Fritinancy: What we talk about when we talk about abortion

Because that’s what we’re talking about this week. Don’t worry, though: I’m going to stay in my lane. Mostly.

In case you’ve been tuning out the news, and who could blame you: On Monday, a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito for the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, confirmed what many of us have been gloomily anticipating for years: that the precedents established in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), long considered settled law, are about to be jettisoned. “The immediate impact of the ruling as drafted in February would be to end a half-century guarantee of federal constitutional protection of abortion rights and allow each state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion,” wrote Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward for Politico.

Here’s what “allowing each state to decide” can mean: Twenty-three states already have laws that could be used to restrict legal access to abortion. Under a state law passed by the Texas legislature in September 2021, abortions are prohibited after six weeks of pregnancy, before many women even know they’re pregnant. “The law empowers private citizens to sue anyone who ‘aids or abets’ a prohibited abortion,” the Texas Tribune reported in March 2022. “Those who sue could be awarded at least $10,000 if they win.”

Snitches get riches, in other words.

I believe abortion is health care. I support abortion access for anyone who needs it. But I’m not a lawyer or a legislator, so I’m using this platform to share some resources about my own specialty: language, messaging, and branding, all of which have played, and continue to play, outsize roles in the ongoing fight for safe and legal abortions.

If you need a refresher on pre-Roe America, The Janes, a new documentary coming to HBO June 8, is a good place to start. “Jane” was the code name for an underground service in Chicago that counseled women and provided abortions between 1969 and early 1973. The service’s official name was “The Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation,” Laura Kaplan writes in her 1995 book about the group, The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service. (The book was reissued in 2019 with a new preface; read an excerpt.) Obviously they would need a simpler alternative, writes Kaplan, a founding member of the group:

As the worried over the details of their work, Jenny said, “It looks like we’re creating a monster.” Lorraine answered, “Well, in that case, I like my monsters to have sweet names, like Fluffy or Jane.” Jane seemed like a good choice. No one in the group was named Jane and Jane was an everywoman’s name—plain Jane, Jane Doe, Dick and Jane. The code name Jane would protect their identities while protecting the privacy of the women contacting them. Whenever they called a woman back or left a message for her, they could say it was Jane calling.

(Remember: The “Roe” of Roe v. Wade–real name Norma McCorvey—had the full alias “Jane Roe.”)

Read more about the Jane group in this April 2019 Vanity Fair article by Clara Bingham, which provides some historical context:

Even as recently as 1969 and 1970, banks routinely refused to issue credit cards to unmarried women, and landlords regularly required women to co-sign leases with a father or husband. “Head and master” laws in many states gave a husband legal rights over his family’s property. In 1970, women comprised only 9 percent of all white-collar professions, including 7 percent of doctors and 3 percent of lawyers. Scores of smoke-filled bars and steak restaurants all over the country, from the Plaza’s Oak Room to Chicago’s Berghoff Bar, maintained “men-only” hours. One United Airlines commuter flight between the two cities allowed only male passengers.

While you’re waiting for the HBO documentary—which I saw at a San Francisco International Film Festival screening, and which I wholeheartedly recommend—you can watch its shorter predecessor, Jane: An Abortion Service (1995), which I found on Kanopy, the free streaming service provided by many public-library systems.

I have no inside info on a third “Jane” film, the feature Call Jane, which stars Sigourney Weaver, Kate Mara, and Elizabeth Banks and which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It was directed by Phyllis Nagy, and the Sundance reviews were positive. It’s scheduled to open in theaters in October 2022.

Movies that treat abortion sympathetically—or at all—are rare. Here are two good ones you can stream: Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020), about a legal but very difficult-to-access abortion, is streaming on Amazon Prime and available to rent on other platforms); the harrowing 4 Months. 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), about a very illegal, very dangerous abortion in Romania in 1987, is available to rent on multiple platforms.

Then there’s Citizen Ruth (1996), Alexander Payne’s wickedly funny satire starring Laura Dern as a paint-huffing, serially pregnant fuckup caught between opponents in the abortion wars. It’s streaming on Apple TV; rent it on Vudu or Prime.

The next season of Slate’s “Slow Burn” podcast, coming June 1, explores “the circumstances and motivations of the people who helped pave the way for the Roe decision—without necessarily understanding what the consequences of that decision would be.” Learn more.

Annalisa Merreli wrote for Quartz in January 2017 about the origins of the terms “pro-life” and pro-choice”:

The term “pro-life” was first introduced to modern language in 1960 by A. S. Neill in his book Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Childrearing (p.138), which promoted progressive parenting and citizen attitudes. Neill wrote, “no pro-life citizen would tolerate our penal code, our hangings, our punishments of homosexuals, our attitude towards bastardy.”

(“Bastardy”: there’s a word you don’t hear much these days. I’m cynical enough to expect it to make a comeback.)

After the Roe decision in January 1973, anti-abortion groups began to mobilize:

Part of their move towards organizing was deciding on what to call themselves; “pro-life” was chosen by movement leaders to put forth a positive image. The same month Roe v. Wade was decided, the first iteration of the Human Life Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment to outlaw abortions, was introduced in congress.

It was a marketing masterstroke: the word “life” has been linked to the opposition of abortion since, and being “pro-life” has come to mean specifically opposing abortion—and not, for instance, opposing war or the death penalty. The success of the label is largely due to its ability to frame the issue not as standing against something (a woman’s choice) but in favor of it (life).

It has been so successful, in fact, that the opposition party was forced to adapt directly to it: the label “pro-choice” was created specifically to counter “pro-life.”

Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel, authors of Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling, say the framing around choice was introduced by Jimmye Kimmey, the director of Association for the Study of Abortion (ASA), who in 1972 wrote a memo (pdf, p. 50) emphasizing the need “to find a phrase to counter the Right to Life slogan.” Some options Kimmey floated in the memo were “Right to Choose” and “Freedom of Conscience.” She didn’t really like either, but did say the concept of choice was preferable to that of conscience: “a woman’s conscience,” she wrote, “may well tell her abortion is wrong, but she may choose (and must have the right to choose) to have one anyway for compelling practical reasons.”

Before the “choose/choice” language took root, advocates for legal abortion often emphasized “rights” and “decisions.” Photo via Vanity Fair.

Is it time to retire the “My body, my choice” slogan? Philosopher and bioethicist Elizabeth Lamphier would rather see an emphasis on “positive liberty”: the freedom to seek care and take steps to protect health. (I’ve written about the use of “choice” in marketing, and I’m hoping to write about “choice” in abortion messaging. Stay tuned.)

Democratic leaders are getting the story wrong again, writes Rebecca Traister in The Cut. She takes aim on the “retro-pig stylings” (zing!) of Alito’s draft opinion but also calls out the “bloodless” language of Speaker Pelosi, Senate Leader Schumer, and President Biden, who have “repeatedly asked voters to trust them in a fight that, up to the very night Roe was struck down in draft form, they refused to accurately describe or perhaps even discern.”

Dr. Cynthia Greenlee on the largely forgotten history of abortion advertising—and what pro-choice advocates can learn from it: “Across the United States, billboards are visible evidence of the contentious abortion debate. Enlarged images of fetuses, cherubic babies, distressed women, and Bible verses tower over highways and byways like anti-abortion sentinels overseeing America’s culture wars.” I still see those billboards in my mostly African American part of Oakland.

Abortion opponents who are members of the Christian majority in the U.S., and especially Catholics and Evangelicals, often assert that life begins at conception; ergo, all abortion is murder. But although many in that contingent attach this belief to “Judeo-Christian values,” the Judeo side of the fence in reality has a distinctly different take. According to Jewish law (halakha), life begins when a child can take an independent breath—about nine months after conception. (At an early point in my own Reform Jewish education I remember learning that Judaism permitted abortion because the life of the mother, not the fetus, was always the priority. Christians seem to see it the other way around, but do correct me if I have this wrong.) A Twitter thread from Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg lays it out clearly (click through for the entire thread). So I ask you: Why are the rights of Jews (and Muslims, whose abortion theology is similar to Judaism’s) being ignored in this debate? Never mind; I know the answer.

To start: Jewish law allows for abortion, and does not hold that a fetus is a person at conception. For the first 40 days of gestation, a fetus is considered “mere fluid” (Talmud Yevamot 69b), and the fetus is regarded as part of the mother for the duration of the pregnancy.
— Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (@TheRaDR) May 7, 2019

Speaking of religion, Cynthia Gorney’s superbly researched and beautifully written Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars (1998) is still essential reading. It was published after the murders of abortion doctors David Gunn and Barnett Slepian but before the murder of Dr. George Tiller, all by “pro-life” fanatics, in case you need some historical reference. (Disclaimer: Cynthia Gorney is an acquaintance and a fellow alum of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. I also count among my acquaintances a doctor who worked closely with Tiller and continues to perform late-term abortions at extreme personal risk.)

Justice Alito “is surprised that there is so little written about abortion in a four-thousand-word document crafted by fifty-five men in 1787,” writes Jill Lepore in the New Yorker. “As it happens, there is also nothing at all in that document, which sets out fundamental law, about pregnancy, uteruses, vaginas, fetuses, placentas, menstrual blood, breasts, or breast milk. There is nothing in that document about women at all. Most consequentially, there is nothing in that document—or in the circumstances under which it was written—that suggests its authors imagined women as part of the political community embraced by the phrase ‘We the People.’ There were no women among the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. There were no women among the hundreds of people who participated in ratifying conventions in the states. There were no women judges. There were no women legislators. At the time, women could neither hold office nor run for office, and, except in New Jersey, and then only fleetingly, women could not vote. Legally, most women did not exist as persons.”

“What did you expect”? asks Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg:

The good news is, we know how this ends. Abortion is legal in Spain. It is legal in Ireland, and in Mexico, and other countries where once it was the fiercest taboo. It will be legal here, too, eventually. The past that red staters claw at was never there, and we are never going back. Black people aren’t going to start stepping off the sidewalk, touching their hats, at the approach of a white person. American history isn’t going to become a thrilling narrative of undiluted glory. And women aren’t being forced pregnant back into the kitchen.

Finally: You can support the organizations that are supporting abortion access by donating to the National Network of Abortion Funds.