Solidarity on Southeast 240th Street

Last Saturday morning I packed up some snacks, strapped a scrawled protest sign to my cargo basket, and pedaled sixteen miles south to Kent, where a clinic had been targeted by protesters as part of a national "Defund Planned Parenthood" campaign. It took some navigating to find a passably safe yet fairly direct route -- but honestly, all the trafficky arterials, broken glass, and monster hills only served to heighten the melodramatic Pro-Choice Bicycle Cavalry fantasy. Hang on, Kent Valley PP! We got your back, we're on our way, and nothing's gonna stop us!

Of course, the dozen or so "Defund" protesters were vastly outnumbered by a huge crowd of several hundred Defenders lining both sides of the street with banners, signs, flags, babies, bullhorns, pink pussy hats, and heart-shaped balloons -- all chanting and cheering and beaming and waving at the passing drivers honking their support. (The clinic is closed on Saturdays, so no patients were inconvenienced or traumatized -- or heartened, which I suppose they might have been -- by this display.)

I locked up my bike, found a place along the curb next to a young man with a collection of Black Lives Matter and No Youth Jail buttons pinned to his coat, and spent a couple of hours waving and beaming and cheering and chanting along with the crowd. Then I headed back north with the rest of the bike cavalry on the Interurban Trail -- a slightly longer, flatter, thousand times more scenic route that follows a long-gone electric trolley line.

As we rode in formation beside the meandering Green River, I thought about an article I'd read the night before from 1969, when the New York Legislature was considering reforms to the state's abortion laws. (At that time, the procedure was only permitted if the pregnant woman's life was in danger; a panel of experts had been assembled to help the senators decide whether to expand access to protect a woman's health as well -- or to repeal the law altogether and let women make this medical choice themselves, with the advice of their doctors.) New Yorker writer Ellen Willis described the iconic scene: "Of the fifteen witnesses listed on the agenda, fourteen were men; the lone woman was a nun." A group of feminists interrupted the proceedings, announcing, "Okay, folks, now it's time to hear from the real experts -- women." When the feminists refused to be silenced, the hearing was adjourned for a closed executive session. "Police barred the door," says Willis, "and the women stood outside shouting, ‘We are the experts!’” After seven hours, three of them were permitted to testify. They told their stories: about their own illegal abortions, about giving up children for adoption, about a friend who had almost died after a botched procedure.

I was struck by the reactions of the senators (all men, naturally) who had arranged the hearing. Many of them supported the idea of reforming or repealing New York's abortion laws, and they seemed genuinely baffled by the women’s indignation, and exasperated at their insistence on speaking for themselves. “There are people here who want to do something for you!” said Senator Seymour Thaler, who is described as "furious." The women's reply was no less irate: “We’re tired of being done for! We want to do for a change!” Thaler went on: “You’re just acting out your persona pique against men.” And a protester quickly set him straight: “Not personal pique – political grievance! In this society, there is an imbalance in power between men and women, just as there is between whites and blacks. You and your experts may have the right ideas, but you’re still men talking to each other. We want to be consulted.” Thaler's conclusion -- "All I can say is, you're the rudest bunch of people I've ever met" -- made me think of the Black Lives Matter protesters who drew similar criticism when they grabbed the mike at Bernie Sanders’s 2015 rally in Seattle to talk about police brutality, mass incarceration, and systemic racism in the criminal justice system. In both cases, these loudmouthed ladies had, by violating the norms of etiquette and Robert's Rules, succeeded in making their voices heard. (Whether the audience was ready to listen is, of course, another matter.)

At the rally in Kent I had been heartened by the chants that put women's voices at the forefront, and emphasized the supportive role their male friends were there to play. "My body!" the women would shout. "Your choice!" the men would reply. Another one -- “Not the church, not the state, women must decide our fate!” -- got me a little choked up for some reason. I thought about the all-male lineup behind Donald Trump as he signed an executive order reinstating the global gag rule, which limits abortion access for millions of women worldwide. I remembered the women who stood in the gallery of the Texas State Legislature in 2013, screaming helplessly as their representatives voted to impose restrictions on abortion clinics that have since closed half of them. It was hard to believe, as several sharpied signs pointed out, that we still have to protest this sh*t. On the other hand, the women who testified at that hearing in 1969 had wondered aloud if they were the first to talk about their abortions in public -- and look at us now, shouting them at every opportunity! (Ask me sometime, I'll tell you about mine.) Plus, I'm told, now you can take home a couple of pills and terminate your pregnancy in the comfort of your own home, instead of flat on your back with your feet up in stirrups. Progress is so hard to gauge.

It was also encouraging to wake up the next morning (a little sore from the long ride, but much refreshed after a long sleep), and sit down with my coffee to read a New York Times Magazine profile of Dr. Willie J. Parker. Dr. Parker is an African American OB/GYN from Birmingham, Alabama, who provides abortion care throughout the South. I learned that he had once opposed abortion on religious grounds, but he came to realize that his beliefs “left me unable to help women when I felt deeply for their situation.” In a "crisis moment," he converted to a new religious understanding that empowered him to “act on my deepest sense of connection... to do what I felt to be the right thing.” This moment, he says, felt as "life-altering" as becoming a believer in the first place.

He also said this: "As a man, I am deeply committed to feminism, reproductive justice and gender equality. I come from a heritage of people who know what it’s like to have your life controlled by somebody else. What’s most proximate to that reality right now is the direct control of women’s bodies and their reproduction, because if you don’t control your reproduction, you don’t control anything else about your life." (That last bit was essentially a pithier version of my own far-too-wordy protest sign.)

This, it seems to me, is solidarity at its intersectional best: an acknowledgment that all of us are, in different ways, both privileged and oppressed; an understanding that those forces interact and play out differently in a variety of contexts; an effort to use our own experience of injustice to deepen our understanding of other people's; and a commitment to bring our unique skills and resources -- including whatever privilege we have -- to the table as we work together to support each other.

I can't pretend to know what it’s like to be a young black man confronted by a white police officer, or a Muslim woman detained at the border, or a trans kid trying to decide which school bathroom holds the least threat of humiliation or violence. But I sure know how it feels to fear for my safety -- to battle negative assumptions based on what I look like -- to have my testimony ignored, my voice silenced -- to have somebody else making decisions about my destiny. These experiences can teach me to listen more deeply to that young man, that woman, that kid. And when I let their stories into my heart I may find, like Dr. Parker, that my life has changed forever.