A week after his inauguration day, US president Donald Trump wrote a tweet in the sand: “The #MarchForLife is so important. To all of you marching—you have my full support!” That day, Vice President Mike Pence, who proudly describes himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican,” headlined the flagship March for Life rally in Washington, DC, becoming the first VP and the highest-ranking White House official to speak at the annual anti-abortion protest since its inception. Briefly, for those who may have missed this anti-abortion bulwark: the March for Life was founded in 1974, the year after Roe v. Wade, the landmark United States Supreme Court decision that asserted abortion rights, and has been held on its anniversary date ever since.
“President Trump actually asked me to be here with you today,” Pence told the undulating crowd, the wind whipping their cheers into the air and across the Washington Monument park grounds. “He asked me to thank you for your support, for your stand for life, and for your compassion for the women and children of America.” The giant flag behind him, emblazoned with a red rose, flapped shadows over his face, but the expression as his head bobbed a yes-yes-yes beat throughout his speech was unmistakable: victory. With every sentence, a responding WOOOOOO! thundered out, spreading like contagion into the surrounding streets where thousands more waited. “Life is winning again in America,” Pence trumpeted. The first rows of the gathered crowd were young and exuberant, all pumping fists and jumping bodies. Signs rose into the air. “I am the Pro-Life Generation.” And “We Don’t Need Planned Parenthood.”
Pence wasn’t the only speaker with political star power. At her turn on the podium, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president and Trump’s former campaign manager, echoed Pence’s promise for change. “This is a new day, a new dawn, for life,” she told the crowd, pausing to flash a toothy smile, her blond hair lacing across her face and against her blood-bright suit. A few days earlier, Conway was widely ridiculed (and, in some cases, celebrated) for coining the term “alternative facts” in an interview with Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press. But she didn’t need smudged truths now to reinforce her boasts at the march. For those who cared about women’s reproductive rights, the real truth was scary enough. Already, Trump had reinstated the Mexico City Policy—or as its critics called it, the Global Gag Rule—prohibiting foreign organizations that receive US family-planning funding from “providing counseling or referrals for abortion or advocating for access to abortion services in their country.” Though administrations had repealed and reinstated the policy before, anti-abortion supporters saw it for how it was intended: as both a signal that Trump was on their side and a promise that more “good news” was to come.
At the close of the speeches, a triumphant rallying cry sprang up through the crowd, soaring through the city core like a bird in flight, ricocheting between the marble buildings like gunfire. “Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho!” the mass chanted. “Roe v. Wade has got to go!” For the first time in a very long time, it actually seemed possible.
In Canada, we have our own March for Life, held in May to coincide with the federal government’s first step toward decriminalizing abortion in 1969. Back then, abortions were still only available in hospitals and only if a committee of doctors deemed pregnancy would threaten the woman’s life or health, though the move was also part of the same legislation that, at least, made contraceptives legal. When Campaign Life Coalition (CLC), the political arm of the anti-abortion movement here, launched the march in 1998, only seven hundred people showed up to protest on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. In 2015, more than twenty-five thousand marched, with an estimated 80 percent under age twenty-five. And, the next year, when an equally large and young crowd gathered, it murmured its agreement as one MP called the Liberal government “the government of death.” Behind the speakers, women, their mouths pressed into silent lines, as if paying penance, held white-on-black signs that stated: “I regret my abortion.” Footage from that day shows legions of high school and university students dotting the hill, many of them wearing black T-shirts that read #EndTheKilling—that year’s theme. Mothers pushed their children in strollers. Fathers piggybacked their toddlers on their shoulders. Dimple-kneed children held up protest signs, and others wove through the crowd. As in the US, Canada’s March for Life is a (nuclear) family affair.
The happy vibe is a sharp departure from the more militant and murderous history of the anti-abortion movement. National Abortion Federation (NAF) statistics from 2015 show that since July 1977, the US has experienced eleven murders, twenty-six attempted murders, forty-two bombings, and 185 arsons, plus thousands of other acts of violence and intimidation against abortion providers, clinic workers, and women seeking health care. The violence crossed the border to Canada in 1992 when Henry Morgentaler’s clinic in Toronto was firebombed in the middle of the night. In 1994, a sniper hid in the back lane of a residential neighborhood in Vancouver, BC, and shot doctor Garson Romalis while he was eating breakfast. Romalis survived the shooting. Six years later, a man stabbed Romalis as he left his clinic. Romalis survived again. Shootings in Hamilton, Ontario, and Winnipeg, Manitoba, followed. Nor is this old history: in 2015, Robert Dear Jr. fatally shot three people at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado.
While the shootings are clearly the work of extremists, in 2015, in the aftermath of the initial “baby parts” smearing of Planned Parenthood, harassments and threats against clinics rose exponentially, according to NAF numbers. Clinic blockades nearly doubled from 2014 to 2015. Meanwhile, picketing, which had been decreasing, jumped from about 5,400 incidents in 2014 to nearly 22,000 in 2015. Hate mail and email harassment has skyrocketed to nearly 28,000 incidents, up from less than one hundred—a huge difference that’s largely the result of the NAF’s decision to respond to the resurgence by hiring an outside security firm to track online threats.
These actions are all because feminists would like to see abortion treated, and thus protected, as a normal part of a woman’s health care regime. Though those on the other side often deride this philosophy as an “abortion on demand” method, as the fictional politician Selina Meyer (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus on the HBO show Veep) once quipped: “If men could get pregnant, you could get an abortion at an ATM.” But the idea that women might abuse their right to control their own bodies (look out, that nasty woman has too much autonomy!) has stuck. In this alternate universe, women are wanton vixens who use abortions as easy birth control fixes. What a near laughable stigma, considering the dearth of abortion access in rural Canada and the US, not to mention that surveys have repeatedly shown that women most often seek abortion after contraception failure. Unfortunately, abortion is an uncomfortable topic, making it a prime target for public-opinion rebranding. The linguistic pairing of anti-abortion and pro-women messaging is like a conversational escape hatch for those who don’t want to admit they’re limiting women’s rights, even though they are.
As Tomris Türmen, former senior policy adviser to the Director-General of the World Health Organization and current president of the International Children’s Center, put it more than fifteen years ago in a Health and Human Rights paper:
For families, the ability to choose family size offers increased choice as to the use of family resources, education, and employment. For communities, individual choices can result in increased options for economic and social development. An enabling environment is a necessary prerequisite for people to be able to promote and protect their own health and that of their partners, as well as for them to be able to act on the decisions they make.
Türmen was writing in support of entrenched, worldwide views on reproductive rights and also asking her readers to consider how to move those rights forward. In doing so, she made it clear that any effort to ensure women reached their full potential must move in lockstep with reproductive rights, lest it eventually fail. Reproductive health access enables women to decide when, and if, they want to have children, a choice that can extend to more freedom in the labor force, in relationships, at home, and beyond throughout life. Or, if you’re an anti-abortion activist, it can mean the opposite of all those things: a way for society to control women.
Though the anti-abortion movement is often seen—and sometimes dismissed—as predominately made up of the Christian religious right, many of its members are working hard to make their message connect with those outside their core. In Canada, this means broadening the movement to include everyone from Muslims to atheists. At the January 2017 march in the US, Democrats had a visible presence. (Few, however, would describe the march as either racially or religiously diverse.) For both countries, however, this bridge building means a shifting rhetoric, one structurally predicated on both a civil rights and a pro-woman mandate. This new narrative is as deliberate as calling fetuses “the unborn,” for whose civil rights anti-abortion activists mobilize. When these messages combine, we get popular slogans and hot pink signs that claim the anti-abortion movement is where one can find “real” and “true” feminists. Forget those counterfeit feminists over there demanding reproductive rights, they suggest; bona fide feminists protect women “from womb to tomb.” Outlawing abortion is seen as gifting women with the inalienable rights of life, pregnancy, and motherhood. Oh, gee, thanks. Does that come with “baby parts” gift wrap?
Changing the approach to the conversation targets both the hard and easy gets: those who aren’t fully swayed by religious arguments and those who haven’t yet fully reconciled what it means to have reproductive control. But is it working? In Canada, the last significant piece of anti-abortion legislation, Motion 312, was put forward in 2012 and called for a re-opening of the debate on when human life begins. Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth wanted to form a committee to review the Criminal Code’s definition that “a child becomes a human being only at the moment of complete birth,” and we can easily guess to what end. Although the motion was defeated, and the Conservative-heavy government ousted a few years later, a surprising number of MPs (ninety-one), ten of them cabinet members, voted in favor of the motion. More recently, MP Cathay Wagantall introduced Bill C-225, the “Protection of Pregnant Women and Their Preborn Children Act,” a slippery-slope piece of legislation which would have made it “an offence to cause injury or death to a preborn child while committing or attempting to commit an offence against a pregnant woman.” It was defeated in its second reading (209 nays to 76 yeas), but note the lurking terminology shift: preborn.
We can attribute these defeats, in part, to public opinion. A 2016 Ipsos poll showed that 57 percent of Canadians believe a woman should be able to have an abortion whenever she wants one, up from 36 percent in 1998. Men and women also agreed at about the same rates. Only about a quarter of Canadians believe that abortion is morally unacceptable. However, it’s interesting to note that when surveyed about what their fellow Canadians think, respondents overestimated the rigid thinking of their neighbors, guessing that 40 percent of the country deemed it unacceptable. This, perhaps, nods to the growing visibility of the anti-abortion movement here, particularly among youth.
As promising as this Ipsos poll is, we shouldn’t confuse it with real, on-the-ground access to abortion services. Even if women wanted to treat getting an abortion as casually and easily as an ATM pit stop, we couldn’t. The overall picture is grim, despite recent access victories, most notably in the province of Prince Edward Island, which until January 2017 provided no access at all to services, not even in hospitals. For an idea of just how grim, consider what one PEI woman who tried to access abortion services in the no-go zone told authors of a 2014 report on the effects of the province’s restricted policies: “Oh, god, it takes something away from you that I don’t think men ever get taken away. A certain sense of I am my own person, I can do as I choose, as who I am, express myself fully, and everything.”
As of fall 2016, there are only a few dozen abortion clinics across Canada, and in several provinces, including Saskatchewan and New Brunswick, an in-hospital abortion may be a woman’s only viable option, although New Brunswick women have the option of paying for their abortion at a private clinic. Yet fewer than 20 percent of hospitals in Canada offer abortion services, and the vast majority of them require at least one doctor’s referral. It’s not unheard of for women to face an additional hurdle: doctors who refuse to give a referral because of their personal anti-abortion beliefs. What’s more, if you look at a map of where those hospitals are located, the visual truth is startling: services are largely clustered around city centers, close to the US border. The number of doctors who learn how to perform abortion is trending down: in the US, that number has plummeted more than 40 percent since the 1980s, and a similar trend is suspected in Canada, perhaps because doctors conscientiously object or because they believe, wrongly, that abortion rights are a done deal here. Already, the number of abortions in Canada has decreased to 81,897 in 2014 from 98,762 in 2007. More than 10,000 of that drop can be attributed to the number of abortions performed in hospitals.
If we want a crystal ball view into what Canada might look like if the anti-abortion movement continues to gain ground, we need only look south, from where many activists are now taking cues. A 2016 Pew Research Center poll reveals that, similar to Canada, the majority of Americans believe in abortion rights. A full 57 percent of Americans believe that in all or most cases abortion should be legal, though only 23 percent believe in unfettered access. A May 2016 Gallup poll showed the two sides as nearly evenly split, with 47 percent of Americans calling themselves “pro-choice” and 46 percent declaring themselves “pro-life” (their words). But, thanks in large part to anti-abortion elected officials, this split is not necessarily reflected in policy. As of 2011, 89 percent of US counties had no known abortion provider, including 97 percent of non-metropolitan counties.
More disturbingly, in the political quest to undo Roe v. Wade, seventeen states have enacted state-mandated pre-abortion counseling and twenty-seven have enacted wait periods. In the first case, before an abortion, women are required to receive counseling on at least one of the following: the supposed link between abortion and breast cancer (five states), the ability of a fetus to feel pain (twelve states), and/or mental health effects (nine states). The waiting periods are generally twenty-four hours and the timer usually starts after the woman has received said counseling, whether it’s mandated to occur on the internet, over the phone, or in person. In addition, twenty-three states require an ultrasound before an abortion is performed, though only three of them force the woman to view the image or hear it described.
Proponents deny the tactics are meant to bully vulnerable women into guiltily or shamefully choosing not to have an abortion. Rather, all of this is done under the guise of helping women. Proponents claim they bestow true informed choice upon women. “Whoomp, there it is!” (again): the benevolent gift of empowerment. Apologies to Tag Team (one of my favorite early ’90s groups), but, no, I don’t dig it. Though it’s difficult to determine the effects of these policies (in part because US states report abortion statistics according to where the procedure took place, not where the woman resides), a 2009 Guttmacher Institute study looked closely at Mississippi, which requires in-person counseling and waiting periods and where researchers have delved more deeply into the data. Abortion rates did indeed fall, though it doesn’t seem that a woman’s desire to control her own body dropped correspondingly. Instead, both out-of-state and second-trimester abortions rose, not exactly what those on either side of the debate would consider a success. Yet as unrestricted access stands on increasingly shaky ground, those clamoring to give it the final push into oblivion are not who we might think—nor is the message what we might expect.
The day before the 2017 March for Life, anti-abortion activists took over the hulking Renaissance Washington, DC Downtown Hotel. After lunch, I joined about fifty activists, lawyers, law students, and others for the adjacent Law of Life Summit, designed to advance the anti-abortion movement through putting forward more anti-abortion legislation, attacking Planned Parenthood as a (supposedly) criminal organization, and encouraging more lawyers, prosecutors, and judges to embrace the mission. Besides a handful of nuns in habits and one or two priests, the staid crowd looked like what it was: a room full of affluent lawyers. Before Royce Hood, founder of the summit and a not-so-long-ago graduate of the Catholic-run Ave Maria School of Law, stepped onto the podium, the crowd milled around the coffee stations hemming the room, treading across the chocolate- and mocha-colored geometrical carpet to pump hands and clap backs. The men favored well-cut suits and Archie-style hair, while the women wore smart blazers, tasteful jewelry, and sleeveless work dresses. From what I could see, the only exceptions to this seemed to be two young women: one in a green shirt carrying a magenta sign that read “Conceived from rape/I love my life” and another in a leather motorcycle-style jacket who wore her electric violet hair in a deep side part.
The latter woman, Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, founder of New Wave Feminists (slogan: “Badass. Prolife. Feminists.”), was on stage. As part of a panel featuring “young leaders,” she sat with two other women. One was Alexandra Swoyer, another Ave Maria graduate and a Washington Times journalist who covered the presidential campaign for Breitbart. The other was Alison Howard, the director of alliance relations at Alliance Defending Freedom. Each had their cell phone out, fingers swiping and connecting. Moments earlier, by way of introduction, the moderator, Jill Stanek, the national campaign chair of the Susan B. Anthony List, crowed, “I have surmised that you all know that we won, right?” She went on to say that the anti-abortion movement must prepare for “the most evil tricks that we can’t even possibly imagine” and called feminists “perennial losers.” She cheered what she deemed feminism’s “generational in-fighting” and its “reluctance to pass the torch”—stoking the divisiveness within the movement. “My observation of the pro-life movement is exactly the opposite. We first demonstrate the love of our young people before they were even born,” she said, emphatically if not grammatically. She was so proud of the women on stage, she beamed. “These women are so precious.”
Herndon-De La Rosa had recently catapulted onto the national stage after New Wave Feminists applied to become a partner at the Women’s March on Washington and was, to her great initial surprise, accepted, and then, swiftly and much less to her surprise, rejected. The march pointed to its pro–abortion rights stance as the reason for its rescinded partnership, but Herndon-De La Rosa “invaded” the totally public march anyway (the audience applauded wildly at this, as if she’d infiltrated the Gestapo) and welcomed the publicity boost the controversy created. She went on to say there were no hard feelings and joked that she “needed to send them a fruit basket, because this is the best thing that’s ever happened.” I’m not sure what she said after that because the room erupted in laughter and clapping, drowning her out. A few minutes later, she won the room again when Stanek asked the panelists how they saw the movement’s future. “The future is pro-life female,” answered Herndon-De La Rosa, riffing off a popular feminist T-shirt with a similar slogan. She added that it was important for anti-abortion advocates to promote the pro-women narrative. “We’re not trying to control women or take over their bodies—that’s not it at all,” she told the crowd. “We believe that you should have control over your body from the moment it first exists.”
Yikes.
Moments later, after the panel ended, the audience voted to skip their bathroom break—they were too engaged to stop. Hood, who emceed the conference, his face permanently pink with excitement, encouraged attendees to step out if they needed to, directing them to the men’s room. “There are restrooms,” he added, hesitating, before jovially breaking off to responding laughter and shouts of “Good for you!” as he confessed, “I don’t know where the women’s room is.” A few minutes after that, the audience broke into another round of rowdy, gleeful laughter when John-Henry Westen, editor-in-chief of the website LifeSite: Life, Family & Culture News, jumped up on stage, holding his laptop, voice hiccupping in excitement as he interrupted Hood.
“Breaking news! President Trump just did it again,” he cried, emphasizing “again” with Shakespearian drama. “He once AGAIN called out the mainstream media for not coming to cover the March for Life.” Giddy noises rippled through the crowd. “He’s like our best advertisement tool right now.” Westen broke off into giggles that were answered with more laughter and riotous clapping. “President Trump is also confirming—officially, sort of—that Mike Pence is going to show up tomorrow.” At this, the audience lost composure, filling the room with shouts of “Wow!” He continued quoting Trump, and the audience continued mirroring his excitement, hollering victory.
What a fun crowd!
The blending of traditional conservatism and new feminism made for a strange but effective mix. In one breath, we got speakers who asserted things like “mom’s the real issue”—referring to the presumed superiority of the traditional family structure and the sanctity of motherhood—and, in the next, other speakers who praised feminism and lamented what they saw as a you-can’t-sit-with-us mentality in the movement. Both, however, preached a brand of pro-women activism rooted in restriction, no matter how often it employed “dank memes,” risqué language, or Urban Outfitters–style (ahem, sorry, Pro-Life Outfitters) “All Lives Matter” shirts shilled on tattooed bodies. While it’s beyond my purview to define someone’s feminism for them, the more I became exposed to the Anti-Abortion Movement Dictionary’s meaning of feminism, the more I became convinced it wasn’t as advertised: a sort of modern feminism-for-everybody with a “pro-life” twist. Take one of New Wave Feminism’s memes, for example, a funky pink text on a black, distressed background: “We reject the failed feminism of victimhood and violence, for ourselves and for our unborn children.” In the corresponding Instagram caption, Herndon-De La Rosa added, “The fauxminists can have #victimhood if they want it. Real #feminism is beyond that.”
Well, now, doesn’t that sound familiar?
Outside the conference room, teenage girls clumped together. The youth rally had ended at the same time. I was surprised to see how many of them carried signs that read “True feminists protect human life.” (The signs were hot pink, of course, a shade so ubiquitous that day it might as well have been the event’s official color.) At the bottom of the sign, a pink banner highlighted the Guiding Star Project, accompanied by #NEWfeminism.
Curious about what, exactly, new feminism was, I hunted down the organization’s booth at the nearby trade show, where teenage girls carrying the signs were even more abundant. I scanned through a pamphlet at the booth, which was bordered by still more young girls, trying to master my poker face. “‘Old feminism,’” read the pamphlet, “is based on the idea that men and women are interchangeable and that women have been unfairly held back from achieving their potential in society because of their role as mothers in the home.” (Oh, geez.) “New Feminism,” the pamphlet explained, “views femininity through a lens of hope and joy. We honor the unique feminine genius—the way women think, perceive, and love as women—and celebrate that these strengths are compatible with the strengths of others. We know that true feminine success is measured by a woman’s love of others” [italics theirs]. Sure, fine, but I had just one question: By what bar is true masculine success measured? The pamphlet didn’t say, but I’d seen enough that day to guess.
I wandered through the trade show, checking out the other feminist-branded booths. For all their dismissal of “old” feminism, these groups tended to promote a feminism that was—well—musty, like first-wave, nearly-a-century-gone, make-sure-you-have-mothballs-handy-because-it’s-so-old kind of old feminism. Non-profit Life Matters Journal, a publication of Rehumanize International, an organization that describes itself as “a non-partisan, non-sectarian/secular group dedicated to the cause of life,” displayed a giant mint-and-pink standing banner that asked, in lettering reminiscent of both tattoos and Pinterest, “Can you be Pro-Life and Feminist?” On it, they’d given Rosie the Riveter a makeover, rendering her face blank except for a piece of tape over her mouth that read “life,” a nod to the Silent Siege project, which calls its tactics a “divine strategy from the Lord”—a strange choice for a supposedly secular group. As the banner pointed out, early feminists, including Alice Paul, who spearheaded the battle for women’s right to vote in the US, and Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the US, largely protested abortion, at least in public. Still, as much as we owe a debt to these women, I’m not about to grab a petticoat and try to be them. I might picture myself standing on their shoulders, but it’s not in a straight and unwavering line. Rather, it’s an inverted pyramid that allows for pluralities and expansion, a rejection of this idea that it’s good to go backward.
“I think the feminist movement has gotten off track,” Lisa Stover, the national programs coordinator for Students for Life of America, told me. “But we do have this new wave of feminists now who recognize to be pro-woman also means being pro-life.” Borrowing from the same logic lines pro–abortion rights activists use, and infusing it with the bitterly steeped tea of traditionalism, she continued: “We’re not just advocating for the child, we’re advocating for the mother as well. But I do think that women shouldn’t have to deny their fertility in order to be just like men. And no woman should be forced to choose between her child and her education, her child and her career, her child and her goals.”
Like many of the “new pro-life generation,” Stover believed only the anti-abortion movement could, in its full support of pregnant women, allow women to “have it all”—well, at least until they ran into all the stumbling blocks (or Great Wall of China–like barriers) the rest of the feminist movement is trying to break down. “By our nature women are nurturers, we are protectors of those who we love,” she added. (If you’re wondering if these women all take the same class to learn how to robotically recall, or unify, their message, the answer is yes, and it’s called apologetics.) “As a pro-life feminist, I’m all for women’s rights,” she concluded, “but not the type of rights that don’t belong to us.”
Even anti-abortion activists who don’t embrace the f-word are quick these days to say that they’re pro-woman. “I like to say I’m feminine. And by that I mean I embrace my femininity, and I don’t believe that being female is a hindrance to equality with men,” Stephanie Gray, the former executive director and co-founder of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, explained from her home in British Columbia. “I think the feminist movement has done something right when it fights for, for example, equal pay for equal work or the right to vote, so women have a voice just like men do. But I think the feminist women—some women of the feminist movement—have done harm by saying that women should have a right to kill their children, because no human ought to have that right. I would say that goes against the nature to be feminine, which is to celebrate the fact that we biologically get to nurture offspring in a way men never will. That’s something to be embraced and turned into and celebrated, not rejected.” Whooo boy. Gray has now struck out on her own. Her new ministry, called Love Unleashes Life, also the name of her book, aims to change the minds of the influential: current and future doctors, lawyers, and legislators.
A few months before the 2017 US March for Life, I met with Alissa Golob, a woman in her late twenties and the former executive director of CLC (Campaign for Life) Youth. Golob attended her first anti-abortion protest at age thirteen, when her pen pal invited her to attend the Show the Truth tour, in which activists hold up posters on busy streets, intersections, and high school campuses. The images on the posters, purportedly of fetuses aborted during the first or second trimester of pregnancy, are intentionally gory and shocking. A suburban Ontario woman named Rosemary Connell started the campaign in 1997 after a trip to the US where she participated in a similar protest using the same gruesome tactics. (It’s worth mentioning here that in both Canada and the US more than 90 percent of abortions take place in the first trimester, during which, at its twelve-week maximum, the fetus is no more than two and a half inches long. Studies have shown that most women would have their abortions even earlier into gestation, when the fetus is about the size of a pencil eraser, if access—and, in the US, funding—were better.) After her first Show the Truth protest, Golob was hooked. “I think children have this innate black-and-white [view],” she had told me when I interviewed her for the first time in 2014. “Everything is black and white to them: ‘Oh, dead baby, bad.’ And that’s what you want. You wish it could be that easy for everyone.” For the next decade after that, she went every summer. When she was with CLC, she organized her own youth-led protests, decorating busy Toronto intersections with similarly horrific photos. She’s emceed the Ottawa march, driven across the country in a “No to Trudeau” van, and grown the movement’s youth contingent, marking herself as an important leader in the Canadian fight to end abortion.
Golob’s place in the movement shifted again in early 2016, when she left CLC to co-found a youth-centric, politically savvy organization called Right Now—its mission to “nominate and elect pro-life politicians.” It does so by pushing people to vote at local nomination meetings and training volunteers to create campaign teams in ridings across the country. It took a month for us to set an interview date because she’d been traveling across the country. On the day we finally met over coffee in downtown Toronto, she hadn’t been home for most of the month; despite the fact that Canadians generally treat abortion as a hot potato, Golob had been busy.
Dressed in a trendy black velvet dress, she often tugged thoughtfully on her choker as we talked. Golob didn’t like Justin Trudeau, but she was not particularly a fan of Trump, either, her expressive eyes rolling in exasperation when I mentioned he was moving her cause forward in the US. She later wrote on her website that she couldn’t “fully support” him because of his “outrageous and derogatory comments toward women.” She would, however, readily take a note or two from the American movement’s tactics, and she would be thrilled if Canada’s conservative political leaders spoke with such openness and enthusiasm about their own anti-abortion convictions.
Her frustration at the anti-abortion movement’s reticence to evolve leaked through. “The world that we live in and the society we live in right now is completely different than the society we lived in in the 1980s, when abortion was completely decriminalized, or even in the early 1970s, late ’60s when it was initially decriminalized, so we can’t keep doing the same tactics,” she said. She respected the founders of the anti-abortion movement, but felt that what may have worked in the 1970s or ’80s wouldn’t work now—not, at least, as the movement’s sole focus. “There’s social media,” she said. “There’s different shifting world views; there’s science that has changed; but most of all there’s technology. And I just don’t see that the pro-life movement is utilizing that. They’re just sticking to continuing to be loud, but not effective.” She paused before adding, “To a certain extent.” She described her position as emphatically “pro-woman” and identified two elements to the issue: “There’s the element of the humanity of the unborn, and then there’s the element of the woman and what she’s going through.” She noted that she’d spent a lot of time working in pregnancy crisis centers, which are often located near abortion clinics and actively seek to counsel women against abortion under the guise of offering “pregnancy resources.” The stories she heard convinced her that many women were coerced or felt forced into having abortions and that, because of this, the pro– abortion rights movement treated women “like they’re disposable trash, basically.” She added that “it was so completely disrespectful and sad and not doing anything to women except making us revert back to not having a say.”
If we want further evidence of how essential this pro-women messaging has become to the new generation of anti-abortion activists, consider Lia Mills. Sixteen years old when I first interviewed her in 2012 (for the piece that caused my mother and grandmother so much anguish), Mills rose to fame after posting an anti-abortion call to action on YouTube when she was twelve. Over one million views later, Mills had traveled across North America, growing her army of “life warriors” wherever she went. I’ve met seven-year-olds in sparkly pink pants who wanted to be just like her and bubbly, blond-haired teens who, after meeting Mills, started anti-abortion clubs in their own high schools. By 2014, thanks in large part to her influence, the majority of the tens of thousands who descended upon Canada’s Parliament Hill for the anti-abortion movement’s annual March protest were enthusiastic youth.
Now twenty and identifying as a pro-life feminist, Mills published her first book, An Inconvenient Life, in fall 2016. I heard from her shortly after I started interviewing pro-life feminists after she, in turn, had heard from someone—not me—that I was delving into the front lines of post-feminism, anti-feminism, and new feminism. She sent me a friendly note and an encouragement to check out her new video. Compelling as always, Mills addressed her audience in a spoken-word beat, condemning both the knee-jerk dismissal of anti-abortion activists as misogynists and what she perceived as a forced societal silence against their advocacy. “Is it at all humanly possible to be pro-women, pro-choice, and pro-life?” she asked. “Third-wave feminists will scream no. As a women and gender studies student, I would know.” In the video, Mills asserted that she supports a woman’s right to choose—her bodily autonomy—but added, in a plea for her audience to understand, “It is choice without restriction that we oppose and condemn.” She used rapists, pedophiles, and other criminals as examples of those who have pushed choice too far, into the realm of harm.
These emerging conversations about women, feminism, and abortion rights often get mired in variations of the question: Who owns feminism? Can the feminist majority really pull a Mean Girls and tell the women who call themselves pro-life feminists, “You can’t sit with us”? While the abortion debate undoubtedly exposes broad divisions between North American women, to me it feels like a lot of this is a distraction ploy. It’s the same one anti-feminists use to undermine all sorts of issues and is meant to force feminists into the exact kind of exclusionary infighting for which we’re too often ridiculed. I doubt pro-life feminism is about to completely usurp the other, more popular feminisms, not because reproductive rights are such a solidly built pillar of today’s feminism—though either side would likely lament or applaud the truth in that—but because pro-life feminism is so dang narrow. Some of it pays lip service to diversity and also condemns the objectification and hypersexualization of women and girls ( morals, ladies!), but pro-life feminism is, for the most part, solely concerned with pro-life feminism. Those who espouse the pro-life model rarely discuss or address the other structural and systemic barriers women face; I’d hazard a guess that’s because they’re wound wire-tight with reproductive rights. Instead, it often feels that, like post- and anti-feminists, they assume most women’s rights are a done deal.
But that hardly matters: their end goal isn’t really to broaden the feminist movement, it’s to broaden the anti-abortion one. As Mills said in her video, the movement is often viewed as misogynistic and limiting, with a modus operandi rooted in controlling women’s bodies. Anti-abortion feminism, in other words, may not engage in contemporary feminist issues, but rubber-stamping a newly branded “girl power” decal on its anti-abortion politics helps ease its own stigma—you know, so long as it doesn’t have to engage in the actual, challenging work of feminism. I don’t believe that, deep down, most people, anti-abortion activists included, would like to see themselves as working to send women back through time, like Marty McFly in some weirder, all-girl version of Back to the Future. If one thing unites all the many types of “Nah, I’ll pass on you, feminism” women I’ve met it’s that they sincerely believe they’re helping women. They’re convinced of it.
Whether other feminists accept their pro-life sisters or not, whether women who fight reproductive rights call themselves feminists or empowered pro-women, the anti-abortion message is the same: only we can answer womankind’s SOS call! And that message is alluring to those who ultimately want to diminish and restrict women’s rights but sure as hell don’t want to admit that’s what they’re doing (even to themselves). In their minds, not only are pro-lifers rescuing women from feminism, they’re also rescuing feminism from women. How utterly benevolent. As a result, we’re told the same old BS: we can embrace feminism so long as we keep it palatable; so long as it’s more about easy empowerment and less about the complex, exhausting, and difficult fight for real rights; so long as it, at its rotten core, promotes anti-feminism. So, no, I can’t see pro-life feminism one day dominating the feminist movement; that would imply a coexistence or even a partnership, albeit an imbalanced one. But can I see it working alongside the anti-feminist and post-feminist movements to crush modern, intersectional feminisms and the reproductive and sexual rights around which they mobilize? Well, yeah, sure, I can see that.
Next to the trade show in the hotel’s ballroom, men in plaid shirts dismantled the sound system from that afternoon’s youth-only rally. Neon lights still illuminated the stage when I peeked my head in. About an hour earlier, music from Transform DJs—“high energy, Christ-centered Electronic Dance Music”—had pounded through the floor of the room where the Law of Life Summit was held, traveling up from the anti-abortion rave. The next day, the all-male group, whose “hits” include “I See You Moving” (“Hands up! For justice! For life!”), and whose members wear shirts like “I survived Roe vs Wade/Roe vs Wade will not survive me,” opened the March for Life rally with the promise: “You are the generation that’s going to end abortion.”
I snuck in and grabbed some of the pamphlets and postcards left on a few seats. One advertised an event for that night: a mega–prayer session called One Voice DC. Another encouraged students to get behind the #StandForLife social media movement. A postcard for Stover’s organization, Students for Life, detailed how to equip the “pro-life generation,” with tips on how to get a starter activist kit and how to request one of the group’s traveling displays. I also found, among other things, a photocopied Cosmopolitan feature on Brandi Swindell, founder of Stanton Healthcare and a speaker at the youth rally.
Swindell’s Stanton Healthcare in Boise, Idaho, is a good example of how the mawkish “pro-life, pro-woman” doublespeak works. Named after suffragette and women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the center fills a huge gap in women’s health services, providing everything from ultrasounds to pregnancy testing to baby supplies, and offering no- or low-cost options. I’m not about to slam any center for offering women’s health services, particularly those that help low-income women, and I can see how Stanton’s traveling ultrasound clinic, which services rural communities and refugee populations, fulfills its purported pro-women mandate. I might have been swayed to see it like the Cosmo writer presents it: an alternative center for women who need help with their pregnancies. Might have, if not for one teensy tiny—okay, colossal—problem: that’s not its central mission. The clinic dubs itself a “life-affirming medical clinic,” which is another way of saying “pregnancy crisis center,” which is another way of saying that it’s located next to a Planned Parenthood and also includes “options counseling” and “sexual integrity consultations” on its list of services. It does not offer any form of contraception, and, of course, does not provide abortions. Stanton Healthcare’s motto is “Replace Planned Parenthood.” Its marketing material reads “We will not just COMPETE. We will not simply EXPOSE. We will not only DEFUND. It’s time to REPLACE Planned Parenthood.”
It’s this end goal of “pro-life, pro-women” and “pro-life feminism” that undermines any posturing the movement makes toward what it claims are its new, sparkly women’s rights objectives. The more deeply I dug beyond the seriously cool hair, Instagram posts, and trendy T-shirts, the more at odds the anti-abortion movement’s women’s rights makeover and the wider feminist movement seemed. Feminism, after all, generally works to broaden what we can do and achieve, not restrict it. If anything, these women wanted to narrow women’s roles, honing who they were and all they could be into a strict faith-based prototype. They may have advocated individualism and independence, but they also prescribed how to do it: be yourself, but only if you color within the traditional lines of family and femininity. Of course, that’s not how they put it to the new legions of anti-abortion activists at the youth rally, or the hundreds that milled about the trade show next door. The aisle housing the Student for Life booth, its affiliate Rock for Life, and their Pro-Life Outfitters clothing arm was especially congested, looking less like a trade show and more like a rock concert merchandise table. I had to hand it to them: they knew how to market to millennials.
On the table, a Rock for Life postcard urged “Be Active. Save Babies. Get Free Stuff.” Another asked “Know someone who has had an abortion?” A friendly twentysomething handed out bright pink (of course) stickers that read “Don’t fund Planned Parenthood.” She peeled them off by the dozen and smoothed them over teens’ backpacks and shirts. The throngs of young women ogled selfie-perfect shirts. In addition to the ones I’d seen earlier, I spotted a baby blue T-shirt with the silhouette of a pregnant woman that read “#ImWithBoth.” Another, on hunter green, said “Former Embryo.” A third, the most popular according to the website, featured a little arrow, just ’cuz, and cool graphic print that read “Human Rights for All.” Teens handed over cash and clutched their purchases. Some had already thrown them over their old clothes, modeling them around the show. A lot of them carried hot pink signs with feminist slogans. “I think that this generation craves authenticity,” said Student for Life’s Stover. “We want real solutions to real problems. We don’t like abortion because it poses a quick fix to a deeper issue. It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. We want a real authentic solution.”
In many cases, this authentic solution is abstinence. The front of one Students for Life hand-out card showed a smiling white couple, college-aged, next to a heart that read, in cursive writing, “Dispelling the myths about ‘safe sex.’” On the back, one of the truths offered was “Condoms simply act as a barrier for preventing pregnancy. They are not designed to protect from STDs.” Umm. Another: “The claim that hormonal birth control will ‘prevent’ sexually transmitted diseases is scientifically false.” Well, yes. That’s something students commonly learn in (non-abstinence-based) sexual education classes. Earlier that day, I’d also picked up abstinence-based curriculum books, one of which included a real-life story from a woman named Stephanie who attributed her success and admission to Oxford University to her sobriety and virginity: “I will wear this ring on my wedding ring finger as a symbol of my promise to not have sex until I am married. One day, on my wedding night, I will give this ring to my husband as a symbol of the love I have for him…a love that is so strong it made me wait for him.” I guess pro-life feminism missed the memo on anti–slut shaming, as well as the one about working to ensure women have healthy, confident, and informed sex lives.
Another missed memo: the one about not criminalizing women who make their own choices about their own bodies. Although the new wave of anti-abortion organizations are largely against punishing women who have abortions, less is said about what would happen if—or when—they succeed in obliterating Roe v. Wade. Many laws that do punish women who have abortions are still on the books, kept in check only by Roe. Once it goes: poof! States will be able to start prosecuting under them once more, an even scarier thought considering many of them are designed to punish women who perform their own abortions, a practice that is likely to increase if anti-abortion groups also succeed in diminishing Planned Parenthood. Already, as of 2017’s March for Life, four American women had been charged for self-inducing their own abortions, three of them with drugs purchased online and one with a coat hanger. These desperate women had not visited a clinic because of cost and distance, and also, in at least one case, shame. Ultimately, Roe saved the women from serious jail time, but their cases provide a chilling glimpse into our possible future.
Drifting through the conference, I couldn’t help but wonder the same thing many leaders in the anti-abortion movement had been asking themselves, both in Canada and the US: What happens when the new faces of the anti-abortion movement can vote? What will those 80 percent of marchers in Canada, those cheering pro-life feminists, decide? I doubt we can count on them to uphold the progressive spirit of feminism—to fight against the creeping Islamophobia and rising anti-immigration sentiment in our countries, to protect LGBTQ rights, to expand Indigenous rights, or to recognize the vital importance of movements like Black Lives Matter. I’m not sure how they’ll interpret even the most basic rights for those who are not like them. The next day, at the march and outdoor rally, I drained the battery on my phone taking photos and videos of the new “pro-life generation,” still marveling at their pink signs, their ardent use of the word “feminist.” There! And there! And there! One group of young high schoolers burst from the crowd, blond and bright, their cheeks rosy from the howling wind or maybe excitement, their voices clear and loud, triumphant laughter marking the end.
“Build the wall!”
“Build the wall!”
“Build the wall!”
“Pro-life!”