[News] Defending Bodily Sovereignty and the Long Arc of Radical Feminist Care

[Anti-Imperialist News]

counterpunch.org 
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/22/defending-bodily-sovereignty-and-the-long-arc-of-radical-feminist-care/> 



  Defending Bodily Sovereignty and the Long Arc of Radical Feminist Care

Diana Block <http://dianablock.com>
March 22, 2024
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/*A Book Review and Reflection Forward*/

In this rapidly degenerating American climate where women (including 
trans and non-binary people) are in danger of losing control over their 
own frozen embryos and face criminalization for crossing state lines to 
get an abortion, Angela Hume’s new book 
<https://www.akpress.org/deep-care.html> is a very important read.  It 
reminds us of the long history of radical feminist action to achieve 
sovereignty over our own bodies – action that refuses to respect the 
constraints of legislative advocacy and legality.

Hume began writingDeep Care – The Radical Activists Who Provided 
Abortions, Defied the Law and Fought to Keep Clinics Open (AK Press Oct 
2023) <https://www.akpress.org/deep-care.html> when Dobbs was still only 
handwriting on the wall.   The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in June 
2022, which eliminated Federal legal protection for abortion, and the 
subsequent drastic restrictions on a range of abortion rights in more 
than seventeen states around the country, has crystallized the need for 
regenerating militant grassroots movement for reproductive justice.

The book is an in-depth examination of the largely untold history of 
West Coast reproductive activism from the 1970s to the beginning of the 
21st century through dozens of interviews with activists who were part 
of this movement. It offers critical lessons for the building of a 
radical reproductive justice movement in the coming period.  Hume 
theorizes that “deep care” values and practices were at the root of the 
linked developments of feminist self-help, feminist health clinics and 
abortion clinic defense. For her, the self-help/self-care movement was a 
core component of building out this three-pronged strategy.  Self-help 
“teaches us about how to empower, defend, and care for each other”, she 
states. “And when we can do this, we can strengthen our community from 
the inside, and we don’t have to rely on the state.”

The history that she narrates elucidates the ways in which 
people-to-people care and education has always been an integral part of 
radical feminist movement starting with consciousness raising groups in 
the seventies.  At the same time, her perspective raises unresolved 
questions about how to embed “deep care” practices into movement 
strategies that go beyond self-reliance and self-defense to build a 
broad militant challenge to the foundations of the U.S. racial, 
imperialist state.

As part of her research for this book, Angela Hume interviewed me about 
my experience in Bay Area feminist self-help circles in the early 
1970’s.  I had had a legal abortion in New York City in 1971, shortly 
after abortion was legalized in New York but before the landmark Supreme 
Court Roe decision of 1973.  Women from my consciousness-raising group 
picked me up at the hospital after the abortion and in the weeks that 
followed we all shared emotional stories of illegal abortions, 
deliberate misinformation about contraception and sex, and the critical 
need to take control of our bodies on all levels.  It was one of my 
first direct experiences of the kind of feminist care that the 
second-wave women’s movement insisted upon in the face of patriarchal 
attitudes and practices which devalued all forms of care even within the 
male-dominated left.

When I moved to California in 1972, the burgeoning women’s self-help 
health movement offered groups that could expand awareness and care of 
our bodies, including cervical self-exams and information about 
menstrual extraction – a way to manage our periods efficiently as well 
as a method of abortion.  My time in the self-help group was 
short-lived.  The particular group that I was in was very caring, but it 
was all white and mainly middle class. I questioned the applicability of 
this type of self-exploration to the health and well-being of women of 
color and working-class women.  And in a period when the U.S. war 
against Vietnam was still raging and horrifying stories about the 
systematic rapes and massacres of Vietnamese women by U.S. soldiers was 
circulating widely, I wasn’t clear how self-examination could help build 
forceful anti-imperialist feminism.

Deep Care gave me a new appreciation of the ways in which the feminist 
self-help movement in the Bay Area was simultaneously evolving a broader 
agenda beyond small groups. Taking inspiration from the Black Panther 
Party’s community-controlled free health care clinics, the Oakland 
Feminist Women’s Health Center (OFWHC)/ Women’s Choice clinic, was 
established in 1973, as a “broad spectrum sexual, reproductive and 
abortion health care provider” which primarily served women of color and 
working-class women, including many queer and trans people. Women’s 
Choice soon expanded into a network of Feminist Health Care centers that 
developed a “participatory” health care model, challenging the 
conventional hierarchical structure of patient-provider relationships.

Deep Care offers particular insight into the role that Black lesbian 
feminist poet Pat Parker <https://poets.org/poet/pat-parker> played in 
the further evolution of the Women’s Choice clinic. Parker had been a 
member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) at an early age but left due to 
the sexism she experienced in the organization.  She went on to express 
her commitment to the Black community and Black women through her 
groundbreaking poetry.  When she started working at Women’s Choice in 
1977, she didn’t have a background in health care but she, along with 
other Black women at Women’s Choice, expanded the work that it did with 
Black and other women of color. As Hume puts it “These clinic workers 
took insights from Black radical and other Black health activist 
histories, inflected them with Black feminist perspectives from their 
own experience, and brought them to the clinic.”

In 1985, as a new women’s health clinic in Richmond, CA came under 
attack by right-wing anti-abortionists, Parker recognized that a 
different level of work was needed to protect the right to abortion.  
She helped initiate the Clinic Defense Committee to build community 
support and protection for the Richmond clinic.  Women’s Choice was 
joined by several other groups, including Radical Women, Women Against 
Imperialism and the Revolutionary Workers League in their clinic defense 
efforts.  As Operation Rescue 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Operation_Rescue>targeted 
clinics across the U.S. with systematic efforts to physically block 
people from access to abortion and clinic bombings spread, the Clinic 
Defense Committee evolved into the Bay Area Coalition Against Operation 
Rescue (later Bay Area Coalition for Our Reproductive Rights).  BACORR 
was a broad coalition providing clinic defense for a variety of clinics. 
For years the coalition developed an array of sophisticated and creative 
tactics that physically protected people’s right to choose abortion.

Hume also details the simultaneous commitment of feminist activists to 
maintaining a network of underground abortion self-help providers. These 
providers maintained practices that were not licensed, insisting that a 
form of direct autonomous care needed to be sustained outside of the 
state’s institutional purview.  Even though the legal system had granted 
women the legal “right to choose”, these underground networks ensured 
that the knowledge and skills necessary for people to exercise direct 
control over their reproductive function would continue despite 
increasing legislative restrictions beginning with the 1977 Hyde 
Amendment 
<https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/issue-brief/the-hyde-amendment-and-coverage-for-abortion-services-under-medicaid-in-the-post-roe-era/>.

In an adjacent development not discussed in the book, the need to defend 
the health and bodily sovereignty of women in prison led to the founding 
of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners 
<http://womenprisoners.org/> (CCWP) in 1995. I have been involved in 
CCWP since then, and more recently Angela Hume has also become active in 
the organization. CCWP recognized that people in women’s prisons were 
consistently denied their rights to basic health care, including their 
reproductive rights 
<https://womenprisoners.org/our-programs/reparations-4-reproductive-justice-behind-bars/>, 
but were not being included in the work of the feminist movement at that 
time. Our slogan, Caring Collectively for Women Prisoners, was suggested 
by a formerly incarcerated woman who understood the absolute importance 
of collective care to ensure survival inside prison. By trying to put 
this principle into practice over decades, CCWP has carried the 
trajectory of the feminist self-help movement of the 1970s into the 
abolitionist movement of the twenty-first century.  And Angela Hume is 
now shaping their own practice of deep care through their direct work 
with people in women’s prisons at the same time as they are documenting 
the long history of that effort.

I was in Cuba with the May Day Brigade in May 2022 when the news of the 
impending Dobbs decision was leaked byPolitico 
<https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473>. 
Many conversations immediately ensued between us and our Cuban hosts 
contrasting their uncontested right to abortion, which had been 
protected in Cuba since 1965, and the reactionary forces that were 
systematically bulldozing reproductive and other gender rights in the 
U.S.  For me, those conversations corroborated the exemplary character 
of Cuba’s model of participatory community health care where 
reproductive health is approached “as a multi-faceted part of every 
woman’s life 
<http://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/05/23/abortion-cuba-us-democracy/#comment-548>” 
from the time she enters puberty. They also reconfirmed the need for 
care to be guaranteed by a state and a constitution that upholds health 
and reproductive care as an inalienable right.

Deep care should be a fundamental value that underlies human interaction 
in community. The fact that it has to be defined and asserted again and 
again as a political project in the U.S. context exposes the intrinsic 
inhumanity and violence of the patriarchal imperialist system that we 
live under. Hume’s book demands that we find ways to fiercely assert 
principles of care and solidarity as core to our movements as we 
accelerate the struggle for sovereignty, self-determination and 
liberation around the world.

*Free Palestine!*



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