This week, we’re sharing a presentation entitled “Abortion Beyond The State” by Jex Blackmore and Hydra Mutual Aid Fund, recorded at the 2024 Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair in so-called Asheville, NC. You can find more audios, past schedules and more at ACABookfair.NoBlogs.Org.
From the description:
“Government control of reproductive capacity has long persisted as a tool to subordinate birthing people, women, people of color, people living on lower incomes, and other marginalized groups. The Supreme Court’s harmful ruling in Dobbs made clear that both the State, its actors, and the non-profit industrial complex have failed the people, giving rise to the urgent necessity for the movement to defend itself through direct provisions to community. This workshop will provide context to the current crisis surrounding bodily autonomy and reproduction and share a roadmap for subverting state control by building networks of support to provide safe and effective abortion regardless of legality.
The Hydra Fund is an independent mutual aid fund supporting access to reproductive care in Michigan. Their mission is to eliminate financial barriers to abortion access in Michigan by providing direct financial aid for purchasing abortion pills and obtaining in-clinic abortion procedures. Additionally, Hydra Fund is engaged in a community outreach education program to support access to evidence-based abortion information.”
For other abortion chats you can listen to from TFSR, check out this link
Other resources mentioned include:
- Turnaway Study (tons of resources here)
- Carolina Abortion Fund
- Mountain Area Abortion Doula Collective
- PlanCPills.Org
Announcement
Phone Zap for Malik Muhammad
Malik Muhammad, a prisoner from the George Floyd Uprising has been on hunger strike against extended use of solitary confinement with no property and after a beating and tasering by staff. You can learn how to participate in a phone zap at MalikSpeaks.NoBlogs.Org
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Transcription
Jex Blackmore: My name is Jex Blackmore and I am a founding member of Hydra Mutual Aid Fund based in Detroit. I’m also the organizing director of Shout Your Abortion, which is an advocacy organization. If you want to move forward and take a seat, there are a lot of seats up here. I will not bite and I just encourage everybody to do whatever they need to do to make themselves comfortable, to move their bodies, get up if they need to get water, whatever is most comfortable to you. Can everybody hear me right now? Cool. If for some reason you can’t hear me, or I’m going too fast, or something isn’t working behind me that I can’t see, just let me know.
I am going to do a little presentation and then open it up for conversation. There might be some times in the middle where I’ll pause to pose questions for you to think about, but I want this to be a space where you can ask questions and be curious, and we can have a conversation as well. So today I’m going to demonstrate how the struggle for bodily autonomy exemplifies the power of autonomous self organized resistance. This fight shows how mutual aid, decentralization and direct action cannot only challenge and dismantle systems of domination, but also build thriving networks of mutual care and distributed resources. Moreover, this issue provides an accessible entry point for mass participation, revealing to many the potential to thrive beyond the confines of institutional systems, which is a critical path to the revolution and essential for our survival in a late capitalist world.
I’m going to break this presentation into a few sections here. At first, I’m going to provide very limited history of the State and reproduction so that we have some context that we’re working from. Then I’m going to go over the impacts of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and provide some context to also how we got to the place where we are today. Then in the third section, I’m going to delve into the global trajectories of reproductive movements that have transcended State control, and examine the autonomous strategies that they’ve employed and the critical insights that they offer to provide us with a roadmap for ways that we can succeed. Then in the final section, I’m going to outline some current imperatives of the movement and propose concrete actionable steps that anyone can take, no matter who you are, what your abilities are, your interests and availability, so that we can support these efforts. Then we’re going to have a conversation after.
Before I get going into the history, I want to just take a moment to acknowledge that anyone who has a uterus and ovaries could become pregnant and give birth, usually between the ages of 12 and 51 although they’re outliers. I want to say that in part because a lot of the history that talks about this is embedded in women’s liberation and women’s rights but I don’t want that to confuse anybody, that women are the only people who get pregnant. So gender does not determine who could become pregnant, and people who identify as men, women, non binary, trans, intersex, can and do become pregnant and give birth if they possess a uterus and ovaries.
The State and other centers of power have consistently sought to control people’s reproductive capabilities, with the extent and nature of this control varying based on a person’s race, age and economic status. It’s important to note that the efforts of individuals to control their own reproduction through abortion and contraceptive methods have been widespread and are as firmly rooted in our past as they are in our present. Both abortion and infanticide have been practiced since the earliest records of human history, and methods have included abdominal uterine manipulation, herbal medications administered vaginally or orally in various surgical techniques using specially designed instruments. The first recorded evidence of an induced abortion that we know about is from an Egyptian papyrus from 1550 BCE. We also have Chinese medical texts from the Han Dynasty, and we are aware that indigenous cultures of the Americas, Zoroastrian, Persian and the traditional healers of Sub Saharan Africa had knowledge of plants and techniques used for inducing abortion. That is absolutely not a complete history, but I do want to make sure that we acknowledge that abortion has been part of our experience as humans as long as humans have been around, and it is.
Our interest in deciding when we start families, when we reproduce, is fundamental to our humanity, and the point at which we start to see this becoming a topic of potential controversy is the moment when people start to organize around profound existential questions such as morality and the nature of life and death. That social discourse on abortion has emerged around the universal weight of these complex questions about the meaning of life. When we have these moments about these misunderstood, universal unknowns, it provides a space for religion to intervene, typically using the opportunity to exert control and shape culture and obedience. I want to look at some of those interventions as well.
Some of the earliest references to the legal parameters regulating abortion have been tied to property rights, and this actually remains in practice today. These regulations often have served to protect male interests and inheritance lineage and the continuity of family property. So here is the code of Hammurabi from ancient Mesopotamia, which included laws that penalized causing a miscarriage, treating it as a property crime against the husband who is considered to have ownership over his wife’s reproductive capabilities. We see this time and time again in ancient Rome and ancient Greece, Canon Law and feudal rights under English Common Law, Puritan legal codes, and even in some places in the law today, around the world.
Across many different cultures, many different religions, this concept has been a very, very powerful tool to reinforce the importance of family units and align individual behavior with the broader interests of the State. By embedding family values within religious practices and teachings, States have been able to promote social cohesion, ensure population growth and maintain hierarchical structures that support their authority. This logic underscores the intersection of religion, family and State interests, showing how deeply these elements have been intertwined throughout history.
So as long as we have been alive, we have been trying to come up with ways and finding ways to control our reproductive health and futures. And as long as there have been a State and religion, they have been also trying to interfere with that. Now I would love to do an entire talk about the Catholic Church and abortion, because it is a dark, dark, dark, dark place, but I’m just going to touch on it a little bit here, because the Catholic Church was and is an extremely powerful institution. It has a lot of power and control still to this day in politics around the world.
I want to note that while there’s a lot of early Christian teachings condemning abortion here and there, there was a ton of ambiguity regarding, really what that means and how it’s defined. There were a lot of exceptions being made when the “mother’s” life was at risk, or at what point in a pregnancy determination would be deemed sinful. There was this idea of the quickening, and that abortion was fine before there was a quickening, which was when the pregnant person felt something move in their body. And there were these theories that female babies would move later than male babies, and a lot of silly stuff.
There was this shame if you intentionally tried to end a pregnancy within the church, but in the mid 16th century, the Catholic Church underwent (counter) reformation. In response to this Protestant Reformation, which criticized the Catholic Church for being corrupt, they decided to formalize their dislike of abortion. They were very problematic for the Church, in part because abortions would conceal sinful relationships, including those between priests and women under their spiritual care. So there’s a lot of evidence that says the Church’s investment in equating abortion with murder was so that they could tease out potential priests that were raping people in the Church.
This was a very unpopular edict and there were tons of people who were appealing for exceptions. Eventually there was a huge rollback and they decided that they were not going to equate abortion with murder. You can see here that is widely and openly acknowledged that men’s sexual misconduct often lay at the heart of the issue and that abortion was tolerated because it was seen as a male-gendered practice. We know that it was rolled back in part because it was so divisive, and there were so many questions about getting these exemptions. The logic shows that it was extremely common, that it wouldn’t be something that we would be seeing time and time again, with people pushing back, if it wasn’t something that everybody was doing.
I’m going to jump forward now to America. We are missing a lot of different cultures and a lot of different historical context, but we only have so much time. I just want to acknowledge that these are the foundational histories for the colonial truth that we see in American history. However, by the time people did colonize America, abortion was not just legal, it was a condoned and practiced procedure and it was common enough to appear in legal and medical records of the period.
Official abortion laws did not appear on the books in the United States until 1821 and that was considered abortion before the quickening or when the women felt the fetus move. That did not become illegal until 1860. So 1821 was the first time that we see any official law against abortion. 1860 was all abortion is illegal. If a woman was living in New England in the 17th or 18th century and wanted an abortion, no legal, social or religious force would have stopped her. There may have been some amount of shame and stigma, which remains today, but there was no huge degradation of the self as a result of seeking an abortion or abortion care. You can see here there’s a lot of these pills of Penny Royal and Cotton Rouge that were advertised at the time and there’s this engraving here that’s a doctor who’s leaning back and having a talk with patients about abortion in 1754. I find this picture really funny because it looks so casual.
I want to put this in the context of the cultural perception of the body and also really start to get into the colonial and racist roots of abortion. This is a very crude timeline but we start to see a cultural shift that happens in America. We have this Enlightenment period, which extends beyond colonial America, but it’s a period where there is a lot of relaxation in a lot of religious ideologies, there’s a lot of exploration in science and medicine. Then we have this pushback against that in this Victorian era and it’s really interesting. There’s this liberal period with enlightenment that promoted personal freedom and rationality, but then once the Victorian sensibilities took hold, there was a massive change in the way that we think about medicine and the way that we think about gender and families and sexuality.
Victorian ideals in part idealized women as pure and maternal, which made abortion socially unacceptable. There was also a growing women’s suffrage movement that was perceived as a threat to male power and patriarchy. There was also a period following when the 13th Amendment was established, the Reconstruction period where America is trying to figure out how to cope with the loss of Black, enslaved labor for their own benefit and wealth. There was a huge fear among the white elite that the declining birth rates among native born white families would lead to a demographic shift, with higher birth rates among immigrants and non-white populations. This anxiety contributed to the push for anti-abortion laws, as preserving the white Anglo Saxon Protestant population was seen as crucial for maintaining social and racial hierarchies.
We can see this in history with the southern Black population hugely expanding, and people moving around the country in ways that made white people really uncomfortable. This is something that’s going to come up again and again and again, and it’s happening right now: this racialized history of control. In addition, the foundation of the American Medical Association launched in 1847, which sought to establish a doctor’s authority over reproductive health and viewed abortion as unsafe when performed by non-medical practitioners. This is a time where there had been this long history of folk medicine, of healers, of women, of non-white people who have brought cultural traditions from all over the world, working as midwives and working as family doctors, essentially. White men said “That’s not legitimate. We’re going to make our own institution that’s going to be the authority on these topics. No one’s allowed to practice besides us and anyone who does is unethical.”
They started to come after folks and started to shame and dismiss generational wisdoms and truths about how to take care of all sorts of health issues, but especially pregnancy. In addition to that, there’s a rising religious movement, particularly among Protestants, which emphasize traditional family values. Of course, we could say that this ties also to the interest in preserving white families. Then there is this guy: Dr. Joseph De Lee. He was an obstetrician and on the cover of Time and he has this quote that “The midwife is a relic of barbarism. In civilized countries, the midwife is wrong, has always been wrong. The midwife has been a drag on the progress of the science and the art obstetrics.” Which is pretty insulting because this guy probably couldn’t even draw a vagina. I’m sure of it.
Then we have this really fun guy called Anthony Comstock, which maybe you’ve heard about recently, because the Republican Party is really interested in bringing Comstock back. Which is wild. He was really upset by sex and anything that was immoral to him. He was really successful at getting the Comstock Act passed, which targeted anybody who was distributing information about things that were seen as lustful, impure, controversial; things about birth control, things about sex, obviously abortion. Here’s this cartoon from 1915 where the quote underneath it is “Your Honor, this woman gave birth to a naked child.” Showing that most people weren’t buying it but it actually had a huge impact on what people could say.
These are some of the things that we still have come up, that we can refer to in the law today. There are a lot of people, very legitimately concerned about our ability to have conversations, like the one we’re having right now about abortion, in a future that is very possible in America, where we would not be able to talk about these things legally. This is another one of my favorites here. It’s this police Gazette of the female Abortionists. There is a demon bat eating a baby. I love that. Then also, here’s reference to Emma Goldman, who was a huge fan of abortion and birth control and she was arrested. I like that they call her a “high priestess of anarchy”. Emma Goldman had a lot of problematic ideas but she was definitely a badass when it comes to talking about birth control and challenging the Comstock law. This is her mug shot and she said “When a law has outgrown time and necessity, it must go. And the only way to get rid of the law is to awaken the public to the fact that it has outlived its purpose. And that is precisely what I’ve been doing, and I mean to do in the future”.
That’s the vibe that we’re all going into today, right now and that’s the takeaway from this whole conversation. I’m not done yet but I want you to just keep in mind that this is something there are examples for and a history of radical anarchists working in this way and acknowledging that the law is unjust in doing it anyways.
Essentially, together, a coalition of male doctors backed by the AMA, the Catholic Church and sensationalist newspapers began to campaign for the criminalization of abortion. By the turn of the century, this coalition had largely succeeded in limiting women’s medical choices. It was one way that male physicians could assert clear authority over their female patients. Now we have this cultural, legal and medical history. I’m going to go a little bit more into the medical history and this is some very dark stuff we’re about to talk about. It’s the United States’ very long history of border sterilization, experimentation and reproductive coercion. They call the father of gynecology this guy, Dr. James Marion Sims. He spent years abusing Black enslaved women and operating on them without any type of medication or pain relief. We think that there were about 10 women that he abused and that’s how we learned about our reproductive organs. That’s how we have the speculum and a bunch of other stuff that we do today, which hasn’t been much revised since that period of time. It all comes back to this extremely horrific history. Dr. Marion Sims was also elected the President of the American Medical Association 1876. He also experimented with things like C-sections and other surgical procedures on women.
Of course, there’s also a family planning movement fraught with racism and eugenics. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was often motivated by racist, eugenic, population control principles and also the ideas leading up to the legalization of birth control. The first, which was celebrated as a tool for the liberation of middle class white women was actually tested on women who lived in public housing project in Puerto Rico without their knowledge or consent in the 1950’s. In addition, in 1935, 32 States maintained federally funded eugenic boards and permitted eugenic sterilization for those deemed undesirable or dangerous. Other excuses to deny women motherhood or the ability to get pregnant before sterilization included, “feeble mindedness”, promiscuity, insanity, criminality, disability and poverty, among others. Here are two people who were colony inmates in Virginia for epileptics and were considered too feeble minded and thus they were forced to be “sterilized.” In addition Black, Indigenous and other women of color, as well as any people of color generally, were disproportionately subject to forced sterilization, and this remains to be an issue to this day.
Between 1973-76 the Federal Indian Health Service performed over 3,406 forced sterilizations. And here’s a pamphlet they were handing out to Native American women encouraging them to have fewer children. It’s really interesting because here you see that they’re saying “Well, if you have a huge family, you’ll be poor and if you don’t, you’ll be rich.” Here again we come back to this acknowledgment of property and wealth, States having an interest in dictating how you reproduce and some concept of of State benefit. This doctor who is a Native American physician replied to this handout and insisted women who are poor and don’t get rich by having their tubes tied, which I thought was a great and depressing statement.
Also between 2006 and 2010 at least 150 female inmates in California prisons were sterilized against their will. I think we all know that it probably far exceeded 150. In 2020, a whistle blower shared accounts of forced hysterectomies at the ICE detention center in Georgia. There are numerous, numerous other examples of this. Now, birth control was not always seen as evil. Again, this was seen as a big benefit to white, affluent women and the Republican Party in particular, was super supportive of birth control and Planned Parenthood, so much so that George Bush Senior had the nickname “Rubbers” in Congress because he was like, “This is great. It’s great for the economy for people to have control over their bodies. It’s great for the economy for people to be able to decide when to have a family, instead of being stuck in poverty because they didn’t have access to those choices.”
Of course, as usual, racism gets in the way and we start to see with Nixon, the emergence of the Southern Strategy, which had come up a couple times. Basically, the Republican Party was very frustrated that they weren’t winning elections. They realized that they could use the growing discomfort with the civil rights movement in the South and the dismantling of Jim Crow laws in order to appeal to Southern, white, Christian voters and really capitalize off of existing racial tensions in much of the southern United States and adopt a lot of the ideologies that they have. So essentially, the Republican Party was like “All right, what we want to do is win elections. In order to do that, we’re going to have to appeal to a bunch of racist white people and that includes adopting a lot of religious language, including that birth control is bad.”
At their core, both eugenic sterilization and anti-abortion laws are about denying bodily autonomy, reproductive and family autonomy and disproportionately constrain the reproductive freedoms of marginalized groups. These regulations are in place as a result of white supremacy, religious extremism, class inequity and political power. Now we’re going to talk about how everything got so fucked up beyond that. It’s going to end on a good note but it is a dark, dark history. Roe v. Wade: people fought really hard for that, mostly white women, fought really hard for that. It was a huge deal, though and the Supreme Court was pretty late to the game. A lot of people were practicing abortion before it was legal. The law was not very inclined to come after people who were practicing abortions because it was common.
Roe was not a great law actually. It came with a ton of limitations and did not eliminate social and economic barriers to abortion. It was a major win regardless and kind of a big fuck you against anti-abortion absolutism. Part of the failure of Roe is that it was loosely based on this guarantee of privacy. There were a lot of loopholes that came up. Then we get Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde. In 1976 he passes the Hyde Amendment, which blocked the use of Federal Medicaid dollars to be used for abortion. Here’s his quote: “I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion: a rich woman, a middle class woman, or a poor woman. Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the Medicaid bill.” So essentially, poor people can’t have access to abortions anymore. This created a precedent to deny Federal use of dollars to fund abortion across the board. That led to a global gag rule. That’s called Mexico City policy. That meant that, like any any place that we’re providing aid for medical care, abortion could not be included. It effectively made abortion access in America a two-tiered system. Those with resources could get one, and many of those without those resources could not. That’s continuing today.
The organizations that were fighting for abortion at this time were predominantly white women-led and ignored the suffering of other people who were poor, or people of color, or black people who were still having unsafe abortions because they just simply couldn’t afford safe procedures. In 1992 we see one of the most important cases of abortion that came through the Planned Parenthood of southern Pennsylvania, versus Casey, which upheld the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling affirming a woman’s right to an abortion, but said that the State has a compelling interest in protecting the life of an unborn child. So basically, you can’t violate someone’s constitutional rights. You have to meet this very high standard if you want to do that and one of the standards is a compelling State interest. So the State is allowed to violate your rights if it can prove that it has a very, very compelling interest to do so and does so by the least restrictive means possible.
What they’re saying is “Well, we have an interest in protecting the life of an ‘unborn child'”, which is a definition that is not based on the medical community, is not scientific. It is a philosophical, religious opinion about when life begins. What it means is that there can be an abortion of a viable fetus under any circumstances, except when the health of a mother is at risk. Then we start to see a wave of restrictions come forth. This is a tiny little bit of targeted regulations of abortion providers. I was trying to find one over time, and I just couldn’t find the chart. I’m sure you remember, because this has been happening in recent history, but states have been chipping away at abortion access through these incremental restrictions. It has been accelerating since 2010, doing everything in their power to make it extremely hard and difficult.
Because of the Planned Parent versus Casey, they essentially were saying, “We have a compelling interest. You have to prove that driving five hours to your nearest clinic actually presents a burden against you”. Which is insane, because for a rich person, who can take time off from work, get childcare, travel and get a hotel, maybe it’s not a significant burden, but for the majority of people, it’s a massive burden. So the legislators are like, “It doesn’t matter. We have a duty to protect the unborn life.” This is a huge turning point and something I want to address because this is the language that Clinton used. “Abortion’s good if it’s rare, safe and legal”, as if the Democrats were, like, doing us a favor. The truth is that the Democrats used abortion as an election motivator, as a way to hold on to power, to create fear among people, but literally did shit for the rest of us. They should have been thinking about the change of culture and really building clinics and supporting clinics and doing whatever it took on a logistical level to provide access. They completely neglected grassroots groups in states where the battle of abortion access had been quietly waged for over half a century.
National abortion rights groups and the progressive movement at large have focused on federal policy and elections, as we’ve just seen and then defending access through the Federal courts. I’m sure you’ve seen Planned Parenthood telling you a million times to get out the vote. Planned Parenthood in 2020 spent $45 million on pivotal elections. Meanwhile, they had clinics shutting down left and right, not because they had to, but because they were afraid that they might be legally challenged if the laws changed. So I don’t buy they claim that there’s care no matter what, because we’ve seen how they’ve responded to that.
Following their lead are smaller groups, people like you and me who care about abortion. They’ve invested a lot of money in supporting Pro-Choice candidates. The National Movement strategy of relying on courts as a firewall meant that advocates were just playing Whac-a-Mole against the growing onslaught of anti abortion laws without any support. When white-led groups focused on upholding Roe left, Black and poor people were struggling to get access to abortion, which they had been doing this full time. Essentially, none of this work has actually helped get people the care that they need, when they need it, in communities across America and especially communities of color. The abortion rights movement has all too often been dependent on political norms that the other side was willing to ignore.
I’m going to backtrack a little bit to talk about how Black women always knew what the fuck was up and were holding it down. That’s not something to be celebrated it’s something we should be ashamed of. Generally, we should acknowledge the fact that we don’t listen to people of color who know what’s going on. In 1994, there was a Pro-Choice conference and this collective of people who would be called Sister song. They are a group of women of color performing Reproductive Justice Coalition, and they coined that term reproductive justice because they were like “Hey, we are being left out of this fight. Even if we elect Democrats that’s not actually serving us. In addition to needing access to abortion and birth control, we need access to childcare. We need access to have safe births, we need people to acknowledge the intersections of social, economic and political inequalities that affect a person’s ability to make decisions about their own reproductive lives. It includes prenatal and postnatal care, protection from forced sterilization and the ability to raise a family without fear of violence or discrimination. It is the full spectrum of reproductive rights and it addresses the unique challenges faced by marginalized communities.”
These activists knew at the time that they could not depend on the courts or on Congress because those institutions had all too often upheld, rather than repealed, the policies that hurt people of color. They often passed laws that were making exceptions like the Hyde Amendment which means that poor people can’t get abortion but that’s good because we didn’t lose abortion totally. That is only beneficial to a certain class of people. That leads us to the Dobbs decision. If you were in the abortion movement or paying attention to any of these restrictions, it would not have been a surprise, but it was somehow a surprise to all of the Democrats. It came in 2022 and it was written by Justice Samuel Alito, who argued, “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion and that the authority to regulate it should be returned to the individual state.” Now we have a patchwork situation where some people have access and some people don’t and it depends on what your zip code is and how much money you have.
Here is a current map of the United States. As you can see, enormous swaths of the country, in fact, 21 million people have no access to abortion and that doesn’t account the people who do live in these blue states that still have a very decimated situation when it comes to abortion access. I come from Detroit. The people in my city cannot afford abortion, even though we have three clinics. The lowest price is $500 for an abortion. It’s just completely unobtainable. There are no clinics in northern Michigan at all. So that’s also unobtainable. On average now, Americans have to travel more than three times farther than they did a year ago and it’s much, much worse if you live in the South. Providers are also struggling to keep up with the needs for those that do exist, and we’re seeing abortions at later gestations across the board. It’s on the rise. We also know that from an amazing book called Turnaway Study, which I highly recommend, that when people are turned away from abortions, they suffer from negative outcomes to their health, their economic stability and the overall well being of the birthing person and their children.
I want to note that what this should have taught us at this point, is that elections are not helping us. We cannot invest money in electoral campaigns in these huge corporate clinics, because they’re not going to have our back. Yet, this past week, there’s a new coalition called Abortion Access Now, which includes Planned Parenthood, ACU, Reproductive Freedom and a couple other groups, that have announced they’ve got $100 million grant, or they’re pulling their money and they have $100 million I don’t think it’s actually a grant technically, but they’re going to be embarking on a 10 year campaign, when the Democrats control the House, Senate and the White House, that they will have some policies ready.
As a person that works in this field, and every day talking with people who need to get abortions, who are talking with grassroots mutual aid, or who are trying to fund people to get care who do not have enough money, this is so appalling. In light of these inequities in the justice, medical and political system, it is evident that pursuing liberation exclusively through these traditional avenues is absolutely insufficient and that leads me to the good part. Okay, cool. Autonomous health movements. It’s important to consider the ways in which we’ve all potentially, at times, rallied behind institutions of power, either directly or indirectly, just simply because they were aligned with the values that we agree with, without really interrogating the impacts and the effects of work that they are doing. This is something that I think is very hard not to do if you grew up in America but it’s something that we need to learn to to question. Autonomous health movements are the future. They have been the way of success in the past, and it’s certainly our challenges in the reproductive life landscape do not exist in a vacuum. Similar struggles have been faced by other countries and historical movements. By drawing on their experiences and lessons learned, we can navigate our own path and develop strategies that address these obstacles.
Studies of global organizers have demonstrated that autonomous health movements (movements of people who are organizing on their own, independent of one another, maybe connected with the next town over, but do not ultimately have a have a large institution telling people what to do) deeply rooted in community contexts, significantly enhance access to abortion services. We know that by prioritizing education, empowerment and direct support within these communities, the movements bridge the informational divide and dismantle barriers to access, particularly for those most marginalized by existing systems.
We have been managing our reproduction since the beginning of time, and we also now have a lot more access to technology and medication that is safe and effective. We can do this outside of the medical system. We can do this outside of the legal system. It’s extremely important that we always know what our risks are but we do not need someone to give us permission. We can organize ourselves and make a safe options for everybody. I want to provide some examples of how that has worked in the past.
Of course, there’s the Jane Collective. They’ve had a documentary out recently. They were around in the ‘60s and ‘70s. This pioneering network of people decided they were going to learn how to perform abortion procedures, and then put ads up all around town in Chicago and people would call them. They would bring them in. They performed a surgical abortion on them. They’re still around. I did a training with Judith Arcana. Showed me how to perform an abortion on a papaya. So if you want to know, I got the deets. The way that we came to know about abortion medication, which again, is extremely safe and effective, is that it’s a common ulcer drug that’s Misoprostol. That’s not the one that they’re trying to buy, which is ban, which is Mifepristone. You can have an abortion without Mifepristone. Misoprostol is the real deal. People in Brazil were just like, “we don’t want to be pregnant. They started to see this ulcer drug on the shelves that were like, it can cause a miscarriage.” So they started taking that and it worked. Then they started to spread the word about it.
In 2008 a collective in Ecuador created a hotline to share information about how to use medication for first trimester abortion. It spread to other Latin American countries, as well as to Indonesia, Poland, Thailand and several African countries. Here we see in Argentina, a collective of feminists attending this abortion workshop. In rural Guatemala, health rights defenders have effectively harnessed and distributed political learning strategies to empower indigenous communities. So essentially, folks travel around, they work with people in Indigenous communities, give them the information that they may need to know how to access medication or how to help support somebody at all gestations to have an abortion. This way, you can have an abortion safely and effectively up until birth, with medication.
They found that once they started to teach people in these communities that they spread that information among themselves and that they had created an effective network that was able to provide abortions in even the most rural areas in the world. Then we also start to see these other powerful movements. A lot of the stuff that’s happened in Ireland and overseas has also been happening because people are talking about their abortions, they’re removing the stigma. If something becomes so commonplace, it’s a lot harder to police it. If everybody’s doing it, it puts social pressure on people to legislate towards it, and it puts social pressure to stop policing it as much. Here’s Women on Waves. This is another very incredible organization that said they were going to park boats outside of countries where abortion was illegal, in international waters, and then grab people who need care, take them to their boat, and then perform an abortion on them. They are providing medication around the world still to this day, and it was an amazingly effective solution.
There are groups like this all over the world. We start to see it as Abortion without Borders, Las Libras, who provide abortion care, still to this day, to people in America, after our abortion bans. Also we can look at the harm reduction movement as a pragmatic framework for community driven public health strategies, because we start to see that people are starting to learn how to take care of each other when these institutions that we think of that should protect us are letting us down. The model that is being shared in Latin America, is called the “accompaniment model.” It’s an activist strategy where a trained activist will accompany someone through an abortion, kind of staying with them physically, or being in regular contact via phone or text messaging and offering support. Here’s an example of one of our colleagues doing that.
Collectively these movements showcase robust and tangible successes, demonstrating the effectiveness of strategies that engage individuals and groups across different levels of experience. It’s also highly adaptable and sustainable. There’s a range of participation, so there’s low risk educational roles to higher risk people who are doing direct action in terms of providing medication for people. It’s also an amazing way to lead towards the kind of world we want to see. We want to be training people. We want to be encouraging people to do the work that they’re doing, to take care of our communities outside of these institutional powers.
This approach illustrates how integrating various degrees of activist involvement can foster more resilient, effective and transformative movements. These movements are, as we’ve seen, adept at navigating the complexities of health advocacy and community engagement. And this is working. We in America, just for the last two years, we know that when you self manage abortion at home it is just as safe as if you were to take a medication at the doctor’s office or in clinics. We have data now to prove that, and also after the Dobbs decision abortions are actually on the rise. So it didn’t do shit except make things really painful and hard for everyone.
I’m going to go over some needs and how to get involved. This stigma and criminalization by people seeking abortions have created entirely preventable and political driven health crisis. Except in relatively rare cases, abortion does not need to happen within medical institutions and can be managed with medication safely at home. We’re going to ignore the fact that we could talk about legislation and how that might make incremental improvements for some people’s lives, because, quite frankly, I like to operate with what power I have and the power of my community, and I don’t have access to lobbying money or anything like that. What the Movement really, really needs, regardless, is elevated public understanding of abortion resources. We need to support independent clinics, funds and practical support networks, and we need to enhance our collaboration and networking between movements, because we have a lack of awareness under resource organizations and a lack of organizing infrastructure. These are some of my colleagues here taking abortion pills outside the Supreme Court. This was a very effective action because it got in international news and in the international news, the newspapers printed where you can get abortion pills, and how easy they are to take them.
So these are things that you can do, and they are not minimal. Telling people about abortion pills is so important. I cannot tell you how many people don’t ask about it, don’t know about it. It’s hard to know that you want an abortion and you should know how to get it if you don’t need one at the time. People find out about abortion pills through other people. They find out about it through stickers. They find out about it through posters. They find out about it because they heard someone talking about it on the internet. This is a situation where it is not armchair activism, it is real activism and I can tell you because I talk to people every day who find out about it this way, who are afraid to look it up online. Rightly so, because people are policing it online. This is amazingly powerful. I have a bunch of stickers, and I have even more here. And before you go, please, please take some and put them everywhere. Here’s an example. I put this, on the way here, on this pregnancy test at Buckies gas station stop. Then there’s also these posters. You can go online, you can download them, and you can wheat paste them all over town, and they help people know where to get abortions.
In addition, I would really encourage folks to take a self managed abortion Training. I’m here all weekend, and if you want to organize something, I will teach you how to help people get an abortion and what to look for and how to support somebody who may be needing that. I’ll be here after if you want to come talk to me. Also, Abortion Pill Info is an amazing resource, and you can schedule time with them. There’s also instructions online but I think, like, if you can get together with a group of friends and really learn this together, you can really strengthen your community. I encourage you to educate yourself on the reproductive justice movement generally. Again, reading the Turnaway Study, or Abortion Beyond the Law, which is for sale here, I saw. It’s an incredible book. Familiarize yourself with local laws and resources. In North Carolina, you have an abortion ban after 12 weeks, which is pretty early and you have very limited amount of clinics. It’s important to know what people’s options are, so that if you run across someone who’s like, I don’t know what to do, you do know what to do.
If you have friends or family in banned states further to the South, how can you support them? How can you let them know how to be safe online? Go to the Digital Defense Fund and there’s these postcards up here that have all of these resources on them. Please, please take them. Everything you would ever need to know to get an abortion, no matter where you live, is on this card. Let them know you can send them medication if they need it. You can order medication. You can have it shipped to you for free if you are pregnant. If you’re a person that’s not pregnant, if you can’t ever get pregnant, you can still get abortion medication and have it on hand for other people. Share this information with as many people as possible, support access to contraception and then support the people who are doing this work in your community. I saw this Carolina Abortion Fund here. There’s also the Mountain Area Abortion Doula Collective and they will also train you how to help people have abortions. Give them money if you can. If you can’t, tell people about them, organize a fundraiser, offer some skills or resources that you have to offer and get creative.
I’m just gonna close with this really cool statement, which is that direct action based on solidarity and care is intrinsically prefigurative as activists and people seeking assistance work together to imagine and create forms of support based on mutual recognition, care and an understanding of the deeply collective nature of autonomy and determination. And I’m saying that because, in addition to all of this, the thing that I really want to drive home is that abortion is often seen as an issue that is not impactful or that is not part of the general the revolutionary work is often seen as like a women’s issue or something that we can’t talk about. I see it all the time in leftist groups who are icked out by abortion for some reason. It is not only an amazing, amazing example of true anarchist solidarity and collaboration in practice, it is completely necessary, and we need it to be included in our perspective and our work.
When we’re doing revolutionary liberation work, it is critical. So I will just remind you, abortion access is a community responsibility, and we don’t have that much time, but I do want to see if anybody has a question or wants to talk.
Audience Question: I’m working with a couple people, and hopefully next year we’ll be able to fund people to get the training you need to be certified, whatever way they want to pursue bodily autonomy skills. One of the reasons that that’s possible is because people where I am, work for a place that will double donations to any 501(c)(3). So if you are doing that kind of work and whether your collective has 501(c)(3) status that has access to 501(c)(3) we will double the donation.
Jex: How do people get a hold of you?
Same Audience Member: I’m here. We haven’t formalized anything, so probably just approached me. A third thing, I really want to understand is how Four Thieves was pursuing a their [mifo/miso card] distribution project.
Jex: I don’t know how Four Thieves is doing that. If anybody wants to learn how to get abortion pills and have them and distribute them, come talk to me. I’m happy to tell you how that works.
Audience Question: I’d like to give a shout out to the Carolina Abortion Fund. Google it and you can learn more. They are fundraising to get people abortions, they need volunteers, they need money, it’s even a pretty fun time doing the work.
Jex: Carolina Abortion Fund, there’s a donation link here, and also information I know is posted in the back you can grab.
Audience Question: I just wanted to say that PlanCPills.Org has a discord if that’s your speed.
Jex: Plan C will send you a million stickers. They have a discord that’s very active. They’re networked around the world, quite frankly, at this point and it’s great. They’re great resources.
Audience Question: I was wondering about language justice and interpretation?
Jex: I love that. That question is about language justice and interpretation. There is a growing number of groups that are trying to translate things into every language, but it is very slow moving, and it is a shame that it’s slow moving. It’s in large part because of resources. We do have red state access, which provides free medication to anyone in a band state, and also Las Libres, which is based in Mexico, but they do also do distribution here, and both of those are big accompaniment models. So if there’s a Spanish speaker, there’s coverage there. The movement needs people who can translate and be available to support people who speak other languages. I know some hire people to do translation for them, but it’s really hard. Number one, it’s expensive, but it’s something that we love to do, but it’s also hard to find translators that are safe, that won’t out someone, who know the language. You know, we’re using medical terminology.
So if anybody in this room has ideas or wants to get involved in that, the movement, absolutely needs it. The same kind of notice that their movement also needs a disability revolution. I would say, most of these materials that are produced and distributed, don’t account for people who have mobility issues. I don’t really know that most clinics have a plan for for folks if they have hearing needs, a whole list of other things to follow, and it’s something that we need more people to do. I would say one thing that’s really beautiful about this movement is that there are so many amazing people doing the work and also, there’s such a need for people. Everybody who’s doing the grassroot work is like, “please come in”. The amount of gatekeeping is pretty chill at this point, which is not the way that it’s been in the past.
Audience Question: I was wondering if you could talk more about security around autonomous abortion work?
Jex: Security risks involved with distribution? Yeah, of course. I’m a big believer that everybody should know what all of their options are and decide what their risks are for themselves. Some people are more risk averse than others for very obvious reasons, and I think that’s one reason why distribution in the South can be really scary, because people who are going to be targeted are going to be people who are typically targeted by the justice system. So disenfranchised people and Black people, for example. It’s illegal to distribute medication but we have no legal examples of them cracking down on someone for distributing medication that we know of so far. There are a couple examples of somebody who has been sending things through the mail. The post office can start tracking you if they think that you might be suspicious by just keeping a record of what packages you send out. So don’t send suspicious packages. Don’t make them really sloppy, I guess. There are these rules like if the package has a bunch of stamps on it and it’s really messed up and crumpled, then you can look suspicious, which is wild. So play it cool. They can put you in a list, and potentially look at what you’re doing but we don’t know anybody that has been caught from doing that and I talked to attorneys, like very regularly.
So far, the general legal consensus is that you could get busted with distributing medication that and you’re not a doctor. So kind of like a drug charge. We think that you should consider that risk. And maybe even on this resource list, there is a repo legal hotline. These are attorneys who will talk to you for free if you want to understand what your legal risk is if you’re helping somebody, if you’re obtaining medication, if you’re holding onto medication. In Louisiana right now, they’re making it a controlled substance. So it’d be like you have fentanyl on you, or something like that. So the legality of all of this is unknown, which is really scary, because we can’t trust that laws are real, that they’re gonna uphold the Constitution. So it is important that you evaluate what your situation is, what you would be risking, and how potentially dangerous it is. There are these attorneys that you can call that will help you for free and walk you through the scenario.
Okay, I’ll be here all weekend. I drove here from Detroit, and I’ll be hanging out. So if you want to talk or have any questions, just come and talk with me. And please take these materials, give them out, distribute them, stick them everywhere. That’s what they’re here for. Thank you.
