We considered it a badge of honor. An event I engineered recently (with a LOT of help from my friends) in San Francisco drew luminaries from the interfaith community, women’s rights and reproductive justice groups – and several stalwart protesters holding signs aloft in the chilly drizzle. What’s a champagne reception without protesters?
Actually, they were not protesting the champagne reception (though they were there before it started.) They were protesting the main event that followed: Reproductive Justice on the Front Lines. It was a conversation between Director of the UCSF Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health Carole Joffe and noted physician/author Dr. Willie Parker. Dr. Parker, a deeply committed Christian and an abortion provider, believes it is morally right for a pregnant woman to control what happens to her body. The protesters believe the fetus takes priority over the woman carrying it. To set the record straight, our protesters were hardly worth notice as far as Dr. Parker is concerned – he is used to being the target of threats and angry insults hurled by protesters who regularly surround the deep south clinics where he flies to provide service to mostly young, poor women of color seeking abortion care.
I appreciated our protesters’ civility, but rather strongly disagree with their dismissal of women like me. These sign-carriers would have opposed my back-alley 1956 abortion, demanding that I carry that rape-caused, life-wrecking pregnancy to term.
Which brings up this current reality: there are protesters who want to destroy rights, and protesters fighting to keep them. There are sign-carriers wanting to send us back to the dark ages, and fighters for light overcoming darkness. Fighters for human rights, for the poor and marginalized, for the planet, for decency, sanity, truth.
I’m with the protesters who are fighters-for. Their movement aims to get us back to being a country of justice for all, and get the U.S., eventually, back to its long-held place of respect around the world. It’s a movement forward that I joined with the pure-joy Women’s March early this year. Happily those protesters are still out there in force: the Stand-Ups, the Indivisibles, the Occupiers, the MoversOn, the countless other groups all over the country. Young and old, male, female, gay, straight, black, brown, white, they embody that same Women’s March spirit of ebullient hope.
And they are my hope for the future.
