JB

You needed two shrinks to say you were suicidal. And so [feminists] would fight for it to be, like, only one shrink saying you were suicidal, or [to extend abortion rights] if you had been raped. A lot of the movement was around trying to get little tiny reforms to the law, which really wouldn’t have helped most people.

By around 2012, 2013, this group of feminists — mostly anarchists in Dublin — got together and the first thing that they did that was kind of shocking to everybody, was they put abortion in the name of the group: Abortion Rights Campaign.

And then the next thing they did was, all these mobilizations that had been happening around these terrible cases, they just said, “Forget about all that. Let’s just have legal abortion in Ireland.” And that drew massive crowds. Every year they had demonstrations, and the number of people doubled every year.

[The referendum] won by 66 percent, which I think gives us some hope. I think a lot of people think that you are either on one side or the other of the abortion issue and you’re not movable. That was not true there. And I don’t think it’s true here. We have a lot of room for organizing people. And part of the way to organize them is not to just talk about these extreme cases, but to really talk about our own experiences.

We didn’t win abortion [in the United States] because all the professionals got together, we didn’t win abortion because the Supreme Court suddenly saw the light. We won abortion because people were in the streets demanding it — and actually demanding a lot more than we got with the Supreme Court decision. The women who planned and started the movement and made it happen are not in those history books. That’s a very effective thing; it makes us think that we don’t have the power to change things. We think all the change comes from the top.

But the Supreme Court had to grapple around to find some way to justify making abortion legal. They found it in the constitution, the same way that they found labor rights in the Commerce Clause. They found it because people were demanding it and they had to come up with some rationale.

I should say that the other thing that really helped in the 1960s in the abortion struggle was that most of the socialist countries already had legal abortion. You could go to Poland and get an abortion for $10. And you have to picture this, this was at a moment when the Cold War was essentially an argument about which type of system has more freedom: socialism or capitalism?

And here women were leaving the “free world” to go get an abortion in Poland for cheap. Right? That put a lot of pressure on the capitalist world. This looks really bad. Same thing with the Civil Rights Movement. It looked really bad that black people were being shot for wanting to vote in a democracy. Right? So then the federal government had to intervene, make it look better.

We don’t have that pressure right now. In fact, Poland is a great example. Poland, where you could go get an abortion for $10 — the moment they overthrew socialism, they went back to restricting abortion and now abortion is illegal throughout Poland. They punish doctors who provide them.