This is Hell
October 15th, 2019
A lot of people who are for abortion rights talk about how important privacy is – and I think that’s going the opposite direction from where we need to go. We need to be making it more public, like the group Shout Your Abortion is doing, we need to be talking about it as a normal thing, rather than feeding that shame and stigma by feeling we can’t speak about it. Privacy and stigma is always aimed at trying to keep us from talking to each other about what’s going on.
Organizer Jenny Brown examines the long history and present politics of the fight for abortions in America, and explains why the left must be clear and honest about abortion – as an unrestricted right, as a social service to be included in national healthcare, and as an unfinished front of the feminist revolution.
Jenny Brown is a National Women’s Liberation organizer and former editor of Labor Notes. She was a leader in the grassroots campaign to have “morning-after pill” contraception available over-the-counter in the U.S. and was a plaintiff in the winning lawsuit. In addition to Labor Notes, her work has appeared in Jacobin, Huffington Post, and Alternet, and she is coauthor of the Redstockings book Women’s Liberation and National Health Care: Confronting the Myth of America. She is the author of Without Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now.
