Sherry Wolf: I’m really glad that we started on such a positive note from Camila about how activists in Argentina led a struggle from dictatorship to democracy and then a massive victory for reproductive justice. She brought together the experience in a real way, showing how mutual aid was politicized and political organizing was tied to aid.
For my remarks, I was asked to talk about some of the lessons of the eighties and nineties. I want to forefront three key points to hammer home about that period of the abortion wars. One, I think that there was never a heyday of a united reproductive justice movement.
It has always been a struggle riven with divisions and debates among left and moderate and right wings that have had to battle it out occasionally uniting in explosive actions, but more often dividing over issues of race and class and strategy.
Second, when the left has argued and organized for a strategy and tactics of agitation and direct action and confrontation with anti-choice bigots and people who attack our bodily autonomy, it created a bridge for new activists to join our side, we made gains and marginalized the right.
And lastly, our movement is in an abusive relationship with the Democratic Party, whose elected leaders, including many who identify as progressives have really been selling out the left, women, trans people, and gender nonconforming people for decades. And I believe like all abusive relationships, it must end.
I came of age in the early eighties, just as the left went into precipitous decline. I don’t think it was a causal connection, but they were synchronous. The huge upheavals and the movements of the late sixties and early seventies were in the rear view mirror. Almost the entirety of the US left had entered the Democrats via the Jesse Jackson Rainbow Coalition and his successive campaigns for president in 84 and again in 88. Jackson functioned in obviously similar ways to Bernie Sander in 2016 and 2020. Jackson, of course, did not build the profile of socialism, which Sanders did. But like Sanders, once Jackson lost in the primaries he threw his support for the Democrats’ nominees. In doing so he brought the thousands of enthusiastic left wing campaign activists behind first Walter Mondale and later Michael Dukakis—about whom nothing interesting has ever been said.
I give you that as a mise-en-scène because it frames what was happening during the 1989 to ‘92 period. That’s where you see the contrast between losing and winning strategies. Those years were a pivotal moment. In the late eighties and early nineties, there was a wave of far-right activism against reproductive services at precisely the same time as queer activists were taking to the streets to fight for access to HIV and AIDS research, drugs, and resources from a hostile federal government.
I was active in New York’s ACT UP in those years. Queers were very much under siege then as now. The rights of LGBTQ+ people and our rights to bodily autonomy were under attack at the same time as abortion came under assault. So, the Right in this country, then just as now, was responding to our militant assertion of control over our bodies and our health.
The anti-abortion movement was largely led by white men in groups like Operation Rescue. It was led by Randall Terry, a 20-something used car salesman, I kid you not, from upstate New York who built a dedicated and fanatical following of violent misogynists and racists. There’s no other way to describe Operation Rescue.
Between 1977 and 1989, 77 family planning clinics were firebombed, 117 were targets of arson, 250 received bomb threats, 31 were invaded by the bigots, and more than 200 were vandalized. As one of the popular chants of our clinic defense movement said, they “pray by day bomb by night, that’s the tactic of the right to life.” Not an exact rhyme, but the meter works.
The Right’s tiny minority really stood in stark contrast to the ideas about abortion and women held by the majority of people at the time. Then, like today, an unwavering majority supported Roe in every region of the country, among every age group, both political parties, and even inside of the Catholic church.
Nevertheless, abortion rights hung in the balance during George Bush Sr.’s administration. When the Supreme Court was considering Webster v. Reproductive Health Services in 1989, half a million people traveled to Washington DC and marched and demonstrated in support of abortion rights and reproductive service access. That really made a difference in the Court’s decision to preserve abortion rights. When Roe was widely perceived as about to be reversed, they stood back from the abyss.
So mass action not only galvanized public consciousness on a mass scale, but it also tipped the decision making of the Court in our favor. It was clear to the Court that they would have no legitimacy in the eyes of the American public if they ruled the way the Right wanted them to.
Even though the Right in the form of Operation Rescue ideologically lost in the Court, it was not going to give up. They actually went on the offensive and did so effectively in Wichita, Kansas in 1991. They laid siege to a city in which none of the prevailing organizations, not the National Organization for Women, not Planned Parenthood, not National Abortion Rights Action League, which is what it was known as at that, time before it became NARAL Pro-Choice America. When Operation Rescue declared their “Summer of Mercy,” most of the progressive organizations, the liberal organizations, the NGOs, and service providers like Planned Parenthood argued against any kind of mobilization and to rely on court injunctions instead.
There were no protests. As a result, the clinics were shut down for weeks in Wichita. The Far Right was emboldened and planned more such sieges of cities and clinics. That was a wake-up call for a lot of us on the left. We established networks to prepare a response. So, when they announced in January of 1992 that they were going to lay siege to Buffalo, we went into motion.
There were key groups like Women’s Health Action Mobilization (WHAM!) in New York City, which was basically an offshoot of ACT UP NY. I was a part of both of them, as were others. Both ACT UP and WHAM! mobilized alongside socialists and others that formed groups like Reproductive Rights National Network and Buffalo United for Choice. Through all these various networks, thousands of people converged on Buffalo to defend the clinics against the Right.
I will never forget the image of gay men in drag beating the right wing bigots with their purses and shoes. They were the drag guerrilla action group Church Ladies for Choice, whose motto was, “we are for free abortion on demand and practical shoes.” That was perhaps one of the lighter moments in what was in fact a pitched battle between the Left and Right.
There were fights that took place outside of the clinics. There were confrontations that hundreds of people took part in, and we won. It was recognized in all the newspapers. All the headlines about it told the truth; no clinics were closed, and no doctors were driven out of the abortion business. Mainstream Buffalo turned its back on operation rescue.
After our victory in Buffalo, people started to refer to Operation Rescue as Operation Fizzle. Really it was, it was a really a tremendous victory for our side. After that, we would go out into the streets and chant against the Right, “Pray, you’ll need it; your cause has been defeated.” It really felt like we had the wind in our sails and we were confident to take on the Right.
When the Democratic Party planned to hold their convention in New York City that summer to nominate Bill Clinton, the right wing said they were going to embarrass the Democrats and lay siege to New York City’s clinics. But now we had the wherewithal to mobilize against the wishes of the leadership of the Democratic Party and protest against the Right. I don’t have the time to get into a detailed account of the promises and the betrayals of the Democrats. I think a lot of the people here already know them—from false promises to sign a Freedom of Choice Act to codify abortion into US law by both Clinton and Obama to the decades of voting to deny federal funding to get access to abortion, and on and on. The fact is that expecting to advance reproductive justice through the Democrats has been proven a failed and bankrupt strategy time and again.
On the other hand, small groups of leftists, not just socialists, but others including anarchists, and radicals in groups like ACT UP and WHAM!, came together and were able to mobilize to change mass consciousness, keep the clinics open and shift the balance of power.
Today, we need to learn the negative lessons of a failed orientation on the Democrats and the positive lessons of mass strategic action and organizing to figure out how to build a new movement for reproductive justice.
We have the numbers on our side to build mass defiance, not retreat into the underground, but resistance to turn this back. We were able to do this before and they’ve done it in other countries coming from much more harsh conditions. We have had nearly 50 years of abortion and tens of millions have had a legal and safe abortion. We have to fight this. Clearly nobody’s coming to save us, but us. It’s time to get serious about organizing a new resistance to unjust laws.