F-Bomb

by Lauren McKeon

  This failure to act on the studies, Koss argues, has left room for men’s rights activists and rape truthers and apologists, as well as those with presumably good intentions, to skew the conversation. “Virtually nothing that is happening today is touching base with science,” she said. “It’s being propelled by assumptions, belief systems, and cherished icons.” In her mind, men’s rights groups and rape apologists are keeping the public outraged, no matter what side of the issue they’re on. For example, said Koss, recent years have seen much rallying around the need for rape kits and even more anger over the backlog of already completed kits. The result has been a tornado of fundraising and awareness activity, but not much else. None of this, maintained Koss, will fundamentally change anything. Piles of research show the kits rarely get used and even more rarely help secure a conviction, especially when it comes to rapes committed by someone the survivor knows. These assaults tend to be less violent but also account for the majority of rapes on campus.

  “It keeps us busy,” Koss told me, referring to the intense focus on rape kits and the fundraising surrounding them, although she doesn’t necessarily mean “busy” in a good way. It’s projects like these (ones that put the focus on catching so-called real rapists) that can keep us from achieving real change. From the outside, it looks as if we’re making progress and empowering women, but the effect is the same as if we’d dismissed them entirely. It’s a curious, chilling game of PR strategy, and one that’s working. We look like we’re doing something, yet our surface actions keep us from tackling root causes, factors that are often more thorny to parse and difficult to confront. Koss was astounded that so much of today’s policy is politically driven, which to her is like creating a public health strategy on cancer without consulting any actual cancer researchers. She’s even more worried that said policies push us further and further away from nuanced definitions of rape and toward simplistic, limiting ones, ones that use the same parameters women like Stotland and Warner-Seefeld impose.

  I’d spent years punishing myself for my own rape, and it depressed me that we were, more than ever, encouraging women en masse to do the same. I can tell you that rape breaks us, even when we want to be strong. We carry it with us always, tucked in an invisible pocket, even when that pocket’s small and zipped shut. We don’t need anybody to tell us what we could have done better, because we’ve told ourselves thousands of times. We don’t need anybody to blame us, because we’ve done that, too. Everything the worst rape apologist has ever said, we’ve likely whispered to ourselves, alone in the dark of the night but also during a romantic candle-lit dinner, or driving to work in rush hour, or eating grilled cheese for lunch with a friend.

  Here’s what we do need: support, real prevention strategies, wellfunded research, women’s centers, and a society that values women and allows them, in turn, to value their sexuality. Rape is used as a weapon in war for a reason: it can make you never want to get up again. If we ever want to reach true gender equality, we need to engage in the mountainous task of eradicating rape, not in the far too easy, and dangerous, one of convincing women they’re making up the whole damn thing. Of course, that would also mean ensuring women have bodily autonomy, something for which we’ve always had to fight. Instead, we’re seeing a thicker and thicker veneer of “empowerment” painted on, a shiny gloss over all sorts of anti-feminist work, from the undoing of feminist work on sexual violence to the dismantling of reproductive rights and resources. My next steps would take me into the height of this rebranding: the mission to portray the anti-abortion activist as the ultimate feminist.

  8

  Teen spirit: Clinic closures, access attacks, and the pro-woman rebranding of today’s anti-abortion activists

  A week after his inauguration day, US president Donald Trump wrote a tweet in the sand: “The #MarchForLife is so important. To all of you marching—you have my full support!” That day, Vice President Mike Pence, who proudly describes himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican,” headlined the flagship March for Life rally in Washington, DC, becoming the first VP and the highest-ranking White House official to speak at the annual anti-abortion protest since its inception. Briefly, for those who may have missed this anti-abortion bulwark: the March for Life was founded in 1974, the year after Roe v. Wade, the landmark United States Supreme Court decision that asserted abortion rights, and has been held on its anniversary date ever since.

  “President Trump actually asked me to be here with you today,” Pence told the undulating crowd, the wind whipping their cheers into the air and across the Washington Monument park grounds. “He asked me to thank you for your support, for your stand for life, and for your compassion for the women and children of America.” The giant flag behind him, emblazoned with a red rose, flapped shadows over his face, but the expression as his head bobbed a yes-yes-yes beat throughout his speech was unmistakable: victory. With every sentence, a responding WOOOOOO! thundered out, spreading like contagion into the surrounding streets where thousands more waited. “Life is winning again in America,” Pence trumpeted. The first rows of the gathered crowd were young and exuberant, all pumping fists and jumping bodies. Signs rose into the air. “I am the Pro-Life Generation.” And “We Don’t Need Planned Parenthood.”

  Pence wasn’t the only speaker with political star power. At her turn on the podium, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president and Trump’s former campaign manager, echoed Pence’s promise for change. “This is a new day, a new dawn, for life,” she told the crowd, pausing to flash a toothy smile, her blond hair lacing across her face and against her blood-bright suit. A few days earlier, Conway was widely ridiculed (and, in some cases, celebrated) for coining the term “alternative facts” in an interview with Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press. But she didn’t need smudged truths now to reinforce her boasts at the march. For those who cared about women’s reproductive rights, the real truth was scary enough. Already, Trump had reinstated the Mexico City Policy—or as its critics called it, the Global Gag Rule—prohibiting foreign organizations that receive US family-planning funding from “providing counseling or referrals for abortion or advocating for access to abortion services in their country.” Though administrations had repealed and reinstated the policy before, anti-abortion supporters saw it for how it was intended: as both a signal that Trump was on their side and a promise that more “good news” was to come.

  At the close of the speeches, a triumphant rallying cry sprang up through the crowd, soaring through the city core like a bird in flight, ricocheting between the marble buildings like gunfire. “Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho!” the mass chanted. “Roe v. Wade has got to go!” For the first time in a very long time, it actually seemed possible.

  In Canada, we have our own March for Life, held in May to coincide with the federal government’s first step toward decriminalizing abortion in 1969. Back then, abortions were still only available in hospitals and only if a committee of doctors deemed pregnancy would threaten the woman’s life or health, though the move was also part of the same legislation that, at least, made contraceptives legal. When Campaign Life Coalition (CLC), the political arm of the anti-abortion movement here, launched the march in 1998, only seven hundred people showed up to protest on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. In 2015, more than twenty-five thousand marched, with an estimated 80 percent under age twenty-five. And, the next year, when an equally large and young crowd gathered, it murmured its agreement as one MP called the Liberal government “the government of death.” Behind the speakers, women, their mouths pressed into silent lines, as if paying penance, held white-on-black signs that stated: “I regret my abortion.” Footage from that day shows legions of high school and university students dotting the hill, many of them wearing black T-shirts that read #EndTheKilling—that year’s theme. Mothers pushed their children in strollers. Fathers piggybacked their toddlers on their shoulders. Dimple-kneed children held up protest signs, and others wove through the crowd. As in the US, Canada’s March for Life
is a (nuclear) family affair.

  The happy vibe is a sharp departure from the more militant and murderous history of the anti-abortion movement. National Abortion Federation (NAF) statistics from 2015 show that since July 1977, the US has experienced eleven murders, twenty-six attempted murders, forty-two bombings, and 185 arsons, plus thousands of other acts of violence and intimidation against abortion providers, clinic workers, and women seeking health care. The violence crossed the border to Canada in 1992 when Henry Morgentaler’s clinic in Toronto was firebombed in the middle of the night. In 1994, a sniper hid in the back lane of a residential neighborhood in Vancouver, BC, and shot doctor Garson Romalis while he was eating breakfast. Romalis survived the shooting. Six years later, a man stabbed Romalis as he left his clinic. Romalis survived again. Shootings in Hamilton, Ontario, and Winnipeg, Manitoba, followed. Nor is this old history: in 2015, Robert Dear Jr. fatally shot three people at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado.

  While the shootings are clearly the work of extremists, in 2015, in the aftermath of the initial “baby parts” smearing of Planned Parenthood, harassments and threats against clinics rose exponentially, according to NAF numbers. Clinic blockades nearly doubled from 2014 to 2015. Meanwhile, picketing, which had been decreasing, jumped from about 5,400 incidents in 2014 to nearly 22,000 in 2015. Hate mail and email harassment has skyrocketed to nearly 28,000 incidents, up from less than one hundred—a huge difference that’s largely the result of the NAF’s decision to respond to the resurgence by hiring an outside security firm to track online threats.

  These actions are all because feminists would like to see abortion treated, and thus protected, as a normal part of a woman’s health care regime. Though those on the other side often deride this philosophy as an “abortion on demand” method, as the fictional politician Selina Meyer (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus on the HBO show Veep) once quipped: “If men could get pregnant, you could get an abortion at an ATM.” But the idea that women might abuse their right to control their own bodies (look out, that nasty woman has too much autonomy!) has stuck. In this alternate universe, women are wanton vixens who use abortions as easy birth control fixes. What a near laughable stigma, considering the dearth of abortion access in rural Canada and the US, not to mention that surveys have repeatedly shown that women most often seek abortion after contraception failure. Unfortunately, abortion is an uncomfortable topic, making it a prime target for public-opinion rebranding. The linguistic pairing of anti-abortion and pro-women messaging is like a conversational escape hatch for those who don’t want to admit they’re limiting women’s rights, even though they are.

  As Tomris Türmen, former senior policy adviser to the Director-General of the World Health Organization and current president of the International Children’s Center, put it more than fifteen years ago in a Health and Human Rights paper:

  For families, the ability to choose family size offers increased choice as to the use of family resources, education, and employment. For communities, individual choices can result in increased options for economic and social development. An enabling environment is a necessary prerequisite for people to be able to promote and protect their own health and that of their partners, as well as for them to be able to act on the decisions they make.

  Türmen was writing in support of entrenched, worldwide views on reproductive rights and also asking her readers to consider how to move those rights forward. In doing so, she made it clear that any effort to ensure women reached their full potential must move in lockstep with reproductive rights, lest it eventually fail. Reproductive health access enables women to decide when, and if, they want to have children, a choice that can extend to more freedom in the labor force, in relationships, at home, and beyond throughout life. Or, if you’re an anti-abortion activist, it can mean the opposite of all those things: a way for society to control women.

  Though the anti-abortion movement is often seen—and sometimes dismissed—as predominately made up of the Christian religious right, many of its members are working hard to make their message connect with those outside their core. In Canada, this means broadening the movement to include everyone from Muslims to atheists. At the January 2017 march in the US, Democrats had a visible presence. (Few, however, would describe the march as either racially or religiously diverse.) For both countries, however, this bridge building means a shifting rhetoric, one structurally predicated on both a civil rights and a pro-woman mandate. This new narrative is as deliberate as calling fetuses “the unborn,” for whose civil rights anti-abortion activists mobilize. When these messages combine, we get popular slogans and hot pink signs that claim the anti-abortion movement is where one can find “real” and “true” feminists. Forget those counterfeit feminists over there demanding reproductive rights, they suggest; bona fide feminists protect women “from womb to tomb.” Outlawing abortion is seen as gifting women with the inalienable rights of life, pregnancy, and motherhood. Oh, gee, thanks. Does that come with “baby parts” gift wrap?

  Changing the approach to the conversation targets both the hard and easy gets: those who aren’t fully swayed by religious arguments and those who haven’t yet fully reconciled what it means to have reproductive control. But is it working? In Canada, the last significant piece of anti-abortion legislation, Motion 312, was put forward in 2012 and called for a re-opening of the debate on when human life begins. Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth wanted to form a committee to review the Criminal Code’s definition that “a child becomes a human being only at the moment of complete birth,” and we can easily guess to what end. Although the motion was defeated, and the Conservative-heavy government ousted a few years later, a surprising number of MPs (ninety-one), ten of them cabinet members, voted in favor of the motion. More recently, MP Cathay Wagantall introduced Bill C-225, the “Protection of Pregnant Women and Their Preborn Children Act,” a slippery-slope piece of legislation which would have made it “an offence to cause injury or death to a preborn child while committing or attempting to commit an offence against a pregnant woman.” It was defeated in its second reading (209 nays to 76 yeas), but note the lurking terminology shift: preborn.

  We can attribute these defeats, in part, to public opinion. A 2016 Ipsos poll showed that 57 percent of Canadians believe a woman should be able to have an abortion whenever she wants one, up from 36 percent in 1998. Men and women also agreed at about the same rates. Only about a quarter of Canadians believe that abortion is morally unacceptable. However, it’s interesting to note that when surveyed about what their fellow Canadians think, respondents overestimated the rigid thinking of their neighbors, guessing that 40 percent of the country deemed it unacceptable. This, perhaps, nods to the growing visibility of the anti-abortion movement here, particularly among youth.

  As promising as this Ipsos poll is, we shouldn’t confuse it with real, on-the-ground access to abortion services. Even if women wanted to treat getting an abortion as casually and easily as an ATM pit stop, we couldn’t. The overall picture is grim, despite recent access victories, most notably in the province of Prince Edward Island, which until January 2017 provided no access at all to services, not even in hospitals. For an idea of just how grim, consider what one PEI woman who tried to access abortion services in the no-go zone told authors of a 2014 report on the effects of the province’s restricted policies: “Oh, god, it takes something away from you that I don’t think men ever get taken away. A certain sense of I am my own person, I can do as I choose, as who I am, express myself fully, and everything.”

  As of fall 2016, there are only a few dozen abortion clinics across Canada, and in several provinces, including Saskatchewan and New Brunswick, an in-hospital abortion may be a woman’s only viable option, although New Brunswick women have the option of paying for their abortion at a private clinic. Yet fewer than 20 percent of hospitals in Canada offer abortion services, and the vast majority of them require at least one doctor’s referral. It’s not unheard of for women to face an additional hurdle
: doctors who refuse to give a referral because of their personal anti-abortion beliefs. What’s more, if you look at a map of where those hospitals are located, the visual truth is startling: services are largely clustered around city centers, close to the US border. The number of doctors who learn how to perform abortion is trending down: in the US, that number has plummeted more than 40 percent since the 1980s, and a similar trend is suspected in Canada, perhaps because doctors conscientiously object or because they believe, wrongly, that abortion rights are a done deal here. Already, the number of abortions in Canada has decreased to 81,897 in 2014 from 98,762 in 2007. More than 10,000 of that drop can be attributed to the number of abortions performed in hospitals.

  If we want a crystal ball view into what Canada might look like if the anti-abortion movement continues to gain ground, we need only look south, from where many activists are now taking cues. A 2016 Pew Research Center poll reveals that, similar to Canada, the majority of Americans believe in abortion rights. A full 57 percent of Americans believe that in all or most cases abortion should be legal, though only 23 percent believe in unfettered access. A May 2016 Gallup poll showed the two sides as nearly evenly split, with 47 percent of Americans calling themselves “pro-choice” and 46 percent declaring themselves “pro-life” (their words). But, thanks in large part to anti-abortion elected officials, this split is not necessarily reflected in policy. As of 2011, 89 percent of US counties had no known abortion provider, including 97 percent of non-metropolitan counties.