Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, recalled a story about a woman in Georgia who was pregnant and didn’t want to be. But Georgia has a six-week abortion ban. The woman drove to South Carolina, only to arrive the day after their six-week ban. She flew to California to get an abortion. Each trip caused her to miss work.
"We cannot call ourselves a free nation when women are not free," McGill Johnson said on the Democratic National Convention stage.
Chicago survived the DNC. Delegates gushed for four days in an extravaganza that was part pep rally, part vaudeville show. Democrats reframed themselves as the party of freedom and they centered women’s bodies as the place to fight for it. Freedom's light switch went off when Roe v. Wade was overturned two year ago, gutting the constitutional right to an abortion two years ago.
In the lead-up to Vice President Kamala Harris' ascension as the Democratic presidential nominee, the theme of mothering quickly crystallized. The right to not be a mother. The right to be a mother. The love of mothers. Mothers losing their children to gun violence.
It all began with abortion.
Speakers on the DNC mainstage used the word freely and repeatedly. Democrats have come a long way. In 1992, Bill Clinton coined the phrase "safe, legal and rare" to describe abortion. That language cloaked abortion in secrecy and shame. While President Joe Biden supports reproductive rights, he too is squeamish about the word abortion.
The "safe, legal and rare" paradigm of the past played into tropes about which women deserve our sympathy: Abortion must be justifiable. On Tuesday night, women told dark stories about the struggle to get an abortion under extreme abortion bans. The women were open and vulnerable, telling stories about being denied medical care while facing a miscarriage or after surviving incest.
McGill Johnson’s recounting of the Georgia woman's story was about liberation, of not justifying having an abortion. She wanted one. That’s it. No tragic backstory.
Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said: "Harris wants to restore your reproductive freedom."
Reproductive freedom also includes having children. U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth told the delegates about her 10-years struggle with infertility and how in-vitro fertilization allowed her to become a mother. She warned that Donald Trump’s next crusade is to go after IVF.
Former first lady Michelle Obama recalled her own fertility issues in her speech, and emphasized how IVF gave her the freedom to become a mother. Vice presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz and his wife, Gwen, also spoke candidly about their struggles and turning to fertility treatments to have children.
Abortion and IVF are intertwined because they are both about autonomy and self-determination. I can’t recall hearing the phrase "pro-choice" on the DNC stage this week. The shift is from choice to freedom. Black women deserve credit for that recasting.
In 1994, a dozen Black women attended a pro-choice conference in Chicago and created an informal caucus. They devised a new framework — "reproductive justice" — grounded in Black feminism and human rights. Its four pillars are: the right to have a child or not have a child; the right to parent the children they have with the social and economic support needed to thrive; the right to live free from violence; and the right to express sexuality in ways they desire.
Building upon that work, this week the In Our Own Voice: Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda launched in Chicago.
Regina Davis Moss is the founder, and she also picked up on the motherhood theme during the DNC.
"It’s an opportunity to talk about so many issues. It's really helpful in the context of reproductive justice because it is broader than abortion," Davis Moss said. "The founding mothers were concerned at the time [about] how do you have conversations without all the social, economic and political discussions that need to take place?" Because for them, "pro-choice" didn’t address barriers that women faced to access abortion and broader health care.
Even as Harris’ political foes denigrate her for not having biological children — which actually means denigrating her freedom to choose, or not choose, motherhood — she is showing that her role as stepmother is not an evil Disney villain. Her family made that clear when they took center stage at the DNC.
"There seems to be a narrative around one particular profile of what motherhood is. In the Black community we have many mothers — grandmothers, aunties, the woman across the street, upstairs," Davis Moss said, referring to Harris’ acceptance speech, in which she shouted out the village of women who helped her single mom raise her and her sister.
People who have abortions are often mothers.
"Childless cat ladies" own their decisions.
Families look all kinds of ways. And that’s freedom.
Natalie Y. Moore is the Race, Class & Communities editor at WBEZ.
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