On June 24th, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court passed a decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, that revoked the constitutional right to abortion established in the 1973 Supreme Court decision “Roe v. Wade” and the 1992 decision Planned Parenthood of Southeast Pennsylvania v. Casey that affirmed Roe. This is a look at some of the political tactics that led to the Dobbs decision, and that may lead us out of it. These tactics can be read or arranged in any order.
Tactic:
socks
At our university, you pass through public space to private space and back into public space at a rate akin to how, in some coastal areas, you pass often from land to water and back. The private space is regulated by the university, which owns more and more land here and pays no taxes; the public space is owned by the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rules differ for each; you can ride your bicycle on the public land but not on the university quads. And, apropos to this story, you can set up a soapbox on public land, but not on the university, at least not without permission of the campus police.
When I had just started graduate school in 2017, I was walking from one classroom to another, crossing a small strip of public land, when I passed a group of protestors. I no longer remember what they said, nor their number (though the group was small) but the item they were flanking was memorable: a large transparent bin, perhaps the size of a refrigerator, filled with thousands of baby socks.
Tactic:
ignorance is bliss
This was in 2017, the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency; if you had told me then that in five years’ time there would no longer be a federal right to abortion, I would not have believed you. So many people on the American left made, over the course of the forty-nine years in which “Roe v. Wade” stood, a common mistake in thinking that the tactics of such anti-abortion activists did not really matter. We believed these tactics were to be encountered regularly, particularly outside clinics and sporadically in public spaces like these; we believed these tactics might complicate the right to abortion, in some places; we believed these tactics could not rescind that right.
Tactic:
more socks
Looking back now, I see that the haul of baby socks I walked by in 2017 was just a tiny piece of a much larger operation. In April 2017, a few months before, anti-abortion activists had piled nearly 200,000 baby socks outside the U.S. Capitol (the same building that would soon be the site of a coup attempt, another event that a few years before would have seemed unfathomable). They were protesting the abortions performed each year by Planned Parenthood. The protest was a massive operation, involving a pink-and-blue box truck. As one of the students leading the event noted, each and every sock had to go through security screening. The aim of the socks, obviously, was to pluck at a similar emotional chord to a six-word story that sometimes makes the rounds: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”— to conjure up life after unrealized life.
Tactic:
hashtag
The sock protestors also had a hashtag: #SockittoPP. It was barely used, because these networks are not very present online, which is part of how the left underestimated them. But searching back now, one of the images is haunting: a few tiny socks, floating in a sink.
Tactic:
shifting the balance of the Court
Just around the corner from the U.S. Capitol stands the Supreme Court, to which Donald Trump appointed three conservative justices— Neil Gorsuch in 2017, Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, and Amy Coney Barrett in 2020. This was the most appointees to the court any president had been able to appoint in one term since Richard Nixon in 1970-1972. These justices, who had stated in their job interviews that they would not seek to overturn Roe, did so anyway.
Tactic:
connecting the dots
In 2017 I felt mildly unsettled by the sock protest on campus. I had just started graduate school and was being sexually harassed by the famous professor who was my advisor, and both the sexual harassment and anti-abortion protestors underscored for me the existence of people determined to make women into a category of people to whom things happen, rather than people who get to choose what happens to us. The continual convergence of issues of reproductive freedom and issues of sexual violence repeatedly demonstrate this point. It is particularly galling, for example, that the American right, which spent much of Trump’s term propounding conspiracy theories about child sex-trafficking (see: Pizzagate, see: Wayfair), now proceeds to oppose abortion on the grounds of rape and incest, including for the children who need it. The right’s obsession with children does not extend to pregnant children, because pregnant children, to them, are definitionally women.
Tactic:
the logic of the crisis pregnancy center,
writ large
The logic of the so-called crisis pregnancy center— centers that appear to provide reproductive health care but in fact exist to direct people away from contraception and abortion— is now coming to pervade the health care system more broadly. There is the assumption that a patient’s capacity to bear children ought to supersede other bodily processes and needs. This has long happened, of course; people with conditions like endometriosis for which hysterectomy can bring relief have often been denied that relief on the grounds that they ought to prioritize future fertility above present pain. Trans women are encouraged to bank sperm before hormone therapy or surgery; trans men to freeze eggs. But the reach of these tactics has expanded with Dobbs— many women have been taken off of life-saving medications like methotrexate, which is used for many autoimmune conditions, because they can have an abortifacient effect.
Tactic:
the walling-off of abortion care from other forms
of health care
There is a fine line between pregnancy and miscarriage care and abortion care: one can go suddenly from needing one of these forms of health care to needing another. The vast majority of people who end up needing the abortions conservatives like to call “late term” are women who want to be pregnant, who had been planning on carrying to term, who learn they cannot and then have to seek abortion care. Yet the healthcare system often separates these functions.
In 2012 I had had a miscarriage which was, like the pregnancy that preceded it, unexpected. In between those two events I had scheduled an abortion, but miscarried before the appointment. In retrospect I am struck by how each of these events— the pregnancy, the abortion appointment, the miscarriage— was coordinated with a different health care facility (a campus health clinic, a Planned Parenthood, a local hospital), as though these were not all part of the same process.
Tactic:
abortion for work
As important to examine as the policies and processes that promote pregnancy above all else are the places and times where pregnancy feels and seems impossible. When I was pregnant as an undergraduate and asked out of curiosity, at my campus health center, what it would look like to keep the baby, the nurse responded: “In my forty years working here I’m not sure if we’ve had anyone do that.” To me at the time this made sense: students needed to study, to earn a living, and only then could we consider parenthood. Of course my fellow students and I invariably chose abortion. We had been training only for work, and were unprepared to take on a form of work so much about love. Today I see this more as aligned with a central trick of the American economy, which is the idea that your remunerative work ought to be the source of most of your satisfaction.
Tactic:
the impossibility of parenting
For many people I know, parenthood is something they would like to choose, and yet cannot. They may enter into it only with a great deal of planning and trepidation. The reasons for this are often material. Take child care: Massachusetts has the highest child-care costs in the country, averaging about $21,000 annually for an infant. A single parent with one child can easily expect to spend the majority of their income on child care. That is, if they can even find it — demand for childcare outstretches supply by at least 30% here.
Tactic:
language
For many years, anti-abortion activists were widely called “pro-life” and their opponents “pro-choice.” Now the former are called, more and more, “anti-choice,” and the results of their labors “forced birth.” The terminology change, for those who use it, reflects a recognition that anti-choice activists do not promote life so much as complicate, compromise, and endanger the lives of those already living in favor of lives that have just begun or do not even exist yet. The failure of many anti-
choice activists to support policies that encourage human flourishing outside of the womb has encouraged the pivot as well. In Wisconsin, an American state famous for its cheese production, protesters have been editing anti-abortion signs reading “Choose Life” so that they say “Cheese Life.”
Tactic:
building a world where people feel they can actually choose their lives
The point is that, as much as we can ever know in advance how we will feel about these things, we should live in a world where we feel free to choose to be parents or not. Life should come out of situations where sex and parenting are freely given and chosen. Anti-abortion activists instead capitalize on the realities that make parenting seem so impossible for so many people. Rather than creating a world where people can freely choose parenthood, a bet is made: if birth is forced, the joys of that new life will come to be part of the justification for living in the world we do. This world is still manageable and good, we say, looking at a sweet baby, as our choices, salaries, lifespans, and horizons get smaller and smaller year after year. Just because life continues to generate life does not mean life is thriving.
by Lilia Kilburn
Lilia Kilburn writes and gardens from her home of
Somerville, Massachusetts.