The Body Politic

The Abortion Stories We Didn't Tell. How decades of silence left us unprepared for the post-Roe fight.

- Rebecca Traister

IN 2004, I COVERED a pro-choice gathering of over a million people in Washington, D.C., called the March for Women's Lives. I was 28, and most of the speakers and celebrities onstage were much older, many of them veterans of the second-wave feminist movement. I watched with dismay as Whoopi Goldberg waved a coat hanger at the crowd and chided its younger members: "You understand me, young women under 30? This is what we used!"

At the time, I wrote that Goldberg "was scolding a generation for its privilege" and thereby committing movement malpractice by alienating young people, blaming them for not knowing about a world into which they were not born. I still think it was bad form; after all, if people in the crowd didn't know about pre-Roe abortion practices, half the blame surely lay with the elders who had not told them and who had perhaps evinced less curiosity about what abortion care was like during Roe. But I've also thought a lot in the years since that gathering about how everyone should have talked about it more: about pre-Roe abortions, Roe-era abortions about abortions, period. Now, in a post-Roe world, I feel even greater frustration at the decades wasted, the millions of stories that did not get told, not just onstage in front of big crowds but in families, social circles, and civic and religious contexts.