Republicans Are Trying to Ban Speech About Abortion Pills. Activists Are Vowing ‘Mass Defiance.’
“We are going to break these laws all day, every day, and help the people around us to do the same,” reproductive rights activist Amelia Bonow told Jezebel.
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Amelia Bonow spent the Fourth of July talking to strangers about abortion pills at a lemonade stand in front of the Supreme Court. About ten days after the institution ended the federal right to abortion, the founding director of Shout Your Abortion gathered friends and volunteers to dress in red, white, and blue and hand out popsicles and lemonade, while spreading the word that, thanks to an activist doctor based in Austria, people in all 50 states can order abortion pills—pregnant or not, regardless of local laws. People cooled off with paper fans printed with the words “ask me about abortion pills” superimposed on a mifepristone tablet, while others carried signs saying, “We will aid and abet abortion.”
Bonow is part of a movement to reclaim the language from the Texas abortion ban, S.B. 8, which deputized private citizens to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion in the state. To Bonow, “aid and abet” can mean any number of things that, for the time being, remain legal—from donating to abortion funds and indie clinics, to sharing information about pills. When actor Busy Philips got arrested as part of a pro-choice demonstration outside the Supreme Court on July 1, she was wearing SYA’s “I will aid and abet abortion” T-shirt. (Granted, it’s much safer for a white celebrity in D.C. to wear such a shirt than an activist in Texas.)
Bonow told Jezebel that anti-abortion lawmakers want to instill fear in people. “S.B. 8 made it clear that the anti-choice movement is not just intent on banning abortions, but on trying to make us afraid to help each other in post-Roe America,” Bonow said. And she will not be cowed into silence, given that we’re in what she called an immediate healthcare and human rights crisis. “We need to commit to participating in one another’s care. That’s going to look really different for everyone, but we need to respond to this moment with a promise of mass defiance and, in declaring that, we will find more helpers,” she said. Bonow added that “expressing defiance and finding a way to support abortion access happening in post-Roe America is not only acceptable, it’s a moral imperative.”
Neither Bonow nor SYA provides pills; they’re just spreading the word about Aid Access, the website that mails them to U.S. women from overseas, and Plan C, a pill information website. But because abortion pills taken at home are the next frontier for anti-abortion lawmaking, anti-abortion activists are already working to criminalize simply talking about them.
Before Roe fell, the National Right to Life Committee, the oldest and biggest anti-abortion group in the country, proposed model legislation that would make it a felony to share information about self-managed abortion online or by phone—that is, it would criminalize speech. The “aiding and abetting” section of the model bill doesn’t mention abortion pills, but that’s absolutely what it’s targeting. Lawmakers in South Carolina have now introduced their version of the law, and many other states are expected to follow.
“We are going to break these laws all day, every day, and help the people around us to do the same,” Bonow said. “They can’t prevent the spread of information, but this may be the play that just takes them to full embrace of fascism.”