Forty years of creative actions for choice

Nadine Bloch January 22, 2013

The Radical Cheerleaders in action at UC Santa Cruzs Baytree Plaza on Nov. 7, 2007. (Santa Cruz IMC/~Bradley)

Today marks the anniversary of the 1973 passage of Roe v. Wade, the watershed Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion under most circumstances in the United States. Since then, there has been an ongoing struggle to defend womens right to choose, which has involved myriad creative actions.

In the 1990s, for instance, my favorite part of a clinic-defense campaign was always the arrival of Church Ladies for Choice (CLFC). From a block away we knew they were coming; you could hear their laughter, smell the perfume, see the glam outfits. And when they arrived, whether it was snowing or brutally hot, they would gather up and start singing hers hymns were just too sexist! Wed all sing along to the familiar melodies with rewritten, topical words. There was Stand by Your Clinic (to the tune of Stand by your Man) and This Womb Is My Womb (it is not your womb, and there is no womb, for Wandall Tewwy). The dress code was consistently high camp or drag, with very hairy arms and legs popping out of over-the-top Sunday-best dresses and hats; CLFC tended to be mostly men. Sometimes the LAW would show up as well not the cops, but Ladies Against Women. Spoofing anti-feminist politics since the time of Phyllis Schaffley and Reagans inauguration, these were conservatively-dressed and well-heeled women (sometimes with members of the LAW Mens Auxiliary in tow). With their white gloves and frilly demeanor, their manifesto declared Repeal the Ladies Vote (Babies, Not Ballots) and made calls to Abolish the environment. It takes up too much space, and is almost impossible to keep clean and Restore virginity as a high-school graduation requirement. Any woman could join LAW as long as she was able to bring along a pink permission slip signed by her husband.

At some point, with either CLFC or LAW around, wed end up singing the old Monty Python song Every Sperm is Sacred. Placards held up by pearl-wearing, proper-suited women would proclaim, No sperm deserves to be wasted! Arrest the masturbaters! All of these shenanigans drew a contrast with the abortion opponents on their knees in prayer, provided diversion and physical support for those who were being escorted into the clinics, and kept up the morale of those forming human-defense chains around the doors. Most of my experience with clinic defense was with the Washington Area Clinic Defense Task Force, an all-volunteer group founded in the 1980s to promote peaceful and safe access to womens health clinics; many other cities in the United States had groups organized to defend a womans right to choose and access to safe clinics as well. In New York City, WHAM! (Womens Health Action and Mobilization) was founded in response to the 1989 Supreme Court ruling in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services that allowed states to bar the use of public money and public facilities for abortions. WHAM was greatly influenced by ACT UPs tactics and operations on behalf of AIDS victims, especially in its commitment to in-your-face direct actions. WHAM disrupted the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court justice David Souter and, in July 1991, dropped a banner over the Statue of Libertys face that read No Choice, No Liberty. The message called on the federal government to stop gagging womens rights. The NYC

Clinic Defense Task Force and CLFC were two groups that emerged from the work of WHAM. A little later on in the scene, the Womens Action Coalition (WAC) took to the streets across the United States, usually with its characteristic drum corps. Fueled by disgust and anger about Congresss treatment of Anita Hill, William Kennedy Smiths rape case and attacks on abortion rights, WAC deployed street theater, fax zaps (before the Internet!), guerrilla postering, pickets and marches. In 1992, WAC crashed the American Bar Association convention, demanding that it officially include a national lesbian and gay lawyers group and support abortion rights. The group also pulled off a fabulous pink-slip action: A month before the 1992 presidential election, dressed in pink slips, WAC women handed out paper pink slips giving the GOP notice that it had failed to meet the needs of women. Probably the largest event in support of womens rights and reproductive freedom was the 2004 March for Womens Lives in Washington, attended by approximately one million people, mostly women. Along with the more well-known groups like NOW, NARAL, ACLU, Planned Parenthood, NAACP and Feminist Majority, others like the Radical Cheerleaders jumped in as well to offer some of their activism with pom poms and middle fingers extended. They were dressed as steampunk cheerleaders, often in black, red, pink and more black with pompoms made from garbage bags. Chants were rewritten standards or stinging diatribes against the state, capitalism, and the oppression of

women and girls: My back is achin, my bras too tight, my booties shakin from left to right! Sound off, revolution! Sound off,revolution! To celebrate the anniversary today, there will be demonstrations across the country, both in person and online. In courtrooms, legislatures and clinics everywhere, the struggle over abortion rights continues a struggle not only over womens bodies but also over the imagination.
To p i c s : A b o r t i o n A r t B l o c k a d e s C u l t u r e Jamming Gender and sexuality History Humor Music Performance Religion Street t h e a t e r U n i t e d S t a t e s Wo m e n ' s r i g h t s

Nadine Bloch is an innovative artist, nonviolent practitioner, political organizer, direct-action trainer, and puppetista, who combines the principles and strategies of nonviolent civil disobedience with creative use of the arts in cultural resistance and public protest. She has worked with diverse organizations, including Nonviolence International, Greenpeace, The Ruckus Society, The Labor Heritage Foundation, Health GAP, Housing Works and the Bread & Puppet Theater. Her work has been featured nationally and locally, in newspapers like The Washington Post and magazines from Ms. to Time. She is a contributor to the books Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution (2012, O/R Press) and We Are Many, Reflections on

Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation (2012, AK Press).

RELATED ARTICLES

For #occupywallstreet, dispersion is part of the plan

Nathan Schneider

Translating the Quebec student protests

Joan Donovan

A decade of war, 27 days of art

Nathan Schneider

Utah court to activists: imitate corporations all you like

Nathan Schneider

Please keep comments constructive and relevant to the post. Digressions, personal attacks, hateful language and unsubstantiated claims may cause a comment to be removed. Join the Waging Nonviolence email list

4 COMMENTS
1. Nathan Schneider
2. January 22, 2013 at 9:58 am

On Facebook, a comment from the Catholic Peace Fellowship offers a reminder that the nonviolence community is by no means in agreement on the issue of abortion. The comment consists of a statement from 1974 signed by luminaries like Dorothy Day and

James Forest. For them, resisting war and resisting abortion go hand in hand:
3.

just as we urge our leaders to institute policies that will put an end to the constant threat of war, so we call upon them, in particular our legislatures and courts, to undertake a prudent and thorough reassessment of the abortion issue in all its ramifications and to develop a policy that will extend the rights and protections afforded by the Constitution, and inherent by nature, to the unborn, and at the same time to provide every support and assistance to those who might otherwise be driven to consider abortion as a solution to real and demanding personal problems. Read the whole statement here.
Reply to this comment

4. A J MacDonald Jr
5. January 23, 2013 at 4:41 pm

Violence is perpetrated daily upon women, via abortion on demand, in the name of choice, just as violence is perpetrated daily upon their children.
6.

Waging Nonviolence supports this violence, although they claim to be against violence. 3,700 children and women are harmed by the violence of abortion on demand each day in the US, and Waging Nonviolence wishes for this violence against women and their children to continue, forever, unabated. A more conservative, and less progressive, position regarding abortion on demand is unimaginable, especially for a group calling itself: Waging Nonviolence. This purportedly nonviolent and progressive organization: Waging Nonviolence, desires for all American women to remain forever locked into one US Supreme Court decision, which was made for

7.

8.

9.

them by 7 old men during the misogynistic milieu of the 1970s, to continue forever, and is the epitome and very definition of rabid and dangerous conservatism: keeping people locked into the morally bankrupt and hopelessly outdated political policies of the past.
10. I suppose Waging Nonviolence would have backed black chattel

slavery too?
11. Shame on Waging Nonviolence for supporting unending violence

against women and their children in the name of choice, and for refusing to seek better alternatives for women pregnant with children, such as health care, financial assistance, adoption alternatives, and whatever else pregnant women might need in order to give life, rather than death, to their children, as true progressives desire.
12. See: http://www.feministsforlife.org/ 13. See: http://wagingnonviolence.org/2013/01/forty-years-of-creative-

actions-for-choice/
14. See: https://ajmacdonaldjr.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/the-lefts-40-

year-long-war-on-women/
15. See: https://ajmacdonaldjr.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/concerning-

women-and-legal-abortions-legalized-abortion-on-demand-is-bothdegrading-and-unjust-for-women/
16. See: https://ajmacdonaldjr.wordpress.com/2012/09/30/time-of-

moral-crisis-over-50000000-dead-innocent-children-since-1973/
17. See: https://ajmacdonaldjr.wordpress.com/2012/12/16/20-children-

die-each-day/
18. See: https://ajmacdonaldjr.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/feminists-

for-life-names-remarkable-pro-life-women-2/
19. See: https://www.facebook.com/makethedreamareality

Reply to this comment

1
2

Nathan Schneider
January 24, 2013 at 5:07 pm

Thank you for your comment. Just to clarify, Waging Nonviolence is a publication and not an advocacy organization. The articles we publish represent part of a conversation we are trying to curate, not an agenda we are trying to pursue. Opinions and assumptions expressed represent those of our authors, not of the publication itself. On the issue of abortion, we recognize that there is a difference of opinion about what nonviolence demands, and we hope to be a place where that discussion can take place in productive ways.
Reply to this comment

1
2

Jim Kelly
January 25, 2013 at 11:01 am

I was appalled at Blochs tone. Im part of the nonviolent community who feels that surgically ripping apart fetuses that , at three months, look like us doesnt easily fit into the nonviolent imagination that Bloch endorses. Tough stuff. But we all have lots to think about here, and for a long time.
Reply to this comment
Source: http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/forty-years-of-creative-actions-for-choice/