One Good Reason
Why dykes should fight for reproductive rights
Just Out, 4/2/04
“Have a blast!” read the buttons on protesters’ lapels, each with a picture of a bomb.
It was May 1986 in Toledo, Ohio, and Roey Thorpe was just out of college, working at the Center for Choice. It was, like many abortion clinics across the nation, the target of increased protesting by abortion opponents. On the evening of May 20, the center was bombed. No one was hurt physically, but the bomber left a lasting impression.
“The next morning, going into the clinic was devastating,” says Thorpe. “Everything was black and melted, and huge pieces of equipment and furniture were just blown into millions of tiny shards. The force of it was so scary. It made me realize that they would stop at nothing, even violence. Up until that point I didn’t really understand how far they’d go.”
Readers know 41-year-old Thorpe as the director of Basic Rights Oregon, but the powerhouse activist got her start fighting for women’s reproductive rights. Why would a lesbian, who is put her own well-being on the line to keep abortion safe and legal for other women?
The answer lies in the battle being waged over who will control the wombs and bedrooms of U.S. citizens. A common enemy has waged war upon the basic physical privacy of individuals. And each time women and queers push forward, a backlash ensues.
As feminists around the country gear up for the national March for Women’s Lives on April 25 in Washington, D.C., Just Out checked in with several Portland women who work in both queer and pro-choice arenas and asked why lesbians and bi women have a vital stake in fighting for reproductive rights.
Which came first?
“I was at PSU and I was looking for a place to be,” says Carmen Schwisow, a field organizer with Planned Parenthood of the Columbia/Willamette. She joined a group that was organizing the National Young Women’s Day of Action. It was Schwisow’s introduction to reproductive rights education and activism.
Schwisow, who is 28 years old and graduated with a degree in women’s studies and sociology in 1999, says that for her, “It was feminism first, coming out as a lesbian second.”
A commitment to feminism is one reason many lesbians and bi women work in reproductive rights organizations. Though difficult to quantify in numbers, the women I spoke with agree that, as Schwisow notes, “It's quite evident whenever you walk into a pro-choice organization, you always find queer women working there.”
Maura Roche, a lobbyist for BRO, grew up in a family of progressive activists. Her mother was a member of the Oregon Women's Caucus, while her father was a leader in the peace movement. “My entire life this whole concept of fighting for the right to privacyShas been a huge focus in my family,” says the 37-year-old, who has been instrumental in fighting both anti-gay and anti-choice ballot measures throughout the 1990s and up to the present day.
If ever there were an expert on Lon Mabon and his tactics, it is Roche. She feels “lucky to have figured out a way to combine making a living and doing activism.”
Teaming up with Roche and Thorpe to advance progressive bills in the Legislature and battle discriminatory ones is state Sen. Kate Brown. “My first job out of law school was at Portland Feminist Women’s Health Circle,” says the 44-year-old Brown. “A number of the women there were lesbians. I think it’s been really critical to the underpinnings of the women’s movement to have [lesbian and straight women] working together.”
As an out bi woman, Brown is the only queer in the state Legislature. “I was pro-choice before I was a lesbian,” says Sue Burns, manager of In Other Words Women’s Books and Resources. In Other Words has signed on as a supporter of the March for Women’s Lives, and Burns hopes to co-sponsor a bus to Washington, D.C., with another feminist organization.
Burns, 33, says she got her start being an animal rights activist and then moved on to pro-choice activism and queer liberation. “My politics depend on the belief that I’m not a lesbian first, I’m not a human first, I’m a female human and I’ll go down fighting for my right to do what I want with my female body.”
Burns, who lived in New Haven, Conn., and Austin, Texas, before moving to Portland to helm the women’s bookstore, says many Portlanders are hip to the interconnectedness of forms of bias. “I think one of the great things about Portland is that the lefty progressive scene is integrated,” she says. “It seems like almost all the political dykes I know and meet are multi-issue activists, and pro-choice is included in thatSit’s very hopeful.”
Keep your laws off our bodies
Portland has decades of history behind the collaboration between queer rights and pro-choice groups. In a recent interview with Just Out, former Oregon National Abortion Rights Action League executive director and current Multnomah County Chair Diane Linn said queers offered “dramatic” support to the choice community in the early 1990s. She says she’ll “never forget” the financial and political support Right to Privacy (BRO’s predecessor) gave at that time. “
Sometimes BRO supporters don’t understand why we work with reproductive rights organizations,” says Thorpe, noting BRO’s membership in the Pro-Choice Coalition of Oregon. “I explain to them that we share a belief in the fundamental right to privacy. And we share a common opponent. The religious right targets [queer and pro-choice groups] in the same ways with the same tactics.” Roche has fought this common opponent firsthand for years at the state Capitol. “Many people don’t know that Lon Mabon started out on anti-abortion measures,” she says.
Mabon was the driving force behind 1990’s unsuccessful Measure 8 to ban abortion, and he and the Oregon Citizens Alliance continued to put forth anti-gay and anti-choice measures throughout the ’90s, including the infamous Measure 9 in 1992. More recently, in 2000, Mabon drafted the Student Protection Act, which would have severely limited sexual education, including crucial HIV education in public schools, had it not been defeated.
“The opposition has a deeper willingness to take anti-environment, anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-death-with-dignity issues and weave them together,” says Roche. “Progressives [tend to] segregate our politics. We’re very choice oriented.”
The irony that progressives’ commitment to egalitarian ideals can be an Achilles’ heel is not lost on Roche. To combat this, she puts forward a view of “constitutional connectedness” underpinning reproductive, gay and death-with-dignity rights. “[It’s about] privacy of the body and self-determination in terms of who you build your life with and the quality of your life,” she says.
National leaders are also advancing the idea of multi-issue progressive organizing. “We can learn something from the other side,” says Tim McFeely, executive director of the Center for Policy Alternatives, a nonpartisan public policy organization that helps state legislators enact progressive change. A longtime queer rights activist, McFeely served as director of the Human Rights Campaign Fund from 1989 to 1995. Conservatives “don’t organize in silos,” he says. By teaming up, the queer and choice movements can leverage support for one another’s issues. Sen. Brown describes the cross-pollination this way: “I don’t want the government in my womb, and I don’t want the government in my bedroom.” Brown says protecting abortion rights was one of the main reasons she went into politics. “For me, it’s about my very essence of being a female. I see women’s reproductive freedom as a human rights issue and as a way for women to achieve a self-determination, not just locally but also internationally.”
Schwisow agrees: “Our reproductive freedom is a fundamental human right, just like our decision about who to sleep with and to be involved with.” Like Brown, Schwisow is bisexual, and because of this she has a particularly personal stake in reproductive freedom and queer liberation. However, she is quick to clarify that not only self-identified bisexual and heterosexual women are concerned with pregnancy and reproductive health.
“I think it’s important to remember there are lesbian-identified women out there who still sleep with men,” she states. “Those folks still need the services a Planned Parenthood can provide, such as pregnancy options, counseling, pregnancy tests, screening for sexually transmitted diseases.”
As options increase for lesbians to pursue parenthood, taking care of sexual health is doubly important. Comprehensive education about reproductive health and sexuality is something Roey Thorpe sees as another area of overlap for the pro-choice and pro-gay movements.
“Queers should know that the reproductive rights movement has been at the forefront of making information about sexuality available in schools,” she says.
Thorpe is not the only leader of a queer organization to acknowledge allies in the feminist movement. The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in New York City took a public pro-choice stance in the late 1980s and publicly “recognized the debt the LGBT liberation movement owed to the feminist movement of the 1970s.”
The center recently published the pamphlet Causes in Common: Reproductive Rights and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Liberation, which was produced as a position paper as part of a grant from the Ford Foundation. The community center will distribute the pamphlet at the upcoming March for Women’s Lives in Washington, D.C. It states: “Reproduction and sexuality are profoundly and intimately related aspects of human experience. Reproduction is a choice that evolves out of sexuality, not an unavoidable consequence of sexuality. Individual human autonomy in the conduct of our sexual lives is integral to our liberty.”
Liberty and individual human autonomy are concepts that seem lost on the Bush administration. While President Bush is attempting to foreclose certain rights for queers from ever existing, he is simultaneously dismantling reproductive rights that already exist for women.
The so-called Partial-Birth Abortion Act he signed into law last year is the first piece of federal legislation to put limits on Roe vs. Wade. The law, which bans late-term abortions, not only affects heterosexual women, it impinges upon the reproductive choices of any woman who has sex with men or any woman who is raped. Additionally, the precedent set by the government’s efforts to determine when “life” begins could precede government decisions about what constitutes gender and, more generally, what individuals are and are not allowed to do with their bodies. Alice Cohen, director of the March for Women’s Lives, says that in terms of attacks on reproductive and queer rights, “a threat to one is a direct threat to the other.” Sometimes that threat is made manifest in a single human being. In February anti-abortion extremist Stephen Jordi of Florida plead guilty to one count of attempted firebombing. Jordi was charged with plotting to bomb abortion clinics and gay and lesbian bars.
Gender discrimination by any other name
The anti-choice organization Oregon Right to Life has filed four initiatives for 2004 that limit women’s access to abortion and expand lawsuits for health care providers. Legislators who may support these types of measures don’t always vote anti-gay, going against the norm. According to Sen. Brown, “There are some legislators who are not pro-choice but who are pro-gay rights.” She says will be on the lookout for anti-choice legislators trying to trade a pro-gay bill for an anti-choice bill, as has happened in the past. “I am not willing to trade one of those issues against the other,” says Brown. “That’s not a palatable trade to me.” Brown gives kudos to BRO for standing by the same principle. “They are not willing to divide and conquer. They will only endorse candidates who are pro-choice.”
The Human Rights Campaign in recent years has not been so meticulously scrupled. HRC’s endorsement of U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., has been a point of contention within the queer community. While Smith’s efforts to fight hate crimes and advance care for people with HIV/AIDS have been heralded by HRC, the organization downplayed his anti-choice stance. However, Smith’s recent announcement of support for the Federal Marriage Amendment belies his commitment to the dignity of queer lives.
“I respect organizers who want to take votes where they can get them,” says McFeely. However, “for me personally, choice is a litmus test.” McFeely says legislators who “force women to have back alley abortions are the same people who want to keep queers in the closet. At the heart of this discrimination is gender.”
Democracy in action
“I think it is all around the word power—and how we share power,” Brown says. “Making women have babies they don’t want to have, or not giving people basic employment or relationship rights, is about limiting access to power.”
Claudia Harper, a “60-something” lesbian who lives in Astoria, couldn’t agree more. The co-chairwoman of Oregon NARAL’s Clatsop County activist team says she sees a parallel between domestic violence and limited access to choice. Harper used to volunteer for a women’s crisis hot line, and she says callers repeatedly recounted having limited or no options for empowerment and decision-making. Some women had unwanted pregnancies but did not know where to turn or feared retribution from their abusive partners. Working the hot line caused Harper “to see that sex can be the most beautiful thing or the most horrific thing.”
In her work with Oregon NARAL, she stresses three key components of choice: access, voice and power. “If we are given access and time to acquire good information, hear diverse opinions expressed, we can learn,” Harper says. “That leads to voice. We find our own voices and beliefs based on what we learned. From that we become empowered and can group with others. “That is what democracy is,” she says. Harper’s colleague Rebecca Green, 31, constituency development director at Oregon NARAL, says reproductive choice is like same-sex marriage-a civil rights issue.
Green is a heterosexual woman who has pro-choice in her blood. Literally. Her grandfather, Dr. Alan Guttmacher, was the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America from 1962 to 1974. Early in his career as an obstetrician, Guttmacher witnessed a woman die of a botched abortion and afterward vowed to fight for women’s reproductive rights.
Green says anti-choice activists and legislators are trying to undo the freedoms she and her grandfather have worked to secure. “My personal opinion is that the people in government who are proactively destroying the right to choose are doing so in order to place more obstacles in front of all people who have the right to control their own destinies,” says Green. “They’re depriving us of the right to do what we want with our lives.”
When Green joins thousands of other progressive activists later this month for the march in Washington, her grandfather will be in her heart. “I absolutely expect to feel a historical connection, not only with my grandfather but with all civil rights activists who have marched on Washington to defend human freedom. I’m proud to be taking part in a long tradition of making citizen voices heard in this way.”
“It’s going to be fun,” McFeely says of the march. “And it will be transformative.” Kierra Johnson, development director for the national organization Choice USA, says young activists are ready to be transformed. “People often ask: ‘Where are the youth?’ We’re coming to Washington!” Johnson says young queer women of color have a particularly vital stake in fighting for reproductive rights. “They need access to comprehensive sexuality information and education, access to health care and access to abortion.”
The 27-year-old says young queer women of color are “cross movement organizers” and are concerned about welfare reform, immigration issues, global issues and other matters of social justice. “We’re not single-issue activists anymore.” Leaders in Oregon are also thinking about the multifaceted issues the march will represent. Sen. Brown says it will be “an opportunity to make connections like, ‘It’s not OK to discriminate against someone because of their race, then maybe it’s not OK to discriminate against someone because of sexual orientation.’ ” Roche, who plans to attend the march, sees it as “a watershed moment for abortion rights. Folks who haven’t stepped up can go to Washington, D.C., and be counted,” she says.
Schwisow will attend with a Planned Parenthood delegation and is busy encouraging other women to join them. “What an incredible moment it will be to stand on the Mall with upwards of a million peopleS[and] tell our nation’s leaders that we want change.”
Oh yeah: On her lapels Schwisow will be wearing two buttons. One reads, “I’m pro-choice and I vote.” The other? “30 degrees from straight.”
Features Editor Meg Daly can be reached at megdaly@justout.com.
March for Women’s Lives
Pro-choice activists say the time is right for a public demonstration of historic size in support of reproductive freedom and justice for all women. Threats to these rights have never been so systematic and coordinated, and the lives and health of women have never faced such peril. At 10 a.m. April 25 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., people will march to uphold choice, justice, access, health, abortion, global and family planning.
The principal organizers are the American Civil Liberties Union, Black Women’s Health Imperative, Feminist Majority, NARAL Pro-Choice America, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, National Organization for Women and Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
For more information or to register, call 202-349-3838 or visit www.marchforwomen.org.
Join NARAL for a Power of Choice Party
The right to choose and the right to privacy are under attack today as never before. NARAL Pro-Choice Oregon’s Choice Vote 2004 Campaign is about more than protecting a woman’s right to choose; it’s about the preservation of personal freedoms and protecting a woman’s right to self-determination. Join the organization for a house party as it jump-starts its campaign to protect personal liberties. Some of the featured speakers will address the connection between queer rights and women’s rights.
For more information contact Rebecca at 503-223-4510, ext. 16, or rgreen@prochoiceoregon.org.
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