Attorney/Clinic Escort/Self-Described Male Feminist Speaks Out on Abortion and Contraception

Author's note: During the summer of 2009, I talked to dozens of young pro-choice activists and doctors about what motivated their work for reproductive justice, what concerns them most about the current state of abortion rights, and what they think the future holds for legal abortion in the U.S. In the following three interviews, four young activists - a law student, an attorney, and the creators of a pro-choice website - discuss these issues and also share their thoughts about why it's so important for their peers to not take legalization for granted.  The interviews will appear in my forthcoming book, Generation Roe.  Sarah Erdreich 

In the second of three interviews to be published on RH Reality Check, Sarah Erdreich talks to Noah Normal.dotm 0 0 1 6 36 JJ CONSULTING 1 1 44 12.0 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Schabacker, Attorney and Clinic Escort

Noah Schabacker: It wasn’t until I came to law school that I specifically applied the label “feminist” to myself, despite the fact that I had been involved in some pro-choice work in college. [It was] mostly ad hoc: supporting Take Back the Night marches, helping campus NARAL when anti-choice protestors would come to demonstrate. I “organized” a counter-protest when Operation Save America came to harass abortion providers in Boulder. I say “organize” because the turnout ended up being … me and my mom. Nobody else wanted to come out, and the various state NARAL/NOW/etc. chapters hadn’t wanted to organize anything because of their concerns about a “hot” media environment.

Applying that label, and thinking about my role as a male feminist, caused me to worry about how much of a leadership role I would be willing to take on in feminist work inside and outside law school. I feel fairly strongly that feminism is a women’s movement, and that male feminists have an obligation not to replicate patriarchal leadership structures in that movement. In practice, that means that I see my role as someone who takes direction, rather than providing direction. It’s not my place to set goals for a feminist group I may be a part of, but instead to implement the goals set by the feminist group (maybe with my input, maybe not – depends on the decision-making structure, the leadership roles, etc.).

Escorting at an abortion clinic fits well with this. I escort in Metro-accessible suburban Maryland, where there’s a need for more escorts. I help to make sure that the anti-choice protestors obey the law – stay off clinic property, don’t obstruct patients’ access, don’t come back and harass clinic staff.

The experience itself is mainly one of making small talk with our fellow escorts (there are four escorts there every weekend, two for each parking lot entrance) while keeping an eye on the anti-choicers who cluster at the driveway entrances. We’re lucky to be working at a clinic in the suburbs, because it means that the clinic is on a fairly large commercial property with a large parking lot. The anti-choice protesters aren’t allowed to come onto that property, so we mainly have to stop them from blocking the driveway when they try to talk to people in cars that are pulling into or out of the driveway.

We know the names of most of the anti-choice protestors, and they are pretty uniformly Catholic. Some of them are nasty (being very aggressive and mean when they need to deal with us), and others are calm and nice. They have the misleading gory signs that purport to show what an aborted fetus looks like (lots of blood, lots of recognizable body parts), as well as more pleasant signs that advertise for crisis pregnancy centers, or starkly claim that “It’s a child, not a choice!” or that “Abortion stops a beating heart.” We chuckle when the wind picks up one of those signs and blows it into the street. The hardest part of the experience is dressing appropriately for the seasons: It can be bitterly cold in the winter, standing in one place for two hours starting at 8:00 am, and it can be beastly hot during the summer.

[Escorting] demands a non-confrontational approach – no patient wants to be in the middle of two ideological opponents screaming at each other – and instead focusing on what the patient needs, which is to be bothered as little as possible by liars brandishing misleading or downright false information about a medical procedure that is a marker for a number of important feminist milestones in society (women controlling their own reproduction, women making decisions about their own health, healthcare access – these are all realized imperfectly in American society, but it is meaningful that women can access them at all).

Anti-choice legislators and judges have been very successful in limiting access to abortion in ways that doesn’t formally outlaw it, but makes it practically impossible to access for non-white/non-urban/non-middle-class-and-above women. Waiting periods, forbidding the government to pay for abortion through Medicaid, placing onerous restrictions on clinics and doctors, requiring parental consent: all of these make it more difficult for women who do not have job-guaranteed leave, or the money to travel to a faraway clinic, or who cannot afford two visits to the doctor, or who cannot tell their parents about their need for an abortion. My fear is that we will see abortion remain a legal in a formal sense, but completely inaccessible in a practical sense.

I really feel that we're continually fighting a rearguard here. Obama has maintained the status quo (probably) on the Supreme Court. I don't see a Freedom of Choice Act passing anytime soon. The anti-choicers are out to stop contraception generally, not just abortion, because pregnancy is supposed to be God's punishment for "easy women." Combined with Dr. Tiller's murder and the generally lukewarm response, along with the lack of training for new doctors in abortion care, I worry that we're going to be seeing a further decline in availability for quite some time.

With respect to the current state of the law, I think that Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992), is the most important case in terms of setting the terms of how judicial battles over abortion unfold. Casey affirmed "Roe's central holding," that women are entitled to a choice on abortion. However, Casey also extended an open-ended invitation to anti-choice extremists to attempt to constrain and limit choice in significant ways, to the extent that women are formally allowed to choose, while in practice only affluent, white, mobile/urban women are able to choose.