Pledging to RESIST the War on Women in Seattle
April 25, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
April 11
Seattle, April 12, 2014. Photo: Special to Revolution
The Abortion Rights Emergency Speak-Out at Seattle's Revolution Books was powerful. The personal abortion and pregnancy stories of three women made the stakes of this emergency even more real, and video messages to the speak-out in New York City from writer Marge Piercy and the son of the first abortion provider murdered, David Gunn Jr, gave a sense of the national movement against this war on women being forged.
One woman talked of having several children already, being newly separated from her first husband, who was not treating her well, and becoming pregnant by another man...she knew that she did not want another child and decided to "give herself a miscarriage" by forcefully massaging her abdomen and prying at the opening of her cervix with the nozzle part of a douche. After hours and hours and several days of doing this, she started to bleed, and after a while she said she could see the embryo had come out. She had a fever and some infection, but she ended up being okay. She also told us that in the course of her and I talking about what she would share at the public program, and in talking about how terrifying and isolating it is to find out you're pregnant when you don't want to be, she remembered an experience that she had suppressed. She had gotten pregnant with her second husband, and she had already had another child with him...at this point she had five children, and she hadn't managed to pay off the medical bills from the previous pregnancy. She talked about being in poverty, and recalled that there was one year when she gave blood in order to get money for a Christmas tree. She decided to give herself another miscarriage, only this time she bled more heavily, and had to call out to her husband, who took her to the ER.
Another woman had gotten pregnant in 1963 when she was 17, and talked about the shame of it, and the religiosity of the era, and the repression. She could not bring herself to tell her mother, and it wasn't until she was seven months into the pregnancy that her mother confronted her, and told her that she had arranged to send her to a "home for unwed mothers." So she went, and she said the experience was like being in a women's prison, there were cliques, and there was gossip after her son was born because he was part Black. Though the girls and women were all there together in the same situation—a whole houseful of women—they never spoke directly to one another about it, they were isolated even from each other. And the doctors and staff did not make any effort to educate the women about what was happening to their bodies through the course of the pregnancy or even what they might expect during labor and delivery. She didn't know about how the water breaks during labor until it happened, and at a moment in the contractions when she could have pushed, and it would have been a relief to push, they brought down the anesthesia mask to have her go to sleep. Her baby was put up for adoption, as were all the babies from the "home for unwed mothers."
The last woman who shared her story spoke of how the shame and stigma heaped on abortion by the Christian fascists and accepted by many who consider themselves pro-choice, had affected her own thinking about abortion. She expressed that when she had her two abortions many years ago, she felt it was right and liberating. But as the years went by with the ideological assault on abortion, she really struggled with whether abortion was wrong and if her own abortions were something she should regret. Since the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride, her thinking has begun to change once again in terms of understanding that abortion is not murder and how critical this right is to women's liberation. It was a big deal for her to tell her story publicly, and she ended by thanking her partner and people in this movement for struggling with her.
We also read excerpts from interviews from Revolution newspaper with abortion providers Willie Parker, Susan Cahill, and Susan Robinson. We wanted people to understand more deeply from the providers' own words how they see abortion rights, and why they continue to provide abortions, even in the face of very real threats by the anti-abortion movement and in the face of the increasing legal difficulties and court battles to keep their clinics open.
People that were at the program got a real sense of what the effects are on women's lives, dreams, plans, and futures when abortion is illegal, inaccessible, and under ideological attack. Everyone who was there got even more clarity on why it is that our side has the moral high ground, and the necessity to confront the abortion rights emergency and fight for women to have this basic right. Then we talked about the plans for the next day…
April 12
It was a beautiful sunny day in Seattle on April 12 when about 20 people gathered for the emergency action to stop the war on women, and to fight for abortion on demand and without apology. We met across the street from Swedish Hospital, which used to be the go-to place for abortion, especially if it was a complicated pregnancy, but since it merged with the Catholic Providence Hospital in 2012, Swedish refers out all so-called "elective" abortions. There is a documented case of a woman denied an abortion from Swedish, on the grounds that the fetus still had a heartbeat, which is similar to the Catholic laws in Ireland that denied this right to Savita Halappanavar when she had a partial miscarriage, and the infection from this killed her. Across the country, there is a quiet takeover happening, a takeover of secular hospitals by religious organizations that have a Dark Ages morality about abortion, birth control, and Death with Dignity that they are seeking to impose on their patients. And this is one expression of the larger war on women, and the attacks on abortion rights.
Seattle, April 12, 2014. Photo: Special to Revolution
So we thought it very fitting to call for "abortion on demand" right outside their doors, and march from there to the Catholic Archdiocese at St. James Cathedral several blocks away. The archbishop in Seattle, Peter Sartain, has been spearheading attacks on gay marriage, and has been part of investigating the nunneries that are not conservative enough for the Catholic leadership. So we had a brief orientation in front of Swedish, laying out what's happening now with the attacks on abortion, and what will continue to happen if we don't act now to stop it, including the clinic closures in Texas, and the fact that already in the U.S. women are self-inducing abortions and miscarriages. As we were talking in front of the hospital, several Black women did a double-take as they walked by and asked us if we were for or against abortion. When we told them why we were there, they told us that they had all had one or two abortions, and were not ashamed and didn't regret having those abortions. Another woman ran up and said, "I am SO glad to meet you!" after hearing us describe the bold action we were about to take. As we marched down to St. James Cathedral, there were some honks from passing cars and thumbs up along the way.
Leading the way down to St. James we had a giant coat hanger with a banner that says "Criminalizing Abortion Murders Women" with the people that had come dressed in all white, and we were quite a sight with our visuals and chanting "Abortion On Demand and Without Apology" all the way down to the cathedral. When we turned the corner we could see five or six anti-abortion protesters that were obviously there waiting for us, with their enlarged posters of stillbirths and photoshopped lies that they use to distort what abortions look like. We stopped chanting and moved to stand on the steps of the cathedral, used the fake blood on the coat hangers, and we raised them up. Throughout the hour of silence, while we stood on the steps at St. James the antis stood there in front of us, and though they occasionally said something about children, one woman said something like "I saw on your website that you say Fetuses are not Babies. Is that true?" we kept up with the silence. I think that all of us felt a sense of having the moral high ground, and that this fight is about women's lives, not the lives of fetuses. With the photos of the women and doctors killed behind us, and the span of years of women killed, murdered really, by lack of access to safe legal abortion care, I think we all felt the conviction that women must have abortion on demand... with no apology. And that sense was reinforced, rather than diminished, by the presence of the anti-abortion group. People talked afterward of how proud they were to have taken part in the action. We then broke the silence, and broke our chains and people read out their parts of the pledge powerfully and with conviction. It was truly a beautiful day!
Some women who proudly identify as radical feminists and do work opposing prostitution and helping prostituted women exit the sex industry were part of the committed core of this action coming out to take a stand for abortion rights as part of opposing all forms of patriarchy. They expressed appreciation for both the organization and artistic sense of the action, as well as the opportunity to get out onto the streets where they feel they need to be more often. Another person expressed concern that there aren't more people in the streets about abortion, and that people don't have a sense of the emergency situation we're in. An attorney and legal observer from the National Lawyers Guild came and expressed how glad he was to be there because he saw taking away abortion rights from women as closely related to fascism. It should be said that there are not enough people in the streets fighting FOR abortion rights, and that's largely due to wrong strategies about how to fight this battle out, confusion about abortion and the stakes for women's lives and dreams, or people just straight up not knowing exactly how bad things are and how abortion rights are being literally closed down right now. April 12 was all about being out publicly to cut through the confusion about abortion, seizing the moral high ground for those who are fighting AGAINST the enslavement of women, and sounding the alarm to those who do not understand how urgent and increasingly terrifying the situation actually is. You got a sense of what it could do, how things could be unleashed, if hundreds were to come into the streets and if there were many more people also sounding the alarm and beginning to join a movement that pledges: "We pledge resistance—to defy fear, to shatter silence, and to break down the isolation. We refuse to wait for politicians or courts to make our will known. We pledge to raise our voices and fill the streets, to make art and wage protest, to defend doctors and assist women, to change hearts and enlighten minds. We pledge to call forth thousands and soon millions to join us until we have STOPPED these attacks and DEFEATED this war. NO MORE women denied the right to dream, the right to live, the right to love, the right to decide for themselves. WE WILL RESIST."
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