Reversal of Roe v. Wade stokes anger among feminists
STAMFORD — Before last Monday night, there were more pressing problems for the young feminists at Westhill High School. There’s expanding bathroom access, for one, which the members of the Feminist Club took up as a banner issue this semester.
And since the winter, they have tried to fight back against the school dress code, which they say targets “people who dress in a feminine manner” while not policing boys’ clothes in the same way.
But for a handful of hours between last Monday night and Tuesday, the group’s day-to-day worries fell away. The news of the Supreme Court’s pending move to overturn Roe v. Wade, a decision that would restrict access to abortion in more than half the country, pierced through everything else.
“When I found out, I was actually in my room, sitting on my bed: My mom came into my room, and I was studying for my AP Psych exam,” MadisonElizabeth Anderson, the 16-year-old club president, said. She had been flicking between study materials and photos of the opulent outfits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual gala — this year’s theme was The Gilded Age.
Her mother stepped into the room and asked if she’d heard about the leaked decision.
From there, the news spread among her peers — Anderson sent a link out to other club members. Over text, they tried to parse out what the news meant.
“I didn’t probably realize its full impact,” Nicola Andrzejewski, 17, said. She was busy at work when the news broke. The shock didn’t settle in entirely, Andrzejewski said, until the next day at school through conversations with Anderson and fellow club member Alexandra Tobiasiewicz, also 17. But once all three of the girls understood what was set to transpire, the shock went bone-deep, they said.
And the worry wasn’t just limited to the Westhill Feminist Club’s 20-plus person membership. Their faculty advisor is Tye Bell, 27, a school counselor.
“The students I’ve spoken to are confused,” she said, and many don’t understand what the pending reversal means.
Shocked too was Westport native Katherine Vartuli, a 22year-old student at UConn Stamford.
“To put it very bluntly, I’m very disgusted,” Vartuli said. Like the Westhill Feminist Club, the idea of someone else governing her reproductive choices rankles her, she said.
The affront feels political and incredibly personal, both because she is a woman and because her mother works at an OB-GYN clinic, she said.
She’s spent the last semester learning about reproductive health and justice for a college course but says she “did not expect (the decision) at all.”
Support for abortion trends higher among young people than it does among other age groups, according to surveys. Public opinion polling company Gallup found that 56 percent of people 18 to 29 self-identify as “prochoice,” while 39 percent call themselves “pro-life.” For people 65 or older, the statistic is almost the exact opposite: 58 percent were anti-abortion and 39 percent supported abortion rights.
Ingrid Semaan, the activist and sociologist who teaches the class that Vartulli just took, has dedicated her adult life to feminist scholarship.
“Roe v. Wade made abortion bans ... prior to viability unconstitutional, but there’s been an erosion of those rights since then, since 1973,” Semaan explained. After viability, the fetus can survive outside of the womb. Most professionals consider the turning point for viability to be around 23 or 24 weeks. However, there is no medical consensus on when it occurs.
Even under Roe v. Wade, according to Semaan, individual states can still implement abortion restrictions. The pro-abortion rights group the Guttmacher Institute says that 43 states “prohibit abortions after a specified point in pregnancy, with some exceptions provided.” Half of U.S. states require that a person seeking an abortion wait some time, “usually 24 hours,” before receiving an abortion after hearing informational counseling, according to Guttmacher.
And beyond the existing obstacles to abortion, Semaan said she views the procedure in the larger framework of reproductive justice, something pioneered by Black feminists in 1994 that views the right to an abortion as just one component of family planning.
To this day, reproductive justice advocates argue that abortion represents only part of the definition of reproductive freedom. The reproductive justice organization Sister Song argues that “contraception, comprehensive sex education, STI prevention and care, alternative birth options, adequate prenatal and pregnancy care, domestic violence assistance, adequate wages to support ... families (and) safe homes” all contribute to reproductive liberty.
“And certainly, we don’t have social supports for people to raise the children they already have, like paid family leave,” Semaan said. She teaches students all these things when she teaches them about Roe v. Wade — especially now the legal precedent is at risk of being overturned, she said.
When young people like the Westhill Feminist Club or her students learn that the right to an abortion nationally is at risk, Semaan said she watches them reckon with reality. Their shock comes face-to-face with the political efforts of the last 40-plus years.
Semaan said she thinks their disbelief “comes from a general sort of impulse to see change as always going forward in a positive direction, rather than ‘sometimes things get better and sometimes things get worse,’” she said. “It really comes from a kind of lovely optimism, but one that isn’t grounded in history.”
History shows that the national and political attitude toward abortion has always been charged.
“There were big assaults in the 1980s against abortion providers and abortion clinics,” Semaan said.
As a teenager, she was closer to those assaults than most. The militant anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue was headquartered in her hometown: Binghampton, N.Y.
During her youth, Semaan attended and helped organize clinic defenses and escort services for people seeking care at places that performed abortions. Those early actions informed her politics and helped define her activism, she said.
Just as current events defined Semaan’s outlook, they have already molded that of the Feminist Club. They have fighting back in the front of their minds, they said.
The girls want to put together an informational video on Roe v. Wade to screen at school. Plus, Tobiasiewicz and Anderson said they wanted to take the club to the abortion rights protest planned for Stamford May 15.
“I’m going to load everybody up in my car,” Tobiasiewicz said, her mind already fixed on what comes next.