“When you’re engaged in political work that is as embodied and vulnerable, uncharted and courageous as self-help, you’re really harnessing something like a new world building power,” says Deep Care author Angela Hume. In this episode, Hume and host Kelly Hayes discuss the work of abortion self-help activists who provided illegal abortions in the 1970s, as well as militant clinic defenders, who repelled right-wing efforts to blockade abortion clinics in the ’80s and ’90s. As Hume says, “There are deep lessons here about comradery, about fellowship, about friendship, about relationality that we can learn from today, and that can inspire us to do good work together.”
Music by Son Monarcas & David Celeste
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about abortion, the history of abortion self-help, clinic defense, and the kind of community-building we need to defend our bodily autonomy in these times. I will be talking with Angela Hume, a feminist historian, critic and poet, and the author of Deep Care: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open. Deep Care chronicles the work of small groups of feminist activists in the San Francisco Bay Area who met regularly in the 1970s to study anatomy, practice pelvic exams on each other, and share knowledge about menstrual extraction, which can serve as a form of abortion. After abortion became legal in the United States in 1973, some of these activists continued to hone and practice their skills outside the clinical system. Some were involved in the creation of independent health clinics. Many also navigated a turbulent era of abortion defense, when right-wingers targeted abortion clinics with blockades and bombings, and assassinated abortion providers. Lessons about how people came together to learn and organize outside the law, and how activists struggled to create as much safety as possible, during an era when clinics were under siege, could not be more relevant right now.
Twenty-two states currently have abortion bans in effect, and many abortion funds are struggling, or even pausing their operations, amid surging requests for assistance and declining donations. Obviously, there are a lot of incredible, committed people waging fights for reproductive justice in the U.S., but I think it’s clear that we do not have the mass movement for abortion access that our current situation demands. I think this episode offers us an opportunity to think about what we might need to cultivate in order to expand and strengthen this essential front of struggle.
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[musical interlude]
KH: Angela Hume, welcome to “Movement Memos.”
Angela Hume: Thanks, Kelly. It’s so good to be here. Thank you for having me.
KH: How are you doing today?
AH: Thanks for asking. I am trying to really pay attention to what’s happening right now. I’m doing what I can to stay steady and stay in close touch with my friends. I’m okay. How are you?
KH: I am a bit of a mess, but I am staying busy and staying constructive.
AH: Yes, yes. Well, thank you for all of the work that you’re doing. It’s incredible.
KH: And you as well. Can you tell us a bit about this book and why you chose to write it? It’s not the book you set out to write in the beginning, is it?
AH: Yes, yes, that is correct. And I’m happy to tell you a bit about my book, Deep Care: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open. And I worry that this might be a bit of a long answer, but I want to answer the questions that you asked. So, I’ll do my best. My book, Deep Care, is a movement history that spans nearly four decades. It’s the story of a radical independent abortion clinic in Oakland, California, and it’s also the story of a long-running abortion underground and militant clinic defense coalition. And as I explained in the book, these three arms of the radical abortion defense movement in the San Francisco Bay Area were interconnected, and this interconnection and collaboration was what made the movement so groundbreaking. And I would say that Deep Care is most fundamentally a book about building community power from the inside.
So, I noticed that you wrote about this recently in your great piece at your blog called “Take a Deep Breath and Think About What You Need To Do,” which is such a great title. And I made a note about it. In it you wrote, “We need to concern ourselves with making connections, forming sustainable bonds and learning how to take meaningful action together.” And that’s really what Deep Care is about, how people have done this in the past. So, it started out for me as a research project about Women’s Choice Clinic in Oakland, an indie clinic that provided radical abortion and reproductive health care for astonishingly almost 40 years. And over time, as I was interviewing activists about the work they had done, most of whom had never before really come forward about this work, the project just kept expanding and deepening. And as it was happening, it felt very dramatic.
Like with every interview I conducted, it was like the plot kept revealing itself. And I’m a storyteller. I have a creative writing background. So, at a certain point I realized I was probably writing a book, and it was then that I started to imagine how I would plot it out. And meanwhile, abortion law was just imploding. And I sensed that what the activists were choosing to share was this really critical survival history and information about how everyday revolutionaries, to go back to your words, “concerned themselves with making connections, forming sustainable bonds, and learning how to take meaningful action together.” And it wasn’t until a couple of years into the research that some of the activists decided that it was time to come forward about the underground arm of their work. And what they told me was that from the early 1970s into the 2000s during years when abortion was constitutionally protected, they had learned and practiced gynecology and abortion outside the walls of clinics like in living rooms and bedrooms.
So, in their underground self-help groups, what they called self-help groups, they learned things like how to track their cycles and their fertility, how to examine their cervixes, how to do pelvic exams, how to size the uterus. And critically, these were the steps in learning how to perform what’s called manual vacuum aspiration abortion. So, it’s true that I didn’t set out to write a book about abortion self-help and clinic defense. In the 2000s, I had been writing a book about feminist and queer poets who were also health activists like Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, Pat Parker and some others. And to my mind, it was going to be an academic book about poetry. And it was and is really compelling to me that these poets wrote about how their physical environments had made them chronically ill and how they wanted to imagine what feminist medicine could look like.
And in the process I learned that Pat Parker, who was a Black lesbian feminist revolutionary and poet, had worked at Women’s Choice Clinic. So, I started researching the clinic and I learned that it was part of a network of feminist women’s health centers and abortion clinics that grew out of a West Coast-led gynecological self-help movement as they termed it. And I thought to myself, this history is just amazing. And I started to see that this was a really critical history that largely had not been told. So, I made studying this history the center of my life for the next five plus years. I went to the libraries and dug around in the archives. I tracked down Lindsay Comey, the clinic’s director for three decades. And I started doing oral histories with people who’d worked at Women’s Choice Clinic. And in all, I interviewed probably dozens of activists who included not only clinic workers, but underground abortion workers and clinic defenders, some of the people I interviewed many times over years.
There were stretches of time when not a day went by that I wasn’t in conversation with someone for the book. It just completely took over my life. And sometimes the activists had boxes of literature and ephemera from the work that they did, like photos, newsletters, pamphlets, manuals, zines that they had created, news clippings and all sorts of other stuff. So, one of the stories that I tell in Deep Care is the story of encountering what I like to think of as bedroom closet archives. To write the book, I had to follow people into their bedrooms and help them pull boxes of movement records and ephemera down from the top shelves of closets. And that’s how intimate the research sometimes was. I would say that as someone deeply interested in the politics of the body and what it means to move in the world as a feminized body and also as someone who loves to talk to and learn from movement elders about their radical political work, writing this book, writing Deep Care felt like the opportunity of a lifetime. And once that opportunity presented itself, I didn’t hesitate. I was just all in 100%.
KH: I find this book so valuable because like so many people, my knowledge of illicit abortion care in the pre-Roe era was mostly limited to the Jane Collective. Obviously I knew that other people had provided abortion care outside the law in the U.S., but I had never accessed those histories. I also knew nothing about the abortion self-help work that went on after Roe in the United States. Can you talk a bit about what it meant to you and to the people you interviewed to bring some of these histories into the realm of public knowledge?
AH: Thanks so much for that question. Yes, absolutely. Writing Deep Care was a profound experience. The entire experience of writing the book felt like an answer to a question that so many highly relational political people are, I think always asking, which is how do you build and nourish the types of relationships that will strengthen your community from the inside? And part of the answer that the history gave me was that you do the relationships over time. Community power takes time, and that’s a truth that’s a little bit hard to hear given where we are today as we face political emergency after political emergency, but it is the truth. So, the experience of writing Deep Care was profound and it came like an answer, and sometimes the answers were hard to hear and sometimes the answers felt like more questions. Bringing some of these histories into the realm of public knowledge, as you say, histories of independent abortion clinic work, of underground manual vacuum aspiration, of militant clinic defense against white Christian fascism.
What was that like? Well, it was an honor. It was the most intensive political study experience I’d ever had. Maybe the first time I’d really studied politics in a serious way. And I’m someone who’s been reading political theory and studying political movement for a while. There’s this moment sort of toward the beginning of the book where I wrote lovingly of the activists I worked with for the book. I’ll just read you the sentence. “They taught me about gardening, backpacking, raising chickens and goats, parenting, aging, caring for elders. They also taught me about feminist conversation, friendship, bias, discomfort, conflict, communication, group work, intimacy, play, grief, transition, stepping back, stepping up, organizing, communism, anarchism, revolution. Writing........