The Black Lives Matter movement has shaken US society to its core in 2020—and accomplished more in a matter of weeks of struggle than decades of waiting for Democrats to take action. The US Supreme Court is now preparing to rule on the most draconian anti-abortion legislation since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal in the US—which would require all Louisiana doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. This law is intended to deny abortion access in the entire state.

At this crucial time, it is worth reviewing the many attacks on a vast array of reproductive rights that Trump has already executed, leading to this moment; the ways that Democrats have helped pave the way for this turning point; and the kind of movement, based on struggle, we need to build to turn the tide back in favor of the right to choose abortion. The article below, updated from 2017, remains just as relevant today.

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An estimated four million people turned out for the 2017 Women’s March around the United States and the rest of the world to protest the misogynist megalomaniac who had just taken charge of the world’s biggest superpower. Donald Trump immediately raised a belligerent middle finger to that mass outpouring.

During Trump’s first reckless weeks in office, he greatly accelerated the attacks on reproductive rights that had already been underway for four decades—with the aim of overturning legal abortion altogether. During a presidential debate in March 2016, Trump even claimed that women who undergo abortions “should have some sort of punishment.” He pledged to appoint enough anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court to overturn its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal in the US—in which case the issue would “go back to the states”—exactly the conditions that existed before Roe v. Wade. In a 2016 interview with 60 Minutes, interviewer Leslie Stahl asked how women would cope if their home state banned abortions, and Trump shrugged, “Yeah, well, they’ll perhaps have to go, they’ll have to go to another state”—as if this would be just a minor inconvenience.

On Trump’s first day in office, he reinstated Ronald Reagan’s so-called “Mexico City Policy” that bans US aid to any health care providers beyond the country’s borders that even mention abortion as an option to desperate patients facing unwanted pregnancies. Both Clinton and Obama struck down this ban, also known as the “global gag rule,” while George W. Bush—and now Trump—reinstated it. But Trump went one large step further—cutting funding not only to family planning agencies but also to HIV, Zika, and maternal healthcare programs that provide abortion referrals.

While self-righteous politicians use the global gag rule to score points with their ostensibly “pro-life” supporters at home, it is a death sentence for poor women around the world: 47,000 women, most from the Global South, die from unsafe or illegal abortions each year, according to the World Health Organization. This number will surely grow now, because evidence shows that the gag rule creates a deadly spiral: defunding the very healthcare clinics that could have provided contraception, thereby raising the rate of unintended pregnancies and unsafe abortions—causing more women to die.

The global casualties of unsafe and illegal abortions underscore women’s need to control their own reproductive destinies, especially for people of color, working-class women and transpeople. Pregnant people bear the emotional, physical, and ultimately the financial burden of carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term. This is the reason why, when abortion is illegal, people risk their lives to have abortions, for the sake of their own and their families’ survival.

This is also the case inside the United States, where the economic and social consequences of racism put the lives of Black women, Latinas, and other people of color most at risk when abortion is unavailable. In the years before abortion was made legal in New York City in 1970, for example, Black women and Puerto Rican women made up 80 percent of all women who died after an illegal abortion. Women’s right to abortion is central to control over their bodies and reproductive lives. Denying it threatens their lives.

The 1976 Hyde Amendment targeting poor women inside US borders, by barring federal funding for Medicaid abortions, was followed by the 1984 Mexico City Policy directed at impoverished women abroad. Every year since 1986, the Hyde Amendment has been reinstated through Congressional vote. Though denying abortions, it has continued to allow funding for Medicaid sterilizations, in what can only be described as a resounding echo of twentieth-century racist eugenics programs that forcibly or coercively sterilized tens of thousands of Black people, Native Americans, Latinx people, those with mental or physical disabilities, and prison inmates.

The Republicans’ path of destruction in the Trump era

Republican Party leaders made no secret of their intent to eviscerate abortion rights in Donald Trump’s first term. In January 2017, the House passed bill H. R. 7, making the Hyde Amendment permanent. But this bill, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act of 2017,” also vastly extended the federal ban to bar federal money (including both federal subsidies and tax credits) for any private health insurance plans that provide abortion coverage.

Republicans’ long-term goal is to realize their long-standing pledge to defund Planned Parenthood nationally because they have a president likewise eager to do so. The Republicans’ first heartless attempts to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, which would have defunded Planned Parenthood for the next full year, failed to muster enough GOP votes to pass the House in 2017. But there is no doubt that they will keep trying to deny federal funding to Planned Parenthood and also to cut Medicaid spending—the most successful part of the Affordable Care Act.

Federal funding for Planned Parenthood has traditionally taken the form of reimbursements through public programs such as Medicaid that provide healthcare to low-income people and people with disabilities. That would dry up completely. Since the Hyde Amendment, the federal money going to Planned Parenthood affiliates only covers preventive care: breast and cervical cancer screenings, contraception, and well-woman visits. But Republicans are working hard to universally deny federal funding for these crucial services even to patients served by the many clinics that do not perform abortions—simply because Planned Parenthood does so at some of its clinics.

Roughly two-thirds of Planned Parenthood’s patients rely on public health programs like Medicaid, and the federal government as of 2016 provided about 75 percent of the organization’s public subsidies. Removing all federal funding will not only devastate Planned Parenthood financially, but it will also overwhelm remaining health centers serving low-income women, leaving millions of women without any preventive healthcare or contraception access.

The experience in Texas provides a glimpse of the early effects of defunding Planned Parenthood. In 2011, Texas cut funding to family planning clinics by 66 percent because many of these clinics made abortion referrals even if they did not provide abortions. The state redirected the funds to “community” health clinics. In 2013, Texas refused federal Medicaid assistance because it went to Planned Parenthood and other family planning clinics—instead setting up a state-funded women’s health program that withheld money from any organization affiliated with an abortion provider. At the time, Planned Parenthood served 60 percent of low- income women in Texas.

Because of these cuts, eighty-two Texas family planning clinics were forced to close, and the remaining clinics had the capacity to serve only half the number of patients they had previously. Many of the women left behind were unable to access affordable birth control or other medical services. Early studies documented the grave consequences:

• The maternal mortality rate doubled between 2010 and 2012, from 72 to 148 pregnancy-related deaths.
• Low-income women who had previously relied on a local Planned Parenthood clinic experienced a 27 percent increase in births in the 18 months following the 2013 cut in funding for Planned Parenthood.

The looming reproductive healthcare crisis—manufactured on Capitol Hill

Obscured by the anti-abortion bombast on Capitol Hill, millions of poor and working-class women—already denied access to affordable abortions—face a looming reproductive healthcare crisis. This crisis is entirely manufactured, in Congress and state legislatures across the country—justified by the same paternalistic bluster that has long trivialized women’s need to control their own bodies as a basic human right.

Abortion is never a selfish or “frivolous” choice, contrary to the caricature created by anti-choice bigots inside and outside Congress—which depicts women using abortion as just another form of birth control, carelessly delaying their abortions for the sake of personal convenience up to the point of delivery. Trump’s claim that “in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby,” is pure fabrication. On the contrary, nearly 92 percent of abortions take place by the thirteenth week of gestation. Only 1.3 percent occur after the twentieth week—nearly all of them due to severe fetal abnormalities that would impede or prevent survival outside the womb or threaten the woman’s life.

The most typical abortion patient is Black or Latina, in their twenties or thirties, who is living below or slightly above the federal poverty line and already has one or more children. Furthermore, 53 percent of abortion patients pay for it themselves, without Medicaid or insurance funding. First trimester abortions can cost from $400 to $1,500, according to Planned Parenthood.

Affordable contraception is as crucial as abortion (and has lowered the abortion rate to historic lows in recent years, due to the Affordable Care Act’s widespread provision of free contraception). Yet the GOP seeks to gut birth control access, along with vital reproductive healthcare. During the House debate on Obamacare repeal, Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., even voiced opposition to the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that insurance plans include maternity coverage. “What about men having to purchase prenatal care?” Shimkus asked. “I’m just . . . is that not correct? And should they?”

The fight to defend Planned Parenthood is therefore a key component of the fight for reproductive healthcare, for all women and also for transgender people. Trans people, especially trans people of color, face widespread discrimination in accessing all healthcare. Nearly 20 percent of transgender people report trouble getting basic healthcare, while 28 percent say they have been harassed in medical settings—causing roughly 50 percent to delay or avoid necessary medical care. Half of transgender men have foregone annual pelvic exams because of this discrimination. In addition, insurance companies often deny coverage for mammograms for transgender men or prostate exams for transgender women, simply because their gender doesn’t match the category for which the service is covered.

How can we defend Planned Parenthood?

Millions of people rely on Planned Parenthood for their healthcare—and the huge turnout at the 2017 and 2018 Women’s Marches showed the enormous capacity that exists for defending reproductive rights through mass struggle. Despite this obvious potential, Planned Parenthood’s national leaders, including its then-president, Cecile Richards, appeared reluctant to build such an activist movement—instead relying on their long-standing strategy of electing and lobbying politicians. After the House passed H. R. 7 in January 2017, Richards tweeted, “Now’s the time to make those calls to Congress.” But calls to Congress have been proven over a period of decades to be a thoroughly inadequate response to the scale of the attacks on reproductive rights, much less the ones we face in the age of Trump.

We need, now more than ever, a fighting movement that explicitly ties reproductive rights to women’s right to control their own bodies. Instead, Planned Parenthood’s public relations campaign in 2017 sought to battle the anti-choice onslaught by retrenching politically, downplaying its commitment to providing abortions, and instead emphasizing the non-abortion medical services that their clinics provide. The organization at that time even sponsored an ad that depicted a (white) woman recalling how Planned Parenthood staff convinced her that she shouldn’t have an abortion, as her adorable toddler plays in the background. This approach doesn’t allow Planned Parenthood’s advocates to argue forcefully for the right to choose abortion—one of its most necessary services.

When anti-choice crusaders announced plans for “Defund Planned Parenthood” rallies across the country on February 11, 2017—mainly outside women’s clinics— Planned Parenthood leaders actively discouraged pro-choice activists from organizing counterprotests. As DNAinfo in Chicago reported, “Anti-abortion activists plan to protest outside Planned Parenthood clinics in the city on Feb. 11. But instead of urging people to counterprotest, Planned Parenthood asked its supporters to stay away and find other ways of helping the organization. That’s because protests and counterprotests might frighten or confuse patients who are trying to use the clinics that day, spokeswoman Julie Lynn said.”

Concern for patients surely is not the only reason Planned Parenthood leaders discouraged protests—since they also opposed protests outside the clinics that they had closed on that day.

Moreover, those who argue that clinic patients will be traumatized by the sight of pro-choice supporters carrying visible placards defending abortion rights do not speak for all patients. On the contrary, the sight of demonstrators defending the right to choose abortion can be a confidence booster for patients, showing that there is a movement to support their right to choose and countering the dozens or hundreds of anti-abortion zealots calling them “murderers” and “baby killers.” It is also the case that many of those demonstrating for choice have been abortion patients themselves.

As it turned out, thousands of pro-choice activists nevertheless turned out to counterprotest the “Defund Planned Parenthood” protesters in February 2017, in many cases outnumbering them. The entire point of counterprotesting these reactionaries is to demoralize them and to deplete the confidence they have gained through Trump’s election. The potential exists today to build a movement that defends the right to abortion without apology, using the power of our numbers to combat the Republican assault on reproductive rights. Only this kind of a movement will shift the balance of forces toward upholding abortion rights.

How we got here: The role of the Democrats and their loyalists

Why have the largest and most long-standing pro-choice organizations, including Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the National Organization for Women (NOW) been virtually paralyzed at a time when Planned Parenthood’s survival is at stake and the right to legal abortion hangs in the balance?

The problem lies in mainstream feminist organizations’ long-standing loyalty to the Democratic Party, which has not returned the favor. While Democrats remain formally pro-choice, they have retreated and steadily surrendered political ground to the Republican Party, tailoring their politics to appease the political “center”— mostly white swing voters undecided between voting Republican or Democrat—as an electoral strategy. Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 presidential election demonstrates the increasing futility of this strategy even on the electoral front, when much of the Democrats’ traditional voting base was not motivated to vote for the party that takes their votes for granted yet does so little to defend their interests. But this electoral strategy has also been an outright disaster for reproductive rights, leading to their steady erosion, whether or not a Democrat was in the White House.

The Hyde Amendment may have been a Republican initiative, but the Democrats held a majority in both the House and Senate when it first passed in 1976—and more than 100 House Democrats voted in favor of its passage. The Hyde Amendment has been renewed every year since with both Democratic and Republican votes—whichever party was in the majority. The Democratic Party did not take a formal stand against the Hyde Amendment until 2016, when its platform finally called for repeal—forty years too late. In addition, Obama expanded the Hyde Amendment’s restrictions on federal funding for abortion to also apply to the Affordable Care Act. Whereas the Hyde Amendment targeted poor women, Obama aimed at the rights of all women receiving insurance from companies participating in the “Obamacare” program. On March 24, 2010, the White House issued an executive order referring to abortion as an issue of “conscience” while stating explicitly, “The [Affordable Care] Act maintains current Hyde Amendment restrictions governing abortion policy and extends those restrictions to the newly created health insurance exchanges. Under the Act . . . new protections prohibit discrimination against health care facilities and health care providers because of an unwillingness to provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions.”

Thus, even self-proclaimed “pro-choice” Democrats have played an active role in enacting and maintaining some of the harshest restrictions on abortion, especially for poor and working-class women. Mainstream feminist organizations, which represent the interests of white, middle-class women, have never held Democrats’ feet to the fire or made a priority of organizing to overturn the Hyde Amendment, presumably because it mainly affected poor women.

History: Mainstream feminists let Bill Clinton off the hook as he betrayed the pro-choice movement

Bill Clinton played an especially decisive role in the 1990s, beginning with his broken campaign promise to pass a “Freedom of Choice Act,” guaranteeing the legal right to abortion. As soon as he was elected, Clinton never mentioned it again. Yet the same mainstream feminists who pulled out all the stops to get Clinton elected never held him accountable for this betrayal.

Even before Clinton’s election, the potential for building a mass pro-choice movement was as clear then as it is now. When legal abortion was last under threat in the Supreme Court, at least 300,000 pro-choice activists demonstrated in Washington, DC on April 9, 1989. In 1992, an even larger crowd—at least 500,000— turned out to defend the right to choose.

But the leaders of the largest pro-choice organization, the National Abortion Rights Action League (since renamed NARAL Pro-Choice America), had already made a conscious choice to shift their polemic on choice to one that would “play” on Capitol Hill. NARAL issued a “talking points” memo to its affiliates in 1989, instructing staffers specifically not to use phrases such as “a woman’s body is her own to control.” Rather, the right to choose was to be cast as a right to “privacy.” Increasingly, pro-choice organizations emphasized that being pro-choice also meant being “pro-family,” giving up critical ideological ground to the main slogan of the Christian Right.

Clinton’s first term as president witnessed the most anti-choice voting record in Congress’s history until then, while states across the country passed a multitude of abortion restrictions—from mandatory waiting periods to parental consent and notification laws. Yet Clinton’s only attention to the abortion issue in his second term was to promote sexual abstinence among teens to lower the country’s abortion rate. In 1997, Hillary Clinton urged the pro-choice movement to start forging unity with abortion foes on points of agreement, such as lowering the abortion rate in the United States.

Mainstream pro-choice organizations continued to take their lead from the Clintons. For example, NARAL embarked on a campaign in 1997 to help the Clinton administration in reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies by 30 percent. “People would like to see fewer abortions,” echoed NARAL leader Kate Michelman at the League’s annual luncheon (ironically) celebrating the twenty-fourth anniversary of the right to legal abortion.

Clinton steals Republicans’ thunder, dismantles welfare

Clinton did fulfill his campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it.” However, he did so by signing Republican-sponsored legislation eliminating the federal welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which immediately threw many thousands of poor women and children off welfare and without a lifeline. Clinton replaced AFDC with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), with a five-year lifetime time limit for assistance, accompanied by a host of punitive measures. Clinton also signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996, which allowed states to decide whether to place “family caps,” denying recipients more financial assistance if they had any more children while already receiving government aid.

This limit was based on the racist notion of “welfare queens” promoted by Ronald Reagan—a caricature of welfare mothers as having numerous children just to increase their monthly government check, which ostensibly allowed them to live in luxury at taxpayers’ expense. The facts show otherwise. In 1990 and up until today, 90 percent of welfare recipients have two or fewer children. The family caps were initially adopted by twenty-two states and remain in fifteen states today. In 2006, the Urban Institute found, not surprisingly, that family caps raise the number of children living in “deep poverty”—which has surely increased further since the 2008 Great Recession.

The state of New Jersey, for example, was one of the first states to enact the family cap and hasn’t increased welfare payments in twenty-nine years. If a woman has an additional child while already receiving welfare payments, her cash assistance drops from $424 to $322 per month. Eight in ten New Jersey children living in poverty receive no public cash assistance.

Ronald Reagan invented the racist “welfare queen” caricature, but Bill Clinton signed the “Personal Responsibility Act,” collaborating with Republicans like Newt Gingrich in punishing poor women and their children, simply because they exist. Yet mainstream feminists, including the pro-choice movement, remained silent as Clinton thrust many thousands of poor women and children deeper into poverty. These middle- and upper-class feminist organizations’ priorities lay elsewhere on the political front, leaving them no time or inclination to advocate for poor women, especially poor women of color.

Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign ads emphasized that he had signed a ban on gay marriage, the Defense of Marriage Act, and “required teen mothers on welfare to stay in school or lose benefits.” Yet the mainstream feminist organizations’ support for Clinton’s reelection never wavered.

Without pressure from below to defend the right to abortion, especially for poor women, the Democratic Party steadily retreated on choice. In January 2005, on the thirty-second anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, Senator Hillary Clinton called abortion a “sad, even tragic choice” that shouldn’t “ever have to be exercised, or only in very rare circumstances.” Michelman—who assumed the role of Democratic Party strategist after

retiring as NARAL’s president—quickly voiced her approval. In a letter to the New York Times, Michelman stated, “Senator Clinton deserves praise for reaching out to anti-choice Americans.”

Is it any wonder that when Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2016 as a pro-choice candidate, her claims rang hollow among those whose votes—including those of poor women of color—she thought could be taken for granted?

The precarious state of reproductive rights thanks to tailing mainstream Democrats

Well before Trump took office in 2017, reproductive rights in the United States were already precarious, due to the patchwork of restrictions in states around the country that determine whether, when, and where women can receive abortions. The following are just some of the many restrictions in place as of March 1, 2017:

• Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia prohibit the use of state funds for abortions, except in cases of rape, incest, or if the woman’s life is in danger.
• South Dakota provides state funding only if the woman’s life is in danger, leaving rape and incest survivors who are poor without the option to abort.
• Eleven states restrict coverage of abortion in private insurance plans.
• Seventeen states require counseling before an abortion that includes at least one of the following medically unsubstantiated claims: The “link” between abortion and breast cancer (five states), the “ability of a fetus” to feel pain (twelve states) or “long-term mental health consequences” for the woman (eight states).
• Twenty-seven states mandate waiting periods of twenty-four hours between the initial counseling session and when the procedure is performed. This requires two separate visits to the clinic—and an overnight stay if long-distance travel is necessary to reach a clinic.
• Twenty-six states require one or both parents to consent to a minor’s decision to undergo an abortion. Eleven other states require that one or both parents be notified.

As this list makes clear, the anti-choice legislation since Trump’s election is just a short step beyond the restrictions already in place in many states. There is a simple reason why the anti-choice agenda has advanced while abortion rights have been so severely eroded over the last four decades. In contrast to the passivity of pro-choice organizations loyal to the Democratic Party, anti-abortion groups tied to the Republicans’ anti-abortion agenda have been well-organized and committed to activism since the 1970s. The anti-abortion movement has rallied by the tens of thousands in Washington each January 22, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. They have built grassroots activist organizations, picketed outside of women’s clinics, harassed patients seeking care, and made their presence known in localities across the country—usually without facing large counterprotests of pro-choice activists.

Even in the face of Trump, congressional Democrats showed no sign of shifting course. Within days of the Republican bill repealing the Affordable Care Act in March 2017, for example, Senate Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi offered a “compromise” to the GOP. “We would be able to swallow, I think, some things (that Republicans want), if that’s the price to pay to get the rest of it,” she announced, without even putting up the pretense of a fight.

The pro-choice movement needs to take the offensive, and we can only do that by forcing Democratic Party politicians to understand that they can no longer afford to ignore those fighting for reproductive rights. This requires large numbers of pro-choice activists defending clinics under attack and counterprotesting anti-abortion bigots whenever they assemble, with the aim of outnumbering them.

When Planned Parenthood spokespeople urged pro-choice activists to refrain from counterprotesting the Defund Planned Parenthood pickets in 2017, they were replaying a familiar argument, counterposing clinic escorts (who help patients into the clinic) to abortion rights protesters, as if the two can’t coexist. Escorts are extremely important, but they are also no substitute for a large and vocal pro-choice presence to counter the anti-abortion movement. Both are needed.

The lessons of the past are useful to inform the future course of the pro-choice struggle. A fanatical group calling itself “Operation Rescue” (OR) emerged in the 1980s, with the primary purpose of barricading women’s clinics with large numbers of anti-abortion activists. OR enjoyed some spectacular success early on, most dramatically during its “Summer of Mercy” in Wichita, Kansas in 1991, when its members descended on women’s clinics by the hundreds. Mainstream feminist organizations chose not to mobilize pro-choice forces to defend the clinics at that time, instead relying on court injunctions and police protection. This tactic failed miserably, and OR managed to shut down Wichita clinics for a period of weeks.

Flush with confidence, OR announced its next major target: Buffalo, New York, with its “Spring of Life” mobilization set for April 1992. Despite the pro-choice washout in Wichita, mainstream feminist organizations again refused to call mass counterprotests. The local Cincinnati branch of NOW, for example, canceled its buses for Buffalo after learning that national NOW was against confronting the bigots.

This time, however, grassroots activists from around the country took matters into their own hands and organized a massive pro-choice counterprotest in Buffalo. When OR arrived in Buffalo, they were vastly outnumbered by pro-choice activists defending the clinics, mobilized purely through grassroots efforts. In the end, not a single Buffalo clinic was closed, and pro-choice activists chanted “Operation Failure” as the anti-abortionists skulked away.

How legal abortion was won, and how we can turn the tide today

As we fight for abortion rights in the age of Trump, it would be wrong to conclude that we are in an unwinnable situation. Many lessons can be learned from the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which first won the right to legal abortion. Women’s liberationists built a movement based not only on the power of numbers but by also confidently linking the fight for abortion to the fight for women’s liberation more broadly. On August 26, 1970, the women’s movement called a national day of action, the Women’s Strike for Equality, which brought over 50,000 women out to demonstrate for women’s rights across the country. These demonstrations also called for free abortion on demand. In addition, hundreds of local protests for legalizing abortion were organized between 1969 and 1973. In this way, the movement successfully influenced popular sentiment throughout society, so that those in power felt the need to respond to pressure from below.

In fact, California’s anti-abortion governor, Ronald Reagan, was forced to sign the nation’s first state law legalizing abortion in 1970. And Richard Nixon—whose opposition to abortion parallels Trump’s today—was in the White House when the Supreme Court issued its Roe v. Wade decision. The Court itself was packed with conservatives, yet voted seven to two in favor of legal abortion. Justice Harry Blackmun, who authored the Roe v. Wade decision, was a Nixon appointee to the Court. Ruling class institutions like the Supreme Court, despite rhetoric to the contrary, are susceptible to pressure from below.

In 1971, Nixon stated, “Unrestricted abortion policies, or abortion on demand, I cannot square with my personal belief in the sanctity of human life—including the life of the yet unborn.” To this statement, the New York Women’s Strike Coalition responded in kind, “We will grant Mr. Nixon the freedom to take care of his uterus if he will let us take care of ours.”

Over time, the women’s movement won the support of large segments of US society. A 1972 Harris poll showed that significantly more Black women (62 percent) supported “efforts to strengthen and change women’s status in society” than white women (45 percent). As Louis Harris and Associates reported in 1972, “American women, in a relatively short period, have accelerated their desires for a changed role in society. Those who are most concerned with strengthening women’s status represent an essentially urban coalition of young, well-educated, and black women.” By 1976, a Harris survey reported that 65 percent of all women (and 63 percent of all respondents) supported “efforts to strengthen and change women’s status in society.”

But just three years after the Roe v. Wade decision, Republicans used the Hyde Amendment to strike the first blow in its campaign to overturn legal abortion, using open racism that heaped contempt on poor women of color to justify it. The Hyde Amendment set the dynamics in motion that gradually stripped poor and working- class women of some of their most basic rights over the course of four decades. Democrats have either acquiesced or even expanded the attacks, as Clinton did when he dismantled welfare in the 1990s and Obama did when he barred federal subsidies for abortion in the Affordable Care Act. The unrelenting legislative assault, based on the assumption that poor and working-class women cannot be trusted to control their own reproductive destinies, took aim first at the right to abortion, then at the right to contraception, and most recently at the right to reproductive healthcare.

Now we face the possibility that the legal right to abortion will be overturned, demonstrating that mainstream feminists, who took their lead from the Democratic Party and turned their backs on those who suffer the most, have failed to stop the attacks.

We need to build on these lessons from the past to build the kind of activist mass movement that fights for those who are the most oppressed-—people of color, trans people, poor and working-class women—among us, with the aim of shifting the balance of forces back in our favor at long last. That will require a grassroots movement that refuses to take “no” for an answer to our demands, while placing our bodies in the streets.