Minnie Phan
Like many people who are raised Catholic, Jen Villavicencio grew up opposed to abortion. Her church youth group activities in Miami, Florida, centered on pro-life politics. In high school, she wrote an essay which she read to her entire class, on how “a woman’s choice ends as soon as she decides to have sex.”
Then, at age nineteen, Villavicencio needed to visit a women’s health clinic. She was there for the emergency contraceptive pill Plan B. She remembers walking through the crowd of protesters outside the clinic as they hurled insults her way and thinking, “I’m one of you! I’m on your side.”
Several years later, Villavicencio graduated from medical school to become an ob-gyn. The misinformation she grew up with—about a fetus feeling pain or moving away from abortion instruments—had all been scientifically challenged. She even volunteered as a clinic escort, her pro-life beliefs having long since faded.
In Villavicencio’s second year of residency, one of her ob-gyn patients was scheduled for an abortion. Villavicencio called the attending physician, who quickly informed Villavicencio that she didn’t do abortions.
Villavicencio felt she had been abandoned. More importantly, her patient had been abandoned. After she managed to help her twenty-one-year-old patient obtain an abortion from another physician, Villavicencio’s purpose changed: “I decided to dedicate my life to caring for the people I had so profoundly misunderstood in the first part of my life.” Today, she is an abortion provider in Michigan.
While many people with anti-abortion views consider themselves to be concerned with the sanctity of life, the anti-abortion movement, using abortion as an issue to mobilize a political base to press advantages, is creating a landscape of systemic oppression that disproportionately affects the reproductive freedoms of people of color and low-income people.
This can be seen clearly during the first six months of 2019, as anti-abortion activists and politicians, emboldened by President Donald Trump’s appointment of conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, have pushed for extreme abortion bans in numerous states.
Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, Georgia, Louisiana, and Ohio have all passed either outright bans or bans based on when an “embryonic heartbeat” can be heard—around six weeks. (This is misleading terminology, as the embryo has only just started developing a heart.) Missouri recently passed an eight-week ban. All of these laws are currently being challenged by organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood.
But it’s important to remember that the rise of all these new laws does not represent “a new, more extreme moment,” says Jennifer Holland, a historian at the University of Oklahoma who studies the rise of the pro-life movement.
Banning abortion outright 'has been the plan in the making since the movement was founded in the late 1960s.'
Over the past half-century, anti-abortion activists have sometimes allowed exceptions for abortions in the case of rape or incest, or focused on banning “late-term” abortions and certain procedures. Portions of the pro-life movement have accepted this incremental approach, a state-based strategy to hinder access to abortion with onerous requirements on providers and patients that result in clinic closures and vast “abortion deserts” across the country.
But their ultimate goal has always been overturning the right to safe, legal abortion. The new Supreme Court has convinced many on the Christian right that finally ending Roe v. Wade, or at least weakening it, is not only feasible, but inevitable. It is this direct strategy we are now seeing unfurl across the country—and there’s a reason it’s been so successful.
Joshua Edmonds became an anti-abortion activist a decade ago, as a college student in northeast Georgia; he even started a campus anti-abortion club. He’s been deeply committed to the issue ever since, becoming the executive director of the Georgia Life Alliance in 2018 and working his way up to the highest levels of the movement.
Today, Edmonds is a key architect and lobbyist behind Georgia’s 2019 abortion ban legislation, HB 481, which recognizes a fetus as a person and outlaws abortion after six weeks.
In May, Republican Governor Brian Kemp signed the bill into law, which is set to go into effect at the start of 2020. In June, the ACLU and the Georgia Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice Coalition sued the Kemp administration over the law. It is now one of several state laws in a race to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
While working on the legislation, Edmonds tells The Progressive, it was “almost surreal to know that what we were talking about was gonna put our state at the forefront of the human rights battle of the twenty-first century.”
Teddy Wilson, a research analyst at Political Research Associates, a group that investigates the right wing, notes that much has happened to beat back abortion rights over the past year. “But if [anti-abortion activists] didn’t lay the groundwork over the last decade, they wouldn’t be in a position to take such immediate advantage” of the new Supreme Court.
Over the past decade, the anti-abortion movement has expanded upon a solid activist infrastructure and invested in its legal resources and electoral viability.
In 2009, conservative religious leaders, both Protestant and Catholic, came together to release the Manhattan Declaration, which outlined three priorities for the Christian Right: advancing “religious liberty,” opposing same-sex marriage, and rolling back abortion. They’ve seen some success in regard to religious liberty, but failed in stopping the momentum of marriage equality. On the issue of abortion, Christian leaders were able to bridge divisions within the movement to set the stage for a united front against abortion.
Then came the Tea Party, which helped Republicans take over Congress and statehouses around the country in 2010. Since then, new and more reactionary elected officials have enacted hundreds of pieces of anti-abortion legislation. Anti-abortion groups have raised millions of dollars—and targeted those funds effectively. A number of national organizations, for example Americans United for Life, write model legislation and filter these bills down into state legislatures. The movement has invested in public interest law firms that help craft language that can pass Constitutional muster. Some activists and legislators have been completely open about the fact that the state bans springing up across the country are designed to reach the Supreme Court and directly challenge Roe.
Despite its seeming omnipresence on the national stage, the abortion issue as a political linchpin is relatively young.
The anti-abortion movement has worked diligently to make abortion the primary political concern for millions of Americans. They have succeeded largely by convincing huge portions of the population—including elected officials—that abortion is murder. And they’ve coopted language to this end—pro-life. Not a fetus, but a baby.
Bob Andres AP
GEORGIA-ABORTO
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signs a bill on Tuesday, May 7, 2019, prohibiting an abortion once the "fetal heartbeat" can be detected.
Movement activists, says historian Holland, have “politicized people in the most intimate spaces of their lives.” Anti-abortion activists went into churches and tied the issue directly to Christianity. They went after schools and convinced young children born after 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, that they were “survivors of the abortion holocaust.” College campuses, as in Edmonds’s case, have also been fertile grounds for pro-life radicalism.
Edmonds says he and others worked for several months to build the strongest bill possible. Lawyers helped draft the legal language. Georgia Life Alliance is the Georgia state affiliate of the anti-abortion behemoth National Right to Life, meaning the parent organization likely lent its weight through resources and support, as it has done in other states.
According to Edmonds, there was input from doctors, prosecutors, economists, and even bioethicists. Donors, including corporations and public charities, helped fund the fight as well—as they did for all abortion ban legislation. Georgia Life Alliance has racked up hundreds of thousands in contributions in recent years, including more than $137,000 from corporations and public charities identified by the investigative outlet Sludge. Governor Kemp himself was a strong supporter from the start; his backing, Edmonds says, helped ignite the process to draft the bill in the first place.
Georgia’s bill has been described as a typical six-week ban. But discreetly, it reaches further than most recently introduced anti-abortion bills.
Specifically, within the bill’s text are several provisions that extend “personhood” to a fetus.
“Modern medical science, not available decades ago, demonstrates that unborn children are a class of living, distinct persons,” the law reads. As such, they will be counted in population measures, can be claimed on state tax returns, and may require child support.
“Personhood” is a strategy that a segment of the anti-abortion right believes can end abortion by Constitutional amendment, per a weak point of the Roe decision. In the majority opinion deciding the case, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote, “If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’s right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the FourteenthAmendment.”
But not everyone in the anti-abortion movement agrees that personhood is the correct route to making abortion illegal. In fact, the personhood strategy has stumbled in recent years, as numerous proposed state constitutional amendments have failed to pass (including in Georgia). And other anti-abortion advocates view it as a dangerous distraction.
“This particular measure might sound good from a pro-life perspective, but it’s not going to save one single life,” said Sue Armacost, then the legislative director of Wisconsin Right to Life, when the state was considering a personhood amendment in 2013.
But the personhood strategy is just one among many, and Georgia Life Alliance is intent on demonstrating how they aim to care for more than just the fetus.
For example, the organization also supported legislation which banned the shackling of pregnant people while in custody, a bill sponsored by reproductive rights groups. Megan Gordon-Kane, a lobbyist for the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Atlanta, says Edmonds was instrumental in ensuring that the anti-shackling legislation passed with conservative support. While Georgia is an outlier in terms of supporting women to this extent, much of the strategy of the anti-abortion right indeed focuses on language around protecting women and families.
“Legislation should be sold as ‘pro-women’ and/or ‘consumer protection,’ ” wrote Mike Crutcher in the 1992 underground manual: Firestorm: A Guerrilla Strategy for a Pro-Life America, according to research by Carol Mason at the University of Kentucky. Reproductive rights activists “are evidently so accustomed to our arguments being focused only on the unborn baby, for us to voluntarily talk about the woman catches them totally off-guard,” Crutcher continued.
Wilson of Political Research Associates says the anti-abortion movement has “always thrown a lot of stuff against the wall to see what sticks.” Pursuing numerous restrictions at the same time has the effect of overwhelming the opposition, which is then forced to take the defensive position.
But the Georgia Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice Coalition, made up of reproductive rights groups that lobbied against the bill, adopts a reproductive justice framework defined by one of its members, SisterSong, as “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities,” as opposed to just focusing on abortion. And it notes, for instance, restrictions like those in HB 481 disproportionately affect people who are black, brown, young, LGBTQ, immigrant, or poor.
Reproductive justice proponents, Wilson says, have “done a much better job of discussing abortion in a more nuanced fashion.” After all, on the topic of abortion, “most people’s views are extremely nuanced.”
For all of the impassioned talk of life, the abortion debate often boils down to politics.
“This bill would not have passed if [Governor] Kemp hadn’t pushed for it,” says Gordon-Kane, whose Feminist Women’s Health Center is part of the statewide reproductive justice coalition. Kemp campaigned for governor on this issue, promising to “sign the toughest abortion laws in the country.” According to Gordon-Kane, Kemp personally called legislators and pressured them to support the bill.
Yet the political landscape in Georgia is shifting. Democrats are picking up seats as suburbs shift from red to blue. In last fall’s election, Democrats gained eleven seats in the Georgia House of Representatives. That means some Republicans in tenuous seats are worried about seeming outside-the-mainstream.
“Every step of the way we were hearing that there were even moderate Republicans literally begging leadership not to make them take this vote,” Gordon-Kane says. It passed the House by one vote. She believes Kemp may have knowingly sacrificed a Republican House majority in order to pass this bill.
But the members of Gordon-Kane’s coalition of reproductive rights groups were not the only ones lobbying against the final version of the law—so was Georgia Right to Life.
The group was once, as you may assume, affiliated with National Right to Life, but that partnership ended in 2014 because the Georgia group campaigned against pieces of national legislation championed by National Right to Life, since the bills contained exceptions for rape and incest. National Right to Life disavowed Georgia Right to Life and its strategy, and instead adopted Georgia Life Alliance, which Edmonds now directs, as their official state affiliate.
In what could be viewed as a microcosm of the national divide between anti-abortion activists on the best strategy to ban abortion for good, Georgia Right to Life ceased to support Georgia’s abortion ban as soon as exceptions for rape and incest were added in compromise. The group sent a letter to policymakers and threatened to campaign against any politician who voted in support of the bill.
As Edmonds tells me, no legislator they were targeting took the bait. Georgia Right to Life rescinded its endorsements of a number of anti-abortion lawmakers in early July.
Georgia Life Alliance also disagrees with exceptions for rape and incest. But, Edmonds says, “even with the exceptions, [the law] is gonna save tens of thousands of lives.”
Still, the group hopes for a future ban with no exceptions whatsoever. “We’re gonna continue working toward that goal,” he says.