by Spencer Beswick, PhD Candidate, History
Anarcha-feminists confronted anti-abortion activists in the streets as part of their broader fight against patriarchy, capitalism, and the state in the late twentieth century. In the 1980s, the Christian Right waged war on abortion. When President Reagan failed to outlaw it, anti-abortion activists in Operation Rescue (founded in 1985) took to the streets to physically shut down abortion clinics. Using the slogan “if you believe abortion is murder, act like it’s murder,” they even defended far-right activists who firebombed clinics and killed abortion providers. Operation Rescue was met by a new generation of anarcha-feminists across the country who drew on an evolving repertoire of anarchist tactics to defeat them. Instead of symbolic protest, anarcha-feminists directly confronted Operation Rescue in order to defend abortion and women’s autonomy from both the far right and the state itself. Anarchist interventions in reproductive justice struggles helped revitalize a feminist movement that had fought a decade of rearguard battles against the neoliberal Reagan counterrevolution.
Militant abortion defense became a key element of late twentieth century anarchist feminism. Anarchists announced their presence at the 1989 March on Washington for Reproductive Freedom with a banner reading “We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!” This slogan is a far cry from the mainstream feminist emphasis on voting and other legal strategies. This demonstrates the anarchist commitment to both women’s autonomy and militant direct action. In New York City, a group affiliated with the anarchist organization Love and Rage (1989-98) used black bloc tactics to defend an abortion clinic from Operation Rescue in 1990. Dressed in all black to preserve anonymity, two dozen helmeted anarchists linked arms alongside members of Women’s Health Action and Mobilization (WHAM!) and AIDS activists in ACT UP to prevent Operation Rescue from disrupting the clinic.
Several years later, Operation Rescue attempted to host a summer training camp in Minneapolis in 1993. The anarcho-punk Profane Existence collective set the tone for the local response when they vowed in a widely distributed poster that if Operation Rescue came to town, anarchists would “lock [them] in a church and burn the fucker down.” While things did not go quite this far, anarchists physically confronted Operation Rescue, blocked them in their church, disrupted their meetings, vandalized their materials, protected clinics from their attacks, and generally made them unwelcome. Although some liberals opposed these tactics, anarchists and other militants handed Operation Rescue a major defeat and ran them out of town.
Reflecting on the experience, an anarchist named Liza wrote in an article titled “Minnesota Not Nice to Operation Rescue,” that “it seems like no matter how hard activists fight, we rarely win. Except this time we were victorious. We fought against these fascists […] We saw the demise of Operation Rescue in the Twin Cities, partly due to our unprecedented aggressiveness and opposition, and partly because their movement is losing, big time.” Operation Rescue soon suffered a split and major demobilization, in part due to legal action taken by President Bill Clinton’s administration against anti-abortion militants. But before this, they were defeated in the streets by anarcha-feminists who took matters into their own hands. Direct action proved critical to defending reproductive freedom.
Although grounded in the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement, this younger generation of revolutionary feminists who confronted Operation Rescue was also inspired by the group Anti-Racist Action, who fought fascists in the streets, as well as squatters in Western Europe Autonome groups who began using black bloc tactics in the 1980s. Anarchists introduced these radical street tactics to the feminist movement and proved their efficacy in the fight against anti-abortion activists. Militant confrontation of Operation Rescue was a turning point in the development of a new anarchist feminism: feminists went on the attack in order to defend women’s autonomy and build a new world. In their uncompromising struggle for reproductive freedom, anarchists offered a new vision of revolutionary feminism.
Primary Sources
Kraker, Jan. “Anarchists Confront Operation Rescue.” Love and Rage, Vol. 1, No. 5 (August 1990), 3.
Lib, Laura. “An Introduction to Anarcha-Feminism.” Love and Rage, Vol. 2, No. 3 (March 1991), 6.
Liza. “Minnesota Not Nice to Operation Rescue.” Love and Rage, Vol. 4, No. 4 (September 1993), 1, 3, 19.
“The Political Pre-History of Love & Rage: Anarchist Struggle in the 1980s and 1990s” (no date), Anarchist History Nerd Brigade, adapted from the “1997 Member Handbook” published by the Love and Rage New York Local.
“Run ‘Em Out of Town: Operation Rescue Are Coming, But Pro-Choice Radicals Are Grinding Our Axes.” Profane Existence, No. 19-20 (Summer 1993), 4.
Secondary Sources
Carroll, Tamar W. Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press,2015.
Hadley, Janet. Abortion: Between Freedom and Necessity. London: Virago Press,1996.
Martin, Bradford. The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan. New York: Hill & Wang,2012.
Tanenbaum, Julia. “To Destroy Domination in All Forms: Anarcha-Feminist Theory, Organization, and Action, 1970-1978.” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory N. 29 (2016), 13-32.
Ziegler, Mary. After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press,2015.
Spencer Beswick is a PhD Candidate at Cornell University researching the history of anarchism and the left. His dissertation, “Love and Rage: Revolutionary Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century,” explores the transformation and revitalization of the anarchist movement in the 1980s-90s. He is an organizer of the Anarchist Oral History Project as well as a local oral history project on Ithaca’s radical past. You can find more of his writing at emptyhandshistory.com and on Twitter @spencerbeswick.
For more on anarcha-feminist abortion struggle, see Spencer Beswick’s recent articles:
The Washington Post: The model for mobilizing to protect abortion rights beyond voting
It’s Going Down: “We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!”: How Anarcha-Feminists Built Dual Power in Struggles for Reproductive Freedom
It’s Going Down Podcast: Lessons from the Fight to Protect Abortion Clinics in the 1990s: A Discussion