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Next Steps

By DHC
Posted 2022-05-10 15 min read

"We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled," Justice Alito writes in an initial majority draft circulated inside the court.

[1]

When I read those words my heart dropped into my stomach. I knew this was coming, even in this term, and still I felt my entire body chill.

The news is terrifying right now. Knowing that it is coming and seeing it in reality are always different things, and seeing the text of this opinion I thought of all of the people who will be hurt and how many lives with be affected when this decision goes into effect.

Despair is a natural response, but I wanted to compile some thoughts from various sources on what people can actually do in this moment. What will be effective to do right now. It’s part of my way of coping, of understanding where I need to put my feet next and to understand how the situation has evolved over time.

I don’t claim to have the answers, and I write this as much for myself as anyone. What I will say, however, is that the paths forward all involve organizing.

Being Effective

…stop engaging in parades, and start disrupting the operation of power.

[2]

Note first: Almost nothing here is effective unless you have done the ground level organizing, and that should almost always start with people who are already doing it, if they exist (and they often do).

Breaking the Law

Determine if you are willing to break the law as part of your action, in what ways, and on what timeline. Think very careflly about this.

If you haven’t already then talk this position over with your family and be prepared to make some hard choices in the future here. Think about it, think about what you are willing to do, and think about the consequences you are willing to endure. Especially if you come from a place of privilege, meaning that for you such thinking is unusual, spend some serious time with the question of where you land on this.

Remember:

You law abiding citizens, come listen to this song
Laws were made by people, and people can be wrong
Once unions were against the law, but slavery was fine
Women were denied the vote and children worked the mine
The more you study history the less you can deny it
A rotten law stays on the books til folks like us defy it

[3]

I do not, here, mean “talk about what other people should do.” This is about your position. Then talk to others who have already been working on this problem.

Understand Where You Live

With the repeal of Roe, we will get to a hodgepodge of laws through the US (At least until the Republicans gain control of the House, Senate, and Presidency again).

For example, in Colorado there is the Reproductive Health Equity Act in force, a blue general assembly, a blue governor.

Broadly, States fall into one of four categories (borrowing from the Center for Reproductive Rights):

  1. Welcoming. Places with strong protections (constitutional or statutory) and few restrictions.
  2. Protected. They lack the stronger protections or maybe have some additional restrictions, but safe abortions are readily available and likely to remain so.
  3. Not protected. Places where it is only grudgingly legal, but which lack enjoined laws or so-called “trigger laws.”
  4. Hostile. Active antagonism with trigger laws or enjoined laws that will go into force almost immediately.

But the details matter and there’s tremendous state level variance even within each of the categories. As a result you will often find different groups will rate places differently at the edges depending on how much, e.g., they look at TRAP laws or whether they consider a court decision binding.

Fundamentally, there are four states (and DC) that protect abortion throughout the pregnancy. There are sixteen states that protect it up to the point of viability. Some of those are statutory protections, some of them are constitutional protections, and sometimes they have other restrictions (like TRAP laws) even though it is generally legal.

Other states are a mixed bag. Some are outright hostile in a lot of ways, but it will remain at least somewhat available so long as the current balance of power in their local government remains where it is.

Know where you are. Know the status of your neighboring states. Know the status of where your friends live. The laws here are a hodgepodge and knowing where your state falls and the specifics of where it falls is important. Some states aren’t likely to restrict it, but also won’t necessarily be good states to drive a friend to either.

Good sources here are the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Guttmacher institute, and Rewire news group.

Know which is which. Especially as you start working with groups that have been doing this already, it will help give you a baseline understanding of what you are up against.

Organize for direct action

I don’t mean parades (what people often call protests).

Organize your workplace, your community, your apartment complex. Get them radicalized and start thinking about what direct action would look like for your group. Start building resources for mutual aid.

What you fight for and how you fight with this depends on what you have organized, but some examples:

  • Get “will not discriminate on the basis of having had an abortion” or equivalent language added to your union contract or tenant agreement.
  • Push your company and your union to vocally support abortion access.
  • Get your company to support paying travel expenses for those who have to travel for abortions.
  • Shut down businesses that do discriminate here. Your local coffee shop fired someone for getting an abortion? Sit in. Fill every table, lock hands and keep people from entering, turn them into a local pariah.
  • Push companies to stop supporting republican politicians. Make companies that don’t do this miserable.
  • Make life miserable for your local legislators (or the US congress or SCOTUS, I won’t judge). Keep pressure up on them.
  • Use your mutual aid funds to help people get abortions or organize driving/flying people between states.
  • Come up with other goals that you can reach with various forms of direct action. Get creative and talk it over with your peers, because what you can do is far more expansive than you likely realize.

On that note: You can only organize where you are involved. You can’t organize effectively from the outside, so don’t try to “organize the south” unless you live there.

Most of these require that you organize to be effective, so start there. Focus on your apartment complex, your school, your job, your communities. If you are working with organizers of other groups, your job is to listen to them and give them what they ask for.

One thing I was told very early in union organizing is that it doesn’t matter if your coworkers are conservative, if they think they are anti-union, whatever else. They can still be organized.

Ultimately remember though: Direct action is a tool, and as Sara Nelson says, our power comes from solidarity. [4] The Black Panthers are known for escorting people to register to vote with guns, but they also made breakfast for children, which is also a form of direct action. Conversely, the Provisional IRA had massive support from the community, for example in the rattling of trash bin lids to signal raids. [5]

Try really hard to not reinvent the wheel.

When you are looking to do something, look for people who are already doing that job and help them. Don’t try to create things de novo, focus instead on supporting what already exists.

Usually when people in dominant cultures first become aware of a problem there’s a group that has been working on that exact problem for over 100 years. This is no different.

The first step there is learn who is already working on these problems. Then you can listen to what they need and give it to them.

Political Approaches

Political approaches fall under the category of “don’t put faith in our systems, our systems are at best broken and at worst working exceptionally well at being terrilbe,” but political approaches can create a lot of buffer. Fighting a group of incompetent Democrats who can’t agree is night-and-day from fighting a group of fascist Republicans. Fighting to protect your rights when you have a state-level constitutional amendment in hand is very different than fighting to protect your rights when you don’t have such passed.

So these are effective approaches in some ways, but don’t depend on the government or the political parties to save us. Only we can do that, and many of these are–like the elements above–only effective with good organizing.

Push Local Government Around

The difference between living in Colorado and living in Texas on these sorts of issues is night and day. So get your local government to pass protections.

Call your city council, your mayor, your local legislator, your local governor.

Make them pledge to pass laws to protect abortion in your state or to provide some degree of sanctuary in your city. Primary them if they won’t do it. If they are all about StAtEs RiGhTs tell them “great, you now have the right to make it legal.” Push them to resist national legislation banning it.

Referendums and Citizen Initiatives

Go through whatever your state’s public referendum or citizen’s initiative process is for adding or challenging a constitutional amendment or a law. Learn what your state does for this and what it requires and get on it, and use it to either strike down legislative overreach or to enshrine protections.

Remember that abortion protections up to at least some point are popular in the US, so even if you can’t get your legislators on board you can still get protections passed locally.

If you already have it protected, try to amplify those protections. Get it as a constitutional amendment if it isn’t already protected there, make it as explicit an amendment as possible.

Push your national legislators

This doesn’t mean yelling “DO SOMETHING” on twitter. Call them. Every day. Fax things to them. Show up at townhalls and yell at them. Chase them into bathrooms. Camp out in front of their office or their house. Confront them in restaurants. Make your displeasure clear.

They are there to serve you. Remind them of that fact.

Tell them to pass the House’s protection. Tell them to expand the SCOTUS. Tell them to push the President to send abortion providers to federal lands and other suggestions that people like Elie Mystal and Imani Gandy have been talking about.

Do this even if they are conservatives. Make them so miserable that they leave.

Vote. Blue.

Vote and vote blue. Every time. Regardless if they have earned it. Make it so that Manchin is the most conservative member of a 60 member senate. Make sure that the Democrats keep the Presidency. Take your local governorship. Take your local legislator. Take your local dogcatcher and make it blue.

If you don’t want a particular Democrat in the role then primary them, then vote for the Democrat who wins the primary.

Voting blue is insufficient. It is woefully inadequate. Electoralism will not save us. But it belongs on this list because you don’t want to be trying to do any of these with a GOP congress and a GOP president, we want to replace Supreme Court members with people who are sympathetic in the long run, not fascists, and a hodgepodge is better than a nationwide ban passed by and enforced by fascists.

The republicans are fascists. Keep them out of power.

On thate note, it is also important to do the work to improve access to voting. Make sure everyone is registered to vote. Make sure that they can vote. Protect them in trying to vote. Help them make sure they remain registered to vote and are eligible to vote. Improve turnout in disadvantaged communities with whatever that takes.

I do, incidentally, mean “whatever that takes.”

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel, Don’t Give Up

White leftists in particular have a long habit of noticing something and coming to three conclusions:

  1. That because they haven’t heard of it previously, no one else has either.
  2. That any other groups that have been working on this have not succeeded due to failures of vision, ethics, or because they haven’t had the white person’s unique insight.
  3. That because something turns out to be hard, it is intractable.

It took over a century in the US to stop some of the worst excesses of child labor and we’re still not done nearly a century after that. Women’s suffrage was similarly over 80 years in the making. Let alone the distance between 1619 and 1865.

There are often groups already doing a lot of the things that people think of, saw this coming, and have deep knowledge of the terrain. Connect with them! Help them as much as possible. Remember that we have to be in this for the long haul.

Conclusions: Consider Where You Are, and Where You Need To Be

In every case, think in terms of where you are, what you want to accomplish and drawing a line to what it will take to accomplish that, and what your escalation is if you fail. As the quote from Gen. Robert H. Barrow goes:

Amateurs talk about strategy and tactics. Professionals talk about logistics and sustainability in warfare.

This means that you can’t just go “we’re going to have a general strike!” then later go “well, no one showed up, so our solution is ADVERTISE HARDER.”

Where you are: Be realistic. Do you have the solidarity and support for a strike? For a general strike? For a sit-in? If not, what will it take to get to that point? How are you going to manage this without burning everyone out?

We must maintain hope and certainty that we will win, and we also must maintain a clear-eyed realization of what our position is.

What you are trying to accomplish and what it will take to accomplish that: If you want to, say, raise the minimum wage for everyone, having a walkout at your local whole foods is unlikely to accomplish that. Your escalation if you can’t secure a 15 dollar minimum wage is not “ask for 25 dollars instead” and your escalation path if you can’t get your local store to strike is not “we’ll have a general strike instead!”

Your escalation path should be clear and you should have one, but that means being realistic about where you are and what you can do right now with the resources that you have. It means understanding where you are logistically, and how that situation will evolve.

Learn constantly. Be prepared to fail and to learn from your failures. Be prepared for this to take not just years but generations.

After all, it took generations to get here.

References

[1]   J. Gerstein and A. Ward, “Exclusive: Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows,” POLITICO. May 2, 2022. [Online; accessed on 5 May 2022]

[2]   E. C. McLaughlin, “A parade is not a protest and other lessons for the looming collapse of our rights,” The Newsletter with ECM. May 7, 2022. [Online; accessed on 9 May 2022]

[3]   A. Feeney, “Have you Been To Jail For Justice?,” Original Recordings. 1969. [Online; accessed on 9 May 2022]

[4]   S. Nelson, “Preface,” in Strike! 50th Anniversary Edition, J. Brecher, Ed. PO Box 23912, Oakland, CA 94623: PM Press, 2020.

[5]   E. Owicki, “Rattle Away at Your Bin: Women, Community, and Bin Lids in Northern Irish Drama,” Theatre Symposium, vol. 18, pp. 55–56, doi: 10.1353/tsy.2010.0011. [Online; accessed on 9 May 2022]

organizing, politics
abortion roe-v-wade scotus
This post is licensed under CC BY ND 4.0 by the author.
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