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Interview
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Reproductive Rights

Radical Acts of Care: From Underground Abortions to Militant Clinic Defense

“There are deep lessons here about comradery,” says author Angela Hume.

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Part of the Series

“When you’re engaged in political work that is as embodied and vulnerable, uncharted and courageous as self-help, you’re really harnessing something like a new world building power,” says Deep Care author Angela Hume. In this episode, Hume and host Kelly Hayes discuss the work of abortion self-help activists who provided illegal abortions in the 1970s, as well as militant clinic defenders, who repelled right-wing efforts to blockade abortion clinics in the ’80s and ’90s. As Hume says, “There are deep lessons here about comradery, about fellowship, about friendship, about relationality that we can learn from today, and that can inspire us to do good work together.”

Music by Son Monarcas & David Celeste

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about abortion, the history of abortion self-help, clinic defense, and the kind of community-building we need to defend our bodily autonomy in these times. I will be talking with Angela Hume, a feminist historian, critic and poet, and the author of Deep Care: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open. Deep Care chronicles the work of small groups of feminist activists in the San Francisco Bay Area who met regularly in the 1970s to study anatomy, practice pelvic exams on each other, and share knowledge about menstrual extraction, which can serve as a form of abortion. After abortion became legal in the United States in 1973, some of these activists continued to hone and practice their skills outside the clinical system. Some were involved in the creation of independent health clinics. Many also navigated a turbulent era of abortion defense, when right-wingers targeted abortion clinics with blockades and bombings, and assassinated abortion providers. Lessons about how people came together to learn and organize outside the law, and how activists struggled to create as much safety as possible, during an era when clinics were under siege, could not be more relevant right now.

Twenty-two states currently have abortion bans in effect, and many abortion funds are struggling, or even pausing their operations, amid surging requests for assistance and declining donations. Obviously, there are a lot of incredible, committed people waging fights for reproductive justice in the U.S., but I think it’s clear that we do not have the mass movement for abortion access that our current situation demands. I think this episode offers us an opportunity to think about what we might need to cultivate in order to expand and strengthen this essential front of struggle.

If you appreciate this episode, and you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can subscribe to Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to the podcast on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help. As a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you, so thanks for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.

[musical interlude]

KH: Angela Hume, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Angela Hume: Thanks, Kelly. It’s so good to be here. Thank you for having me.

KH: How are you doing today?

AH: Thanks for asking. I am trying to really pay attention to what’s happening right now. I’m doing what I can to stay steady and stay in close touch with my friends. I’m okay. How are you?

KH: I am a bit of a mess, but I am staying busy and staying constructive.

AH: Yes, yes. Well, thank you for all of the work that you’re doing. It’s incredible.

KH: And you as well. Can you tell us a bit about this book and why you chose to write it? It’s not the book you set out to write in the beginning, is it?

AH: Yes, yes, that is correct. And I’m happy to tell you a bit about my book, Deep Care: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open. And I worry that this might be a bit of a long answer, but I want to answer the questions that you asked. So, I’ll do my best. My book, Deep Care, is a movement history that spans nearly four decades. It’s the story of a radical independent abortion clinic in Oakland, California, and it’s also the story of a long-running abortion underground and militant clinic defense coalition. And as I explained in the book, these three arms of the radical abortion defense movement in the San Francisco Bay Area were interconnected, and this interconnection and collaboration was what made the movement so groundbreaking. And I would say that Deep Care is most fundamentally a book about building community power from the inside.

So, I noticed that you wrote about this recently in your great piece at your blog called “Take a Deep Breath and Think About What You Need To Do,” which is such a great title. And I made a note about it. In it you wrote, “We need to concern ourselves with making connections, forming sustainable bonds and learning how to take meaningful action together.” And that’s really what Deep Care is about, how people have done this in the past. So, it started out for me as a research project about Women’s Choice Clinic in Oakland, an indie clinic that provided radical abortion and reproductive health care for astonishingly almost 40 years. And over time, as I was interviewing activists about the work they had done, most of whom had never before really come forward about this work, the project just kept expanding and deepening. And as it was happening, it felt very dramatic.

Like with every interview I conducted, it was like the plot kept revealing itself. And I’m a storyteller. I have a creative writing background. So, at a certain point I realized I was probably writing a book, and it was then that I started to imagine how I would plot it out. And meanwhile, abortion law was just imploding. And I sensed that what the activists were choosing to share was this really critical survival history and information about how everyday revolutionaries, to go back to your words, “concerned themselves with making connections, forming sustainable bonds, and learning how to take meaningful action together.” And it wasn’t until a couple of years into the research that some of the activists decided that it was time to come forward about the underground arm of their work. And what they told me was that from the early 1970s into the 2000s during years when abortion was constitutionally protected, they had learned and practiced gynecology and abortion outside the walls of clinics like in living rooms and bedrooms.

So, in their underground self-help groups, what they called self-help groups, they learned things like how to track their cycles and their fertility, how to examine their cervixes, how to do pelvic exams, how to size the uterus. And critically, these were the steps in learning how to perform what’s called manual vacuum aspiration abortion. So, it’s true that I didn’t set out to write a book about abortion self-help and clinic defense. In the 2000s, I had been writing a book about feminist and queer poets who were also health activists like Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, Pat Parker and some others. And to my mind, it was going to be an academic book about poetry. And it was and is really compelling to me that these poets wrote about how their physical environments had made them chronically ill and how they wanted to imagine what feminist medicine could look like.

And in the process I learned that Pat Parker, who was a Black lesbian feminist revolutionary and poet, had worked at Women’s Choice Clinic. So, I started researching the clinic and I learned that it was part of a network of feminist women’s health centers and abortion clinics that grew out of a West Coast-led gynecological self-help movement as they termed it. And I thought to myself, this history is just amazing. And I started to see that this was a really critical history that largely had not been told. So, I made studying this history the center of my life for the next five plus years. I went to the libraries and dug around in the archives. I tracked down Lindsay Comey, the clinic’s director for three decades. And I started doing oral histories with people who’d worked at Women’s Choice Clinic. And in all, I interviewed probably dozens of activists who included not only clinic workers, but underground abortion workers and clinic defenders, some of the people I interviewed many times over years.

There were stretches of time when not a day went by that I wasn’t in conversation with someone for the book. It just completely took over my life. And sometimes the activists had boxes of literature and ephemera from the work that they did, like photos, newsletters, pamphlets, manuals, zines that they had created, news clippings and all sorts of other stuff. So, one of the stories that I tell in Deep Care is the story of encountering what I like to think of as bedroom closet archives. To write the book, I had to follow people into their bedrooms and help them pull boxes of movement records and ephemera down from the top shelves of closets. And that’s how intimate the research sometimes was. I would say that as someone deeply interested in the politics of the body and what it means to move in the world as a feminized body and also as someone who loves to talk to and learn from movement elders about their radical political work, writing this book, writing Deep Care felt like the opportunity of a lifetime. And once that opportunity presented itself, I didn’t hesitate. I was just all in 100%.

KH: I find this book so valuable because like so many people, my knowledge of illicit abortion care in the pre-Roe era was mostly limited to the Jane Collective. Obviously I knew that other people had provided abortion care outside the law in the U.S., but I had never accessed those histories. I also knew nothing about the abortion self-help work that went on after Roe in the United States. Can you talk a bit about what it meant to you and to the people you interviewed to bring some of these histories into the realm of public knowledge?

AH: Thanks so much for that question. Yes, absolutely. Writing Deep Care was a profound experience. The entire experience of writing the book felt like an answer to a question that so many highly relational political people are, I think always asking, which is how do you build and nourish the types of relationships that will strengthen your community from the inside? And part of the answer that the history gave me was that you do the relationships over time. Community power takes time, and that’s a truth that’s a little bit hard to hear given where we are today as we face political emergency after political emergency, but it is the truth. So, the experience of writing Deep Care was profound and it came like an answer, and sometimes the answers were hard to hear and sometimes the answers felt like more questions. Bringing some of these histories into the realm of public knowledge, as you say, histories of independent abortion clinic work, of underground manual vacuum aspiration, of militant clinic defense against white Christian fascism.

What was that like? Well, it was an honor. It was the most intensive political study experience I’d ever had. Maybe the first time I’d really studied politics in a serious way. And I’m someone who’s been reading political theory and studying political movement for a while. There’s this moment sort of toward the beginning of the book where I wrote lovingly of the activists I worked with for the book. I’ll just read you the sentence. “They taught me about gardening, backpacking, raising chickens and goats, parenting, aging, caring for elders. They also taught me about feminist conversation, friendship, bias, discomfort, conflict, communication, group work, intimacy, play, grief, transition, stepping back, stepping up, organizing, communism, anarchism, revolution. Writing this book has been an immersive shattering experience, the greatest privilege of my life.”

So, I can’t know what it means to the activists in the book that I wrote the book, but I did become very close to a few of them along the way. And I think they were glad I wrote it. Some of them told me that they had thought about writing about their abortion work themselves, but many had become nurses or doctors and they weren’t professional writers and many had become parents and caregivers too. And of course they’d become invested in other political projects over the years as well. So, in short, they were just very, very busy people. So, I think people were glad that someone a little younger, someone energized, resourceful, available, and someone who could write came along and took the time to assemble their stories and archives into a book. In the end, I think the book was energizing for some of the activists.

KH: That’s beautiful to hear. Can you tell us a bit about the groups whose work you documented in the book in terms of providing abortion self-help? What did some of that work look like and how did it evolve?

AH: Yes, I can absolutely speak to that question. I’ll start by saying that when we hear the word self-help, we tend to think of the popular culture idea, which is of course a neoliberal idea that you can sort of self-actualize through your individual consumer choices. And that’s not the self-help that I’m talking about in Deep Care. The self-help that I’m talking about is a radical political movement and philosophy. In the seventies, lay people who worked at feminist women’s health centers like the Oakland Women’s Choice Clinic and laypeople who worked outside of clinics in underground small groups called their feminist health education work self-help. And for them, all of this work fell under the umbrella of self-help. The movement notably was always from the beginning, working class-led, and it was influenced by left movements of the sixties, like civil rights, feminist consciousness raising, Black radicalism and the Black Panther Party and Black feminism fundamentally informed the self-help movement from the very beginning.

A lot of the book is about Black feminist self-help philosophy. What does that mean? Well, in a nutshell, intimacy is political and political work is never not personal. And some of the activists I write about were laypeople who got trained in how to provide gynecological and abortion care at the licensed clinic in Oakland that I’ve been talking about, Women’s Choice. And some of the activists were lay people who learned and practiced gynecology and abortion outside the clinic once again. So, in their self-help groups, people learned how to do suction abortions. And what they used to perform these abortions was a simple suction device that they put together themselves with a cannula, some tubing, a syringe, and a mason jar. And they call the procedure menstrual extraction, which is a phrase that I think registers the idea that we have the right to bleed, we have the right to have our period, even if that means we have to take it out ourselves.

So, to get good at vacuum aspiration or menstrual extraction, the self-help groups would meet regularly to practice suctioning out the contents of their non-pregnant uteruses. And eventually they became proficient in performing early manual section abortions for each other and for people in the community who they were connected to. And over the decades, they made all sorts of tweaks to their processes and procedures. They developed, for example, sophisticated security protocols and even secret codes that they used to communicate about their work. And I get into some detail about what these protocols and secret codes looked like in the book. There was one cohort of self helpers in particular who used this kind of elaborate Italian dinner code to talk about all of the different actions that they would do. Eventually some groups started using what is called a brake bleeder, as in the mechanics tool that is used to bleed the brakes of a car.

They used a brake bleeder as a mechanism to create more efficient suction. And then later on, still some self helpers learned how to use the Ipas manual vacuum aspirator, which is the industrial manufactured manual aspiration device used all around the world in places where there is not sufficient clinic infrastructure. Some people learned how to use the Ipas MVA as well. And self-help practices looked different depending on where people were located, in a rural place, in an urban place, in proximity to an abortion clinic or not.

Self-help looks different depending on what kinds of training they had access to and what types of medical supplies they could access from where they were. Once abortion with pills became an option, some self helpers also worked on helping people access pills as well. So, I do realize that some people might be thinking like, what? And there was an abortion underground after Roe. And that makes sense because most people don’t know about the self-help movement that there was an underground during the years that Roe stood. That is to say during years that abortion was a constitutionally protected right. But for many years, activists did teach and practice abortion outside of clinics.

KH: I think some people may wonder why activists performed abortions outside the law during the years when abortion was legal throughout the United States. Can you talk about why some groups continued to perform abortions outside of a clinical setting after abortion became legal?

AH: Yeah, absolutely. For a long time before the Dobbs decision of 2022, which reversed the decision in Roe making abortion a constitutional right, before Dobbs abortion was legal nationwide. But even so, it was not necessarily accessible. And as the people I interviewed argued, we can’t rely on the state or capitalism to take care of us. And because they really believed this, self helpers felt very strongly that they needed to work outside of the law. And I’ll give you just a bit more context. After Congress passed what’s called the Hyde Amendment in 1977, the federal government no longer funded abortion for people on Medicaid. So, while abortion was constitutionally protected, to access it you had to have good insurance and also the resources to get yourself to a clinic. And in the decades since the passage of Hyde, we’ve seen what has been the systematic dismantling of access by the right, in part through the forced closure of clinics all around the country.

And for many activists I talked to, a Supreme Court decision that came down in 1989 called Webster v Reproductive Health Services marked the beginning of the end of Roe. So, in this decision in 1989, the Webster decision, the Supreme Court said that ideas about trimesters and viability were not in the constitution, and therefore there was no reason that the government shouldn’t have an interest in protecting “potential human life” throughout pregnancy. And this made it possible for individual states to ratchet up their restriction of abortion. So, this was the moment in 1989 when underground self health groups in the San Francisco Bay Area really started to shift into high gear.

They started to expand their network and really, I would say skill up. They really did believe that Roe would go down and they were very radical in their politics. And some of them told me that they wanted to be ready for the revolution. They really believed in community-based solutions. And then for some self helpers working outside the law wasn’t so much practical as it was philosophical. For them the fundamental idea behind abortion self-help is that early abortion is a normal and a natural process. And that small groups of lay people trained in how to do sterile manual vacuum aspiration can easily do it. So, for self helpers saying, we’re going to do this ourselves was about saying no to the states and the medical industry’s surveillance and control of a process that they really believed was intimately their own.

KH: That sense of ownership is really inspiring. And as recent history has made clear, we really do need to take ownership of knowledge and skills that can allow us to maintain our autonomy. Because, as we have seen, legal rights can be swept away at any time.

Your book also documents the height of the clinic defense movement when activists defending abortion access confronted waves of anti-abortion protesters who were determined to shut down abortion clinics. For people who didn’t live through this particular moment, it might be hard to fathom the severity of what groups like Operation Rescue were doing in the 80s and the early 90s. Can you talk about what this moment of highly organized struggle looked like on both sides?

AH: Sure. Starting in the 1980s, some activists focused their efforts on defending patients against anti-abortion extremists or “antis” as they called them at clinic doors. And then after the federal government made it a crime to block someone from accessing a clinic through the FACE Act or Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act in 1994, activists focused themselves on refining their clinic escorting techniques and also started new clinic escorting programs. So, clinic defense developed out of an era of anti-abortion harassment and terrorism that started in the 1980s. And this terrorism only intensified in the 1990s. And what had happened was that the new right that elected Ronald Reagan in 1981 had worked throughout the 1970s to basically recruit and sort of fold free market conservatives, fiscal conservatives and white Christians into a single powerful base. And by the 1980s, what was the Republican anti-welfare campaign had come to imply an anti-abortion stance.

And I think this is exemplified by the Hyde Amendment once again, which prohibited federal funding for abortion. So, basically the abortion issue was the linchpin of the right’s strategy to consolidate its base. And the strategy was very effective in terms of amassing a very large base. An organization called Operation Rescue, founded by Randall Terry came on the scene in 1986, and Operation Rescue galvanized its members to descend en masse upon abortion clinics to block them and shut them down. So, to give you a sense of what this looked like at its height, in the summer of 1991 in Wichita, Kansas, Operation Rescue deployed 25,000 anti-abortion protestors to the city to shut down area clinics. And in the sort of greater San Francisco Bay Area clinic defenders in response to what was happening, formed a coalition that they called Bay Area Coalition Against Operation Rescue or BACAOR to stop these clinic blockades.

And it was this really diverse and largely effective anti-fascist coalition made up of not only abortion workers from Women’s Choice Clinic, but socialists, communists, anarchists, anti-imperialists, queer folks, labor organizers and trade unionists among others too. And I tell a detailed story of how BACAOR came to be in Deep Care. BACAOR would sometimes face off with hundreds of operation rescue protestors at clinic doors and clinic defense was radicalizing for the activists who did it. One longtime clinic defender named Laura Whitey talked a lot to me about the power of being on the defense line, using her physical body to defend other people and about learning that she could defend other people. And she told me, “There you were holding a clinic defense board or shoving an anti away from a door or helping carry a woman over the heads of people into the clinic. It led me to see that I was part of building an autonomous community that was not dependent on the existing power structures and building power from within.”

And another longtime clinic defender, whose pseudonym in Deep Care is Danny Rose, told me about how clinic defense taught them that “What’s required of you in this moment is to take responsibility and get out there and be a part of leading the resistance. We’re all leading this.” And I think that is to say everyone gets to and really must be a leader. And this is in some ways such a starkly different organizing politics than what we often see today where organizers just agonize over questions about leadership like who should be in leadership and are we uplifting the right identities and voices, et cetera, et cetera. So, BACAOR allowed for political differences within coalition, notably, and fought to maintain collective processes. And they also made space for political change and evolution within membership in the interest of maintaining a coalition that could really stand up to white Christian fascism. And in the story of BACAOR there are powerful lessons for us today, I do believe, in a time when the left is just having such a difficult time coming together.

KH: Speaking of lessons that are relevant to our times, your book also documents how activists defending abortion access grappled with surges in right-wing violence. In Deep Care, the 1990s are characterized as “the war years” due to the extremity of violence perpetrated against clinics and abortion care providers. Reading that section was especially chilling, given that we are living through another moment of right-wing escalation. What lessons can we draw from what people experienced during that time?

AH: It’s a great question. And it was the Women’s Choice Clinic longtime director Lindsay Comey, who characterized the 1990s as the war years to me. And Lindsay was a Navy corpsman. She was a veteran, so she knew what war looked like. She had been to war. In the 1990s independent abortion clinics were facing threats on multiple fronts. And just to give you an example of what this looked like, in the first half of 1994, more than half of U.S. abortion clinics experienced death threats, stalkings, bombings, invasions, arsons, and or blockades. And by the end of 1994, there had been four murders and eight attempted murders of abortion workers. And then in 1994 in this climate, the Federal FACE Act, or once again Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act was passed. And the FACE Act made it a federal crime to block a clinic’s entrance. And also around that time, the feds intervened by basically putting cops from local police to federal marshals to FBI agents in and around clinics, basically requiring health workers to cooperate with them.

So, abortion clinics were suddenly these highly militarized spaces, which as you can imagine, was very difficult for providers who were trying to provide feminist abortion care. Also, at that time, clinics were facing skyrocketing insurance premiums and donations were diminishing because there was a liberal administration in place. Clinton had been elected. And then additionally, there was the rise of neoliberal managed care. And without getting too much into the weeds, the state’s Medi-Cal or Medicaid program, under managed care, meant more administrative labor for clinic workers on top of smaller reimbursements for services at the very same time. So, clinics were really struggling under all of these new and sort of intensifying pressures. And one longtime Women’s Choice Clinic worker named Melissa Moffitt had this to say to me, she said, “We were hypervigilant, the antis were okay with the idea of killing people who were doing abortions. They also did things like publicized providers’ home addresses. It was really scary.”

Lindsay also told me about receiving hate mail on the job. She emphasized the difficulty that was created by the increasing liability insurance premium hikes. And she talked about how when she was on the job, she would find herself asking, is today the day that I’m going to have to climb out on the fire ladder or wondering to herself, should she really be wearing a bulletproof vest? And she described this as “life under occupation.” She said, “The war was at your door.”

And she also told me about how dealing with the war on abortion providers really took its toll on reproductive health care workers. In her words, “The burnout was atrocious and a lot of people could not handle it and left the clinic.” And Lindsay told me that for those people who walked away, they were walking away from something really intense. And she said, “I think it’s always okay to say I have to leave the war.” So, I think a lesson, I mean, there’s so many lessons in this history for us today, but I think one lesson to keep in mind is that political struggle can be exhausting. And sometimes we have to step back and rest, and sometimes we might even have to leave and we need to support each other in taking the time away that we need.

KH: I think that’s a deeply important lesson. We need rest and we need to restore ourselves. Recently, I have heard repeatedly from some people that they’re troubled by discussions about rest and renewal, because the struggle doesn’t stop, and not everyone gets to rest in the face of injustice. As I told someone recently, who voiced those concerns, I am deeply troubled that some people are not allowed any rest or relief, just as I am deeply troubled that some people are being deprived of food and are literally starving as a result. It’s heartbreaking to know that kind of deprivation is occuring, but I also know that I need to eat. Personally, I would no longer be involved with movement work at all if I hadn’t learned to pause when my body and mind need to pause. I’m not sure I would be alive if I hadn’t learned that, because I have overworked myself in really destructive ways over the years, at different times. And I had to learn that, not only was that not sustainable, for my health and continued existence, but that I didn’t want to model disposability that way. We learn through imitation all the time, and I did not want to model the idea that we make our movements stronger by destroying ourselves, because the truth is that we make our enemies stronger by destroying ourselves. We make our movements stronger by caring for ourselves and each other, so we can stay in the fight. We have to be invested in each other and to understand that we are more than our productivity. That’s part of what sets us apart from this death-making culture in the first place. We prioritize each other’s survival and collective well-being. This system does not. That distinction is meaningful.

I am also thinking about the violence you just described and how people grappled with those threats. Political violence has been a hot topic lately, but what that usually means in media conversations is violence against members of the ruling class. Because under the norms of this system, those people are supposed to be exempt from violence, including gun violence, for example. When pundits talk about political violence, they aren’t talking about people being murdered by police, or the systemic violence of poverty, or people who are forced to experience the risks of pregnancy against their will. They are talking about something distinct and isolated, even though most violence that we experience in this society is political, because politics inform the conditions that dictate our lives.

AH: Yes, yes, yes. That’s so well said.

KH: Violence is embedded in the norms of this society, and that normalization skews a whole lot of analysis. For example, there is very little discussion in the media right now about threats against abortion care providers, even though those threats definitely exist. Do you see parallels between the current moment of right-wing escalation and the threats that clinic workers faced in the 1990s?

AH: Oh, totally. A report was released just a couple of years ago by the National Abortion Federation laying out how providers in the U.S. are facing significant increases in violence and disruptions to their work, including stalking, invasions and assaults and battery. So, the hostility against abortion workers of the 1990s is a hostility that many abortion workers are still facing today. And with the increasing persistent attacks on abortion providers and access all around the country, the threats are very real even today.

And abortion workers continue to feel that sense of threat. I think that people in the reproductive rights and justice community abortion workers are having a lot of really hard conversations about security, about how to continue the very important work of de-stigmatizing abortion and spreading information about abortion, abortion with pills, how to access abortion widely, spreading this information to the people who need it, while at the same time doing what needs to be done to keep each other safe. And these are difficult questions that I think activists will continue to have to grapple with in the coming months and in the coming years.

KH: Another aspect of the clinic defense section of Deep Care that I found really interesting was the tension that existed between some clinic staff and the activists providing clinic defense. In your book, you describe situations where the clinic staff, at facilities targeted by Operation Rescue, would tell clinic defenders to stay away, and that their help wasn’t wanted. But activists defending abortion access, who were unwilling to let these shutdowns take place, refused to stand down. I found those uneasy negotiations so interesting. Can you talk about how folks navigated that tension?

AH: Absolutely. When I interviewed BACAOR activists about the work that they did, a significant piece of that work was communicating with clinics and clinic directors about what they were all about and what they wanted to do. Some clinic defenders in the early 1990s talked about how it became their special role to get in touch with clinic directors and say basically like, “Hey, we’ve got Intel about a hit.” That is to say, an attack by Operation Rescue on a clinic on a given day. BACAOR members would tell clinic directors that they wanted to work with the clinic to help get the patients inside. And clinic defenders told me about how oftentimes, sort of in the early days of clinic defense, when things were especially hairy at clinic doors, when Operation Rescue was known to deploy hundreds of antis to clinics on a given day, clinic directors were sometimes resistant to BACAOR adding to everything that was already going on.

But according to one clinic defender named Maryanne, “There were times when they were mad as heck at us, but then they began to see that we were effective.” And so the story that BACAOR told me was that in time through that, what can be sort of a long process of relationship building, they were able to gain the trust of clinic directors. In the later 1990s into the 2000s, an activist named Barbara Hoke did a lot of organizing of clinic escorts in the Bay Area. She didn’t think of what she was organizing with others so much as clinic defense, as clinic escorting. And she talked to me a lot about how working with clinic escorts to develop protocols and norms for escorting, so that what that looked like was, to an extent, highly predictable for patients, for clinic escorts, for clinic staff and directors. That was something that everybody sort of knew what it would look like.

And there was a safety in that consistency. She emphasized that, the importance of consistency, in and through clinic escorting practices. And so the philosophies of how to best defend patients against anti-abortion protestors, it evolved over time as the material conditions evolved. But it was something that clinic defenders and clinic escorts were always thinking about. They were always thinking about these questions of how to work with clinics, how to best support patients to help people get in the doors. That was what it came down to was helping people get in the doors so that they could receive their procedure.

KH: I am just fascinated by those uneasy points of strategic connection, and how people managed to build trust over time. I think there’s so much there.

I also wanted to mention that I did not expect this book to include poetry. Can you talk about the poetry you chose to include and why it has a place in the telling of these histories?

AH: I would be happy to. As I mentioned before, my background is in poetry and literature. In addition to being someone who is passionate about political history and theory, I am a writer and I write poetry and I read poetry and write about it. So, I have my ear attuned to poetry just generally. And in the course of my research, one thing that really struck me was how many Bay Area abortion defenders were also poets and artists, even beyond poets like Pat Parker and Judy Grahn, who really got me started on the journey of the book. And I do include a poem by Pat Parker in the book, the Black feminist revolutionary, about the exacting nature of abortion work on top of the unpaid reproductive labor that many women do as parents and as caregivers. And that poem is included in full right in the middle of the book. And the clinic’s long-term director Lindsay Comey, who I’ve mentioned a couple of times, and who I did interview extensively for the book, is in her own words, an orator.

So, during our interviews, Lindsay would spontaneously spit poems or to my poet’s ear what I could only think to describe as poems. So, I transcribed a few of them and lineated them according to her natural cadence. And I interspersed them throughout the book. And some of the most important things that Lindsay told me in the course of our interviews came out in, what to my ear were lines of verse. And there are so many more Lindsay poems that I wasn’t even able to include in the book. I would’ve liked to, but just due to space restrictions and that sort of thing, I wasn’t able to. So, listening to poetry, thinking in terms of poetry was such a huge part of my process. And actually at the very end of the book, I ended up including an original poem of my own, which is actually a collage of lines that activists I interviewed said to me during our interviews about lessons they had learned over the years doing radical abortion defense.

And it felt really powerful to me and really right to me to have those oftentimes extremely poetic lines of insight conclude the book. And I’ll say that there are other forms of art in the book too. There are original anatomical illustrations. There are art posters and other art propaganda that visual artist activists created. There’s a fairly detailed account of an erotic street improv theater event, and more. So, Deep Care features a number of images throughout the book, but no photographs. And I did that on purpose. I wanted the images included in the book to be like original drawings or other designs by the activists themselves. And as a poet and an activist, I feel strongly that poetry and other art are essential to political movement and transformation. What would politics be without creative expression and invention, play [and] beauty? I think art reminds us to feel what is happening all around us, which is so critical, especially when what’s at work all around us wants us numb, unfeeling, compliant, and mechanized. I don’t think that there is any resistance without poetry, and abortion defenders really understood this.

KH: I couldn’t agree more. As someone whose background is in creative writing as well, I think that learning to write poetry prepared me for the narrative work of organizing as much as anything in my life, because facts don’t propel people into political action. What people feel moves them to act or doesn’t.

AH: Totally.

KH: To write poetry and to create compelling narratives, you have to do more than convey information. You have to make people feel things. So, I really appreciate your insights on the role of poetry in struggle, because I feel like having a poetics has been central to my own work.

Another thing I found striking about the stories women shared in your book was the comradery between people who organized together. There are some schisms between people that are mentioned, but it’s clear that while people were working together on these issues, there were strong bonds of fellowship and shared purpose that sustained their work. Right now we’re in a really trying moment when so-called rage donations to abortion funds have largely petered out, and folks who are trying to connect people with the care they need are struggling.

Part of me wonders if simply asking people to donate without giving them a sense of membership or fellowship in struggle, a more active role, has failed to hold people together in this struggle. To form the kind of front we need in an effort to provide care to as many people as possible, do you think we need to recover some of that camaraderie and fellowship that people experienced in the clinic defense movement and the abortion self-help movement?

AH: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Radical abortion defenders who I interviewed for the book, taught me so many lessons about political friendship. In the course of the research as I was reading what self helpers had written about their work, and then as I was talking extensively with self helpers from across the generations, I just became so deeply interested in the sociality of self-help, what I think of as the improvisatory and experimental nature of what I think of as intimate relationship practices that made up self-help. What I mean by that is how people talk to each other in self-help groups like how they studied and learned together, how they moved in space and in relationship to each other’s bodies, and how they approached and touched and interacted with each other’s bodies. Frankly, the way that they moved was slowly. I got really interested in all of the subtle lessons they learned along the way.

Often through their mistakes about trauma and care and feminism and friendship and autonomy and love. I learned about how self-help taught them so much of what they know about sex, but how self-help was at the same time not sex, how self-help practices could feel more intimate than what they did during sex with their lovers. When you’re engaged in political work that is as embodied and vulnerable, uncharted and courageous as self-help, you’re really harnessing something like a new world building power, I think. And self helpers understood this across the decades. They understood that intimacy is political.

There are deep lessons here about comradery, about fellowship, about friendship, about relationality that we can learn from today, and that can inspire us to do good work together.

KH: I really appreciate those lessons, and I am so grateful for all of the knowledge and history you’ve shared with us. As we wrap things up, is there anything else on your heart or mind that you would like to share with the audience today?

AH: Oh, well, thanks for the opportunity to make a few final comments. Just super briefly, some people are saying right now that Republicans and the right are softening on abortion, and I just want to say don’t believe it for a second. If you want to understand how power works in this country, you can’t not study the politics of abortion and reproductive health, and I just encourage everyone to do so. I think that everyone is accountable to helping ensure abortion access for their community. And so to help do this, I just want to encourage you to visit plancpills.org, which is an online information hub that connects people with abortion pills, regardless of the state laws, so that you can learn about how access works and what it looks like, and you can pass that information along to the people who can get pregnant in your life.

And also visit ineedana.com to learn about what access looks like from any location in the U.S., like how far, for example, someone would need to travel to get an in-clinic procedure. Those are just a couple things in my mind and a couple of resources that I just think are so important for everyone to have. So, yeah, thank you so much, Kelly, for having me, and thank you again for all that you do.

KH: Thank you so much for joining us today. I loved your book and I was so grateful for the opportunity to discuss it with you.

AH: Oh, likewise, Kelly. Thank you so much again.

[musical interlude]

KH: We have so much to learn from the abortion self-help groups and militant clinic defenders that Angela writes about in Deep Care. As I read the book, I thought a lot about the kind of movement for reproductive autonomy that we need in the United States today. After the fall of Roe, there was so much concern about people organizing in ways that might be unhelpful, or even harmful, that a lot of people were told to simply donate. While it’s important to head off potentially harmful actions, I think we may have overcorrected in some cases, because donating, by itself, has not bound people together in fellowship and collective action. At political inflection points, when people are highly motivated, they need paths into movement. While abortion funds are political homes for many people, we are going to need a variety of formations and containers to build the larger movement we need. Relationships and shared purpose can help people remain grounded in the struggle, amid chaotic and traumatic news cycles. Reading groups, abortion doula collectives, and various types of affinity groups can become fundraising teams for struggling abortion funds, or pivot to other types of action, as needed.

People often get caught up in the need to act at scale, given the enormity of the problems we face, but Angela’s book offers a strong reminder that small groups of people can do pivotal work. Consciousness-raising groups can become action teams, depending on what skills they acquire and what interventions the moment calls for. As someone who was trained as an abortion doula, after Roe fell, I feel like we could use a lot more organizing, at large and small scales, aimed at proliferating knowledge about self-managed abortion. In the same way that the activists in Deep Care shared knowledge about menstrual extraction, we should be educating each other, and also educating our communities. Making information about how to self-manage an abortion common knowledge should be considered a moral and political imperative in our times. While that information can presently be found online, the end of Roe should serve as a chilling reminder of how fast the political terrain can change. Under a Republican administration, sharing that kind of information online could easily be criminalized. Like the activists in Deep Care, we need to take ownership of knowledge that can help ensure our reproductive autonomy. We have to be ready to help each other access care, whether that means getting across state lines or accessing pills and understanding how to use them.

I urge people who are passionate about these issues to form discussion groups. Read together. Talk about the connections between attacks on gender-affirming care and abortion care. Talk about how we can support people who are losing access to the care they need, and about how we can better educate ourselves and our communities. Form bonds of fellowship, so that we are ready to act together as conditions change, and when people need us. Whether that means fundraising, taking direct action, or doing care work, organized people have more organizing potential than overwhelmed individuals. It’s easy, in moments like this one, to become mesmerized by the tragic circus of U.S. politics, but this is a time for action. Learning together is a form of action. Relationship-building is a form of action. Do not let this system turn you into a spectator. Find co-conspirators and figure out what you can contribute together. Get ready and stay ready, because we live in dangerous times. The future and our liberation is at stake, so let’s build the infrastructure we need to survive and get free together.

I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes

Referenced

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