The new choice
Some Bay Area feminists are asking if there isn't a more honest and effective way to fight for abortion rights.

By Tali Woodward

FEARING A RETURN to the era when women died bleeding in back alleys from illegal abortions, the pro-choice movement has deviated little over the past 30 years from its narrow message about the right to choose: it's about privacy and the ability to control one's own body. Indeed this was the constitutional interpretation offered in the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which established the national right to abortion.

But while bumper-sticker slogans about keeping laws off a woman's body are as common now as they were decades back, the pro-choice message is not resonating anymore. National polls show that the number of people who identify themselves as pro-choice has been declining since the 1980s. Some people say they are both "pro-choice" and "pro-life," an indication, if there ever was one, that the meaning of these terms has been lost.

The political defeats are piling up, too. On Oct. 22, Congress passed a bill outlawing what choice opponents describe as "partial-birth abortion." Anti-choicers have characterized this treatment as barbaric and outside the realm of normal medicine, but any abortion provider will tell you this law criminalizes many second-trimester abortions. Still, the outcry over the ban – which includes no exemption for protecting the health or life of the woman and was approved by a number of Democratic legislators – was limited.

If the pro-choice movement is to become popular again, some activists say its basic ideology needs to be reassessed.

Given the continual threats to the legality of abortion, it's clear why the movement has concentrated on sounding a simple theme. But perhaps the privacy argument, which fails to address the moral rationale for choice, isn't the best way to reach the generation that has come of age since Roe v. Wade. This group takes for granted that abortion is legal, and it is not haunted by the memories of friends who died from botched, illegal abortions. The movement's focus on civil liberties doesn't reflect the experiences of the post-Roe generation, which is accustomed to legal abortion but is all too familiar with other challenges to reproductive freedom. Low-income women, who have always faced more barriers to safe abortion, are similarly out of sync with this message.

And maybe the "My Body, My Choice" message is simply too pat for something that is tied to other complex issues in people's lives, such as their finances, their sexuality, their relationships, their communities, and their moral or religious beliefs.

In response to these issues, a loose network of young activists in the Bay Area is pushing for a broader definition of "choice." They call their mission "reproductive rights."

For too long, these activists say, mainstream pro-choice organizations have focused almost solely on chants and slogans about the legality of abortion, while warning women not to get bogged down by other issues like race, class, and queer adoption. Reproductive rights organizers want to build a movement that protects abortion rights but also delves into issues of general reproductive health and the politics of child rearing. These activists want to refocus the debate around parenthood, making it about the right to become a parent when and how and why one wants to. And they refuse to shy away from other, seemingly separate but inextricably linked issues like welfare reform and immigrant rights. They are focused on coalition building and on reaching beyond the middle-class white women who have always constituted the core of both the abortion rights movement and the larger women's movement from which it grew. The new reproductive rights movement, they insist, must include women of color, poor women, lesbians, and even men.

And in possibly the most risky challenge to the status quo, these activists are also encouraging women to voice their complex emotions about abortion, reasoning that if you force people to sanitize their feelings and experiences, there's a good chance you'll also clean them of passion and energy.

Internal debate is not new to the abortion rights movement. And many may ask if it's wise to reexamine pro-choice ideology at this time of unprecedented national threat, but these activists think placing abortion in its larger context may be the only way to reestablish the urgency needed to protect women's right to choose.

Broadening the definition

Several months ago I sat down with Khadine Bennett, then an organizer with the California Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (CARAL), to talk about the challenges facing the abortion rights movement. "Even though Roe v. Wade is in effect, lots of people don't have access to choice – and that doesn't mean just the choice whether or not to have an abortion, but to have children and to raise them in a really healthy way, [which is] always an issue within communities of color," Bennett said.

Access to doctors, transgender rights, the financial realities of raising kids, gender parity, domestic violence – Bennett sees all these as reproductive rights issues. She also makes a point of including men in her analysis, saying that control over your reproductive system is "a basic human right – and it's important for all women to believe that, but also for all men to believe that." She wants to include people who believe in abortion rights even if they might not personally have an abortion, and also those who decided to have children at a young age. If being "pro-choice" is defined too narrowly, Bennett said, "then we become as bad as the anti-choice people. I think the movement is stronger because it's inclusive of that spectrum of feeling."

"Often the right [wing] is so strong that we get distracted," she said. "It's easy to say, 'When things get better ...' But this political climate is no excuse at all. That should mean we do our work harder and better."

The pro-choice movement has long been criticized for sidestepping tough issues like race and class. For instance, it has been hesitant to get tangled up in the controversies of government funding for abortion. When Congress cut off federal money with the Hyde Amendment in 1976, "there was just no outcry from the movement, and that was a watershed moment," said Marlene Gerber Fried, director of the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program at Hampshire College and president of the National Network of Abortion Funds. "Poor women were like, 'Where are you?' "

Although Bennett acknowledged that some of the bigger pro-choice groups can seem removed because they are national and "superglossy," she insisted a few months back that "there's a way to be supportive of the work – whether it's CARAL or NARAL or Planned Parenthood – and push them to change."

But despite Bennett's deep commitment to the reproductive rights movement, she's been repeatedly disappointed by how the movement is run. By mid August, Bennett left CARAL. She said it had slowly become more apparent that the organization was focused on fundraising and policy and did not share her dedication to grassroots work, particularly with women of color. Then, when CARAL decided to become a chapter of NARAL called NARAL Pro-Choice California, Bennett met national organization president Kate Michelman and asked her to prioritize organizing women of color. According to Bennett, Michelman said she couldn't do that, prompting Bennett to give notice the following day. NARAL spokesperson David Sheldon told me Bennett had asked Michelman to sign off on a particular program and that "Kate wasn't willing to make that commitment during a time of transition."

"I will always be committed to this movement," Bennett said recently. "But I'm also committed to challenging the way the movement looks right now."

Is the personal still political?

Aspen Baker had just graduated from UC Berkeley when she found herself confronting an unplanned pregnancy. She was torn about what to do. "At the time I was working as a bartender, and I had a bunch of friends, but I didn't feel I could talk about it," she told me. Baker's relationship with her boyfriend disintegrated. When she tried to talk things over with her father, he "flipped out."

"All of a sudden this was changing all my relationships," she said. "I went back and forth [with the decision]. My parents were 22, 23 when they had me. They didn't have much money. I knew that it could be done. And I felt really stupid for getting pregnant – it was the most out-of-control I ever felt."

Baker eventually decided she wasn't ready to have a child. After her abortion, she had a few days of relief, but weeks later her "head was still spinning." She looked in the yellow pages for counseling but only found groups that appeared, to her skeptical eye, to have an anti-choice agenda. The Bay Area may be something of a liberal oasis, but the anti-choice network here is surprisingly well developed. Protesters descend on most clinics each week, and San Francisco alone has three active "crisis pregnancy centers," which advertise counseling services to pregnant women, then attempt to convince them it's wrong to seek an abortion. "They talk about 'choice options,' but in their world, abortion isn't one of them," Baker explained. (There's another set of services geared to women who've already had an abortion – the anti-choicers figure that's the ideal time to make sure they don't ever repeat the "mistake.")

To deal with her emotions, Baker sought out a therapist, but she was aware many women don't have the economic resources to do that, and it bothered her. She tried to channel her energy into existing pro-choice groups but found that few people had any patience for what they seemed to regard, dismissively, as her personal issues.

Mainstream pro-choice organizations have long told women to keep their difficult feelings about abortion to themselves, warning that any hint of conflict or pain will be exploited by the anti-choice side. Baker maintains this does women a disservice. "People on the pro-choice side have shied away from talking about that because they don't want to play into the pro-life mythology. They often say if a woman feels [anything negative] after an abortion, it's just because of her boyfriend or religion." The problem, according to Baker, is that often "no one is listening to what she thinks, how she feels, how she defines the experience."

By June 2000, Baker had the idea for Exhale, a postabortion counseling agency that's not associated with either side in the abortion war. It started with five women gathered around a kitchen table, but now Exhale has 25 trained counselors and a call line open every weekday from 5 to 10 p.m. Exhale's counseling system is designed to allow women to do their own defining: what constitutes a baby, what amounts to feeling guilty, and what it means to be ready for parenthood. "It's not always that the abortion has created such a crisis," Baker told me, "but you don't get to talk about it in the same way [as you do other experiences]. The social stigma makes it harder. Exhale wants to offer a place where women can tell their stories and express their emotional needs without fear of judgment or criticism or manipulation."

If the movement tells people what and how to feel, it invalidates individual experience and can spawn a base distrust. Baker hopes that by dealing with women's complex feelings, rather than ignoring them, the movement will grow stronger.

Former CARAL organizer Bennett believes not being able to talk freely about abortion is a cultural barrier that needs to be attacked in much the same way as more concrete barriers like economic access. "There's still a stigma that you were irresponsible or careless," she told me. Abortion is directly tied to sexuality, and even in the relatively open Bay Area, "unless it's the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, people don't talk about abortion."

So while few deny that having an abortion is psychologically trying, even for a woman who is confident about her decision, the difficulty is often only acknowledged in private.

While I was working on this story, a good friend of mine learned she was pregnant. She told me she was considering having the baby, though her relationship was new and her work unsteady. I tried not to voice an opinion, and later she confessed that one reason she felt so horribly conflicted was that every person she talked to seemed to be forcing one on her.

Ultimately, on her own, this friend decided to have an abortion. The day after the surgery she wrote me an e-mail: "It is just hitting me now I think, the severity of it all. The enormity of what it means to have this much choice. Think what you will about the politics of the issue. Believe that you know what you would do. Convince yourself it is in your best interest. Revel in the bliss of the freedom you have to decide your fate.... It is far more debilitating than I imagined. I was sure my relief would supersede the guilt and pain. I was wrong."

My friend is pro-choice. Should I censor her words because they don't conform to what the movement deems appropriate?

Jennifer Parker is the executive director of Access, an Oakland-based organization that helps individual women overcome barriers, financial and otherwise, to safe abortion. Parker agrees there's not enough room for women's complicated feelings about abortion. But she believes anti-choice tactics are primarily to blame. Abortion opponents have somehow managed to co-opt the language of women's empowerment, Parker told me. They've taken a page from the women's lib movement – about the necessity of self-expression and consciousness-raising – and manipulated it. In fact, one group is even collecting stories of women's negative responses to abortion in hopes of overturning Roe on the basis of "evidence" of abortion's supposedly irreversible psychological damage.

In fact, one-third of all U.S. women have an abortion during their lifetime, and it's second only to circumcision as the most common surgery. But Parker says many women who call Access feel so isolated that "it's like they're the only one."

"We're seeing this trend where people are talking about abortion, and it's OK – but only if they regret it," she said. This reaction, she thinks, is the product of an intentional strategy: the right "realized that they couldn't make it illegal, so they've tried to make women feel bad." The result, insists Parker, is an absence of women saying publicly, "I had an abortion, and it was the right thing to do." Right now, she pointed out, there's a "notion that if you have some bad feelings [about having an abortion], you're anti-choice."

Parker believes talking honestly about abortion in public would draw more people into the movement. "Nobody wants to be that person who has to confront the unplanned pregnancy," she said. But the confusion and anger and yes, even regret, that a woman experiences is almost always about the fact that she is unintentionally pregnant, not the fact that she has the option to choose abortion.

Toward a new philosophy

When Australian bioethicist Leslie Cannold studied women's opinions and feelings about abortion, she found they were oriented around motherhood, a topic that is rarely mentioned in the charged political debate over abortion.

"The abortion issue is not separate from the complex web of women's experiences, understandings, and feelings about mothering children," Cannold writes in her book The Abortion Myth. In her research Cannold asked women to imagine there was a contraption that would allow them to have any unintended pregnancy "extracted" so it could mature into a child outside the body. She found this idea did not ease the anxiety of women who weren't ready to become mothers. The salient issue for these women was not that of carrying the baby to term but instead the more complex decision of whether to become a mother.

This is a point activists will acknowledge, but there's a general hesitancy to publicly discuss the morality of abortion. However, Dr. Eleanor Drey, medical director of the Women's Options Center, the abortion clinic at San Francisco General Hospital, addressed it directly. "I think you worry if you bring up the morality, that the people in the pro-choice movement might lose," she explained. But Drey believes the moral rationale for abortion rights is solid – though also subtle and hard to summarize. "It's easy and dramatic for abortion opponents to label abortion as murder," she said to me. "It's harder to say, here are the problems with forcing someone into being a parent or [seeking an unsafe procedure]. You're talking about balancing potential life versus actual life."

Abortion providers are forced to grapple with the emotional and moral realities of abortion in a way the rest of us are not. I asked Jody Steinhauer, a UCSF doctor who founded Medical Students for Choice, a group that works to make abortion a regular part of medical training, about the emotional toll of performing abortions. "Yeah, it's hard, but so is taking care of a dying woman with ovarian cancer, and we do that," she said pointedly. She also noted that the work is satisfying: "It's a three-minute procedure, and you've solved a big problem for the patient."

Cannold calls for "a new feminist perspective on abortion that includes a thorough feminist discussion of the moral aspects," including the worth of a fetus as a potential child, the value of a woman's ability to control her own life, and the pitfalls of criminalizing a medical procedure some women will always seek out, even if it's illegal. If the abortion debate can be reframed as one about the choice to parent, Cannold argues, it will be clear whose choice it is to make. "To say that women should decide whether or not they will become mothers is not to say that they aren't responsible for making this decision thoughtfully, carefully, and ethically," she writes. "Rather it is to ask who is in a better position to make decisions about motherhood and abortion than the pregnant woman herself."

To be sure, many people who have thought long and hard about the political uproar over abortion have come to believe it comes down to women's agency over their lives. "I think the morality stuff is very important, and we sort of gave that to the other side," said Professor Fried, who has been active in the pro-choice movement for 27 years. "We've allowed the moral issue to just be about the fetus. Some of [the challenge] is to resurrect the morality of a woman's life."

From her vantage point, the abortion rights movement has often seemed directed by short-term concerns. But longer-range, broader thinking may be winning out at last. "I see that among younger women a lot now. It's sort of back to the late-'60s inclusiveness," Fried said. She paused, then went on with increased urgency. "We are not winning; we are losing. More people need to go out for abortion rights. Why will they do that? If they see their issues included."

Back to the root

Grassroots activism on reproductive issues is already built around parenting.

Eveline Shen runs Asians and Pacific Islanders for Reproductive Health, an Oakland-based organization founded after the Supreme Court's 1989 decision giving states considerably more power to restrict abortion. APIRH is dedicated to a "much more holistic and comprehensive," grassroots approach, according to Shen, than the mainstream abortion rights groups. Take the organization's definition of reproductive freedom: "When a woman has the economic, political, and social power and resources to make healthy decisions for herself and her family in all aspects of her life." Shen says this includes the freedom "to go to school and be free from sexual harassment. To be free of domestic abuse and have access to health insurance regardless of citizenship status, to receive economic assistance from the government without it impinging on her social behavior and family formation." The group also supports gay adoption.

APIRH's work is locally focused. Its girls' group researched and wrote a thorough "Reproductive Freedom Tour of Oakland" in 2001 and joined in the fight to get a medical-waste incinerator, which had been linked to infertility, out of East Oakland. APIRH is working with the Asian Women's Shelter to explore connections between domestic violence and reproductive rights – for instance, how does abuse affect pregnancy? Does financial dependence on men mean women are less likely to visit the doctor?

Shen, who is a graduate of UC Berkeley's School of Public Health, is hell-bent on getting activists and others to recognize the interconnectedness of these social issues. "We want to get mainstream reproductive rights groups to think about race and class, but we also want social justice groups to think about gender," she told me. She also emphasized that this is a good way to diversify the movement. "People think of the reproductive rights movement as white – it hasn't done a very good job of bringing poor women and women of color into the movement. African American and Latina women have been the targets of forced sterility, of very repressive tactics. So people are wary of entering into that arena." If the movement stretched beyond abortion, you'd be less likely to get the response that it's just "a white woman's issue," she said.

Shen later told a laden story: in 1998, APIRH conducted 12 focus groups with Asian and Pacific Islander women. "Many didn't know what 'pro-choice' meant. They didn't even know the political term was related to abortion. For whatever reason, the pro-choice movement did not connect to their lives," she recounted. Shen sees true grassroots work as the way to change this – asking people to define their own issues rather than coming in with an agenda all drawn up.

It's a strategy the pro-choice movement hasn't been very good about employing. Even as they did the initial planning for a major march on Washington, D.C., next April 25, the biggest pro-choice organizations – the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and Planned Parenthood – made little effort to involve or even appeal to smaller groups that make up much of their base. Only more recently have overtures been made to these organizations, several activists told me. "I don't think that's a valid criticism," NARAL executive vice president Mary Jane Gallagher said, noting that the effort costs in "excess of $3 million."

"Were we the initial impetus to organization of this march? Absolutely," Gallagher said. "But an effort was made to include diverse groups. We exist through our state and affiliate organizations. We are grassroots organizations."

But as Parker told me, "it doesn't work to recruit people for your movement. You really need to bring in the people first and then say, what are the issues to you?"

Parker also talks about "building from the ground with people who are very suspicious about the abortion rights movement" because they associate it with campaigns of forced birth control, or worse, forced sterilization. "For the big, national organizations, I think it means letting go of some of the language – like 'Keep Abortion Safe and Legal' – and developing new messages," Parker said.

"We've sort of lost the meaning of the word choice, which really was about choosing what you wanted to do, not necessarily choosing abortion. But I think that's how it's perceived" these days, she said.

The abortion rights plea, she pointed out, "started with middle-class women who felt pushed into having children." It understandably doesn't resonate with people for whom having children isn't a realistic choice – financially or otherwise. And the larger pro-choice groups have hesitated to get involved in other, relevant issues like inadequate welfare support for families, poor prenatal care, or even abortion funding.

Parker and company are much more global in their thinking than some of their predecessors. They regularly point out that maintaining the right to abortion is not the only reproductive rights struggle going on. After all, preventing queers or low-income people from raising children is an affront to reproductive freedom on par with outlawing abortion. Every happy family is not necessarily alike, and every family arrangement needs support – whether it is a single teenage mother and her four kids, a gay couple and their two adoptees, or a straight, childless couple. The point is to assist individuals in building the kind of family they want to be a part of, if they want a family at all.

"Obviously, the legal right to abortion serves as a foundation for having reproductive freedom," Parker said. "But it's not, by itself, sufficient."

E-mail Tali Woodward