Countering the Ideology of “Violent Care”

The Politics of Abortion Defense

Abortion defenders have long understood that the White nationalist Far Right under neoliberal capitalism polices, uses, and discards women as a strategy of economic and social control—and therefore it must be countered. Their resistance movement began in the early 1970s with “self-help”—activists’ term for gynecology and abortion practiced by laypeople in a group setting. Early on, these activists understood their work to be antithetical to coercive family planning, including U.S. government and International Planned Parenthood Federation programs in Latin America and South Asia for population control and capitalist development.^[4] They advocated for women’s, not states’, control of contraception and abortion.

In the late 1970s and the decade that followed, the New Right—a harbinger of today’s Far Right—waged war on poor women, people of color, and LGBTQ community members.^[5] Starting in the 1970s, the Right merged its antiwelfare and anti-abortion campaigns, culminating with the Hyde Amendment’s withdrawal of Medicaid funding for abortion except when the procedure was necessary to save a pregnant person’s life, punishing poor women of color.^[6] Radical abortion defenders who came of age in the 1980s witnessed Hyde’s impact amid escalating attacks on abortion rights, cuts to impoverished families’ health and social supports, and the denial of funding to care for people with HIV/AIDS.^[7] The Catholic Church, meanwhile, supported Operation Rescue while thwarting the distribution of condoms and clean needles for HIV prevention, harming women, LGBTQ people, and communities of color.^[8] Over the decades, in response to the Right’s punishing denial of support for these communities, abortion defenders also helped shape HIV/AIDS activism and developed harm reduction programs.^[9]

Some abortion defenders came of age in the 1990s, during what Linci Comy, the Oakland Women’s Choice Clinic’s longtime director, described to me as the “active terrorism years of the anti-abortion movement.”^[10] During this decade, violent anti-abortion activists threatened abortion seekers and providers around the country, firebombing clinics and murdering seven health care workers.^[11] To counter this violence, abortion defenders rose up, creating community-based solutions to two interrelated problems: the state’s structural abandonment of women and queer and trans people, and the Christian Right’s ideological claim to women’s bodies and lives within the heterosexual “nuclear” family.^[12] 

How the Anti-abortion Movement Hurts Women and LGBTQ People

For me, the anti-abortion movement’s contradiction came into stark relief at the “pro-life” Walk for Life West Coast^[13] in downtown San Francisco on January 21, 2023, on what would have been the weekend of the fiftieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, around seven months after the Supreme Court overturned the federal constitutional right to abortion.^[14] I went to the event to join the counter demonstration with people I had interviewed for my book. Our sizable counter demo watched and raged as Walk for Lifers mobbed Civic Center Plaza to hear Rebecca Kiessling, a vocal advocate of no-exception abortion bans,^[15] and Shawn Carney, cofounder of 40 Days for Life, an international anti-abortion organization that orchestrates ongoing “vigils” outside of clinics during Lent and other times of the year to “end abortion,” among others with extremist positions. 

“Abortion Hurts Women,” signs read, a message that the anti-abortion movement had been pushing for decades.^[16] This claim—one that abortion defenders have long refuted, in some cases citing their own life-saving abortions as evidence to the contrary—has been proven false by research on the long-term effects of unwanted pregnancies on women’s lives. In 2022, the University of California, San Francisco’s landmark Turnaway Study reported that women who were unable to obtain abortions experienced more economic hardship over time than women who were able to obtain abortions. Women who were forced to carry to term were four times more likely to see their household incomes fall below the federal poverty line; they were also more likely to be unable to afford basic needs.^[17] The study revealed that the denial of abortion hurts women. Combining this finding with demographic data on abortion seekers suggests that denial disproportionately harms women of color, who comprised more than 60 percent of abortion seekers nationally in 2020, and low-income women, who obtained 75 percent of all abortions in 2014.^[18] 

The denial of abortion hurts women, and thus, the anti-abortion movement hurts women. I recalled Laura Weide: “They wanted to hit women.” Another clinic defender named Agnes Sampson (pseudonym) put it to me this way: the antis were about “stomping women into the dirt.”^[19] Clinic defenders knew what the misogyny of the Right felt like when unleashed on the body because they had experienced it enacted on their bodies. They had experienced unplanned pregnancies and barriers to abortion access, and many were lesbians, queer-identified, or gender-nonconforming people who had been the targets of queerphobic speech and violence. They understood that the Right’s anti-abortion campaign was—and is—inextricable from its anti-LGBTQ campaign and that both were attempts to eliminate the body autonomy^[20] of women and other gender minorities to ensure the hegemony of cis White men. In this context, abortion defenders have long been aware of and in solidarity with reproductive justice, HIV/AIDS, and queer and trans health activism.

Since the Dobbs decision, 21 states have banned or further restricted abortion.^[21] In 2023, 86 anti-trans bills were passed in 25 states, limiting the freedom of trans youth and adults in almost all areas of life: school, sports, public bathrooms, health care, the military, the arts.^[22] Clearly, this war on the body autonomy of feminized people—attacking women and queer and trans people’s right to live in their bodies, sexualities, and genders freely—in the name of care and protection is the linchpin of the Right’s strategy for building its base and consolidating power. 

Siân Norris describes this campaign as a “decades-long war of organized misogyny” that views White women as “wombs of the nation” that must be controlled to ensure the reproduction of the “white ethno-state.”^[23] We can see the expression of this White supremacist-misogynist ideology in the track record of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian Right advocacy group that wrote a model bill of the Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks and then helped defend it to the Supreme Court in Dobbs.^[24]  In 2022, ADF brought a case to a Texas judge arguing that the FDA should never have approved the abortion pill mifepristone and that it should be banned.^[25] Today, ADF leads the charge in the legal attacks on trans rights and health. They’ve helped pass laws that restrict teaching about gender in schools and are helping to pass laws that restrict gender-affirming care for trans youth.^[26] 

White Supremacy’s Violent Care

After the rally in January 2023, Walk for Life participants lined up to march along Market Street. Our counter demonstration began to relax. But then, a group of large White men wearing ski masks walked defiantly through an apathetic police line and into our counter demo. They unrolled a large banner that read, “150K White Kids Per Year / Abortion Is Genocide.” Their explicitly White supremacist message implied that abortion must be outlawed to protect the White population’s birth rate—and ultimately, its dominance. Some counter demonstrators, mostly young women and queer and trans people, used their bodies to try to block the sign. Some huddled together in self-defense as the men started lunging at them.

Everything crystallized for me in that moment: men attacking women while claiming to care about them is not a contradiction in the anti-abortion movement’s logic; rather, this logic coopts and redefines care as an activity that encompasses and necessitates violence, including the violence of objectification. The anti-abortion movement’s “care” has never been about protecting the health and autonomy of human lives and communities. Rather, it has been—and is—about maintaining White wealth and power, including the value-generating power of women’s bodies, necessary to reproduce the labor force.^[27] I use the paradoxical phrase “violent care” to describe this far-right ideology, which demands the possession and control of White women along with the control and immiseration of poor women of color and queer and trans people, whose reproductive capacity does not directly support the White Christian Right’s nationalist project. Administered in the name of protecting White fetal life, this “violent care” racializes, dehumanizes, exploits, and punishes.

Since the late 1960s, the anti-abortion movement has coopted social justice rhetoric, purporting to be a civil rights movement for the unborn while promoting White supremacist ideology. As Jennifer Holland argues, by simultaneously victimizing and identifying with fetuses, White antis could imagine themselves, too, as victims.^[28] This victim logic bridges late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century White supremacist claims that legal abortion would mean “race suicide” for White people with twenty-first-century far-right ideological and political campaigns. The latter include “replacement theory,” the conspiracist idea that liberals aim to supplant White people with people of color by welcoming immigrants,^[29] and “abortion abolition,” which appropriates nineteenth-century anti-slavery rhetoric to advocate for the total criminalization of abortion as murder. Their efforts are not marginal: anti-abortion “abolitionists” have proposed bills in 17 U.S. states.^[30]

In 1992, after defending clinics in Southern Louisiana against a weeklong Operation Rescue siege, Laura Weide underscored the irony of the antis’ appropriation of civil rights rhetoric: “I heard some ORs chanting ‘KKK anti-gay’ against us when we were chanting ‘Racist, sexist, anti-gay, born-again bigots, go away,’ which again affirms that these people violently oppose everyone’s civil rights.”^[31] As Weide’s comments suggest, the far-right anti-abortion movement, undergirded by White supremacist-misogynist ideology, promulgates a culture of violent care. Such “care” is not truly care for life; its concern is for the fortification of White patriarchy.

“We did it before, and we’ll do it again:” Radical Abortion Defense as Revolutionary Care

The Far Right’s violent care ideology isn’t an abstract evil force; it is structurally determined by neoliberal capitalism. This ideology reflects what Laura Briggs describes as the “privatization of dependency” under neoliberalism, or the “political revolution that began in the late 1970s in the United States, in which corporate America and Wall Street…reset government priorities to shrink spending on the well-being of actual humans—from schools to housing to child welfare programs like [Aid to Families with Dependent Children]—in order to keep corporate taxes low and profits high.”^[32] As Briggs shows, the neoliberal imperative to privatize care has justified the state’s continued impoverishment of poor women of color. Briggs’ analysis contributes to a reproductive justice framework, which since the 1990s has provided a critique of racist structural barriers to the reproductive autonomy and thriving of women of color and their families.^[33]

How can we counter the institutionalization of violent care? How can we fight a Right that, under the guise of care, sickens and immiserates bodies that it views as exploitable or as obstructive or irrelevant to its White wealth- and nation-building project? Bay Area abortion defenders developed several approaches, all of which are instructive. First, they built independent clinics like Women’s Choice to establish standards of trauma-informed feminist care that center patient autonomy. Working with Medi-Cal, California’s state insurance program, which covers abortion care, they filled the gap created by the Hyde Amendment by offering this care to low-income and other marginalized people, including survivors, sex workers, immigrants, people with AIDS, and queer and trans people. They consolidated survival skills and knowledge, disseminating these into the community. Crucially, Bay Area abortion defenders cultivated an underground in which laypeople could collaborate with health workers at a licensed clinic, become trained in gynecology and abortion, and take their training and practice beyond the clinic’s walls. 

Bay Area abortion defenders also developed creative community self-defense approaches to clinic defense, including bringing satirical street theater to outdoor areas in front of churches. For example, in 1989, they staged an ostentatious mock wedding outside San Francisco’s First Orthodox Presbyterian Church, in which a “minister” pronounced a couple “man and property,” while rowdy “guests” shouted “Breed! Breed! Breed!” and pelted the bride with coat hangers and plastic babies.^[34] Using imagination and humor, their direct actions countered the repressive violent care that has defined the anti-abortion movement. 

Violent care is not care—radical abortion defenders understood this. They repudiated the violent care of the Right and the state by doing care differently. Their decades-long movement to ensure abortion access reveals that community-based care at its best is shared, empowering, trauma-informed, equitable, and revolutionary. Moreover, care is a commitment to health and safety—regardless of the legal status of its provision. And radical care centers the need for solidarity in struggle, across different experiences of race, class, and gender, and across political ideologies. As Linci Comy once put it to me, “We did it before, and we’ll do it again.” Of course, radical abortion defenders never stopped doing it. They have been doing care differently all along. Herein lies the power of their revolutionary movement.