their illegal abortions and forced childbearing.

The 1969 Redstockings Abortion Speakout, the first ever, broke the silence around abortionthe secrecy born of illegality and the self-blame that resulted when women never even told each other about their abortions. Twelve young women faced an audience of more than 300 men and women and with simplicity and calm and occasional emotion and even humor told of incidents in their personal lives which they formerly had consigned to the very private, Susan Brownmiller reported in the Village Voice.

One woman testified:

When I had [the abortion] I thought I was the lowest of the low To find out that my mother, that my cousins, that people I was close to, had abortions, helped me more than most of the therapy that I had to go through Im sure there are women sitting out here right now who are feeling the same thing that Im feeling. So stand up, do something!

Irene Peslikis, one of the testifiers, recalled later, All of a sudden there were a whole bunch of women telling the truth about abortion. Finally! Finally! We were saying, yeah, we did it, we had it, and we want our rights. We want to have legal free abortion.

The speak-out was a public version of the consciousness-raising that womens liberation groups had already been doing for a year and a half. Using a method they adapted from the Southern Civil Rights Movements Tell It Like It Is sessions, women went around the room and told each other the truth about their lives, their pain, their secrets, and their hopes. They discovered that their personal problems were shared by many other women. Peggy Dobbins recalled later, If you spoke your personal experience, you discovered it was shared. If it was shared, it was social. And if it was social, it was political. And if it was political, you could do something about it. This realization led to the slogan The personal is political, a phrase meaning that things that seem to be personal struggles in fact have political roots and solutions. Perhaps nothing seemed more personal and secret than abortion. These women made abortion public and political.