F-Bomb

by Lauren McKeon

  More disturbingly, in the political quest to undo Roe v. Wade, seventeen states have enacted state-mandated pre-abortion counseling and twenty-seven have enacted wait periods. In the first case, before an abortion, women are required to receive counseling on at least one of the following: the supposed link between abortion and breast cancer (five states), the ability of a fetus to feel pain (twelve states), and/or mental health effects (nine states). The waiting periods are generally twenty-four hours and the timer usually starts after the woman has received said counseling, whether it’s mandated to occur on the internet, over the phone, or in person. In addition, twenty-three states require an ultrasound before an abortion is performed, though only three of them force the woman to view the image or hear it described.

  Proponents deny the tactics are meant to bully vulnerable women into guiltily or shamefully choosing not to have an abortion. Rather, all of this is done under the guise of helping women. Proponents claim they bestow true informed choice upon women. “Whoomp, there it is!” (again): the benevolent gift of empowerment. Apologies to Tag Team (one of my favorite early ’90s groups), but, no, I don’t dig it. Though it’s difficult to determine the effects of these policies (in part because US states report abortion statistics according to where the procedure took place, not where the woman resides), a 2009 Guttmacher Institute study looked closely at Mississippi, which requires in-person counseling and waiting periods and where researchers have delved more deeply into the data. Abortion rates did indeed fall, though it doesn’t seem that a woman’s desire to control her own body dropped correspondingly. Instead, both out-of-state and second-trimester abortions rose, not exactly what those on either side of the debate would consider a success. Yet as unrestricted access stands on increasingly shaky ground, those clamoring to give it the final push into oblivion are not who we might think—nor is the message what we might expect.

  The day before the 2017 March for Life, anti-abortion activists took over the hulking Renaissance Washington, DC Downtown Hotel. After lunch, I joined about fifty activists, lawyers, law students, and others for the adjacent Law of Life Summit, designed to advance the anti-abortion movement through putting forward more anti-abortion legislation, attacking Planned Parenthood as a (supposedly) criminal organization, and encouraging more lawyers, prosecutors, and judges to embrace the mission. Besides a handful of nuns in habits and one or two priests, the staid crowd looked like what it was: a room full of affluent lawyers. Before Royce Hood, founder of the summit and a not-so-long-ago graduate of the Catholic-run Ave Maria School of Law, stepped onto the podium, the crowd milled around the coffee stations hemming the room, treading across the chocolate- and mocha-colored geometrical carpet to pump hands and clap backs. The men favored well-cut suits and Archie-style hair, while the women wore smart blazers, tasteful jewelry, and sleeveless work dresses. From what I could see, the only exceptions to this seemed to be two young women: one in a green shirt carrying a magenta sign that read “Conceived from rape/I love my life” and another in a leather motorcycle-style jacket who wore her electric violet hair in a deep side part.

  The latter woman, Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, founder of New Wave Feminists (slogan: “Badass. Prolife. Feminists.”), was on stage. As part of a panel featuring “young leaders,” she sat with two other women. One was Alexandra Swoyer, another Ave Maria graduate and a Washington Times journalist who covered the presidential campaign for Breitbart. The other was Alison Howard, the director of alliance relations at Alliance Defending Freedom. Each had their cell phone out, fingers swiping and connecting. Moments earlier, by way of introduction, the moderator, Jill Stanek, the national campaign chair of the Susan B. Anthony List, crowed, “I have surmised that you all know that we won, right?” She went on to say that the anti-abortion movement must prepare for “the most evil tricks that we can’t even possibly imagine” and called feminists “perennial losers.” She cheered what she deemed feminism’s “generational in-fighting” and its “reluctance to pass the torch”—stoking the divisiveness within the movement. “My observation of the pro-life movement is exactly the opposite. We first demonstrate the love of our young people before they were even born,” she said, emphatically if not grammatically. She was so proud of the women on stage, she beamed. “These women are so precious.”

  Herndon-De La Rosa had recently catapulted onto the national stage after New Wave Feminists applied to become a partner at the Women’s March on Washington and was, to her great initial surprise, accepted, and then, swiftly and much less to her surprise, rejected. The march pointed to its pro–abortion rights stance as the reason for its rescinded partnership, but Herndon-De La Rosa “invaded” the totally public march anyway (the audience applauded wildly at this, as if she’d infiltrated the Gestapo) and welcomed the publicity boost the controversy created. She went on to say there were no hard feelings and joked that she “needed to send them a fruit basket, because this is the best thing that’s ever happened.” I’m not sure what she said after that because the room erupted in laughter and clapping, drowning her out. A few minutes later, she won the room again when Stanek asked the panelists how they saw the movement’s future. “The future is pro-life female,” answered Herndon-De La Rosa, riffing off a popular feminist T-shirt with a similar slogan. She added that it was important for anti-abortion advocates to promote the pro-women narrative. “We’re not trying to control women or take over their bodies—that’s not it at all,” she told the crowd. “We believe that you should have control over your body from the moment it first exists.”

  Yikes.

  Moments later, after the panel ended, the audience voted to skip their bathroom break—they were too engaged to stop. Hood, who emceed the conference, his face permanently pink with excitement, encouraged attendees to step out if they needed to, directing them to the men’s room. “There are restrooms,” he added, hesitating, before jovially breaking off to responding laughter and shouts of “Good for you!” as he confessed, “I don’t know where the women’s room is.” A few minutes after that, the audience broke into another round of rowdy, gleeful laughter when John-Henry Westen, editor-in-chief of the website LifeSite: Life, Family & Culture News, jumped up on stage, holding his laptop, voice hiccupping in excitement as he interrupted Hood.

  “Breaking news! President Trump just did it again,” he cried, emphasizing “again” with Shakespearian drama. “He once AGAIN called out the mainstream media for not coming to cover the March for Life.” Giddy noises rippled through the crowd. “He’s like our best advertisement tool right now.” Westen broke off into giggles that were answered with more laughter and riotous clapping. “President Trump is also confirming—officially, sort of—that Mike Pence is going to show up tomorrow.” At this, the audience lost composure, filling the room with shouts of “Wow!” He continued quoting Trump, and the audience continued mirroring his excitement, hollering victory.

  What a fun crowd!

  The blending of traditional conservatism and new feminism made for a strange but effective mix. In one breath, we got speakers who asserted things like “mom’s the real issue”—referring to the presumed superiority of the traditional family structure and the sanctity of motherhood—and, in the next, other speakers who praised feminism and lamented what they saw as a you-can’t-sit-with-us mentality in the movement. Both, however, preached a brand of pro-women activism rooted in restriction, no matter how often it employed “dank memes,” risqué language, or Urban Outfitters–style (ahem, sorry, Pro-Life Outfitters) “All Lives Matter” shirts shilled on tattooed bodies. While it’s beyond my purview to define someone’s feminism for them, the more I became exposed to the Anti-Abortion Movement Dictionary’s meaning of feminism, the more I became convinced it wasn’t as advertised: a sort of modern feminism-for-everybody with a “pro-life” twist. Take one of New Wave Feminism’s memes, for example, a funky pink text on a black, distressed background: “We reject the failed feminism of victimhood and violence, for ourselves and for our
unborn children.” In the corresponding Instagram caption, Herndon-De La Rosa added, “The fauxminists can have #victimhood if they want it. Real #feminism is beyond that.”

  Well, now, doesn’t that sound familiar?

  Outside the conference room, teenage girls clumped together. The youth rally had ended at the same time. I was surprised to see how many of them carried signs that read “True feminists protect human life.” (The signs were hot pink, of course, a shade so ubiquitous that day it might as well have been the event’s official color.) At the bottom of the sign, a pink banner highlighted the Guiding Star Project, accompanied by #NEWfeminism.

  Curious about what, exactly, new feminism was, I hunted down the organization’s booth at the nearby trade show, where teenage girls carrying the signs were even more abundant. I scanned through a pamphlet at the booth, which was bordered by still more young girls, trying to master my poker face. “‘Old feminism,’” read the pamphlet, “is based on the idea that men and women are interchangeable and that women have been unfairly held back from achieving their potential in society because of their role as mothers in the home.” (Oh, geez.) “New Feminism,” the pamphlet explained, “views femininity through a lens of hope and joy. We honor the unique feminine genius—the way women think, perceive, and love as women—and celebrate that these strengths are compatible with the strengths of others. We know that true feminine success is measured by a woman’s love of others” [italics theirs]. Sure, fine, but I had just one question: By what bar is true masculine success measured? The pamphlet didn’t say, but I’d seen enough that day to guess.

  I wandered through the trade show, checking out the other feminist-branded booths. For all their dismissal of “old” feminism, these groups tended to promote a feminism that was—well—musty, like first-wave, nearly-a-century-gone, make-sure-you-have-mothballs-handy-because-it’s-so-old kind of old feminism. Non-profit Life Matters Journal, a publication of Rehumanize International, an organization that describes itself as “a non-partisan, non-sectarian/secular group dedicated to the cause of life,” displayed a giant mint-and-pink standing banner that asked, in lettering reminiscent of both tattoos and Pinterest, “Can you be Pro-Life and Feminist?” On it, they’d given Rosie the Riveter a makeover, rendering her face blank except for a piece of tape over her mouth that read “life,” a nod to the Silent Siege project, which calls its tactics a “divine strategy from the Lord”—a strange choice for a supposedly secular group. As the banner pointed out, early feminists, including Alice Paul, who spearheaded the battle for women’s right to vote in the US, and Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the US, largely protested abortion, at least in public. Still, as much as we owe a debt to these women, I’m not about to grab a petticoat and try to be them. I might picture myself standing on their shoulders, but it’s not in a straight and unwavering line. Rather, it’s an inverted pyramid that allows for pluralities and expansion, a rejection of this idea that it’s good to go backward.

  “I think the feminist movement has gotten off track,” Lisa Stover, the national programs coordinator for Students for Life of America, told me. “But we do have this new wave of feminists now who recognize to be pro-woman also means being pro-life.” Borrowing from the same logic lines pro–abortion rights activists use, and infusing it with the bitterly steeped tea of traditionalism, she continued: “We’re not just advocating for the child, we’re advocating for the mother as well. But I do think that women shouldn’t have to deny their fertility in order to be just like men. And no woman should be forced to choose between her child and her education, her child and her career, her child and her goals.”

  Like many of the “new pro-life generation,” Stover believed only the anti-abortion movement could, in its full support of pregnant women, allow women to “have it all”—well, at least until they ran into all the stumbling blocks (or Great Wall of China–like barriers) the rest of the feminist movement is trying to break down. “By our nature women are nurturers, we are protectors of those who we love,” she added. (If you’re wondering if these women all take the same class to learn how to robotically recall, or unify, their message, the answer is yes, and it’s called apologetics.) “As a pro-life feminist, I’m all for women’s rights,” she concluded, “but not the type of rights that don’t belong to us.”

  Even anti-abortion activists who don’t embrace the f-word are quick these days to say that they’re pro-woman. “I like to say I’m feminine. And by that I mean I embrace my femininity, and I don’t believe that being female is a hindrance to equality with men,” Stephanie Gray, the former executive director and co-founder of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, explained from her home in British Columbia. “I think the feminist movement has done something right when it fights for, for example, equal pay for equal work or the right to vote, so women have a voice just like men do. But I think the feminist women—some women of the feminist movement—have done harm by saying that women should have a right to kill their children, because no human ought to have that right. I would say that goes against the nature to be feminine, which is to celebrate the fact that we biologically get to nurture offspring in a way men never will. That’s something to be embraced and turned into and celebrated, not rejected.” Whooo boy. Gray has now struck out on her own. Her new ministry, called Love Unleashes Life, also the name of her book, aims to change the minds of the influential: current and future doctors, lawyers, and legislators.

  A few months before the 2017 US March for Life, I met with Alissa Golob, a woman in her late twenties and the former executive director of CLC (Campaign for Life) Youth. Golob attended her first anti-abortion protest at age thirteen, when her pen pal invited her to attend the Show the Truth tour, in which activists hold up posters on busy streets, intersections, and high school campuses. The images on the posters, purportedly of fetuses aborted during the first or second trimester of pregnancy, are intentionally gory and shocking. A suburban Ontario woman named Rosemary Connell started the campaign in 1997 after a trip to the US where she participated in a similar protest using the same gruesome tactics. (It’s worth mentioning here that in both Canada and the US more than 90 percent of abortions take place in the first trimester, during which, at its twelve-week maximum, the fetus is no more than two and a half inches long. Studies have shown that most women would have their abortions even earlier into gestation, when the fetus is about the size of a pencil eraser, if access—and, in the US, funding—were better.) After her first Show the Truth protest, Golob was hooked. “I think children have this innate black-and-white [view],” she had told me when I interviewed her for the first time in 2014. “Everything is black and white to them: ‘Oh, dead baby, bad.’ And that’s what you want. You wish it could be that easy for everyone.” For the next decade after that, she went every summer. When she was with CLC, she organized her own youth-led protests, decorating busy Toronto intersections with similarly horrific photos. She’s emceed the Ottawa march, driven across the country in a “No to Trudeau” van, and grown the movement’s youth contingent, marking herself as an important leader in the Canadian fight to end abortion.

  Golob’s place in the movement shifted again in early 2016, when she left CLC to co-found a youth-centric, politically savvy organization called Right Now—its mission to “nominate and elect pro-life politicians.” It does so by pushing people to vote at local nomination meetings and training volunteers to create campaign teams in ridings across the country. It took a month for us to set an interview date because she’d been traveling across the country. On the day we finally met over coffee in downtown Toronto, she hadn’t been home for most of the month; despite the fact that Canadians generally treat abortion as a hot potato, Golob had been busy.

  Dressed in a trendy black velvet dress, she often tugged thoughtfully on her choker as we talked. Golob didn’t like Justin Trudeau, but she was not particularly a fan of Trump, either, her expressive eyes rolling in exasperation when I mentione
d he was moving her cause forward in the US. She later wrote on her website that she couldn’t “fully support” him because of his “outrageous and derogatory comments toward women.” She would, however, readily take a note or two from the American movement’s tactics, and she would be thrilled if Canada’s conservative political leaders spoke with such openness and enthusiasm about their own anti-abortion convictions.

  Her frustration at the anti-abortion movement’s reticence to evolve leaked through. “The world that we live in and the society we live in right now is completely different than the society we lived in in the 1980s, when abortion was completely decriminalized, or even in the early 1970s, late ’60s when it was initially decriminalized, so we can’t keep doing the same tactics,” she said. She respected the founders of the anti-abortion movement, but felt that what may have worked in the 1970s or ’80s wouldn’t work now—not, at least, as the movement’s sole focus. “There’s social media,” she said. “There’s different shifting world views; there’s science that has changed; but most of all there’s technology. And I just don’t see that the pro-life movement is utilizing that. They’re just sticking to continuing to be loud, but not effective.” She paused before adding, “To a certain extent.” She described her position as emphatically “pro-woman” and identified two elements to the issue: “There’s the element of the humanity of the unborn, and then there’s the element of the woman and what she’s going through.” She noted that she’d spent a lot of time working in pregnancy crisis centers, which are often located near abortion clinics and actively seek to counsel women against abortion under the guise of offering “pregnancy resources.” The stories she heard convinced her that many women were coerced or felt forced into having abortions and that, because of this, the pro– abortion rights movement treated women “like they’re disposable trash, basically.” She added that “it was so completely disrespectful and sad and not doing anything to women except making us revert back to not having a say.”