If we want further evidence of how essential this pro-women messaging has become to the new generation of anti-abortion activists, consider Lia Mills. Sixteen years old when I first interviewed her in 2012 (for the piece that caused my mother and grandmother so much anguish), Mills rose to fame after posting an anti-abortion call to action on YouTube when she was twelve. Over one million views later, Mills had traveled across North America, growing her army of “life warriors” wherever she went. I’ve met seven-year-olds in sparkly pink pants who wanted to be just like her and bubbly, blond-haired teens who, after meeting Mills, started anti-abortion clubs in their own high schools. By 2014, thanks in large part to her influence, the majority of the tens of thousands who descended upon Canada’s Parliament Hill for the anti-abortion movement’s annual March protest were enthusiastic youth.
Now twenty and identifying as a pro-life feminist, Mills published her first book, An Inconvenient Life, in fall 2016. I heard from her shortly after I started interviewing pro-life feminists after she, in turn, had heard from someone—not me—that I was delving into the front lines of post-feminism, anti-feminism, and new feminism. She sent me a friendly note and an encouragement to check out her new video. Compelling as always, Mills addressed her audience in a spoken-word beat, condemning both the knee-jerk dismissal of anti-abortion activists as misogynists and what she perceived as a forced societal silence against their advocacy. “Is it at all humanly possible to be pro-women, pro-choice, and pro-life?” she asked. “Third-wave feminists will scream no. As a women and gender studies student, I would know.” In the video, Mills asserted that she supports a woman’s right to choose—her bodily autonomy—but added, in a plea for her audience to understand, “It is choice without restriction that we oppose and condemn.” She used rapists, pedophiles, and other criminals as examples of those who have pushed choice too far, into the realm of harm.
These emerging conversations about women, feminism, and abortion rights often get mired in variations of the question: Who owns feminism? Can the feminist majority really pull a Mean Girls and tell the women who call themselves pro-life feminists, “You can’t sit with us”? While the abortion debate undoubtedly exposes broad divisions between North American women, to me it feels like a lot of this is a distraction ploy. It’s the same one anti-feminists use to undermine all sorts of issues and is meant to force feminists into the exact kind of exclusionary infighting for which we’re too often ridiculed. I doubt pro-life feminism is about to completely usurp the other, more popular feminisms, not because reproductive rights are such a solidly built pillar of today’s feminism—though either side would likely lament or applaud the truth in that—but because pro-life feminism is so dang narrow. Some of it pays lip service to diversity and also condemns the objectification and hypersexualization of women and girls ( morals, ladies!), but pro-life feminism is, for the most part, solely concerned with pro-life feminism. Those who espouse the pro-life model rarely discuss or address the other structural and systemic barriers women face; I’d hazard a guess that’s because they’re wound wire-tight with reproductive rights. Instead, it often feels that, like post- and anti-feminists, they assume most women’s rights are a done deal.
But that hardly matters: their end goal isn’t really to broaden the feminist movement, it’s to broaden the anti-abortion one. As Mills said in her video, the movement is often viewed as misogynistic and limiting, with a modus operandi rooted in controlling women’s bodies. Anti-abortion feminism, in other words, may not engage in contemporary feminist issues, but rubber-stamping a newly branded “girl power” decal on its anti-abortion politics helps ease its own stigma—you know, so long as it doesn’t have to engage in the actual, challenging work of feminism. I don’t believe that, deep down, most people, anti-abortion activists included, would like to see themselves as working to send women back through time, like Marty McFly in some weirder, all-girl version of Back to the Future. If one thing unites all the many types of “Nah, I’ll pass on you, feminism” women I’ve met it’s that they sincerely believe they’re helping women. They’re convinced of it.
Whether other feminists accept their pro-life sisters or not, whether women who fight reproductive rights call themselves feminists or empowered pro-women, the anti-abortion message is the same: only we can answer womankind’s SOS call! And that message is alluring to those who ultimately want to diminish and restrict women’s rights but sure as hell don’t want to admit that’s what they’re doing (even to themselves). In their minds, not only are pro-lifers rescuing women from feminism, they’re also rescuing feminism from women. How utterly benevolent. As a result, we’re told the same old BS: we can embrace feminism so long as we keep it palatable; so long as it’s more about easy empowerment and less about the complex, exhausting, and difficult fight for real rights; so long as it, at its rotten core, promotes anti-feminism. So, no, I can’t see pro-life feminism one day dominating the feminist movement; that would imply a coexistence or even a partnership, albeit an imbalanced one. But can I see it working alongside the anti-feminist and post-feminist movements to crush modern, intersectional feminisms and the reproductive and sexual rights around which they mobilize? Well, yeah, sure, I can see that.
Next to the trade show in the hotel’s ballroom, men in plaid shirts dismantled the sound system from that afternoon’s youth-only rally. Neon lights still illuminated the stage when I peeked my head in. About an hour earlier, music from Transform DJs—“high energy, Christ-centered Electronic Dance Music”—had pounded through the floor of the room where the Law of Life Summit was held, traveling up from the anti-abortion rave. The next day, the all-male group, whose “hits” include “I See You Moving” (“Hands up! For justice! For life!”), and whose members wear shirts like “I survived Roe vs Wade/Roe vs Wade will not survive me,” opened the March for Life rally with the promise: “You are the generation that’s going to end abortion.”
I snuck in and grabbed some of the pamphlets and postcards left on a few seats. One advertised an event for that night: a mega–prayer session called One Voice DC. Another encouraged students to get behind the #StandForLife social media movement. A postcard for Stover’s organization, Students for Life, detailed how to equip the “pro-life generation,” with tips on how to get a starter activist kit and how to request one of the group’s traveling displays. I also found, among other things, a photocopied Cosmopolitan feature on Brandi Swindell, founder of Stanton Healthcare and a speaker at the youth rally.
Swindell’s Stanton Healthcare in Boise, Idaho, is a good example of how the mawkish “pro-life, pro-woman” doublespeak works. Named after suffragette and women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the center fills a huge gap in women’s health services, providing everything from ultrasounds to pregnancy testing to baby supplies, and offering no- or low-cost options. I’m not about to slam any center for offering women’s health services, particularly those that help low-income women, and I can see how Stanton’s traveling ultrasound clinic, which services rural communities and refugee populations, fulfills its purported pro-women mandate. I might have been swayed to see it like the Cosmo writer presents it: an alternative center for women who need help with their pregnancies. Might have, if not for one teensy tiny—okay, colossal—problem: that’s not its central mission. The clinic dubs itself a “life-affirming medical clinic,” which is another way of saying “pregnancy crisis center,” which is another way of saying that it’s located next to a Planned Parenthood and also includes “options counseling” and “sexual integrity consultations” on its list of services. It does not offer any form of contraception, and, of course, does not provide abortions. Stanton Healthcare’s motto is “Replace Planned Parenthood.” Its marketing material reads “We will not just COMPETE. We will not simply EXPOSE. We will not only DEFUND. It’s time to REPLACE Planned Parenthood.”
It’s this end goal of “pro-life, pro-women” and “pro-life feminism” that undermines any posturing the movement makes tow
ard what it claims are its new, sparkly women’s rights objectives. The more deeply I dug beyond the seriously cool hair, Instagram posts, and trendy T-shirts, the more at odds the anti-abortion movement’s women’s rights makeover and the wider feminist movement seemed. Feminism, after all, generally works to broaden what we can do and achieve, not restrict it. If anything, these women wanted to narrow women’s roles, honing who they were and all they could be into a strict faith-based prototype. They may have advocated individualism and independence, but they also prescribed how to do it: be yourself, but only if you color within the traditional lines of family and femininity. Of course, that’s not how they put it to the new legions of anti-abortion activists at the youth rally, or the hundreds that milled about the trade show next door. The aisle housing the Student for Life booth, its affiliate Rock for Life, and their Pro-Life Outfitters clothing arm was especially congested, looking less like a trade show and more like a rock concert merchandise table. I had to hand it to them: they knew how to market to millennials.
On the table, a Rock for Life postcard urged “Be Active. Save Babies. Get Free Stuff.” Another asked “Know someone who has had an abortion?” A friendly twentysomething handed out bright pink (of course) stickers that read “Don’t fund Planned Parenthood.” She peeled them off by the dozen and smoothed them over teens’ backpacks and shirts. The throngs of young women ogled selfie-perfect shirts. In addition to the ones I’d seen earlier, I spotted a baby blue T-shirt with the silhouette of a pregnant woman that read “#ImWithBoth.” Another, on hunter green, said “Former Embryo.” A third, the most popular according to the website, featured a little arrow, just ’cuz, and cool graphic print that read “Human Rights for All.” Teens handed over cash and clutched their purchases. Some had already thrown them over their old clothes, modeling them around the show. A lot of them carried hot pink signs with feminist slogans. “I think that this generation craves authenticity,” said Student for Life’s Stover. “We want real solutions to real problems. We don’t like abortion because it poses a quick fix to a deeper issue. It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. We want a real authentic solution.”
In many cases, this authentic solution is abstinence. The front of one Students for Life hand-out card showed a smiling white couple, college-aged, next to a heart that read, in cursive writing, “Dispelling the myths about ‘safe sex.’” On the back, one of the truths offered was “Condoms simply act as a barrier for preventing pregnancy. They are not designed to protect from STDs.” Umm. Another: “The claim that hormonal birth control will ‘prevent’ sexually transmitted diseases is scientifically false.” Well, yes. That’s something students commonly learn in (non-abstinence-based) sexual education classes. Earlier that day, I’d also picked up abstinence-based curriculum books, one of which included a real-life story from a woman named Stephanie who attributed her success and admission to Oxford University to her sobriety and virginity: “I will wear this ring on my wedding ring finger as a symbol of my promise to not have sex until I am married. One day, on my wedding night, I will give this ring to my husband as a symbol of the love I have for him…a love that is so strong it made me wait for him.” I guess pro-life feminism missed the memo on anti–slut shaming, as well as the one about working to ensure women have healthy, confident, and informed sex lives.
Another missed memo: the one about not criminalizing women who make their own choices about their own bodies. Although the new wave of anti-abortion organizations are largely against punishing women who have abortions, less is said about what would happen if—or when—they succeed in obliterating Roe v. Wade. Many laws that do punish women who have abortions are still on the books, kept in check only by Roe. Once it goes: poof! States will be able to start prosecuting under them once more, an even scarier thought considering many of them are designed to punish women who perform their own abortions, a practice that is likely to increase if anti-abortion groups also succeed in diminishing Planned Parenthood. Already, as of 2017’s March for Life, four American women had been charged for self-inducing their own abortions, three of them with drugs purchased online and one with a coat hanger. These desperate women had not visited a clinic because of cost and distance, and also, in at least one case, shame. Ultimately, Roe saved the women from serious jail time, but their cases provide a chilling glimpse into our possible future.
Drifting through the conference, I couldn’t help but wonder the same thing many leaders in the anti-abortion movement had been asking themselves, both in Canada and the US: What happens when the new faces of the anti-abortion movement can vote? What will those 80 percent of marchers in Canada, those cheering pro-life feminists, decide? I doubt we can count on them to uphold the progressive spirit of feminism—to fight against the creeping Islamophobia and rising anti-immigration sentiment in our countries, to protect LGBTQ rights, to expand Indigenous rights, or to recognize the vital importance of movements like Black Lives Matter. I’m not sure how they’ll interpret even the most basic rights for those who are not like them. The next day, at the march and outdoor rally, I drained the battery on my phone taking photos and videos of the new “pro-life generation,” still marveling at their pink signs, their ardent use of the word “feminist.” There! And there! And there! One group of young high schoolers burst from the crowd, blond and bright, their cheeks rosy from the howling wind or maybe excitement, their voices clear and loud, triumphant laughter marking the end.
“Build the wall!”
“Build the wall!”
“Build the wall!”
“Pro-life!”
THREE
The future is feminist
9
Reason for hope: The young women and girls who are giving misogyny the middle finger
When I was in Washington for the March for Life, I visited the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument. The brick house was built in 1800 on a Capitol Hill street corner and burned in the War of 1812, only to rise again, phoenix-like, in 1929 as the headquarters for the National Women’s Party and hub of the American suffrage movement. I made this side trip because I wanted to see where the first wave of feminism had flourished into being. For all its flaws (hello, white feminism, meet your deeply rooted origins), the suffrage movement eked out women’s first rights and rose defiant against its contemporary anti-feminist culture, and the irony of its status among today’s anti-feminists was not lost on me as I padded through the house, its stained-glass windows making a kaleidoscope of light. Suffragist women were jailed, beaten, and force-fed if they went on hunger strikes to protest, and still they fought for the right to vote, a right that some anti-feminist women today, nearly a century later, want to repeal. For feminists, this was the moment things started looking up; for anti-feminists, it was the moment the world went to hell.
Inside, I planted myself in front of a door-sized ornate mirror decorated with a gold decal sticker of another frame. A small plaque beneath the mirror encouraged museum goers to take a selfie: “See yourself here.” I turned that phrase over in my mind as I stood there, staring at myself, face puffy with exhaustion, hips full with a too-steady diet of chocolate, and really thought about it. What would it take for us to make a shift as seismic as women’s first emancipation? The white marble busts of Alice Paul, Alva Belmont (who, if you don’t know, was not just the pocketbook of the movement but a woman with a wicked taste in feathered hats), Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton surrounded me. I may not have wanted their feminism, but I knew all of us today owe them a debt. If they were alive, I thought, we’d likely have much to teach each other.
Turning to go upstairs, my guide, dressed in full park-ranger attire, pointed out the seven gold-tipped, spiked poles mounted to the stairwell. They, the actual poles the women used to fly their protest flags, were taller than I, their surfaces slightly knotted and dinged. “You can touch them,” the guide, Lauren, said as we walked up the steps. “Rub off a little courage.” As I walked through the house, I admired the su
ffragist women’s knack for flair and pageantry. They knew how to make a dope sign. Often in the gold, white, or purple of the movement—or sometimes all three—the huge cloth signs balanced hope and demand, shame and surety. One sign, gold on gold, read in all capitals: “Forward. Out of the darkness. Leave behind the night. Forward out of error. Forward into light.” Another, purple on white, with a scalloped and fringed edge: “Mr. President what will you do for woman suffrage?” And perhaps the most famous, some of the last words Inez Milholland Boissevain, the woman on the white horse, uttered: “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?” It was the last sign I saw, though, that sent chills skittering up my spine—the good kind of chills that told me even these early feminists knew the movement needed to keep building, building, building to thrive. Framed behind glass, a watermark cracking down its middle, it read, “The young are at the gates.”
They say you can’t go home again. But if you pester the principal enough, you can go back to high school, which is almost the same thing. Since starting this project, I’d wanted to return to my old high school gender studies class, a place that had played a formative role in my own feminism. It’s likely that, in the early 2000s, my high school was one of a handful in the entire province offering gender studies classes. That’s since changed, thanks to a group of young women called the Miss G——Project for Equity in Education. (Julie Lalonde, whom we met in chapter two, was one of its members.) The project is named after a case study in Dr. Edward H. Clarke’s 1873 book Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for Girls. Miss G——, a young woman of remarkable intellect, died, doctors declared, because she tried to compete with young men in the academic field. “Believing that woman can do what man can, for she held that faith, she strove with noble but ignorant bravery to compass man’s intellectual attainment in a man’s way, and died in the effort,” at least according to Clarke. The goal of the Miss G——Project was to implement gender studies electives in high schools across Ontario (and, ideally, spark similar curriculum changes across the country). After an eight-year advocacy and public awareness campaign, the project succeeded. In fall 2013 the first gender studies classes debuted across Ontario high schools.
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