The leaked draft of the Supreme Court case against abortion rights authored by Justice Samuel Alito (Politico, May 2, 2022) spread across the US like a destructive forest fire. The case originated in Mississippi and had the potential of returning one half of the women in the US to the days before abortion became legal in New York in 1970 and across the US by way of Roe v. Wade in 1973.
It took the better part of the 20th century to bring this reproductive right to masses of women and their families and that right had struggle and death written all over it. Back-alley abortions took an untold number of lives before the legalization of abortion. Women won the right to this part of reproductive health in the fight for women’s rights in general. The women’s movement had as its inspiration both the civil rights and antiwar movements that came before it. A footnote to the antiwar movement was the fight of politically left women to gain status within that movement and not be treated as subservient.
An educated conclusion is that millions of people, and groups such as Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League, were left momentarily speechless before the outrage spurred people to fight back against the Supreme Court draft. Demonstrations were held across the country with New York’s and Washington, DC’s standing out.
I wrote to a physician that I had met many years ago at a women’s health clinic where I was an escort. He had witnessed the outrage of anti-abortionists at street level for years while working in the medical field for which he had been trained. I saw firsthand what he experienced on the days when I was assigned to the clinic where he worked and it was an unmitigated horror.
The physician that I knew from those days in the 1990s and the early part of the 2000s, wrote that a women’s zip code now could determine whether or not she would have access to a safe abortion. He called the latter “outrageous.” I thought that as part of this segment of the far right’s juggernaut to roll back gains of human rights across the board, who could predict where their misplaced zeal to reshape the world in their image and their values would land? Would anti-abortion pills and birth control be their next targets? Would they attempt to ban abortion nationwide?
The line of anti-choice protesters, who filled the sidewalk beside the clinic where I once was an escort, exhibited grotesque behaviors. They howled and shouted, carried blown-up photographs of supposedly aborted fetuses, and often had children by their side, a good lesson for these kids in how not to behave.
On one day at a women’s health clinic across town from the other clinic where I volunteered, a mass of anti-abortionists led by a nationally-known vicious individual, carried out an assault on the clinic and we held back that attack without returning the violence of the anti-abortionists.
Always in the back of my mind, and often at the front and center of consciousness, were the incidents of violence and murder at women’s health clinics across the US and the murder and assaults against abortion providers and the staff at clinics.
By the time I became an escort, the anti-abortion movement had already precipitated the end to any support at the federal level of funds for abortion services. They had changed the language of abortion and transformed the word fetus into the words unborn child. Soon would come the portrayal in mass culture of the righteousness of women and young women having children no matter what the consequences.
Margaret Atwood writes in the Guardian“enforced childbirth is slavery,” (May 7, 2022). The right-wing zealots of the antiabortion movement care nothing of the lives of women and children, as can be seen in the anti-abortion “counseling” centers often set up in proximity to women’s health clinics in many locations. They hear the voice of a god many cannot begin to comprehend who would oversee a world in which social welfare and medical supports are nonexistent and it’s every women, child, and man for herself and himself in this brave new world.
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Your zip code: Your life
Posted on June 7, 2022 by Howard Lisnoff
The leaked draft of the Supreme Court case against abortion rights authored by Justice Samuel Alito (Politico, May 2, 2022) spread across the US like a destructive forest fire. The case originated in Mississippi and had the potential of returning one half of the women in the US to the days before abortion became legal in New York in 1970 and across the US by way of Roe v. Wade in 1973.
It took the better part of the 20th century to bring this reproductive right to masses of women and their families and that right had struggle and death written all over it. Back-alley abortions took an untold number of lives before the legalization of abortion. Women won the right to this part of reproductive health in the fight for women’s rights in general. The women’s movement had as its inspiration both the civil rights and antiwar movements that came before it. A footnote to the antiwar movement was the fight of politically left women to gain status within that movement and not be treated as subservient.
An educated conclusion is that millions of people, and groups such as Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League, were left momentarily speechless before the outrage spurred people to fight back against the Supreme Court draft. Demonstrations were held across the country with New York’s and Washington, DC’s standing out.
I wrote to a physician that I had met many years ago at a women’s health clinic where I was an escort. He had witnessed the outrage of anti-abortionists at street level for years while working in the medical field for which he had been trained. I saw firsthand what he experienced on the days when I was assigned to the clinic where he worked and it was an unmitigated horror.
The physician that I knew from those days in the 1990s and the early part of the 2000s, wrote that a women’s zip code now could determine whether or not she would have access to a safe abortion. He called the latter “outrageous.” I thought that as part of this segment of the far right’s juggernaut to roll back gains of human rights across the board, who could predict where their misplaced zeal to reshape the world in their image and their values would land? Would anti-abortion pills and birth control be their next targets? Would they attempt to ban abortion nationwide?
The line of anti-choice protesters, who filled the sidewalk beside the clinic where I once was an escort, exhibited grotesque behaviors. They howled and shouted, carried blown-up photographs of supposedly aborted fetuses, and often had children by their side, a good lesson for these kids in how not to behave.
On one day at a women’s health clinic across town from the other clinic where I volunteered, a mass of anti-abortionists led by a nationally-known vicious individual, carried out an assault on the clinic and we held back that attack without returning the violence of the anti-abortionists.
Always in the back of my mind, and often at the front and center of consciousness, were the incidents of violence and murder at women’s health clinics across the US and the murder and assaults against abortion providers and the staff at clinics.
By the time I became an escort, the anti-abortion movement had already precipitated the end to any support at the federal level of funds for abortion services. They had changed the language of abortion and transformed the word fetus into the words unborn child. Soon would come the portrayal in mass culture of the righteousness of women and young women having children no matter what the consequences.
Margaret Atwood writes in the Guardian “enforced childbirth is slavery,” (May 7, 2022). The right-wing zealots of the antiabortion movement care nothing of the lives of women and children, as can be seen in the anti-abortion “counseling” centers often set up in proximity to women’s health clinics in many locations. They hear the voice of a god many cannot begin to comprehend who would oversee a world in which social welfare and medical supports are nonexistent and it’s every women, child, and man for herself and himself in this brave new world.
Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer.