Notice: Trying to get property 'ID' of non-object in /code/wp-content/themes/thenation-2023/functions.php on line 3332 The Dubious Feminism of the Natural Childbirth Movementhttps://www.thenation.com/article/culture/yarrow-birth-control-pregnancy/Moira DoneganDec 12, 2023
Culture / Books & the Arts / December 12, 2023

More Than a Natural Function

The politics of birth.

The Dubious Feminism of the Natural Childbirth Movement

Though it responds to a justified distrust of the medical establishment among women, it also subtly partakes of an insidious mythology.

Moira Donegan
(Corbis / Getty)

Pregnant women are everywhere, but in a way it’s hard to see them. The pregnant woman’s body is shrouded in a veil of symbolism, made an object of our anxieties and hopes in a way that’s distinct and intense even when compared with the various other ways we objectify woman. When people look at a pregnant person, they often don’t see a human being so much as a series of abstractions related to pregnancy: “maternity,” “nature,” and “creation” in all their gauzy allure. They see a vision, colored by ideology, of what has long been presumed to be women’s destiny. In some tellings, childbirth is the act by which the mother comes as close as a human can be to a god; in others, it’s the moment where she is revealed to be an animal after all. But most understandings of childbirth depict it as somehow fated, the fulfillment of an ancient and even sacred human function. Childbirth, we are given to understand, is the culmination of the mother’s humanity, the moment in which she fulfills her highest biological and social purpose. These are not necessarily bad beliefs—at least, they do not appear ill-intentioned. But they have the unfortunate effect of obscuring what might be the most important aspect of pregnancy and childbirth: that they are done by real human beings—women, mostly—with minds and needs of their own.

Books in review

Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood

Buy this book

Allison Yarrow’s new book, Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood, seeks to correct some of our misconceptions about the process of birth. Offering an account of labor and delivery practices in contemporary America, the book is also something of a manifesto for the natural childbirth movement.

Yarrow points to a crisis in American childbirth. C-sections are common; pregnant women fear pain or even death during delivery and so seek out medical intervention. Our biology has been misunderstood, Yarrow says, often for misogynistic reasons, and women’s bodies are often blamed for difficult pregnancies or birth complications. Sometimes, doctors impose their own judgments about what is best in childbirth, and for the scared and vulnerable woman in the maternity ward, this can be painful, violating, confusing, even degrading.

How has American childbirth gone so wrong? Yarrow asks. How have hospitals, doctors, and the obstetrics field more generally acted on a set of reductive assumptions and misogynistic myths about women, pregnancy, and childbirth in ways that make the act of bringing a child into the world more dangerous, painful, and frightening than it should be? Yarrow embarks on a mission to uncover the ways that the medical system fails the people she refers to as “birthers”: scaring them, curtailing their options, and, in Yarrow’s view, imposing unnecessary medical interventions. Yarrow is appalled by the terror and pain that many women feel during childbirth; she wants labor and delivery to be a peaceful, joyous experience, and she is determined to find out why it isn’t. In this project, Yarrow is often lucid, righteously angry, compassionate, and moving.

Current Issue

Cover of March 2024 Issue

But after Birth Control’s inquiry into the sexist failures of the medical system, Yarrow eventually moves on to a broader condemnation of the field of obstetrics itself and espouses a near-absolute faith in the ability of the female body to deliver safely on its own. Ultimately, she comes to oppose just about every medical intervention related to childbirth. Her vision precludes the use of epidurals, looks down on hormonal birth control, and decries everything from induced labor and C-sections (including in cases of breech) to the hospital setting and, ultimately, the involvement of doctors itself. Her solution instead is unmedicated home birth with the assistance of a midwife. Taking its cues from the nearly century-old natural childbirth movement, Yarrow’s book advances a vision that downplays the complications of pregnancy, waves away the high rates of maternal mortality in the pre-medicalization era, insists that the pain and fear felt by women in labor are psychosomatic or are caused by the very medical interventions meant to help them, and claims that childbirth is hardly ever complicated or dangerous enough to warrant the presence of a doctor.

These are the book’s empirical claims, but Birth Control also makes a set of moral ones. Not only is childbirth low-risk, Yarrow argues, but it is, for women, a natural fulfillment of their biological destiny—an opportunity to become their truest, most fully realized selves. “Childbirth is the most powerful moment of a woman’s life,” Yarrow writes, approvingly citing the British birth advocate Sheila Kitzinger. “A woman meets herself in childbirth.” It follows that such a spiritually significant event is too important to be mediated by things like birth control pills, medical expertise, and pain medication. Giving birth isn’t dangerous, Yarrow tells us, and you don’t need a doctor to help you do it. If you’re scared, it’s because you’ve been brainwashed; if it hurts, it’s because you’re rushing things and don’t trust your own body. Your body knows what to do—not your mind. In this way, Birth Control not only offers a critique of the troubling history of sexism in the medical profession; it also partakes of the subtler and more insidious mythology of biological destiny advanced by the natural childbirth movement—one in which the story of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood carries with it clear prescriptions about what women and their bodies should do and be.

The Nation Weekly

Fridays. A weekly digest of the best of our coverage.
By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You may unsubscribe or adjust your preferences at any time. You can read our Privacy Policy here.

Birth Control comes out swinging against the med-ical profession, and it advances the arguments of the natural childbirth movement in what is perhaps a uniquely inconvenient political moment. Although the medical risks of pregnancy can be a tangential concern for the vast swaths of the public who are not currently pregnant themselves, law and reality have now merged to make the very real dangers of pregnancy and birth newly visible. In 2023, one year after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the rapid proliferation of abortion bans with no practicable exception for the life or health of the mother has made the difficulty and danger of pregnancy and birth brutally clear. Maternal and infant mortality rates are rising. Women are being denied abortions even as their miscarriages give them sepsis; they are also being forced to develop preeclampsia, or gestational diabetes, and subjected to births that lead to life-altering injuries.

Though Yarrow points to an excess of medical intervention as the cause of the sorry state of American childbirth, these catastrophes have been caused by too little access to care—too little respect for women, too little freedom for doctors, and too little choice. Pregnancy and birth, it turns out, are very dangerous, made more so by the misogyny and inequality that cut off access to the effective treatments that save lives. In this context, the natural childbirth movement’s assertions that pregnancy and birth are safe, and that their medicalization is nothing more than the nefarious project of what Yarrow calls “a profession founded on fear of the generative power of the birthing body,” are a bit difficult to swallow. If birth were so safe, and medical care so unnecessary, then the removal of that care—its prohibition and constraint under misogynistic laws—would not have resulted in so much human pain and loss. Every day, another tragedy emerges in the news to prove this fact again.

This is not to say that the natural childbirth movement is entirely wrong in its critique of medical providers. Indeed, Yarrow takes her cues from a long feminist tradition of challenges to medical authority, one best exemplified by the collaborations of Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English. Their 1972 pamphlet Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, one of the most influential texts of feminism’s second wave, describes how delivering infants had traditionally been women’s work—that is, until the 19th century, when the practice of medicine became professionalized and the emerging male-dominated field of obstetrics took a dim view of its competition. Yarrow tells a similar story in Birth Control: Two parallel tracks of childbirth care developed with the stigmatization of midwifery in the 19th century—one of credentialed, professional doctors, mostly men, and the other of uncredentialed, nonprofessional midwives, mostly women. Sensing competition, doctors embarked on a years-long lobbying campaign to penalize, stigmatize, and ultimately outlaw much of midwifery. And it worked: By the 20th century, births were increasingly being conducted under the care of male doctors, not female midwives, and more and more of them took place in hospitals. But obstetricians did not learn from the experience and expertise of midwives; instead, they looked to standardize and innovate in childbirth care and set about reinventing the wheel. Women in labor tended to suffer because of it.

This history is real, and in terms of the human suffering involved, it is also chilling. Medicine, like every site of institutional authority, has a long and horrible history of enforcing gender hierarchy through violent means. So when the natural childbirth movement asserts that medicine has frequently been used as a legitimating pretext for women’s violent oppression, it has history on its side.

But the righteousness of the natural childbirth movement’s complaints about exploitation and callous disregard by doctors can obscure the sometimes dubious empirical claims it makes about medical outcomes, or the essentialist and unsupported assumptions about women that motivate its reasoning. For one thing, the obstetrics field has changed dramatically since medicine was professionalized, and many of those changes have made obstetric practice and maternal care kinder and more skilled. For example, Yarrow spends a good deal of time decrying the use of episiotomies—surgical cuts made to the perineum during birth to create a larger opening for the baby to pass through. These cuts were painful and often conducted without the woman’s consent; sometimes, they were used to hasten birth when a bit more time and patience would have allowed a successful delivery without the painful and invasive genital incisions. But for all the horror of the episiotomy, the reality is that the procedure is only rarely practiced now. Its use began to decline in the 1980s, as a growing body of data showed that the incisions did not yield the beneficial outcomes they were believed to have, and in 2005, a definitive study disproving the supposed benefits of episiotomies led to a dramatic drop. Hospitals and ob-gyn departments respond quite well to empirical evidence, even if they do not respond as well as one would like to women’s own testimony.

Demographic changes in the field also make the natural childbirth movement’s narrative of male doctors exploiting female bodies—or, as the subtitle of Yarrow’s book puts it, “The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood”—not quite as straightforward as its advocates insist. Throughout Birth Control, Yarrow uses the word “men” as a stand-in for “doctors,” a move meant to contrast the so-called masculine empiricism of medicine with the supposedly feminine realms of intuition, tradition, and superstition that are favored by the natural childbirth movement. It’s a rhetorical move that obfuscates reality in more ways than one. For starters, the obstetrics field is now dominated by women. Perhaps no field of medicine has been transformed so quickly and completely in its gender composition: In 1970, just 7 percent of gynecologists were women; in 2018, 59 percent were. The field is likely to become even more female in the future. According to a 2015 report by the Association of American Medical Colleges, about 85 percent of obstetrics residents are women, a trend that is due in no small part to patient demand: Women tend to prefer female obstetricians and increasingly have the power to request them.

The term “natural childbirth” itself is nearly a century old. It was likely coined by the British obstetrician and World War I veteran Grantly Dick-Read in his 1933 book of the same name. Dick-Read believed that childbirth was not an inherently painful process; instead, the pain was caused only by women’s fear—an anxiety that caused them to clench their muscles—which Yarrow calls the “fear-tension-pain theory.” Dick-Read set out to change British childbirth, encouraging women to abandon medical interventions in order to achieve a supposedly more authentic birth process. For him, this primarily meant forbidding pain medication for women in labor. This point—the rejection of pain relief—is still the natural childbirth movement’s main tenet, the factor that separates a “natural” birth from an “unnatural” one.

Yarrow quotes Dick-Read at length, and any account of the natural childbirth movement’s history would be incomplete without him. But she is ambivalent about him, making it clear that she can find him off-putting. Dick-Read’s book “can feel pejorative and coddling,” she writes. “[He thinks] women’s purpose is to give birth.” (An odd complaint, given that Yarrow’s book makes similar claims, but Birth Control is not a work of great consistency.) It likely doesn’t help that Dick-Read came to advocate natural childbirth for the purpose of eugenics: He believed that the “over-civilized” women of Britain’s upper classes—those he found most genetically desirable—were not breeding enough because they had developed a pathological fear of pain during labor. He compared these women unfavorably with the “primitive” women of other countries, who allegedly did not fear childbirth; he praised, too, the poor and ignorant women of the London slums, who he said gave birth without medical assistance, complaint, or even basic hygiene. “There was no soap or towel; Dick-Read brought his own,” Yarrow writes of a delivery he performed in one such slum. “There was ‘no fuss or noise,’” she adds, quoting the doctor himself.

But Dick-Read’s solution for the upper-class women he hoped would breed more was not to give them pain meds so they would stop suffering in labor and hence stop fearing it. Instead, his solution was to inform them that natural childbirth would not hurt and that the pain they had felt was only because they were doing it wrong. “Fear of birth pain produces the real thing,” Yarrow explains. If pain is psychosomatic—merely the product of a woman who doesn’t trust her body enough—then the answer is not to treat the pain, but to fix the woman. “The solution to the syndrome, Dick-Read proposes, is to ‘relieve tension and to overcome fear in order to eliminate pain,’” Yarrow writes. “In other words, the work of eliminating labor pain is in the mind.”

What is the natural childbirth movement’s approach to labor pain? Judging by the most prominent movement leaders cited in Yarrow’s book, the approach is simply to deny it. People like Dick-Read argued that labor pain was only the result of women’s “over-civilization.” Yarrow herself maintains that most labor pain is caused by Pitocin, a labor-inducing drug, rather than by the contractions of the uterus, the dilation of the cervix, or the descent of an infant through the vaginal canal. Others in the movement seek to sentimentalize labor pain by describing it in cloying, mystical, or schmaltzy terms. “The power of birth is like the strength of water cascading down the hillside, the power of seas and tides, and of mountains moving,” Yarrow quotes the British midwife Sheila Kitzinger as saying, which I guess is one way to put it. Yarrow also reports that “painful isn’t the word I use to describe my three natural childbirths.” Good for her.

In Birth Control, Yarrow justifies the natural childbirth movement’s opposition to pain relief for women in labor by alternately claiming that the use of pain medication leads to C-sections (although it does not) and that unmedicated labor pain is mostly psychosomatic, all in a woman’s head. In this sense, the movement resembles nothing so much as the medical misogynists it decries: gaslighting women by insisting that their pain is nothing more than the product of their own anxiety. Yarrow also denounces those religious traditions that have depicted labor pain as a punishment for the sins of Eve. But from the very start, the natural childbirth movement has also framed labor pain as a result of women’s inadequacy, their unwillingness to just get over it. Labor pain, the movement suggests, is something that happens only if you’re scared of what your body is meant to be doing naturally. If you’re not thinking of your labor in sufficiently optimistic terms, or if you don’t love your baby enough, or if you’re simply not enlightened enough, you feel pain. But if you’re good, kind, loving, and wise—someone who trusts nature and her body and is not too civilized to resist them—then you don’t.

A decade after Dick-Read’s death, the natural childbirth mantle was taken up by the woman who can be called the true founder of the modern American movement: Ina May Gaskin. Now 83, Gaskin is a midwife whose first book, Spiritual Midwifery, became a sensation when it was published in 1975. Other books followed: Yarrow calls Gaskin’s 2003 book, Guide to Childbirth, “perinatal required reading.”

Gaskin was the countercultural matriarch of a rural Tennessee commune called the Farm, which was founded in 1971 by a group of some 300 hippies who had left San Francisco in a caravan of school buses to seek a promised land. The Farm was the kind of spiritual community that leads outsiders into debates about whether it was technically a cult. The group was led by Stephen Gaskin, Ina May’s husband, who wanted to build a community based in part on the revelations that he’d experienced while high on LSD. The Farm was generally suspicious of law, science, medicine, and authorities other than Stephen. To join, members had to accept him as their leader and hand over all their money. They practiced plural marriage and collective breastfeeding; Stephen prohibited divorce, abortion, and birth control. The Farm produced a small commercial crop of soybeans—and a lot of babies.

Under these conditions, Ina May became a skilled midwife, even though she never studied nursing or had any formal medical training. Gaskin opened a birthing center on the Farm, where members and nonmembers alike could deliver their babies. What Yarrow does not disclose is that, in order to discourage abortion, the birthing center advertised that the Farm would, if asked, take in and raise the babies of women who gave birth there. Ina May used no painkillers during delivery; over time, she became famous for the “Gaskin maneuver,” a method of positioning a laboring woman on her hands and knees with one leg bent forward, like a runner’s stretch, which has become widely used to correct shoulder dystocia without resorting to C-sections. (Gaskin claimed that she learned the move from Indigenous Guatemalan women.)

Like Dick-Read, Gaskin decries pain relief as insufficiently “natural” and suggests that labor pain can be alleviated by a woman’s efforts to change her state of mind. Unlike Dick-Read, however, Gaskin did not tell women to just grit their teeth and bear it, but instead invited fathers into the birthing process, encouraging them to, among other things, French-kiss their partners during labor and to issue encouraging platitudes. “At one birth she attended, a husband repeatedly told his wife she was ‘marvelous,’” Yarrow writes of Gaskin’s midwifery practice. “The woman believed that the words opened her cervix and invited the baby out.”

It is lovely that the mother believed this. But should we? Yarrow seems to think so. The natural childbirth movement is perhaps aptly summarized by this little vignette, with the laboring woman virtuously forgoing painkillers and proving her worthiness, femininity, and proximity to nature by delivering a child without any help other than assurances from the man who impregnated her that she is “marvelous.” Yarrow and the rest of the movement routinely insist that they only want to fulfill women’s own desires regarding childbirth. But this is a polite fiction. The truth is that the natural childbirth movement is prescriptive and highly judgmental: It posits an ideal birth and then imagines the kind of woman who achieves it. Yet if a birth involves painkillers, or fear, or a need for medical intervention, or even an acknowledgment that it hurts, then that birth, and the woman who goes through it, are necessarily less than ideal—i.e., flawed. In that sense, the natural childbirth movement, which so nobly seeks to free women from the degradation and hurt that they endure at the hands of doctors, often begins to look less freeing than cruel.

It is curious that Yarrow, for all her praise of Gaskin, does not mention the midwife’s most distinctive contribution to the philosophy of natural childbirth: the theory popularized in a 2008 documentary, Orgasmic Birth: The Best-Kept Secret. Gaskin claims that if childbirth is done correctly, with sufficient stimulation from the father and an appropriately enlightened state of mind in the mother, women will climax as they deliver. Patriarchy’s various demands on women—to be caring, self-sacrificing, sexy—are thus distilled into one gruesome image. Compelled to be simultaneously earth mother and sexpot, the laboring woman is not relieved of sexual responsibility even when giving birth: She is expected to achieve an orgasm—or, at least, to perform one—even as the infant tears its way out of her. There’s a word for this, but it is not “liberation.”

The truth about childbirth—that it is dangerous; that it is complicated; that things can go very wrong without warning; that it really, really hurts—are things that the natural childbirth movement’s most ardent proponents must talk around and deny in order to have their worldview make sense. “There is no physiological function in the body which gives rise to pain in the normal course of health,” Dick-Read asserts, as if that settles the matter. Yarrow agrees: She frequently speaks of the “design” of women’s bodies—though without saying who designed it—and insists that this design cannot be flawed and should not be tampered with.

This brings us to the most troubling suggestion made by the natural childbirth movement: that giving birth is what women are for—their bodily destiny, their logical purpose, and in some sense their highest reason for being. It is here, in its rapturous faith in women’s reproductive role, that the movement begins to sound like the anti-choice zealots whose regressive and sexist ideas about pregnancy and childbirth now carry the force of law. As Yarrow asserts in a chapter called “Childbearing Hips,” women “[need] more stories that acknowledge the truth: we were born to birth.” Although Yarrow is pro-choice, how different is this contention from the one offered by the anti-choice extremist Laura Strietmann, who argued that pregnancy is not really dangerous even for little girls impregnated as the result of rape, because “a woman’s body is designed to carry life”?

Women are not “designed” objects; they are not mere vessels for the reproduction of humanity or animals marching toward their natural destiny. They are people—thinking, feeling, and intelligent human beings, even while they give birth. The natural childbirth movement is responding to a real concern: the justified distrust of the medical establishment by women and their reasonable discomfort with many of the ways that labor and delivery are—and historically have been—mismanaged and misunderstood. But practitioners like Dick-Read and Gaskin do not alleviate the suffering of women in labor. They simply deny it, burying it under layers of romanticizing naturalization, like so many paisley scarves.

None of this really helps the people it intends to help; it only adds yet another unreasonable expectation that women will fail to live up to. It is Yarrow’s great virtue that she feels immense loyalty to women in labor. She has been as vulnerable as they are—scared and uncertain, navigating disrespect from doctors and the morass of postpartum life; her empathy for them, her desire to protect them, is searingly evident on the page. She wants to save laboring mothers, to show them a better way. But the natural childbirth movement, with its embrace of regressive myths about women and its insistence on the nonreality of their pain, is not the better way Yarrow seeks. Women—mothers—deserve better than its patronizing sentimentalization of their physical pain. They deserve competent medical attention. They deserve sensitivity and respect. And they deserve the good drugs.



]]>
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/yarrow-birth-control-pregnancy/
The Feminist Moment We Didn’t Know We Neededhttps://www.thenation.com/article/society/barbie-feminism-camaraderie/Moira Donegan,Moira DoneganAug 3, 2023

Women are finding camaraderie in the unlikeliest of places at a time when the forces of sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are strong and emboldened.

]]>
August 3, 2023

The Feminist Moment We Didn’t Know We Needed

Women are finding camaraderie in the unlikeliest of places at a time when the forces of sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are strong and emboldened.

Moira Donegan
America Ferrera, Greta Gerwig, and Margot Robbie pose for a photo during a pink carpet event to promote Barbie in Seoul on July 2, 2023. (Jung Yeon-Je / AFP via Getty Images)

Asking “Is Barbie a feminist?” is a bit like asking “Why would a loving God allow so much suffering?” You’re not likely to get a satisfying answer, but the fact that you’re asking the question can reveal a lot about your situation. In 2023—a year after the Supreme Court overturned the national right to abortion in Dobbs, amid a virulent backlash against #MeToo, and as conservatives escalate their attacks on gay rights, gender-affirming health care, and birth control—Barbie might be the closest thing to a feminist icon that we have in mass culture right now.

Barbie, released in July, quickly became the biggest film of the year, earning $356 million worldwide at the box office in its opening weekend. The phenomenal success was due not only to the film’s aggressive marketing to women and girls but also to the script’s unambiguous, if tepid, feminist message: that girls can do anything—or, at least, that it would be nice if they could. The movie follows a Barbie doll, played by the impeccably chipper Margot Robbie, as she makes her way out of the feminist utopia of Barbie Land into the messier and more complicated real world, healing a mother-daughter relationship and becoming human herself along the way.

Quite boldly, the film presents the Barbie franchise as a synec­doche for feminism itself. The dolls, we are informed, believe that women in the real world can do anything, because Barbies, in their world, hold all the positions of influence, responsibility, and power. When the real world pales in comparison, it is because we, the humans, are not enough like the dolls.

To put it mildly, this is something of a rebrand. For decades, Barbie was an object of feminist scorn. An impossibly thin, disproportionately busty, and unblinkingly cheerful paragon of white femininity, she became a symbol of everything women were relentlessly instructed to be. And what they were supposed to be, if you were deducing from Barbie, were sexpot consumers: critically thin, rabidly materialistic, and not very bright. Barbie often seemed to be an advertisement for eating disorders, not only in her proportions but in the message pushed by her manufacturer, Mattel. Slumber Party Barbie, which came out in 1965, came with a scale stuck at 110 pounds and a weight-loss book that read, “Don’t eat!” Barbie trafficked in tropes of women as frivolous and stupid. Teen Talk Barbie, from 1992, included a voice box that said things like “Want to go shopping?” and “Math class is tough!” Studies conducted as recently as 2014 and 2021 found that playing with Barbie dolls damages young girls’ body image and limits their sense of the possibilities for their future. Barbie has been not only a symbol of misogyny but an agent of it: a product that measurably makes the world a worse place for girls.

This increasingly apparent dark side of Barbie began to hurt Mattel’s bottom line. Barbie sales plummeted by a third between 2011 and 2015, as millennial mothers, raised in the comparatively enlightened 1990s and 2000s, chose toys for their daughters that did not promulgate such a narrow vision of gender. When Mattel introduced new Barbie bodies in 2016, it had these women in mind. “The millennial mom is a small part of our consumer base,” then-Barbie brand head Evelyn Mazzocco explained to Time, “but we recognize she’s the future.” In a sense, this cold market calculation reveals some unambiguously good news for American feminism: Mattel is telling us, with capitalism’s cruel honesty, that it doesn’t think a rigidly sexist Barbie can make a profit anymore. People—women—want something different.

That’s where Greta Gerwig comes in. The director, known for her melancholic chronicles of girlhood, was tasked with solving Mattel’s marketing problem by reversing the politics of Barbie. The result has been a blowout success, the sort of dramatic turnaround in brand identity that will one day be taught in business schools. Barbie is a feminist now, and

Current Issue

Cover of March 2024 Issue

Barbie has proved a feminist moment.

Teen girls whose feminist mothers didn’t let them play with Barbies are now gathering in suburban movie theaters, wearing gleefully parodic pink ensembles and soaking in the film’s confused but earnest message of gender equality. Grown women, who resent the messages Barbie sent to them as girls, are in on the joke too, greeting one another with “Hi, Barbie!” on the bathroom line. More still are cheering from their seats as America Ferrera, one of the film’s stars, delivers a monologue recounting the impossible standards that women are held to—standards long embodied by the Barbie dolls themselves. (For Mattel, the movie may represent more of an evolution of gender politics than of race: At one point, Ferrera’s character compares the rapid spread of patriarchy in Barbie Land to the spread of smallpox among Indigenous Americans, a line that’s played for laughs.) It is a sign of Gerwig’s talent, if also of her cynicism, that she transformed Barbie—a ubiquitous item of American girlhood that has long marked the onset of misogyny—into an opportunity to commiserate over the frustration of living under it.

In another era, women might have found such commiseration elsewhere. In the early 1970s, major cities were home to dozens of women’s activist groups, where women who were moved by the feminist cause could find solidarity, as well as mutual aid and opportunities for activism. Many groups offered consciousness-raising sessions, organizing conversations that brought women into a new awareness of gendered hierarchy. These groups have disappeared, but their tactics persist: Barbie offers its own version of consciousness raising, as the dolls’ conversations with Ferrera help restore their self-respect. “By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy, you robbed it of its power!” one Barbie tells her.

Something similar seems to be happening among members of the audience at screenings of Barbie, and it is happening at other major events this summer as well: from Taylor Swift shows, for instance, where teenage girls trade friendship bracelets, to concerts in Tennessee, where artists like Orville Peck and Hayley Kiyoko have invited drag queens on stage in defiance of a state anti-drag law. In politics and in law, gender progress is rapidly disappearing in America, and the forces of sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are strong and emboldened. To the untrained eye, it may seem that feminism is on the back foot. But women are finding camaraderie anyway, often in unexpected places—even places like Barbie.



]]>
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/barbie-feminism-camaraderie/
What Are the Lessons of “Roe”?https://www.thenation.com/article/society/abortion-roe-mary-ziegler/Moira Donegan,Moira Donegan,Moira DoneganApr 4, 2023

If you squint at it long enough, the abortion debate can look like an opportunity for conservatives to act like liberals—at least rhetorically. In arguing against abortion rights, conservatives cast themselves as brave advocates for an inconvenient moral truth. By standing up for the “little guy”—that is, the fetus—they claim to take the side of the oppressed. Like the most annoying of liberals, anti-choice conservatives can also treat this “oppressed class” as an ornament for their own self-regard, insisting that in their opposition to abortion rights, they provide “a voice for the voiceless.”

This co-optation of the best and worst of liberal tendencies by the anti-choice movement is the subject of Mary Ziegler’s new book, Roe: The History of a National Obsession, which surveys the rhetoric and arguments used by both sides of the abortion debate, beginning in the late 1960s—before the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, and before the issue became polarized along partisan lines—right up to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the 2022 ruling that overturned Roe and eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion. Along the way, Ziegler’s book reveals how the anti-choice movement tried out and discarded a series of arguments in its search for a rationale that might appeal to judicial and general audiences alike. Her book can be understood as a history of the abortion as an argument, and how that argument has influenced American politics over the past half-century.

legal historian who teaches at the University of California, Davis, Ziegler has written six books on abortion and the law. Though she’s unambiguously pro-choice, her work often aims to take a nuanced, more heterodox position on the issue, seeking to correct misconceptions about abortion’s history and highlight areas of agreement on both sides. Her first book, After Roe, recounted abortion politics in the first decade following the decision, when pro- and anti-choice activists had more in common than today’s readers might imagine. Her previous book, Dollars for Life, was a chronicle of the anti-choice movement’s victories in fundraising and in capturing the judiciary.

Dollars for Life was published last June; Ziegler is nothing if not prolific. She’s also rigorous: Her books are stuffed with facts more than analysis, though they’re sprinkled with just enough details about the major players involved to remind the reader that they were living human beings. But the strength of Ziegler’s books lies in their abundance of historical detail, immersing the reader in information about larger social movements and politics. Like its predecessors, Roe: The History is a dates-and-names book, though it aspires (also like its predecessors) to illuminate a central question that the historical record alone cannot answer: Why did Roe v. Wade become such a political lightning rod?

In its search for an answer, Roe pays meticulous attention to both the pro- and anti-choice sides. But Ziegler tends to focus more on the anti-choice movement, and it’s not hard to understand why. As the ones trying to change the law—and the ones with the most fundraising power—anti-choice conservatives have evolved and adapted to events more quickly than abortion rights activists. Ziegler recounts the anti-choice movement’s history to her largely pro-choice audience with the tone of someone who has recently returned from a trip to a faraway land: Let me show you how they do things in this strange place.

And strange it is. Ziegler reminds us that the abortion debate in the pre-Roe era was not strictly divided along party lines. Both the Republicans and the Democrats included among their numbers people who supported abortion rights and people who opposed them, for a variety of reasons that might be counterintuitive to many readers today. Some people supported abortion for religious reasons; some for racist ones. Some people opposed abortion as an extension of their commitment to Black liberation. But something like the contours of our modern abortion divide began to emerge in the 1970s, when, banking on a popular opposition to the women’s liberation movement, a cadre of religious leaders and Republican strategists on the right—most notably Pat Buchanan—worked to radicalize evangelicals against abortion and turn it into a winning electoral issue. The strategy paid off: Opposition to abortion would become a central preoccupation of the Republican base, and the issue would help fuel the rise of the party and the religious right in the 1970s and ’80s.

But even as Republicans and religious conservatives were making their anti-choice positions the center of their politics, some opposition to abortion rights persisted on the left. As Ziegler tells us, in 1969 a small group of elite anti-abortion liberals founded Americans United for Life, which was intended to put a progressive, genteel, and charitable face on the anti-choice crusade. In contrast to those groups with a straightforward and avowed commitment to gender hierarchy and women’s subordination—such as the National Right to Life Committee and, later, the violent Operation Rescue—Americans United for Life used the liberal rhetoric of rights and equality to argue for abortion bans under the rationale of fetal protection, appealing to that old left desire to stick up for the little guy.

But the political battle lines around abortion would soon solidify, as the United States was plunged into a series of fiercely partisan battles over social issues during the Reagan era. People with liberal commitments found that they could no longer remain anti-choice; people with anti-choice commitments found that they could no longer remain liberal. Americans United for Life eventually fell into anti-feminist hands and became a rabidly right-wing group focused on ensuring Republican control of the judiciary. If the 1970s had opened with a still-lingering sense of uncertainty and discomfort among some liberals on the question of abortion, in the 1980s anti-choice conservatives began to draw the line: Even if liberals might have been sympathetic, this was now the right’s cause.

As the anti-choice movement veered more sharply to the right, it also became increasingly moralistic in its language and maximalist in its aims. In 1973, after the Roe decision, the National Right to Life Committee called for a constitutional amendment establishing fetal personhood. The proposition, which enjoyed support in Congress, would have criminalized abortion in all 50 states. But the pro-choice side, especially the large establishment-liberal groups like NARAL, were happy to fight on this territory. They depicted the proposed fetal-personhood amendment as not just extreme but anti-science, using Justice Harry A. Blackmun’s opinion in Roe—which had gone long on medical technicalities and emphasized the rights of doctors, not women—to argue that the amendment substituted religion for medicine and backward superstition for forward-looking sophistication. This argument worked in part because, in the 1960s and early ’70s, the pro-choice movement was populated less by activists than by doctors. In the early post-Roe years, the movement’s main advocacy groups, such as NARAL, were associations of medical providers—respectable, educated, reformist, and largely male. The anti-choice side was no match for this bastion of credentialed professionalism, and the fetal-personhood amendment went nowhere.

As a result of this early defeat, the anti-choice movement shifted to the strategy that it would continue to pursue into the 21st century: seeking not to ban abortion outright but instead to restrict it, making the procedure more and more expensive, humiliating, and onerous to get. The movement struck its first major blow in 1976 with the Hyde Amendment, a provision that banned the federal funding of abortion through Medicaid. The right to an abortion was thus immediately and drastically curtailed: Suddenly it was no longer an entitlement that every woman had, but rather an option that she could choose if she was able to pay for it.

Meanwhile, the pro-choice movement was reinventing itself. What had long been associated with medical professionals was now increasingly dominated by feminists. These new pro-choice advocates saw themselves not as medical experts but as equal-rights activists. The feminist commitment to abortion rights emerged out of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and ’70s, in particular its anti-rape campaigns, which identified forced sex and forced pregnancy as two sides of the same coin. “Tying Roe to liberty for women,” Ziegler writes of the feminists who made abortion their cause in the late 1970s and early ’80s, “would legitimize the idea that women had the right to say no (or yes) to parenthood and pregnancy as well as to sex.” As a result, the argument for choice was no longer just a matter of deference to medical practitioners’ expertise and discretion, as Blackmun had outlined in Roe. Increasingly, abortion rights were about women’s self-determination, their personal responsibility, and their individual freedom—those ideological buzzwords so often associated with the political right.

his role reversal, Ziegler observes, went both ways. The Roe decision marked the embrace by abortion rights activists of a rhetoric of independence and individual liberty that had long been advanced by the right. The ruling also upheld a vision of expansive federal power, including a judiciary that was able to undermine traditional social hierarchies such as gender with a stroke of its pen. Perhaps this is why the Roe decision inflamed so many on the right against the federal judiciary.

Conservatives had already begun to target the courts in the wake of the major civil rights rulings of the 1950s and ’60s. But after Roe, the judiciary took on a new importance in the conservative imagination, changing from an enemy to be hated into a tool worth capturing. Republican politicians spoke of the need to discipline the judiciary, to strip it of its jurisdiction over hot-button social issues; conservatives decried “judicial activism” and depicted federal judges as partisan hacks pursuing Democratic policy aims. This conservative resentment toward the judiciary lasted longer than one might think; well into the 2000s, it was the right that decried judicial capture and the left that championed the independence of the courts. But when the right set out to take control of the federal courts, Roe—and the determination to overturn it—was the main reason why.

In the first decades after Roe, anti-choice conservatives also went on the offensive in other ways that mimicked some of the left’s traditional habits. The abortion rights movement was vulnerable, after all, on race. Pro-choice proponents had never fully reckoned with the history of their cause—especially the fact that in its early years, birth control and abortion rights activism had at times attracted an unsavory smattering of eugenicists, “population control” enthusiasts, racists, and busybody social reformers with a prurient interest in the sex lives of the poor, immigrants, and the mentally ill. The right pointed to this history and argued that abortion rights were racist by their very nature; a popular 1988 evangelical book, Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood, claimed that the organization had been founded as part of a conspiratorial effort by racists to destroy the Black community.

Less quackish anti-choice arguments pointed to the higher rates of abortion among Black women and suggested that Black communities had been offered abortion rights in lieu of other, more substantial rights and social programs oriented toward achieving equality. The anti-choice conservatives who made these arguments were, of course, not interested in the realities of Black women’s social position; they saw no contradiction in calling for Black women to be free while denying them the freedom to control their bodies, or in saying that Black women deserved social welfare services that would be “better than abortion” while at the same time forming alliances with those who wished to gut the welfare state. But there were members of the Black community who were skeptical of the abortion rights activists, believing they held too narrow an understanding of Black women’s needs, and it created a tension in the movement that has still not been resolved.

The anti-choice movement also began to use medical science for its own purposes—and then to distort it. In the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court reaffirmed Roe but replaced the 1973 trimester framework with a more subjective and contingent standard, “viability”—that is, the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb. The court ruled that states could ban abortion outright after “viability” had been achieved. But “viability” proved to be a slippery standard—the science around it was and remains unsettled, including the measure of what is viable from one pregnancy to another. In response to this new ambiguity, the anti-choice movement set about searching for pretexts to claim that abortion harmed not only fetuses but also women themselves, and it looked for ways to attribute viability or other physical advancements to the fetus that it didn’t have. If the pro-choice side, with its physician-led advocacy groups, had claimed the mantle of science in the 1970s, the anti-choice movement tried to snatch it away two decades later. But even when the science didn’t conform to their worldview, anti-choice conservatives pressed on anyway. Soon, states would pass laws that required abortion providers to read a litany of medical lies to women before performing the procedure, including empirically untrue statements such as that abortion causes suicide or increases the risk of breast cancer.

eading Ziegler’s descriptions of these abuses of fact, it’s hard at times not to hear irritation slipping through her normally staid prose. But Ziegler is a historian, not a polemicist, and for the most part she treats her subjects with scrupulous neutrality. One knows where her sympathies lie, but she is careful not to intervene in the story. For a book about abortion, it’s an uncommon choice. But the result is that even some of the most passionate and polarizing people in Roe—for example, the millennial abortion “abolitionists” who congregate in a Chick-fil-A in Longview, Tex., to proclaim their willingness to break clinic protection laws—can come off with the blandness of saltines. Ziegler aspires to a rigorous facticity, yet her prose can be so dryly factual that it is hard at times for the reader to grasp the moral emergency presented by those facts.

Ziegler’s approach, however, also has its virtues. In the abortion debate, anti-choice activists—and more than a few judges—have cast feminist abortion rights supporters as hysterical. By contrast, Ziegler’s dispassionate recounting of the debate’s major arguments is instructive, because her calm and orderly tone gradually makes clear how much it is that passion, not logic and science, has been driving the anti-choice movement. Even when anti-choice conservatives invoke noble values—racial justice, religious freedom—they never make a credible case that abortion bans actually serve them.

In this way, Ziegler offers us a methodical and fair-minded chronicle. But what is most apparent from reading it is that the anti-choice movement won its long fight to overturn Roe not because its side was more persuasive but because it focused more on obtaining power. Anti-choice conservatives have marshaled a broad array of arguments against abortion’s legality, but whether they involve freedom or the judiciary, work or medical technology, race or religion, none of them have been successful in gaining broad popular support. When the anti-choice movement has won important victories, it has done so not because it made the best arguments but because it has captured the courts. For the most part, despite failing to bring the majority of people to its side, the anti-choice movement has been successful because of the federal judges who agreed with it. Dobbs and its gruesome, tragic aftermath seems poised to further the trend: The American public is now more pro-choice than it’s ever been, and the more that people see what it’s like to live without Roe, the more they miss it.

Yet will the popularity of abortion rights matter? Will the more successful arguments of the pro-choice side ultimately make a difference? While Ziegler’s book frames itself as the history of a national obsession, it is also a book about power and the brute fact that whoever wields it determines our public policies—policies that often bear little relation to public opinion. While liberals and the left have sought to win people over to their side, Ziegler documents that the abortion fight, from Roe to Dobbs, is actually a story about state capture. And maybe this is the real lesson of her book, the one those of us who believe in abortion rights would do well to heed: that there is no argument, no angle, no story of suffering or indignity that will bring the constitutional right to abortion back. The task, then, is not to argue, but to organize.



]]>
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/abortion-roe-mary-ziegler/
Why Is There More Republican Support for Gay Marriage Than for Abortion Rights?https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/republicans-gay-marriage-abortion/Moira Donegan,Moira Donegan,Moira Donegan,Moira DoneganAug 11, 2022

For a second, it looked like a pretty stark difference. When Democrats introduced a series of bills to the House this month, each designed to codify in statute a particular kind of sexual freedom, the vote counts were unnervingly partisan. The Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill that would codify a federal right to an abortion, received no Republican votes. HR 8373, an unnamed bill to protect legal access to contraception, received just eight Republican votes. But the Respect for Marriage Act, which would require states to recognize same-sex and interracial marriages, received a comparatively robust 47 Republican votes.

It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of same-sex marriage from the Republican Party. But still, the asymmetry between Republicans’ support for reproductive rights and their support for gay marriage is striking. Even as homophobia, and particularly, transphobia mounts on the right wing, marriage equality has maintained more support within the Republican Party. Why?

It’s not because of the polling. Though support for abortion rights is a notoriously difficult to measure, the best estimates suggest that something like two-thirds of Americans support legal abortion. Pew Research recently put the figure at 61 percent. That’s not far off the public support for gay marriage, which also enjoys the backing of a sizable majority of the public: about 70 percent, according to Pew. Is it that gay marriage is more popular with Republican voters? It is, but not by much: 44 percent of Republican voters say that support gay marriage, while 38 percent say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. If Republicans were following the will of the people more broadly, their positions would be radically different. If they were following only the will of their own voters, then more of them would support abortion rights.

It’s not a philosophical difference, either. After all, the two issues are not so ideologically different. Any honest account acknowledges that the movements for reproductive freedom and gay rights are inseparably linked—mutually interdependent, and proceeding from the same principles. In an ardent and loving recent obituary for the gay rights activist Urvashi Vaid, the writer Masha Gessen recounted a conversation that Vaid had with the AIDS activist Larry Kramer that summarized the connection. “That’s the issue of reproductive choice,” Vaid told Kramer. “It was never about men should march with women because they support women. It was more that men should march for reproductive freedom because we’re marching against the power of the state to tell you and me what to do sexually.… If the state can say you can’t have an abortion, the state can say you can’t have sodomy.” At their core, the demands made by each movement are much the same: that the sexed body must not constrain the possibilities for a person’s life.

But if abortion rights and gay marriage rights are intrinsically linked, why is one currently being attacked so much more viciously than the other? One answer is simple: It’s the misogyny, stupid. Men benefit from gay marriage; it affords them freedom and social power. But most of the freedom and power afforded by abortion rights goes to women. But sexism, though an essential part of the equation, seems like an incomplete answer. It’s also a matter of the content of the ask. Wanting an abortion is, in some ways, a fundamental rejection of an ancient order of power that says people’s destinies must be determined by their bodies. But wanting to get married is a comparatively nonthreatening ask: It’s about wanting access to an ancient and essentially conservative institution. One of these desires is something people on the right can relate to; another is something they hate and fear.

It’s not that no one has tried to show the human side of abortion. Over the past 10 years, the reproductive rights movement has disavowed the stigmatizing language of “safe, legal, and rare,” and has begun talking about abortion as an affirmatively pro-social good. Groups like WeTestify have adopted first-person abortion storytelling as a central messaging strategy, betting on both the expertise of abortion storytellers and on their public appeal. Sometimes, the abortion rights movement has even emphasized abortion’s role in preserving institutions like marriage and the family, leaning heavily on the true, but questionably relevant, reality that most people who have abortions are already mothers, or advancing the stories of women who say that their abortions made them better wives and better parents. But this strategy has been most successful in shaping how the abortion rights movement presents itself to patients and constituents, not in changing how abortion as an issue is understood by elites. “Everyone loves someone who’s had an abortion,” goes the slogan, but this destigmatizing effort seems to do little to sway Republican elites, who still consider abortion, and the women’s freedom that it creates, something unpleasant and sinful—something to be regretted and forgiven, not something to be thankful for.

Not so with gay marriage, which has always had a different cast. This idea was echoed by Kierra Johnson, executive director of the National LGBTQ Task Force. “The movement was able to say to the people in power, ‘The face of gay marriage looks just like you.’” Reproductive rights, on the other hand? “Those people just don’t see themselves in the experiences of women & others who seek abortions,” she told me.

That they could see themselves in the experiences of gay people isn’t an accident. The LGBT rights movement of the 2000s and 2010s was deliberate at selecting the most palatable messengers for their cause: People who had markers of class privilege, people who had stable, monogamous relationships, people who had lots of education and prominent positions. Not exclusively, but frequently, these people were male. Almost always, they were elites—elites, that is, like the politicians who decided their fates. The movement chose its faces carefully. For everything else she embodied, Edie Windsor, the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that eventually secured federal recognition of gay marriages, was also a creature that Republicans could relate to intimately: the heir to a large fortune, who was outraged at her tax bill.

At a Pride Month dinner thrown by the Justice Department in 2014—something of a victory lap for the LGBT legal movement after the prior year’s victory in Windsor v. United States—the lawyer Pamela Karlan, an out lesbian and, at the time the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Obama DOJ—told a story that illustrates this point. She was describing a moment at the Supreme Court in 2003, just after the oral arguments in Lawrence v. Texas. “I was standing in the well of the court with Walter Dellinger,” Karlan told the dinner guests. “Linda Greenhouse, who was then the New York Times’ Supreme Court reporter, came over. ‘What did you think was the most interesting part of the argument?’ Walter asked. Without missing a beat, Linda replied, ‘The bar section.’ What she meant was this. A huge proportion of the gay, lesbian and bisexual former clerks and of LGBT members of the Supreme Court bar had showed up. And when the Justices came out from behind the velvet curtain, you could actually see them reacting to our presence as their eyes swept across the courtroom.”

The justices were confronted with the reality that gay people were people like them, people they knew and liked—powerful people, rich people, lawyers. The result was that they ruled in those people’s favor, a ruling that happened to be on the side of justice. Maybe it is not flattering to the marriage equality movement to point out that much of its success is owed to moments like this, to the ability of gay elites to remind powerful politicians of themselves. But it is the truth. It is hard to imagine a similar scene unfolding at the Supreme Court for Dobbs v. Jackson, with all the Supreme Court lawyers and ex-clerks who had had abortions staring down the court. This is not because powerful elites don’t have abortions. It’s because they risk more than gay elites do in saying so.



]]>
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/republicans-gay-marriage-abortion/
The Pro-Choice Movement Has Won the Culture Warhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/abortion-feminist-stigma-claws/Moira Donegan,Moira Donegan,Moira Donegan,Moira Donegan,Moira DoneganDec 3, 2019

I own a tote bag that says “I had an abortion” in blue block letters. I also have a T-shirt that says “Everyone loves someone who had an abortion.” You can get a pro-abortion holographic fanny pack as part of a fundraiser for the National Network of Abortion Funds. In Shout Your Abortion’s online store, there’s a gold necklace that reads “Abortion” in the script font of a nameplate and sweatshirts that read “El aborto es normal” in gothic letters reminiscent of the New York Times logo. There are simple statements, like the T-shirts that implore “Ask me about my abortion” in plain sans serif white letters on a black field. Some items are snazzier, like the gold notebook and the pair of shiny purple earrings from the NNAF, both of which proclaim “Fund abortion, build power.”

These items are supposed to be bold, even provocative, attracting stares and prompting questions. This is the whole point: to interrupt the silence around abortion, to get people to talk about it more frankly. They’re supposed to make viewers a tad uncomfortable, taken aback—and are also supposed to make them wonder why they feel that way.

An estimated one in four women will have an abortion before the age of 45—along with a number of trans and nonbinary people, as activists are quick to point out—but the experience of abortion is wildly more common than the opportunity to safely speak about it. Perhaps no other hot-button cultural issue or area of political controversy and certainly no other health care procedure is spoken about with such a strange distance from the experiences of those who have gone through it. This is doubly strange because these people are all around us, in our homes and in our families, working beside us in the office and playing games on their phones in the subway.

The expertise of abortion patients is everywhere, but it’s largely unsolicited, largely concealed, and mostly absent from our public conversations about reproductive freedom, which are rarely conducted in the first person. Everyone knows women who have had an abortion, but many of us don’t know who in our lives—or who besides ourselves—is among them. If you ask the women in your life, probably only some of them will tell you the truth.

The recent wave of pro-choice merchandising is part of a growing effort to change this, an effort that has a long history. For years, feminists have embarked on public projects meant to change hearts and minds about abortions and the people who have them. Many of these have focused on the confessional, with women speaking about their abortions in an effort to humanize and contextualize the issue.

The most visible effort to move first-person abortion storytelling into the public eye began during feminism’s second wave era. In March of 1969, the New York City socialist feminist group Redstockings arranged for women to tell their abortion stories not in whispers or behind closed doors but in public, on the steps of Greenwich Village’s Washington Square United Methodist Church. Twelve women spoke about their experiences as abortion patients in front of about 300 people, four years before the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade.

That year, the attorney Emily Jane Goodman wrote a brief for a case before a New York federal court, Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz, that challenged abortion restrictions on the basis of not doctors’ rights but women’s. The case was built around the depositions of women who had had abortions, who testified about their experiences and asserted that access to abortion was crucial to their civil rights.

These group efforts flatly rejected stigma. They brought women’s accounts of abortion into the public square and into the legal system. Their abortions, they said, did not stand in contrast to their dignity and virtues; instead, abortion enabled them. In 2016, Goodman joined more than 100 other lawyers in signing an amicus brief that was filed with the Supreme Court. “To the world, I am an attorney who had an abortion,” the brief opened, “and to myself, I am an attorney because I had an abortion.”

n recent years, feminist efforts to combat abortion’s stigma have become more organized and sustained, moving from group demonstrations in the activist sphere to ongoing projects conducted in the mainstream. Pro-choice organizations like Planned Parenthood have branched out into the entertainment industry, offering consulting services to Hollywood studios and producers. Other activists, too, have become involved in TV and film productions in an attempt to ensure that pop culture depictions of abortion are more accurate and more compassionate toward patients. It’s a gradual process, changing minds about abortion, but these days it’s arguably faster and more reliable than trying to change policy through legislation or the courts. As hope fades for abortion rights activists in the legal sphere, the cultural realm has become an increasingly important battleground.

Just a few years ago, depictions of abortion on TV were on the whole less realistic and less progressive than they are now. According to Steph Herold, a data analyst at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a program at the University of California, San Francisco, these efforts are working. She cites episodes of House and Grey’s Anatomy with flat-out inaccuracies. “Many shows,” she writes in an e-mail, “depict abortion as a serious surgery that requires multiple clinicians that is always performed in a hospital, and that’s just not the case in reality.”

More recent television shows have been more accurate and more honest about the realities of abortion—and the ways that unnecessary restrictions hurt patients. Jane the Virgin ran an episode in 2016 that Herold considers particularly effective, in which Jane’s mother, Xiomara, has a medication abortion. “I love it because Xiomara’s daughter and partner support her. There’s no hand-wringing about her decision. There’s nothing emotionally fraught about it,” Herold says. A 2016 episode of BoJack Horseman “managed to make many hilarious abortion jokes at the expense of abortion restrictions while highlighting the importance of providing compassionate support to people through their abortions.” In addition to depicting the procedure itself, a 2018 episode of Claws managed to highlight inequities in abortion access. “I really appreciated that this show had characters talk about racism inherent in the foster care system, and how people struggle to come up with the cost of an abortion,” Herold points out. “You often don’t see those systemic issues related to abortion access addressed on TV.”

Positive cultural representations of abortion seek to transmit sympathy and compassion as well as accurate information, transferring these elements from TV shows and movies into the minds of viewers through a kind of political osmosis. But like the tote bags and T-shirts soliciting people to “ask me about my abortion,” they’re also intended to provoke real-world conversations, to encourage people to tap into the expertise of former abortion patients, or to speak about their experiences without secrecy or shame.

That’s the thing about stigma: It’s a self-perpetuating phenomenon. The more stigmatization compels patients to remain silent about their abortions, the more others feel isolated in their abortion experience, more threatened by the same stigma and more likely to hide. Silence begets silence. Feminist destigmatization efforts attempt to interrupt the cycle, to signal to people who have had abortions that they are not alone—and to people who haven’t that abortion is common, respectable, and decidedly not tragic.

Yet I wonder about these efforts and what they ask people to do. Efforts to destigmatize abortion that rely on women to disclose their experiences ask them to perform a public service; they’re deputized to overcome shame, ease the nerves of judgmental outsiders, combat disinformation. Women end up being tasked to fix the very conditions that victimized them.

And after all, there are still good reasons to keep your abortion (or abortions) under wraps. Anti-choice forces are passionate and galvanized, emboldened by the ascent of Donald Trump and the appointment of conservative judges to the federal courts, and they do not shy away from the idea of enacting their opinions through force. “People can threaten you and dox you, people can try to get you fired, people can come after your family members” if you speak publicly about your abortion in an activist context, says Renee Bracey Sherman, a reproductive justice advocate and the founder of the abortion storytelling group We Testify. “All of that has happened to me.”

But for combating so pervasive and persistent a stigma, the options are few. How else do you convey that your abortion does not make you immoral or stupid or frivolous, other than by asserting that it is part and parcel of your whole self, a self that displays its own virtues—your moral commitments, your responsibility, your intellect? How else, other than extending these gestures of solidarity to one another, do we provide what Bracey Sherman calls “love and support” to those who feel ashamed and alone? Abortion storytelling isn’t new, she reminds me; women have always told one another about their abortions. In fact, these kinds of conversations are a big part of how women learn about ways to end pregnancies. What’s new now is that they’re mainstream.



]]>
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/abortion-feminist-stigma-claws/