Jill Filipovic: Democratic party may be open to backing anti-abortion candidates who can help them win back Congress
She says this is an option that should not even be on the table, is an insult to women and a losing strategy
Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and Nairobi, Kenya, and the author of the book “The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness.” Follow her on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
(CNN)The chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Ben Ray Luján, said in an interview this week that his party intended to support candidates who can win, regardless of their position on abortion rights.
There will be no abortion “litmus test” in the Democrats’ drive to win back the House, he said. His comments echoed earlier ones from Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer and Bernie Sanders.
Jill Filipovic
That’s not just an insult to the women (and men) who make up the Democrats’ base. It’s a fool’s errand.
Much of the left has learned all the wrong lessons from Hillary Clinton’s defeat. They could focus on increasing turnout among their base — women and African-Americans — but Democrats have instead taken a rhetorical page from both Donald Trump’s sexism and Bernie Sanders’s populism by trying to appeal to disaffected white guys.
This pivot to the right on women’s health is particularly insidious, reflecting an anti-feminist backlash across the
Democrats may say they are trying to field the most competitive team of candidates they can to win a majority in Congress, and in some districts that candidate might be anti-abortion. But this treads a dangerous path: ceding to demands that the entire political system cater to the perceived values of a group that largely stopped voting for Democrats in the 1960s, when the party pushed the Civil Rights Act and equal rights for women.
The public embrace of anti-choice candidates is just one plank of this party overhaul. The new Democratic platform emphasizes building infrastructure, lowering prescription drug costs and creating jobs.
These are all valuable goals, but making them the entire focus of the media blitz at the expense of policies aimed at serving women and people of color seems to be a naked appeal to the white working class, who some political observers have decided voted for Trump out of economic anxiety. This narrative is belied by the social science, which showed bigotry had much more of an influence on Trump supporters than personal finances.
It’s not just “economic anxiety” the party is trying to transform into votes. Funding candidates who oppose legal abortion contradicts any claim that Democrats are the party of the masses, let alone the ignored and underserved.
Women are more than half the population, and one in three of us will have an abortion in her lifetime, according to a 2011 study from the Guttmacher Institute. Nearly every American will have a friend, lover, colleague, girlfriend, sister, boss, wife or mother who has had an abortion, even if they never know it.
Feminists focus on reproductive rights for good reason: a woman’s ability to decide for herself when and if to have children shapes much of the rest of her life — whether she completes her education, whether she marries for love, whether she parents when she feels adept and ready, whether she fulfills her professional potential, and whether she’s able to follow her own personal path wherever it leads.
Supporting laws that give the state the power to compel women to continue pregnancies is misogynist and illiberal. Expecting Democratic politicians to stake out clear ground on abortion rights is not a “purity test” or a difference in opinion on policy or efficacy, like divergent views on the best ways to reduce inequality or suggesting we should repair the ACA before promoting a single-payer system.
It’s a basic question of human rights: Are women sovereign citizens in our own bodies? If your answer is no, the Democratic Party shouldn’t fund your campaign.
It’s disturbing to see the United States’ ostensibly progressive party so quickly abandon both its own most loyal voters and progressive ideals, all in a frenzied grab for the same Trump supporters who have dominated sympathetic media coverage of the election. It’s also a losing strategy.
Most Democrats are pro-choice (about the same proportion of Republicans who are pro-life), and fewer than one in five Americans says they only support candidates who agree with them on abortion rights. One imagines those one in five are probably the most strongly pro-choice or pro-life, and that the strongest pro-life belief — that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, even rape, incest, or life of the pregnant woman — probably correlates with many other religious and conservative beliefs as well.
It seems unlikely that abortion alone is the one issue alienating many voters from the Democratic Party.
What is obvious, though, is that abortion rights are an animating issue for the Democratic Party base, and support for abortion rights gets a whole lot of women marching, donating money, and volunteering for Democrats.
The party has a lot to lose by alienating them in a dodgy gamble to scoop up Trump voters, where a “win” apparently means building the ranks of the party by adding more people who are hostile to women’s rights. Clearly, we have enough of those guys already.
The policy giving those in jail an incentive to undergo a sterilization procedure was unequivocally a form of eugenics: an attempt to control who can bear and raise children and why.
Thousands of people had been forced or coerced into sterilization with no justice. Shutterstock
Evidence provided to Congress by state attorneys general and health departments proves that abortion is both extremely safe and highly regulated. Searchable by state.
Last week, Tennessee Judge Sam Benningfield rescinded a program that would reduce jail sentences for inmates who agreed to undergo free birth control processes, either a Nexplanon implant or vasectomy, through the state health department. Following the announcement of the program in May, 32 women and 38 men had signed up for the program. Nobody underwent surgery prior to the cancellation of the program, and those who signed up will still be granted the 30-day credit.
The program was pulled after being described as “controversial” by media outlets—a stark mischaracterization. In fact, it was coercive, incentivizing individuals to trade in their reproductive freedom for reduced jail time. It is unequivocally a form of eugenics: an attempt to control who can bear and raise children.
Eugenic sterilization refers to the practice of using sterilization as a means of promoting certain “desirable” characteristics over others. Desirability, of course, is racially and economically coded. People of color, poor and rural people, disabled people, and immigrants have been the targets of eugenics research and policies used to justify violence against them, as well as used deceptively or without informed consent in order to develop birth control methods. The first oral contraceptive pill developed for use in the United States, for example, was tested on poor women and women of color, who were also often sterilizedagainst their knowledge.
In his book, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness, Matt Wray details how poor and rural communities were often targeted by early eugenics practices in the United States. The poverty rate in White County, where Judge Benningfield serves, is more than 18 percent, higher than the national average. “Birth control” programs like Judge Benningfield’s in our current criminal justice systems will inevitably lead to the disproportionate sterilization of poor people in White County. And while the population of White County is 96 percent white, we do know that Black, Latino, and Native communities are overcriminalized in the state of Tennessee.
In a press statement released by the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, Executive Director Hedy Weinberg said, “Offering a so-called ‘choice’ between jail time and coerced contraception or sterilization is unconstitutional. Such a choice violates the fundamental constitutional right to reproductive autonomy and bodily integrity by interfering with the intimate decision of whether and when to have a child, imposing an intrusive medical procedure on individuals who are not in a position to reject it.”
The United States has a shameful history of coerced and forced sterilization. In the 1900s, thousands of forced sterilization cases were documented in the United States, and programs were institutionalized in about 30 states. While many women have opted for sterilization as a means of permanent contraception, many of these programs sterilized people in the name of “social welfare,” frequently without telling them the surgery was irreversible. In many cases, it was used as a form of social control, meant to punish women who were considered “sexually deviant,” as well as poor women and drug users.
Activists rallied against sterilization across the country, developing coalitions to force politicians to address the issue. Organizations like the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), Coalition for the Medical Rights of Women, Chicana Welfare Rights Organization, Bay Area Committee Against Forced Sterilization, the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse, and the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse were integral in pushing back against the onslaught of sterilization policies across the country. Some states, such as North Carolina and Virginia, eventually paid reparations to victims of such policies.
The 1974 U.S. Supreme Court court case Relf v. Weinberger ruled against the coerced sterilization of welfare recipients and called upon what is now the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to put in place restrictions to prevent the practice.
Still, thousands of people had been forced or coerced into sterilization with no justice.
We have continued to legislate who can bear children and why. This is most evident in U.S. social welfare policies. In the 1960s, welfare reform was adapted to include provisions for family caps, or limits to welfare funding that deny additional assistance for new children born into families already receiving benefits. In addition, women were threatened with the loss of their welfare benefits if they refused to be sterilized. The sole aim of such policies were to discourage women on welfare from having additional children, and the coercive practice of family caps still exists in states across the country today.
These social welfare policies fit into a broader pattern of legislation aimed at social control. For example, the birth control pill was originally only accessible to married women. It wasn’t until 1972 that birth control was ruled legal for unmarried people, as well. Additionally, the Aid to Families of Dependent Children (AFDC) provides benefits to impoverished children. Archaic “man-in-the-house” clauses attempted to strip children of those benefits if women were living with or even dating a man that could be considered a “substitute father.” These regulations intended to shame women who lived and had sex outside a conventional marriage—an attempt to control sexual behavior and sexuality. Attempts to provide AFDC subsidies for women who used long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) were previously introduced across multiple states, with Washington even recommending mandatory proof of birth control use for AFDC eligibility in 1995.
For that matter, it wasn’t long ago that California had to explicitly pass a law banning forced sterilization in its prisons. A bill was passed in 2014 after reports that nearly 150 women were coercively sterilized through the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation between 2006 and 2010. The incident was a painful reminder of the state’s eugenics history; it had one of the most active sterilization programs in the country in the early 1900s.
So while the judge’s program was shockingly reminiscent of explicit eugenics and punitive sterilization laws in the past, it was also part of a dangerous trend of controlling the reproduction of marginalized and vulnerable communities that never actually ended.
In an official statement released by Judge Benningfield, he admitted that he intended the program to be mostly used by women to dissuade them from having children.
“The primary purpose in this was to try to reduce the number of children born drug dependant [sic] or suffering the consequences of in[-utero] drug exposure,” he stated. “I thought it would also reduce the number of children who would eventually wind up in foster care.”
The discussion of reproductive rights has often focused on the right to abortion and birth control. This recent program is a reminder that, for vulnerable communities, the right to have children and raise them to adulthood continues to be undermined. This reality is addressed by the reproductive justice framework—a major tenet of which is the right to have children and raise children, a concept previously neglected by so-called traditional reproductive rights organizations.
Judge Benningfield told reporters that the majority of crimes in White County are drug-related, as the county has been hit fairly hard by the opioid epidemic. His program was clearly motivated by his desire to dissuade drug users from having or raising children. The judge also offered a “two-day credit” for people who attended a program on neonatal abstinence syndrome, a treatable condition experienced by some newborns exposed to drugs in utero.
Painting the program as “controversial” obscures the reality: It is a form of eugenics where one judge determined that some people were more suited to have children than others. It is scary to think how far Judge Benningfield’s program was allowed to proceed, and what might have happened if it had not gained the attention of the media.
In a statement by SisterReach, a reproductive justice organization in Memphis, Tennessee, CEO and Founder Cherisse Scott supported the cancellation of the program, but warned about similar programs that currently exist across the state: “These [programs’] attempts are not centered in patient investment like expanding health care options, sexual health education or comprehensive contraceptive access. Instead, their programming preferences methods they deem most effective or suitable for people they classify as ineffective.”
It is also worth noting that Tennessee also has multiple abortion restrictions—from mandated counseling, wait periods, parental consent laws, and restrictions to public funding. Over 95 percent of its counties do not have clinics that provide abortion care. Tennessee was also where a woman was shackled while she went into labor and where Anna Yocca was jailed for trying to perform a self-induced abortion.
Taken in that context, Judge Benningfield’s program fit into a pattern of Tennessee legislation and policy that undermines pregnancy-related choices. While anti-abortion laws prevent them from choosing not to have children, forced sterilization attempted to restrict their ability to have children. The hypocrisy of this contrast reveals the reality: that overall, Tennessee leadership does not trust women, particularly women of color and poor women, to make decisions about their bodies and families.
Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, on why it would be bad political strategy for the Democratic party to support anti-choice candidates.
Recently, Democratic Party leadership made news by suggesting that an appropriate course correction to the recent election losses would be to be more flexible on abortion rights. Nothing could be further from the truth.
It’s easy to get mad at the Democrats for even considering this move, and believe me, I have been. But let’s consider where they are coming from. We just lost the biggest election of our lifetime, and the stakes are incredibly high. Most days, it feels like our democracy is on line. Some of them in leadership are facing a crisis in confidence. They’re nervous. I get it.
However, let’s be honest about what they’re missing: jettisoning absolute support for abortion rights is simply bad political strategy that leads to worse policy and creates dangerous outcomes for women like us.
According to NARAL’s polling, seven in 10 Americans believe in legal access to abortion. That support cuts across red, purple, and blue states, and applies to people who personally would not choose abortion for themselves, but would never dream of imposing their point of view onto their neighbor or friend. Almost no one believes that a politician knows better than you what’s best for you or your family.
When abortion is illegal or highly restricted, it doesn’t go away – it just becomes more dangerous. In my home state of Texas, where abortion is more severely restricted than almost anywhere in the country, Google searches for self-induced abortion are soaring.
OK, so if abandoning abortion rights achieves no good political or policy outcomes, what’s it about? Two things. First, a lack of recognition among politicians that they too carry the sexist attitudes of the society around them and therefore are willing to give when it comes to women’s rights. Second, and behind the scenes, it’s a dangerous desire to appease a rigid opposition that will never be appeased because the fight for them is not really about abortion. They are trying to appeal to a discomforted set of people who long for a day when more rigid gender roles created a greater certainty about their prospects and station in life. When women could not control our own fertility, our ability to fend for ourselves was tenuous and our reliance on men and marriage was borne out of necessity, not equal partnership.
The fight for abortion rights represent whether or not women can be considered full, equal partners in society, whether we’re respected to make our own decisions without paternal intrusion. As women, one of the most critical decisions we will ever make our lives (or have made in my case) is when and how and with whom you have a family. That decision affects every other part of your life: where you live, whether you finish school, whether you can get the kind of job you want, who your partner is. Ultimately, that decision affects whether and how you achieve your dreams and contribute to society with all the talents and passion you possess. Having a total stranger make that decision for you – whatever it is – speaks volumes about how society views you as incapable of doing so.
Some women personally believe they would never avail themselves of abortion services, no matter what the circumstance. That’s a perfectly laudable position. We work as hard to safeguard their personal decision-making as we do the millions of American women who have chosen to terminate a pregnancy.
But not everyone is comfortable with women’s decision-making. Those who are deeply uncomfortable with our ability to make decisions for ourselves represent a small, but increasingly powerful, fringe minority of people in the country who are downright hostile. And when representatives of this fringe are elected to office, they almost always vote to not just make abortion illegal or inaccessible, but to restrict our ability to get contraception and to reject policies that support working moms. They’re not really anti-abortion. They are against world where women can contribute equally and chart our own destiny in ways our grandmothers never thought possible.
The truth is that trying to appease this far-right crowd is a dark, dangerous strategy with no reward. And it creates a future with our voices shut out.
I truly understand why Democrats in leadership are nervous. But this is a very important moment for them. The choice they are making is not whether or not to support abortion rights. The choice they are making is whether to be the party that embraces the future or flirts with the past at women’s expense. Choosing the former option means recognizing that our strength as a country lies in honoring the fundamental freedoms of all people and embracing the diversity that will allow us to thrive. Economic security and full equality cannot be realized without reproductive freedom. As women, we need them to craft legislative and political policies that meet real women and real families where we are at. We already have one party trying to legislate us backward in time.
As they consider this question, it’s our job to remind these elected leaders that, ultimately, they are accountable to us. It’s you – younger women, and especially women of color – who voted overwhelmingly last November to reject Donald Trump. It was women who brushed ourselves off after a devastating defeat and decided to take the streets by the millions a day after Trump’s inauguration in the largest protest movement in the history of the country. And we did all of this because we know our fundamental freedoms cannot be bargained away.
Democrats must hear us.
It’s our future – your future – that is being kicked around. Party politics will determine whether our futures will be mortgaged or invested in. It’s time to invest in women.
In Texas, legislators have been systematically handicapping Planned Parenthood for years.
Photograph by Jim Scalzo / EPA / Redux
Among the various chances that congressional Republicans have taken intheir effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, one of the riskier moves involves the federal defunding of Planned Parenthood. In both the House and the Senate, replacement legislation has included a provision that would cut off all federal Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood for one year. (The bill would also bar federal tax credits from being used to purchase private health plans that cover abortion.) The provision is reportedly included even in the so-called skinny repeal. The Senate parliamentarian has determined that the provision violates the Byrd rule, which states that a reconciliation bill can only address matters that affect the federal budget; if the anti-Planned Parenthood provision cannot be passed under reconciliation, it would require sixty votes to pass. Many observers expect Senate Republicans to rework the language in the bill so that it can stay in reconciliation. Ted Cruz, meanwhile, has suggested that the parliamentarian’s ruling can be ignored.
That Republicans have taken things this far is a testimony to just how important defunding Planned Parenthood has become to many of them. Planned Parenthood operates more than six hundred clinics across the country, and a majority of its patients have incomes that fall near or below the federal poverty level; the organization receives around forty per cent of its revenue from federal funding, mostly through Medicaid. Cutting off those payments would be a drastic change for women’s health care in this country. For a glimpse of just how drastic it would be, we can look to Texas, where state legislators have been systematically defunding and handicapping Planned Parenthood for years. Currently, the Texas legislature is in special session, and three more anti-abortion measures have already been passed. One of them prevents local and state government agencies from contracting in any way—including via lease agreements—with clinics that are affiliated with abortion providers. As with the federal provision attached to the repeal of Obamacare, Planned Parenthood is not mentioned by name in this Texas bill. And yet, as Texas senators acknowledged last Friday, the bill only affects Planned Parenthood. (Calls to multiple state senators who sponsored the bill were not returned.)
The campaign against Planned Parenthood in Texas kicked off in 2011, a point when, as Lawrence Wright noted recently in the magazine, the organization was serving sixty per cent of the health needs of low-income women in the state. In the 2011 legislative session, which Texas Monthly called “the most aggressively anti-abortion and anti-contraception session in history,” the state government cut family-planning spending by two-thirds and approved a budget that, starting in 2013, banned Planned Parenthood from participating in the state’s women’s-health program, now called Healthy Texas Women. Federal law requires that states allow Medicaid patients their choice of “any willing provider,” and so Texas had to give up a nine-to-one federal funding match. Millions of dollars in spending for women’s health care were turned away. Then, this past May, Texas asked the Trump Administration for that federal funding back—a request that, if approved, would signal to other states that Planned Parenthood can be banned from Medicaid family-planning programs at will and with no financial repercussions. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, sixteen additional states have already proposed or approved similar bans.
It’s possible that, even if Planned Parenthood is defunded at the federal level by current Republican efforts, funding might be restored by subsequent legislation. But Texas provides a startling example of how quickly the women’s-health landscape can be wrecked by a withdrawal of resources—and how lasting that wreckage can be. Within months of the family-planning budget getting slashed in Texas, more than sixty women’s-health clinics had closed. Such effects can take years to undo, even if laws are reversed. In 2016, the Supreme Court overturned a Texas law that had halved the number of abortion clinics in the state. Only two clinics have reopened. The sprawl of Texas is almost incomprehensible—it’s the same distance from Houston, my home town, to El Paso as it is from Houston to Kansas City—and that sprawl means that rural clinic closures bring immediate and catastrophic consequences for poor women and women without cars. Teen abortions and teen births have both been increasing in Texas since 2011, and the maternal mortality rate in Texas doubled from 2010 to 2014. It’s now 35.8 deaths per hundred thousand live births—the worst maternal mortality rate you can find in the developed world.
Last week, I spoke to Caroline Coyner-Such, a clinician who has been working in health care for forty-three years, twenty-seven of those at Planned Parenthood. She now works at a clinic in North Austin, one of three in the Austin area that collectively serve nearly nineteen thousand patients each year. “Twenty or thirty years ago,” she told me over the phone, “we saw mainly women under the age of thirty-five. These days, as Texas women lose access to other options, we’re seeing more women, and a wider range of women—preteens up to women in their fifties and sixties.” The previous day, a homeless patient had come in. The North Austin clinic provides well-woman exams, S.T.I. screenings, cervical-cancer screenings, breast-cancer screenings, and birth-control counselling, among other things. It does not provide abortion services, but the surgical center at the South Austin location, thirty minutes away, does.
As clinics in other areas have been forced to close, the Austin-area clinics have begun seeing more and more patients from farther away. “Yesterday, I saw a patient from Elgin, which is an hour away,” Coyner-Such said. “We see people from Killeen, which is another hour away. This means people have to take a whole day off from work to drive to Austin to get basic services—which often used to be available in their communities—and go back. We routinely send prescriptions out in a seventy-five-to-one-hundred-mile radius.” The Austin-area clinics have a base of private donors and local grants that they’ve been able to draw from as they’ve scrambled to replace public funding; small clinics often lack this piecemeal buffer, and rely more heavily on Title X, which is Planned Parenthood’s other federal funding source.
“People are fearful,” Coyner-Such told me. “The summer is usually lower in terms of patient numbers, but not this year.” The news is a constant presence in her workplace, she said, with patients showing up afraid that their insurance will be taken away, and with new regulations from the legislature rolling in. “We have to be constantly monitoring in order to know what we’re going to lose and what we have to recoup,” she said. “It takes a lot of effort to stay on top of—I can’t believe I’m even using this term, but—the fake news.” Patients are sometimes openly surprised that the clinic is clean and professional, or that Coyner-Such has specialty certifications. She knows the kind of campaigning she’s up against. “Years ago, I had a Planned Parenthood bumper sticker, and someone slashed my tires,” she said. “After that, I quit doing bumper stickers—it’s not worth the tire replacement.”
The Republican health-care legislation asks that the landscape of women’s care be reimagined without Planned Parenthood in it. But without Planned Parenthood that landscape, particularly for low-income women, scarcely exists. Pink billboards have gone up around Austin and other major cities in Texas advertising the Healthy Texas Women program, which does not provide abortion services and is explicitly intended to redirect patients from Planned Parenthood, yet sixty thousand fewer women are enrolled in the program than were enrolled in the Medicaid Women’s Health Program in 2011, before Planned Parenthood was excluded. Even setting aside the fact that comprehensive women’s health care necessitates the option of safe abortion—and that the Hyde Amendment has banned federal funding of abortion, with rare exceptions, since 1976—Planned Parenthood serves such a large portion of low-income women, and has done so for so long, that other clinics are logistically incapable of picking up the slack. “There is a real fear, if Texas continues along this line, if they continue to downgrade our funding—where will these women go?” Coyner-Such said. “Will they wait six months for an appointment at another clinic? Or will they be pregnant because they aren’t able to access our services?” Then she excused herself, going back to the patients who awaited her.
In 2011, María Teresa Rivera was arrested in El Salvador. She was accused of having anabortion and sentenced to 40 years in prison on the charge of “aggravated homicide.” Rivera claims she had a miscarriage and did not even know she was pregnant. Attorneys were able to free her, but not before she served four and a half years of her sentence. She fled the country when a prosecutor appealed the judge’s decision to a higher court.
On March 20, the Swedish Migration Agency granted Rivera and her 12-year-old son political asylum. She is believed to be the first person in the world to be granted asylum for abortion persecution.
Splinter spoke with María Teresa Rivera in her new home near Stockholm in June. Interview has been edited and condensed.
The nightmare started in November 2011 in San Salvador, El Salvador. It was the night before my son’s elementary school graduation and I went to bed late preparing food and ironing his outfit. A few hours later I woke up with stomach cramps. I went to the outhouse because I felt like I needed to go poo-poo. I just remember feeling like something in my stomach collapsed. When I went to clean myself I noticed I was bleeding. I walked back to the house and my mother-in-law called the ambulance for help. I was losing blood and it took so long to get me to the hospital that I fainted. I don’t remember anything after that.
When I woke up in the hospital, there were already police officers guarding the room. The officers asked me where my son was. I was confused and didn’t know what they were talking about. They were accusing me of killing my son. Later I realized they were accusing me of having an abortion. El Salvador is one of six countries in the world that have a blanket ban on abortions.
I didn’t know I was pregnant. I kept getting my period and my stomach didn’t grow. I told the officers I hadn’t killed anyone.
I was told I was under arrest for aggravated homicide and was handcuffed to the hospital bed so that I wouldn’t escape, police officers told me. I asked them to take blood samples and all the tests they needed to take. But the doctors didn’t do any of that. There’s no scientific evidence.
I was in jail the next morning. I was still sick and recovering in the jail. There were so many women in my cell that all we could do was stand. The cell was so overcrowded that the women took turns sleeping on the floor. They all stood for longer hours so I could remain lying down. The women took care of me. They even shared their food with me. At the holding jail where I was taken there’s no food provided, so family members bring meals. My mother-in-law would bring me food, but I never got it. Then I was transferred to prison.
I missed my son’s graduation. And then the next four and a half years of his life.
I mentioned to a co-worker in January 2011 at the factory I worked at that I was worried my period was late. Later she came to testify in court to say I knew I was pregnant. But the prosecutor claimed I had an abortion in November. That’s illogical because it would have meant I was 11 months pregnant at the time of the abortion.
I’ve always said that if I wanted to have an abortion I would not have waited 11 months. It just makes no sense to condemn me for an 11-month pregnancy.
I was sentenced to 40 years in prison for a homicide I did not commit.
When the judge gave me the sentence, I felt like it was all over. The first thing I thought was, “How old is my seven-year-old son going to be in 2052 when I leave prison?” I did the math and told myself, “He is going to be 47 years old and he’s going to hate me. He is going to blame me for missing his life.” I thought about all the things that can happen to my child in that amount of time. It was very difficult.
The truth is I’ve had a hard life, but that’s also what gives me strength. I was five when my mother disappeared during the civil war in El Salvador. We never heard from her again. My grandmother raised my brother and me. She used to take us to work with her. We helped clean vegetables at the market. But when she got sick family members juggled us around. I was eight when I was raped on my way home from school. I had to walk through a dark road and my aunts blamed it on me. My brother and I ultimately ended up in an orphanage for children of the disappeared.
I never watched the news on TV, much less read newspapers. I didn’t want to poison my mind with bad stories. I’ve had to live through my own stories. So when I got to prison I assumed I was the only women in prison for having an abortion or miscarriage.
I was all over the news, so the women in prison recognized me. It turned out there were a lot more women in prison who were accused of having abortions. Some of them had 30-year sentences, others were sentenced to 35 years. But I got the most severe sentence. I was the first to get a 40-year sentence, so my story made international headlines.
In prison it just takes one person to recognize you and then word travels. Rumors spread.
The women in prison called me the “mata niños”—the baby killer. They threatened to kill me just like I had killed my son. Luckily they never physically attacked me; it was all just emotional stress.
But I met other women in prison, some as young as 18, who were incarcerated for having an abortion. All of them were poor. The women who have money pay private doctors for the procedures or they fly out of the country for an abortion.
Women would come to me and tell me they were in there for an abortion. I’d get their names and share them with my lawyer.
[At least 129 women were prosecuted for abortion-related crimes in El Salvador between 2000 and 2011, according to Agrupación Ciudadana por la Despenalización del Aborto (Citizens’ Coalition for the Decriminalization of Abortion), an advocacy group that also helped fight Rivera’s case. Of these, 23 were convicted of receiving an illegal abortion; 26 were convicted of homicide. There are at least 21 women in Salvadoran prisons serving time for abortion related charges.]
I met 11 of these women during my four years in prison. We all had similar stories. We came from poor and working-class families. Some of them had little schooling. Some of the women were raped. There were cases of incest and miscarriages.
We all lived through this very difficult experience and only we know how we feel.
We made a pact and promised each other that the first one to be freed was going to become a spokeswoman for all of us. There were 11 of us who made the agreement. We all thought the other person would be freed first. But it turned out to be me.
Now I have that responsibility, and I cannot break that commitment. I don’t speak out so people know who I am—I speak out so that people learn what’s going on. My commitment to the women who are still incarcerated are what give me power to keep going now.
When I heard the judge say he was overturning my case I felt like I was dreaming.
The judge ruled there was not enough evidence to prove the charges against me. He annulled the sentence and ordered the State to pay damages for sending me to prison for almost five years.
The judge’s decision made headlines again, but the stories focused on how the prosecutor would appeal the ruling. One of the largest newspaper included graphic details in the story about the annulment. They said I had cut my own umbilical cord, removed the newborn and threw it into the latrine while it was still alive. They never quoted the judge who freed me.
I tried to get work immediately but I quickly realized I wasn’t really free. I’ve had to work since I was a young girl. I’m a hard worker and willing to do anything so I could provide for my own son. I’ve never had fear of any work. In prison I would stick my hands in toilets to clear them up. I’m not afraid of an honest job.
But I’d walk into businesses that had hiring signs on their windows and they’d look at me and tell me the position has been filled. People recognized me and didn’t want to hire me.
I told myself I wouldn’t speak to reporters again. The media in my country only used my story against me. They never printed anything in my favor.
Then officials announced they were going to appeal the judge’s decision to annul my case. That’s when I knew I had to leave.
I was invited to speak at a conference in Stockholm. That was my way out. People in Sweden who I’ve never met raised money and paid for the flight for my son and me.
I feared they wouldn’t let me fly out of the country because the prosecutor was after my case. I knew my sentence was annulled and felt more secure when I was able to get a passport without any issues. But at the airport I was still anxious. I was shaking when they scanned my boarding pass to enter the plane. In the end we didn’t have any problems getting out of the country.
The first flight in my life I went from El Salvador to Panama, Panama to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Stockholm. I didn’t know anything about Sweden before I got here. All I was able to gather when I looked at a map is that were a lot of lakes.
I arrived in Stockholm in October last year in the evening and the next morning I applied for asylum. They were very kind to me. I know that other women like me have fled to the United States without authorization. Some of them are undocumented or still going through the asylum process.
There was a sense of relief when I arrived here but it’s also been very difficult. I can communicate with very few people and all I have here is my son.
I live in immigration housing provided by the Swedish government. It’s in a rural town and two bus rides and a train ride away from Stockholm. But I’m walking distance from a lake. We’re the only Spanish-speaking family around here. I knew we were going to struggle and have to fight to start our lives here but sometimes I feel like I don’t even know where to start.
I’ve met other Salvadorans who have asylum here. Many of them fled during the civil war in the 1980s and early 1990s and some of them are missing limbs. They’ve formed a community here and have been supportive, even extending invitations to dinners.
Right now I’m learning Swedish using the internet. My son has started school and he teaches me words, too. We don’t have internet at home. When I can afford cell phone service we use my phone but sometimes we have to go to shopping centers with free wifi to get online. I’m not allowed to work until I get my work permit.
People who heard I was coming to Sweden through advocacy groups have donated a few things. My neighbor also let me have his old TV. He’s from Syria, a single dad with three girls.
I’ve also done a little shopping myself. When I went to the immigration office I was walking by and saw a big ad on the side of a retail building. I looked at my son and I said, “Let’s go in there.” It’s a place called Ikea. I got my dishes there. I had never heard of Ikea but I saw people going in and out and I just went inside to see what we’d find. The first thing I said was, “Wow this place is big. We don’t have anything like this in El Salvador.” But you know, the most important thing for me right now is price.
It’s been five years since the judge declared I was guilty of aggravated homicide. That was in July 2012. And this is still happening.
[On July 5, a Salvadoran judge sentenced 19-year-old Evelyn Beatriz Hernandez Cruz to 30-years in prison for giving birth to a stillborn baby in a toilet. She was at home on April 6, 2016 when she felt sharp pains in her stomach and went to the restroom. She later fainted and woke up in the hospital. Medical staff at the Hospital Nuestra Señora de Fátima in Cojutepeque reported her to law enforcement officials.
Prosecutors could not provide evidence to determine whether the fetus died in utero or moments after delivery, but she was still charged with aggravated murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison.]
I’ve told my son that when the time is right I want to him to share his story with reporters, too. I want the world to know what these laws and the stigma are doing to the families of these women. I’m not afraid to speak out anymore. I don’t care what people say about me. I’m going to speak and talk about the lives that Salvadoran women are living.
“These policies only work to further place women at a disadvantage.”
For years, anti-abortion advocates have used the claim that abortion is bad for women’s health to help justify restrictions on the procedure. But how do states with highly restricted access to abortion stack up when it comes to women’s health overall?
Not so well, according to a new report by two reproductive rights groups.
Released on Tuesday, the report by the abortion rights legal advocacy group Center for Reproductive Rights and the research organization Ibis Reproductive Healthfound that states with more anti-abortion laws alsotend to have poor outcomes generallyfor women’s and children’s health compared with states that have fewer restrictions.
Researchers tallied up the number and typeof abortion restriction in each state and sifted through data and literature on women’s health overall from 2015 to 2016. Then they gave each state two numbers: one for the number of restrictions and another for the number of women’s health “benchmarks” met by the state. These benchmarks included things like access to primary care providers, low maternal mortality rates, childhood vaccinations, and children receiving mental health care.
“Framing a measure like, ‘We’re doing this to protect and promote women’s health,’ eases the passage of it,” says Terri-Ann Thompson, a researcher at Ibis and an author of the report. But she explains that their research suggests those states often don’t actually prioritize policies that would benefit women and children.
Over the last seven years, states legislators have enacted more than 300 anti-abortion bills. Among them are restrictions on insurance coverage for abortion, limits on which health care professionals can perform abortions, mandatory counseling on fetal pain and development, and requirements on the time frame within which abortion can be performed. Meanwhile, in some areaswomen’s and children’s health care has been deteriorating.
Consider the situation inSouth Carolina. The state has 14 abortion restrictions on the books, meaning it is one of five states—along with Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, and Oklahoma—that have every type of restriction identified by Ibis. Last year, the state passed a ban on abortion after 20 weeks, which Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion legal group, touts as an important move for maternal health. “Late-term abortions cost more than early abortions,” says AUL in a report on 20-week bans, “a fact that reflects the greater health risks of later abortions and provides an incentive for the abortion industry to support late-term abortion instead of women’s health and safety.”
Abortion rights groups say the bans are actually detrimental for women. Only a small fraction of the nearly 1 million abortions performed each year are after 20 weeks. Women who get abortions after 20 weeks often do so if the pregnancy is a threat to their health, or if a serious fetal anomaly has been detected. “The reality is that abortion later in pregnancy is extremely rare and often takes place in complex and difficult situations where a woman and her doctor need every medical option available,” Alyssa Miller, Planned Parenthood South Atlantic’s director of public affairs for South Carolina, told the New York Times. “These bills are simply part of an extreme political agenda to chip away at access to safe and legal abortion.”
But even before Gov. Nikki Haley signed the 20-week ban into law,South Carolina already had some of the worst outcomes for women’s health in the country, according to the new report. In 2015,maternal mortality rates in the state had soared nearly 300 percent and reached theirhighest point since the turn of the century. The Post and Courier attributed the rise to the “growing numbers of women who go through pregnancy and childbirth while suffering from chronic diseases, such as diabetes and hypertension.” In 2015, one third of women in South Carolina had no dedicated health care provider, a worse level than the national average. And this year, the Legislature is considering a budget bill that would cut all state funding from Planned Parenthood, potentially forcing the clinics in the state to close.
Meanwhile, the report notes that South Carolina fares even worse when it comes to children’s health. The state met none of the benchmarks—meaning it was worse than the national average on everything from child mortality rates to teen birth rates to the percentage of children with asthma problems.
Thompson points to Louisiana as another good example of the connection between restrictive laws and bad outcomes. Like South Carolina, the state has fared terribly when it comes to women’s and children’s health outcomes such as infant and maternal mortality rates over the last two years. Last year, Gov. John Bel Edwards signed seven abortion restrictions into law, and the state is currently battling in court over four abortion-related laws. Add to that, in 2014, Republican Sen. David Vitter urged the Louisiana health department to investigate a Baton Rouge clinic he accused of violating a privacy law in order to “protect the health and safety of women and children in Louisiana.” He made the request one day before state lawmakers were scheduled to discuss an anti-abortion bill to require that abortion providers have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. The measure passed but is currently facing a court challenge.
“They make these claims that they’re trying to promote the health and well-being of women, but that really isn’t backed up by the numbers,” says Thompson. “These policies only work to further place women at a disadvantage in overall health.”
If you go to a clinic that provides abortions, chances are you’ll probably see a group of people wearing brightly colored vests outside: They’re clinic escorts, helping patients get into and out of the building safely, regardless of the reasons any patient is entering the building.
Though clinic escorts have been around for decades, Donald Trump’s election in November has inspired a new wave of people to volunteer their services: Many abortion clinics say there are unprecedented numbers of people showing up for the job. And while clinic escorts spend much of their time dealing with anti-abortion protesters, they feel that there’s much about their work that pro-choice advocates get wrong, too.Understandably, one of the biggest questions escorts get is about their safety. They may face harassment, threats of violence, or physical harm depending on the location of their clinics and other factors. Many say the most common problems they have with anti-abortion protesters are intimidation or crowd control instead of actual violence, but there are still concerns. “We have one protester who makes me feel physically, viscerally unsafe—he just makes my skin crawl,” says escort Victoria, who asked not to use her real first name. “He uses his body to physically intimidate people going into or leaving the clinic. He only approaches younger women who are alone or with other young women.”
How does volunteering actually work? Duties vary depending on the facility and its location, but escorts can do everything from standing in a line to block anti-abortion protesters from the premises to guarding patients as they get to and from their vehicles.
What all clinic escort programs have in common is that they take a patient-first approach and act as a nonconfrontational barrier; escorts aren’t there to pass judgment on anyone walking into a clinic or change the views of protesters. “Escorts are present to support people and create space for them to be empowered while accessing reproductive healthcare,” escort Fausta Luchini explains to Glamour. ”Our goal is always to de-escalate [and] normalize and destigmatize abortion services.” Escort Danielle Ingram says she likens escorts to “traffic cops,” in that she and her fellow volunteers spend much of their time helping people get in and out of the parking lot and blocking the driveway if a protester tries to approach.
It isn’t just anti-abortion protesters that make it difficult to keep conflict to a minimum. One of the biggest problems for clinics, escort Robyn says, are pro-choice supporters showing up to counterprotest anti-abortion demonstrators. “Counterprotests can actually be really harmful,” she explains. “When a patient arrives and sees people shouting on the sidewalk, they don’t immediately see that you’re there with a supportive sign, they simply see people shouting and holding signs when they are trying to get into a doctor’s office.” Not only does this create emotional distress for patients, but it can also escalate situations, lead to violence, and cause a scene—to the point where law enforcement officials may need to get involved.
“Being a clinic escort is not a free pass to vent your spleen on [anti-abortion activists], and it is not a full contact sport,” escort Cate Ross explains. “I still get absolutely livid listening to [the protesters], but they ultimately are trying to provoke you into a reaction. Don’t play their game. It’s not about the protesters. It’s about the patients.” When people incite arguments with protesters and then leave the area, escorts are often the ones dealing with the aftermath of amped-up anti-abortion advocates.
For people who are pro-choice, Victoria says being an escort is a great option for showing support, but it’s not for everyone. “I am prohibited from engaging the protesters, and as someone who avoids confrontation, [I think] that makes it a good fit for me. But it’s very tempting to want to make side remarks or flat-out tell them to f*ck off sometimes,” she says. “It’s also physically demanding to stand on concrete for hours on end in all weather.” She says pro-choice advocates should definitely try other avenues for showing their support, like donating to Planned Parenthood or the National Network of Abortion Funds.
Additionally, Robyn says that if people want to support clinics that provide abortions, they can send thank-you cards to clinic nurses, doctors, and staff. Escort Rivka also recommends bringing escorts cups of coffee or donating to the Free Vest Project, which provides clinics with vests for their volunteers. Other escorts point out that clinics often need people for many other services, like stuffing envelopes or making phone calls, which can be incredibly helpful.
But most importantly, Victoria says the best thing people can do is use their voices—not just to call their representatives or talk to local officials, but to discuss reproductive rights with others in their lives. “Challenge your friends and family when they pass judgment on accessing reproductive healthcare, including abortion. Challenge the narrative that abortion is always a difficult decision, a decision between ‘a woman and her doctor’; it’s a decision for the pregnant person, period. Her doctor shouldn’t have a say,” she explains. “Point out the economic and racial inequities that contribute to the abortion stigma. I think we need to get a lot more radical. The other side isn’t backing down, and neither should we.”
A federal judge has struck down Alabama’s one-of-a-kind law that enabled judges to put minors seeking abortions through a trial-like proceeding in which the fetus could get a lawyer and prosecutors could object to the pregnant girl’s wishes.
Alabama legislators in 2014 changed the state’s process for girls who can’t or won’t get their parents’ permission for an abortion to obtain permission from a court instead. The new law empowered the judge to appoint a guardian ad litem “for the interests of the unborn child” and invited the local district attorney to call witnesses and question the girl to determine whether she’s mature enough to decide.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Russ Walker sided Friday with the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama , writing that the law unconstitutionally and impermissibly imposes “an undue burden on a minor in Alabama who seeks an abortion through a judicial bypass,” and violates the girl’s privacy rights by enabling a prosecutor to call witnesses against her will.
Both the judge and the ACLU said they were aware of no other state with such a law.
Every state requiring parental consent for abortions involving minors must also have a “judicial bypass” procedure so that girls can get a judge’s approval in a way that is effective, confidential, and expeditious, the ACLU said.
The state had argued that the law was intended to allow a “meaningful” inquiry into the minor’s maturity and the process was still a “confidential, and expeditious option for a teenager who seeks an abortion without parental consent.”
The civil rights organization said it had the opposite effect, by enabling lawyers for the state or the fetus to subpoena the minor’s teacher, neighbor, relative or boyfriend to testify she’s too immature to choose an abortion, or that continuing the pregnancy would be in her best interest.
It is unclear how many such proceedings have happened since the law was enacted. Walker noted that a district attorney this summer opposed the abortion request of a 12-year-old girl who had been impregnated by a relative.
The girl was 13 weeks pregnant and had just completed fifth grade when she went before a family court judge, according to a court record. The judge approved the abortion on June 27, and the district attorney appealed the same day, arguing that the girl was too immature to make an informed decision. The Alabama Court of Civil Appeals on July 12 ruled in favor of the girl.
The ACLU filed the lawsuit in federal court in Montgomery on behalf of Reproductive Health Services, a Montgomery abortion clinic. The Alabama ACLU’s executive director, Randall Marshall, praised the federal judge’s decision, saying the prosecutor in the 12-year-old’s case made her situation worse by delaying her ability to obtain an abortion.
In an interview published in The Hill, Democratic campaign chairman Ben Ray Luján said that the party would financially support candidates who oppose abortion. The primary rationale for opening up the party’s base to anti-abortion candidates is to win House majority in 2018. In addition to that, Luján said that there was no “litmus test” for Democratic candidates. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman justified the move by saying that the party needed candidates to “fit” their respective districts in order to score victory.
“There is not a litmus test for Democratic candidates,” Luján explained, “As we look at candidates across the country, you need to make sure you have candidates that fit the district, that can win in these districts across America.”
The Hill noted that Luján had been working on gaining more candidates in order to defeat Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections. The chairman put emphasis on having a “big [Democratic] family” to win House majority in 2018. He said, “To pick up 24 [seats] and get to 218, that is the job. We will need a broad coalition to get that done.”
Luján isn’t the only prominent Democrat against litmus tests for Democratic candidates. Prior to him, House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority leader Charles Schumer have criticized and opposed party litmus tests.
In spite of Luján’s reasoning for casting a wide and diverse net for Democratic candidates, some believe that the party’s decision will end up alienating those who support free choice, abortion, and fair reproductive health care. People like Mitchell Stille of NARAL Pro-Choice America criticized the move and said that supporting anti-abortion candidates was “bad politics that will lead to worse policy.”
Even within the party, there are those who would disagree with Luján’s position. Chair of the Democratic National Committee Tom Perez would be one of them. Back in April, Perez noted that abortion and reproductive health care were critical issues for Democrats.
In a statement to the public, Perez shared his thoughts and said, “Every Democrat, like every American, should support a woman’s right to make her own choices about her body and her health. That is not negotiable and should not change city by city or state by state.”
PRO-CHOICE CAMPAIGNERS AT A NATIONAL MARCH FOR WOMEN’S LIVES IN WASHINGTON DC, 9TH MARCH 1986. (PHOTO BY BARBARA ALPER/GETTY IMAGES)
PHOTO: BARBARA ALPER
It’s no secret that President Donald Trump, his administration, and Republican lawmakers are trying to dismantle women’s reproductive rights in 2017. Trump has already taken steps to defund Planned Parenthood and expand the global gag rule. The Department of Health and Human Services hired women who have said that contraception doesn’t work, that IUDs have “life-ending properties,” and that abstinence-only education works to serve in leadership positions. Republicans in Congress are trying to dismantle health care provided to women by the Affordable Care Act. The list goes on and on, but this is not the time to give up.
Despite the threats to reproductive rights at the federal level, state legislators are finding ways to protect women. States have always been vital to expanding and restricting reproductive rights. Before Roe v. Wade in 1973, for example, states decided the legality of abortion, and only three had repealed their abortion lawsby the time the landmark decision was made. But while Roe v. Wade took away one decision for states, according to Gloria Totten, the founder and president of a policy and leadership center called the Public Leadership Institute (PLI), plenty of other legislation that threatens women—attacks on Planned Parenthood, shutting down abortion clinics, and enacting bans on specific procedures—often starts at the state level. However, the reverse is true too, and state lawmakers are harnessing their power to enact policies that protect and expand women’s reproductive health rights.
For example, New Mexico just approved a new policy whereby pharmacists can directly prescribe women birth control, a move officials say will help women in the largely rural state have better access to contraception. Democratic lawmakers in Nevada are working to pass a bill that would require all insurers to cover patients’ contraception, regardless of a business owner’s religion. They also just passed legislation to make insurers cover 12 months of birth control at a time without copayments; Colorado recently signed a similar bill into law, and Virginia has one in the works.
With abortion rights threatened by a Supreme Court dominated by conservatives, it’s state lawmakers who will have to step up if Roe v. Wade is dismantled. The state of Maryland just enacted legislation to guarantee Planned Parenthood funding in the event that the federal government cuts it. Oregon is looking to pass a law that would require all insurers to cover abortions in the state regardless of a person’s gender, income, or citizenship status. Meanwhile, Illinois is trying to undo a “trigger law” that would outlaw and criminalize abortion if the Supreme Court’s historic Roe v. Wade decision was ever overturned, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has proposed writing a woman’s right to an abortion into the state constitution—a major achievement for a state whose biggest city has been called “The Abortion Capital of America” for its centuries-old progressive views on the issue.
But there’s a long way to go before every state actually respects reproductive rights. Each of these bills faces resistance from antiabortion activists, but tensions between community activists and lawmakers who are trying to pass actual reproductive rights legislation can be just as damaging to the process.
“Part of the advice that we’re constantly giving both the lawmakers and the advocates is that you need to start working together early on in the process,” Totten tells Glamour. Totten’s organization offers support to local and state-level lawmakers, providing resources to better understand the issues and figure out the best tactics for passing legislation. “Too often what we find is that policymakers will say, ‘I want to do something!’ and they’ll know their legislative process really well. Or the advocates will say they want to do something and they’ll know the external environment really well, but [lawmakers and advocates] fully bake their ideas before coming together,” Totten notes.
One of PLI’s recent achievements was convincing 52 lawmakers across 27 different states to pledge to introduce proactive abortion rights legislation. Totten hopes lawmakers will meet with advocates and organizers earlier in the process of drafting legislation to streamline the system and figure out how to effectively promote and enact bills.
For those looking to get involved in reproductive rights issues close to home, Totten says people should look for nearby chapters or affiliates of organizations like Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and interfaith alliances, many of whom also work with legislators.
Even with these encouraging developments, Totten knows not every proabortion bill will get passed—in many cases, they won’t even be debated, let alone get a vote. But that doesn’t mean it’s time to throw in the towel. “In most places we will not pass anything, so we have to be even more strategic about when we’re using policy,” she says. The fight might seem overwhelming at times, but Totten knows from experience that even the smallest actions—like getting groups to sign resolutions or volunteering with proabortion organizations—really do add up.
.jpg)
Abortion - Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information 