DALLAS – The repeal of abortion rights was met by many American women with a sense of shock and fear and warnings of an ominous decline in women’s status as full citizens.
But for some women, the decision meant something different: a triumph of human rights, not a setback for women’s rights.
“I just reject the idea that as a woman I need an abortion to be successful or to be as thriving as a man in my career,” said Phoebe Purvy, a 26-year-old from Texas. “I don’t think I should sacrifice a life to do that.”
The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade was a political victory won by lobbyists, strategists and campaign professionals for decades. But it was also a cultural battle waged by activists across the country, including those from the demographic that abortion rights advocates warn have the most to lose in the new American landscape: young women.
Often pointed to by anti-abortion leaders as the face of the movement, a new generation of activists say they are ready to continue the fight in a post-Roe nation.
Many, but not all, of them are Christian conservatives, the demographic that has long formed the core of the anti-abortion movement. Others are secular and see their anti-abortion efforts as part of the progressive quest for human rights. All grew up with once-unthinkable access to images from inside the womb, which helped convince them that a fetus was a full human being long before it was viable.
Many believe that the procedure should be banned at conception – that even the earliest abortion is effectively murder. But they embrace the mainstream anti-abortion view that women are victims of the abortion “industry” and should not be prosecuted, putting them at odds with a rising “abolitionist” wing of the movement calling for women to be held legally responsible for their abortions .
And overwhelmingly, these young women reject the idea that access to abortion is necessary for their own or any woman’s success.
Ms Purvi said she supported a legal ban on abortion from conception. But she’s increasingly uncomfortable using the term “pro-life” to describe herself because it evokes an emphasis on preventing abortion at all costs rather than helping women. She favors “life-affirming” and works at a pregnancy resource clinic in Dallas that uses the same term to describe free and low-cost prenatal care, postpartum doula services, breastfeeding counseling and other services offered to a predominantly black clientele. with low incomes.
Mrs. Purvy was born into a Mexican community in South Texas. Her mother was poor and in an unstable marriage, she said, and received prenatal care from Planned Parenthood. The family later received financial and emotional support from their church, which inspired Mrs. Purvy to provide help to women like her mother. “At this point in my life, I’m equally about unborn children and women’s rights, but I think I’m a little more women-forward and women-centered,” she said. “That’s where a lot of the change happens.”
A clear majority of Americans say abortion should be legal with few or no exceptions, according to a March Pew poll. Women aged 18 to 29 are significantly more likely than older women to say that abortion in general should be legal and that it is morally acceptable. Only 21 percent of young women say abortion should be generally illegal, Pew found.
From Opinion: The End of Roe v. Wade
Commentary by Times Opinion writers and columnists on the Supreme Court’s decision to end the constitutional right to abortion.
- Michelle Goldberg: “The end of Roe v. Wade was foreseen, but in wide swaths of the country it still creates agonizing and potentially tragic uncertainty.”
- Spencer Bocat-Lindell: “What exactly does it mean for the Supreme Court to experience a crisis of legitimacy, and is it really one?”
- Bonnie Christian, journalist: “For many supporters of former President Donald Trump, Friday’s Supreme Court decision was a long-awaited vindication.” It could also mark the end of his political career.
- Erica Baccioci, legal scholar: “It is precisely the state of the unborn child’s existential dependence on its mother, rather than its autonomy, that makes it particularly suitable for care, nurturing and legal protection.”
The movement’s minority status is part of its appeal, said historian Daniel K. Williams, who has written about the history of anti-abortion advocacy.
“The pro-life movement has so far had the best of both worlds in terms of attracting young people,” Mr Williams said. It positions itself as a countercultural alternative to conventional wisdom, but also supports widely popular beliefs about the importance of justice and equality for the vulnerable. Historical samples—common within the movement and much contested outside—include the civil rights movement and the suffragettes of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
For the majority of American women who support abortion rights, the enthusiasm of other women to strip them of their own constitutional rights can be confusing and infuriating, a deep betrayal. But overwhelmingly, young women who oppose abortion are seen as human rights activists—happy warriors on the right side of history.
“It’s always been a youth movement,” said Kristen Hawkins, who became president of Students for Life in America in 2006 when she was 21. She recalled a line she heard from conservative activist Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King Jr., who often attends anti-abortion events: “When young people join your movement, you know victory is on its way.”
Ms. Hawkins’ organization — which supports a near-total ban on abortion beginning at conception and opposes oral contraceptives — now claims 1,250 groups on campuses across the country, from middle schools to graduate schools. Her signs that read “I am the pro-life generation” are everywhere during anti-abortion demonstrations.
Ms Hawkins says the modern anti-abortion movement offers a more empowering vision for young women than abortion rights feminism.
“This is 2022, not 1962,” she said, noting that women’s legal rights to do things like secure loans have advanced dramatically since the pre- Roe era.
If feminism tells young women they should be able to terminate their pregnancies to achieve their educational and career goals, she said, the anti-abortion movement tells them they can have anything.
Young people have been part of the anti-abortion movement since the 1970s. Washington’s annual March for Life, held around the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, now draws busloads of students from across the country to what has become over the years a youth-led celebratory rally.
Claire Fletcher, 26, a Catholic school teacher in Illinois, has attended the March for Life at least 10 times. She grew up in a strongly anti-abortion home, influenced by the realization that her adopted younger sister’s birth mother had an abortion before giving birth.
The event and the movement it represents has always been “a source of joy and celebration of life, fun and community,” Ms Fletcher said.
When she was a teenager, her father led a caravan of buses from Louisiana that she described as raucous road trips involving matching hats, flash mobs, tourist stops and silly songs. She can still sing an anti-abortion parody of Taio Cruz’s hit “Dynamite” by heart: “I just want to celebrate and be pro-life, saying ‘Aw, I gotta pray!’
As a teenager active online, Lauren Marlowe had a vague understanding that supporting abortion rights was what “nice” people did. But she was drawn to think differently in part because of advances in ultrasound imaging. “Back then, when they looked at an ultrasound and thought it was a bunch of cells, that’s all they could see,” she said, referring to a phrase used by philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson in a famous 1971 defense of abortion.
Ms. Marlowe, 22 and the social media coordinator for Students for Life in America, started a small line of “fashionable clothing for life” as a student at Liberty University. The line advertises a T-shirt with the word “pro-life” emblazoned in the “Friends” font, and a hoodie with the cheeky slogan “Just a clump of cell.”
In Tennessee, Kayleigh Cornett, 28, said she expects her job as CEO of Hope Clinic for Women, a “life-affirming” center that provides services and support to pregnant women, will get busier in the post-Roe landscape . Tennessee has a trigger law that is expected to go into effect by mid-August and will ban abortion in almost all cases, including rape and incest.
Mrs. Cornett received what she experienced as a life calling from God while attending a Christian youth convention as a teenager: to “love” young women facing unplanned pregnancies. She volunteered at an Arizona pregnancy resource center in high school and earned a degree in nonprofit management with the goal of leading one.
Reading progressive Christian writer Sarah Bessie’s book Jesus the Feminist showed her that her faith and her concern for women did not have to be in tension. “Oh my God, I can be both,” she recalls. “It turns out I’ve been a feminist all along, but I had this wrong definition of it.”
Hers is one of the rare pregnancy resource centers that provides some form of birth control to clients. While the clinic does not engage in politics, it cautiously supports the state’s upcoming abortion ban, including the lack of rape and incest exemptions.
“I’m a firm believer that trauma begets trauma,” she said. A woman “who ended this child’s life will not make her pain go away.”
On Thursday, Nashville police said they were investigating an attempted arson attack at the Hope Clinic, part of a major vandalism…
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