Welcome to Litsy!

This is a brief history how three womxn fought for radical reproductive justice and the total repeal of all abortion laws. This is activism! So thankful for these ladies. But we must continue their work; only a total repeal will stop the attacks on our abortion healthcare rights. So let‘s get to work!

As long as the government maintained a voice in the abortion debate, it would use its power to chip away at each woman‘s right to make her own choice about abortion. The 1973 Supreme Court decision, though ruling that abortion was a constitutional right, stopped short of endorsing the principal that the ~only~ person qualified to make a decision about abortion is the woman herself.

When they were locked out of the hearing, they began to tell the truth about their own illegal abortions in front of national television cameras. The power of their action touched other women who had undergone abortions in secret. Telling the truth about illegal abortions was an important tool in radical feminists‘ assault on abortion laws.

#shoutyourabortion

It was the radical strategies of 1) opposition to reform and demand for repeal, led by Lucinda Cisler, 2) mass consciousness raising on abortion with women testifying to their “criminal” acts in public and in court, 3) the development of the feminist self-help clinic ideas and their promotion of simpler, new abortion techniques that led to the national reform in five years time.

This is what activism looks like!

Besides, he said, my insistence that he share the responsibility for birth control was really just a masked attempt to castrate him symbolically.

If he doesn‘t want to step up and help protect both of you, DROP him! These are what I call ‘penis feelings‘—the fragile ego of many mxn, usually relating to the attached penis. Contraception will not make a mxn less than a mxn. 🙄

The idea of women controlling their own bodies, of taking power simply by acting as if they already had power, was tremendously threatening to the state and the medical establishment. Regardless of what the government and the AMA have prescribed, women always have and always will break anti-abortion laws. When the law doesn‘t respect women, women won‘t respect the law.

Preach!

And I think that‘s one of the greatest lessons of JANE. If there‘s something that needs to be done, we don‘t have to wait until x, y, and z happen. We don‘t have to beg anybody else to please do this for us. We can go ahead and we can do it ourselves.

If you were a poor pregnant woman in Chicago in the early 1970s and you needed an abortion, you called JANE: a women‘s liberation abortion service that performed over 11,000 safe, affordable abortions between 1969 and 1973. JANE could help you when no one else would; JANE never turned a woman away for lack of funds. JANE was listed in the phone book under the last name “How.” You called JANE, and JANE would tell you ~how~ to get an abortion.

Our rights for this are not just to be able to go down to the abortion clinic and get an abortion. It‘s much deeper. This is absolutely not a single issue. It really goes right to the heart of our right to have our own sexuality.

Say it!!!!

She came back with a mason jar, a cork with two holes in it, two lengths of fish tank tuning, and a syringe. These were the raw materials for the Del-Em, the suction device that became basic to what self-help proponents called “menstrual extraction.” Menstrual extraction was the process by which a woman, with her self-help group, could remove the contents of her uterus – be it menstrual blood or early pregnancy. 💙 #womxnsempowerment

The only way that they can keep abortion illegal is to keep us in total ignorance of our bodies. Mystifying us about our body was absolutely central to any patriarchal plan of keeping us down.

Yes! Get familiar with your body, inside and out. Take control and experience that amazing feeling of empowerment!

Allowing men to make policy for women makes as much sense as allowing dogs to make policy for cats.

Trust womxn! Let womxn decide!

Pat and Rowena created the Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (ARAL) to carry on their political work. ARAL eventually grew into NARAL, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. Today, NARAL stands for National Abortion Rights League.

NARAL is one of my favorite orgs! Repealing is the only way to end state‘s relentless attacks on our healthcare right.

The Army of Three knew that they had to do more than get people just to talk about abortion. They wanted to eliminate abortion laws. The only way they knew how to do this was to break a law, get arrested, and get sentenced. This would be challenged on the grounds that the law was unconstitutional.

Now that‘s serious activism!

Reproductive Justice is goes deep. Bodily Autonomy is about much more than abortion healthcare access. And we claim it for all womxn.

Abortion organizations in the late 1970s and 1980s very often did not link abortion to other reproductive rights or to women‘s liberation. In an effort to soft-sell abortion in changing political times, activists adopted the term “pro-choice,” a move some veteran organizers claimed made abortion the right that dare not speak its name.

Rather than leaving the abortion decision up to each woman, the Court stated that the decision to abort was protected by the right to privacy between a woman ~and her doctor~ and it stated that the government could restrict or even prohibit abortion under certain circumstances. It gave women an abortion policy which was controlled by the state and by doctors, not by women seeking abortions.

1959: the Army of Three, the first US activists to advocate the complete ~repeal~ of abortion laws and restrictions: Patricia Maginnis, Lana Clarke Phelan, Rowena Gurner; first to talk about abortion in terms of women‘s rights. By addressing themselves to ordinary women rather than to doctors & legislators, they began to build a grassroots movement that asserted that women—not legal & medical professionals—should make decisions about abortion.

The campaign succeeded because doctors managed to convince male politicians—and the middle-class male public—that abortion was a serious threat to the maintenance of patriarchal authority. Controlling women‘s reproductive choices through the innovative tactics of state regulation and criminalization of abortion was, the doctors claimed, a necessary precondition of social order itself.