What's Woke? Part II: Progressive Elitism and the Pro-Choice Movement
Top-down politics and cultural vanguardism are antithetical to the democratic organizing required to defend choice
Several of my close friends were truly distraught — shocked, enraged, sleepless — by the Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs decision, which, of course, overturned Roe v. Wade. While I wasn’t hit the same way emotionally, I sympathized with their feelings. I’ve always been strongly pro-choice. While I respect the pro-life position as a matter of individual principle, I nonetheless believe (like a majority of Americans) that access to safe, legal abortion in the early stages of pregnancy should be a constitutional right. And to have that right revoked when it’s existed your entire adult life is a terrible feeling. So yeah, I definitely understood where my friends were coming from on this.
Yet I didn’t viscerally share their feelings. Why not? To some extent, simply outrage fatigue. I’ve been upset about so much in American politics for so long that Dobbs seemed par for the course. Plus, there was no sense of shock. Roe’s overturn had been long predicted and a draft of the decision leaked almost two months in advance.
A more interesting reason that Dobbs landed differently with me, though, is that the lens through which I viewed Roe had been profoundly altered back in the 1990s, when I was a grad student studying political science at the University of Chicago. One of the professors in my department, Gerald Rosenberg, had just published what was at the time a quite controversial book, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? (1991). Much to my and most everyone else’s shock, Rosenberg, a staunch progressive liberal, argued forcefully that Roe had not, in fact, been a salutary development for the pro-choice movement. It would have been much better, he maintained, to have stuck with the harder, but ultimately more meaningful process of securing the right to abortion by continuing to pass legislation on a state-by-state level — a campaign that was well underway when Roe was decided.
A Prescient Critique
At the time, I found Rosenberg’s reasoning both emotionally enervating and intellectually compelling. Riding the historic wave of progressive social change associated with the Warren Court and Civil Rights movement, I, along with virtually every other left-of-center liberal back then (except, of course, Rosenberg), all-too-easily assumed that the Supreme Court was and would remain a vital engine of progressive social change as we then understood it. (Back then, I also believed that “progressive social change” necessarily meant remaining firmly rooted in the bread-and-butter issues of the New Deal era, even as issues of racial and gender equity were finally being more adequately addressed. This presumption, however, has been sadly proven wrong by the rise of elite-driven progressive politics, which have become increasingly indifferent — if not actively hostile — to such core working-class concerns.)
The Hollow Hope poured data-driven cold water over this warm and fuzzy assumption that the Court would continue to spearhead an ever-improving course of equitable social change. Of course, this is anything but a controversial contention now. But back in the early ‘90s, it shocked the prevailing progressive liberal sensibility of the day.
With regard to Roe in particular, Rosenberg argued that the decision had, in fact, done much more to mobilize the pro-life movement and turn abortion into a partisan wedge issue than it had to actually increase access to safe, legal abortion. Needless to say, this absolutely wasn’t what pro-choice advocates wanted to hear. Yet any honest look at the evidence backed him up.
As strange as it sounds today, it’s nonetheless true that up through the mid-1970s, Republican voters were more pro-choice than Democrats. In the wake of Roe, however, GOP leaders realized that pivoting to oppose abortion would serve the party’s interests by 1) splintering pro-life Catholics out of the Democratic coalition and 2) attracting newly energized anti-abortion evangelical Protestants. Rather than remaining a pragmatic issue of crisis management and family planning, abortion became a primary wedge issue in the ever-burgeoning American Culture War.
Similarly surprising is the fact that access to abortion services began dropping steadily in nearly every state only a few years after Roe was decided. Just as Rosenberg had warned, a newly determined opposition mobilized to work at the state level. Meanwhile, pro-choice activists, feeling falsely secure in their Supreme Court victory, abandoned grassroots organizing.
In 2013, The American Prospect reported on how “as we mark the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the truth is that access to abortion isn't anywhere close to equitable for women around the country”:
In fact, things are worse in certain parts of the U.S. than they were in the 1970s and 1980s. In nearly every state, the total number of abortion providers has dropped since 1978 – even in traditionally liberal havens like California . . . Over the past ten years, the Great Plains states have become progressively more antagonistic to abortion-seekers; Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, all of which were on the "middle ground" in 2000, have moved into the "hostile" category; Kansas now has only one abortion provider per 100,000 people. The Deep South has shifted over the past decade as well — Florida, a state of almost 19 million in 2010 had only 5 abortion providers per 100,000 people, down from 12 in 1980.
Why the changes in access? According to a poll released last week by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, a majority of Americans – 63 percent – want Roe v. Wade to remain the law, but anti-choice activists are working at the state level to erode access.
Thirty years after The Hollow Hope was published, a 2021 New York Times story on “Where the Pro-Choice Movement Went Wrong” made the same basic point. Fifty leading pro-choice advocates interviewed agreed: The movement’s biggest mistake had been “the relative neglect of grassroots groups in states where the battle over abortion access has been quietly waged for half a century.” Meaghan Winter, author of All Politics Is Local: Why Progressives Must Fight for the States (2018), argued that the pro-choice movement should have focused on “changing the culture, building clinics . . . and thinking about creative ways to build electoral power.” But during the half-century since Roe was decided, it concentrated on elite-level national politics and federal litigation instead.
Progressive Elitism
To make matters worse, this shift towards elite-driven politics has been not simply strategic, but also substantive. Of course, there are always exceptions. But generally speaking, the pro-choice movement, as well the mainstream feminism of which it’s part, has overwhelmingly represented the concerns and sensibilities of upper-middle class and professional women, rather than those in the poor, working, and even middle classes. We’ve heard a lot about “Leaning In” and “breaking the glass ceiling,” the glamor and grit of the #GirlBoss, the romance and excitement of “Sex in the City,” and, of course, the many real and imagined injustices suffered by professional women. But we haven’t focused much if at all on how the brute facts of soaring socioeconomic inequality have negatively impacted non-college-educated women in the lower 80% of the income distribution, who constitute the vast majority.
Contrary to current woke pretensions, this elitist bias hasn’t fundamentally changed even now that #GirlBoss-style feminism has been roundly declared to be over. Sure, there’s a lot of desultory dissing of “white feminism.” But like other such contemporary wokeisms, this invocation of race obscures more about class-based inequality than it reveals.
Further, the central mission of mainstream feminism today is apparently to join forces with the self-styled vanguard of the LGBTQ movement to push an ever-escalating campaign to culturally erase and legally restrict societal recognition of the so-called “gender binary.” While extremely radical in its ambition to change not only language and culture but the nature of human being itself, this agenda has less than zero to do with the sort of pragmatic, working-class centered equity issues that used to define the left. (It also raises other extremely troubling issues that I won’t focus on here, most notably the indiscriminate popularization of life-altering medical interventions for children and youth under the euphemism of “gender-affirming care” including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.)
The centrality of this new gender ideology to today’s feminism became more widely apparent in the wake of Dobbs. As abortion suddenly became reinstated as a primary political issue, the question of how best to describe the category of people that may find themselves confronted with unwanted pregnancies became newly contentious. It wasn’t widely understood by the general public that the professional leadership of the pro-choice movement had already solidly rejected any conventional use of the word “woman” in this regard. As this fact broke into the news cycle, however, it immediately fomented division.
Even The New York Times, which is normally quite careful never to say anything that woke gender radicals might object to, published an article on how progressive activists and their allies in the medical profession and elsewhere are now insisting that the word “woman” be systematically replaced with more “inclusive language” such as “pregnant person.” Reporter Michael Powell opened with a discussion of the following statement on abortion that the ACLU posted on Twitter last May:
“This tweet,” Powell noted, “encompassed so much and so many and yet neglected to mention a relevant demographic: women.”
“This was not an oversight,” he went on to explain, “nor was it peculiar to the language favored by the ACLU”:
From Planned Parenthood to NARAL Pro-Choice America to the American Medical Association to city and state health departments and younger activists, the word “women” has in a matter of a few years appeared far less in talk of abortion and pregnancy.
Driven by allies and activists for transgender people, medical, government and progressive organizations have adopted gender-neutral language that draws few distinctions between women and transgender men, as well as those who reject those identities altogether . . . Today, “pregnant people” and “birthing people” have elbowed aside “pregnant women.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a section on “Care for Breastfeeding People,” the governor of New York issued guidance on partners accompanying “birthing people” during Covid, and city and some state health departments offer “people who are pregnant” advice on “chestfeeding.”
The Cleveland Clinic, a well-known nonprofit hospital, posed a question on its website: “Who has a vagina?” Its answer begins, “People who are assigned female at birth (AFAB) have vaginas.” The American Cancer Society website recommends cancer screenings for “people with a cervix.”
. . . For those who fight in the trenches of reproductive politics, the surprise is that a turn to gender-neutral language surprises . . . NARAL punctuated this point in a tweet last year defending its use of “birthing people”: “We use gender neutral language when talking about pregnancy, because it’s not just cis-gender women that can get pregnant and give birth.”
Is it fair to characterize such prioritization of “gender-neutral language” as elitist? From the perspective of woke progressivism, the answer is obviously “no.” On the contrary, the purported purpose of such language is precisely to defend the visibility, dignity, rights, and perhaps even the very lives of marginalized and oppressed trans, nonbinary, and other genderqueer “folx” whose existence is presumed to be brutally negated by the statement that abortion is a “woman’s issue” in any conventional sense of the term.
From this perspective, insisting that “men can get pregnant” is also seen as striking a vital blow for the eventual teardown of the “gender binary,” which is imagined as nothing more than an evil relic of the white cisgender heterosexist colonialist patriarchy. Consequently, it makes perfect political and ethical sense to prioritize the use of what’s considered to be properly non-gendered language, both with reference to abortion and more generally.
For pro-choice advocates who’d prefer to prioritize building effective state-level coalitions and maximizing abortion access for low-income women, however, it’s hard to imagine a more counterproductive strategy. Rather than figuring out how to develop a broader, stronger, and more truly inclusive pro-choice movement, prioritizing “gender inclusive language” instead divides erstwhile allies right out of the starting gate.
“The noble intent behind omitting the word ‘women’ is to make room for the relatively tiny number of transgender men and people identifying as nonbinary who retain aspects of female biological function,” Pamela Paul opined angrily in a buzz-generating (and once again, uncharacteristically woke shibboleth disregarding) article in The New York Times. “But despite a spirit of inclusion, the result has been to shove women to the side . . . Some might even call this kind of thing erasure.”
Public opinion polls affirm the common sense intuition that those most likely to support “gender inclusive language” are white college-educated Democrats — the same demographic that reads The New York Times. Yet as the defiantly positive reaction to Paul’s article indicates (read the comments), many who otherwise see themselves as uber-progressive don’t like it, at least in this context. And if such otherwise staunch progressives are resistant or even outright rebellious, how’s it going to land with everyone else who doesn’t identify at all with such politics — which is probably about 92% of the U.S. population? The answer is obvious.
Woke progressives who insist on folding the post-Dobbs abortion issue into their ongoing war to eradicate the “gender binary” are a self-styled vanguard, a self-anointed moral and political elite. Almost certainly, they are also disproportionately members of the socioeconomic elite, with high levels of cultural capital (i.e., college grads with a deep understanding of the mores of the professional-managerial class), if not necessarily high incomes (as professional activists and nonprofit staff don’t make much unless they’re at the very top). Not to mention, the gender revolution they’re gunning for is backed by activist billionaires and big money.
As The Intercept’s D.C. Bureau Chief Ryan Grim explains in his recent article, “Elephant in the Zoom” (which I highly recommend reading in full), such woke vanguardism has made it difficult if not impossible for the nation’s leading pro-choice organizations to function effectively, even given the new sense of urgency generated by Dobbs:
That the (Guttmacher) institute has spent the course of the Biden administration paralyzed makes it typical of not just the abortion rights community — Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had similarly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines. It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function.
Such leading pro-choice groups, however, have not necessarily “ceased to function” completely — simply in the ways that their traditional supporters expect. As Lisa Sellin Davis documents, for example, Planned Parenthood has “become one of the largest purveyors of cross-sex hormones in the country in the last decade”:
Last week, a new study came out, noting that there’s been an 800% increase in prescriptions for cross-sex hormones between 2013 and 2019. Some people are celebrating this, seeing it as confirmation that trans people are a large and diverse group, finally able to be themselves and get the interventions they want. Others see it as confirmation that there is an epidemic of young people feeling deep distress about their bodies or gender roles in ways never before seen, and resorting to serious, and possibly inappropriate, medical interventions to attend to that distress.
Either way, it’s great news for insurance companies and nonprofits like Planned Parenthood, for if it’s going to be much harder to make money off abortion care, it looks like it’s going to be far easier to profit off hormones.
Media Silos & Left-Liberal Confusion
These are huge, even revolutionary changes. As such, one might imagine that they’d be debated hotly, particularly among left-liberals where concern for effective advocacy of abortion rights runs high. By and large, however, that’s not happening. On the contrary, it’s reasonable to assume that most in such circles have no clear sense of such dynamics, let alone a confident take on them. The obvious question given the gravity of the issues involved is: Why?
The answer, I believe, follows the pattern previously laid out in my initial “What’s Woke?” post: A combination of genuine confusion about what’s happening, legitimate fears about questioning it, peer pressure to go along with the woke program, individual resistance to change, and apprehensions of political inadequacy. There’s also the savviness of woke activists who deliberately blur the line between left-liberal support for trans rights, which is rooted in a wider commitment to individual rights and liberties, and the radical crusade to eradicate the “gender binary,” which is part of a post-liberal Critical Social Justice commitment to overturning the white cishet colonialist patriarchy.
Left-liberals also tend to listen only to legacy media sources that have no interest in clarifying this distinction. Why would they? It would only produce more old-school versus new-school progressive schisms; the resultant division and embarrassment would be bad for business. From a bottom line perspective, it’s much better to keep both camps as happy as possible by pretending that no such conflict exists.
Media coverage of the dramatic clash between Berkeley Law Professor Khiara Bridges and Republican Senator Josh Hawley over the question of whether abortion is better understood as a “women’s issue” or one concerning “people with a capacity for pregnancy” during last July’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing provides an excellent case in point:
This highly politicized exchange was viewed over 8 million times in its first 24 hours online and countless times since. Unsurprisingly, however, acknowledging such an explicit fight over this touchstone of wokeism was a bridge too far for The New York Times, which — reverting back to its usual caution on such matters despite the story’s obvious newsworthiness — didn’t report on it at all.
More boldly if disingenuously, NPR (which, of course, caters to precisely the same demographic) tried to please both its nouveau progressive listeners (who enthusiastically support Bridges’ position) and their old-school counterparts (who bristle at the insistence that characterizing abortion as a “woman’s” issue is transphobic). To that end, NPR host Michel Martin interviewed Mara Keisling, founder of the National Center for Transgender Equality, who soothingly explained to listeners that despite the blunt contentiousness of the Bridges-Hawley exchange, the issues involved are actually “not zero-sum.”
Logically, to say that a conflict is “not zero-sum” is to claim that a heretofore hidden synthesis between two seemingly irreconcilable positions can be found. Yet that isn’t what Keisling proffers. Instead, she riffs on about how “we have to be kinder to each other”:
We have to be kinder to people who don't agree with us. We have to be kinder to people who are just wrong. We have to be kinder to people who fall for Senator Hawley's, you know, bullying. We just have to be kinder, and we have to be educating people, and we have to be educating them in the language they understand.
OK, but — “educating people,” however nicely, on how Hawley is a bully and Bridges is correct is in no way equivalent to demonstrating that the conflict they represent is not, in fact, zero-sum. On the contrary, it presumes that the conflict can be eliminated by getting everyone (who’s thought to matter, at least) on the same side. Naturally, Martin didn’t point out this obvious gap in Keisling’s logic or press her to explain her argument better. Instead, he simply thanked her politely and wrapped up the segment.
When it comes to hot-button woke issues, such obscurantism is par for the course with the liberal/legacy media. Countless other outlets that position themselves further to the left or right, however, are more than happy to not only hype such stories, but present uncompromising (and not the least bit “kind”) political takes on them. Since the typical NPR listener is loathe to venture outside of their own media bubble, however, they tend to have little sense of how these bigger political arguments play out in ways that are, in fact, very much “zero-sum.”
For its part, the conservative right didn’t hesitate to characterize Bridges’ position as both laughably insane (because of course men can’t get pregnant) and profoundly dangerous (as progressives fully intend to use their cultural and political power to impose their radical gender ideology on everybody). “The Left isn’t even trying to hide their craziness anymore. And they are dragging the Democratic Party with them to the fringes,” opined Right News Wire. “They have fully bought into the idea that men can literally become women and vice versa . . . The Left has given up on trying to win the argument. As soon as they get backed into a corner, they simply accuse others of committing an act of violence.”
Meanwhile, the progressive left was ecstatic about what it viewed as Bridges’ successful “evisceration” of Hawley’s “transphobic line of questioning.” Salon and the HuffPost both ran admiring headlines on how she’d “schooled” him. “Hawley was noticeably annoyed by the idea that cisgender women are not the only people who can get pregnant,” reporter Brandon Gage scoffed. “Bridges tried to explain that right-wing rhetoric that excludes transgender Americans from the conversation endangers their lives.” “Not at all heroes wear capes,” wrote Hanna Lustig admiringly in Glamour. “By playing dumb about the concept of gender beyond the outdated binary, Hawley was denying the existence of trans men and nonbinary people who have the capacity to become pregnant. Bridges, however,” she reported happily, “wasn’t going to let that erasure happen.”
Meanwhile, in Kansas . . .
Kansas voters made international news in August when a decisive 59% majority voted against removing abortion rights from their State Constitution. This came as a surprise as Kansas is a solidly Red State. It hasn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1932 and hasn’t favored a Democrat for President since 1964. Over 56% of Kansans voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. Nonetheless, the proposed anti-abortion amendment lost by about 160,000 votes, even as Republican voters outnumbered Democrats by around 187,000.
Tellingly, this successful campaign to protect abortion rights in Kansas was spearheaded by Kansans for Constitutional Freedom (KCF), “a bipartisan coalition of reproductive rights advocates and allied organizations committed to protecting the constitutional rights of Kansans to make personal healthcare decisions free from government interference.” As far as I can see in the news coverage, the leading national feminist and pro-choice organizations — NARAL, Planned Parenthood, etc. — were nowhere to be found. Presumably, this was a good thing: If they had been involved, their uncompromising woke politics would have undoubtedly hurt the cause.
“We definitely used messaging strategies that would work regardless of party affiliation,” KCF field organizer Jae Gray explained to the Washington Post. “We believe every Kansan has a right to make personal health-care decisions without government overreach — that’s obviously a conservative-friendly talking point. We were not just talking to Democrats.”
Indeed, they were not. As documented by the Washington Monthly’s analysis of eight of KCF video/TV ads, they instead “developed a messaging strategy that resonated across the political spectrum and eschewed purity tests”:
To appeal to libertarian sentiments, the spots aggressively attacked the anti-abortion amendment as a ‘government mandate.’ To avoid alienating moderates who support constraints on abortion, one ad embraced the regulations already on the Kansas books.
And they used testimonials to reach the electorate: a male doctor who refused to violate his ‘oath’; a Catholic grandmother worried about her granddaughter’s freedom; a married mom who had a life-saving abortion; and a male pastor offering a religious argument for women’s rights and, implicitly, abortion.
KCF organizers also reached out to voters in more rural and conservative areas of the state, holding in-person rallies and crafting locally resonant messaging. One summer event in western Kansas featured horses from a nearby ranch, a Dolly Parton playlist, and T-shirts emblazoned with a pink uterus wearing a cowboy hat. The humorous yet memorable appeal to voters was to “Vote Neigh” on the upcoming amendment.
KCF’s successful strategy to protect abortion rights is the mirror opposite of the tactics employed by leading national pro-choice groups. It represents state-level rather than D.C.-centric politics. It rejects partisan warfare in favor of broad-based coalition building. It’s focused on the grassroots rather than driven by an elite vanguard. And it seeks to persuade voters by meeting them where they are rather than dictating to them where they must be.
Put more abstractly, the KCF approach to abortion rights clearly represents strong liberal democratic values. Its very name reflects this: “Kansans” (democratically engaged citizens) “for Constitutional” (who respect the rule of law) “Freedom” (and are committed to individual liberty, the defining commitment of liberalism). At the same time, its’ cultural messaging communicates taken-for-granted ease with old-school middle-American values such as professional autonomy, religious faith, and family loyalty. It’s not the least bit concerned with woke pieties or even the more mainstream Democratic Party script.
Leading national pro-choice organizations, in contrast, are reportedly so divided over what their foundational political commitments should be that they’re barely functional. While their adoption of woke-speak is evident, the question of what this means with regard to a more comprehensive political philosophy remains conspicuously unaddressed. Are they rejecting liberal democracy as part of the oppressive white cishet colonialist patriarchy, along with the “gender binary”? Logically, this would make sense. Yet such questions are consistently evaded rather than honestly addressed.
As with other woke-driven organizations and movements, the apparent strategy is to try and have it both ways: Hand the steering wheel over to the post-liberal woke vanguard, but keep the old-school progressive liberals on board for the ride. Generally speaking, this seems to work pretty well (despite its intellectual incoherence). By and large, the woke vanguard seems energized, righteousness, and determined. Old-school progressive liberals, in contrast, appear confused, intimidated, and weak.
When it comes to the concrete challenge of passing abortion rights legislation on a state-by-state basis, however — which serious pro-choice advocates can no longer avoid after Dobbs — it’s quite doubtful this arrangement will work. Woke vanguardism is (to say the least) unpopular. Even erstwhile progressive allies often rebel when they’re instructed that the word “woman” should never be used unless properly qualified. The thought of taking such a campaign outside the progressive elite echo chamber — let alone to a Red State like Kansas — and thinking it would do anything other than generate negative blowback would be laughable if it didn’t represent such a serious problem.
As the Kansas case demonstrates, however, alternative strategies can be devised. And, if well chosen, they’re quite likely to be successful — most Americans do, after all, support basic abortion rights. In the bigger picture, it’s possible that the shift back to state-level politics forced by Dobbs may prove to be a good thing. Certainly, political innovations that break out of the dismal molds set by our ever-escalating culture war and dead-end two-party duopoly are desperately needed. Issues that motivate ordinary citizens to become politically engaged in their home states could be a painful yet necessary lever that helps crack up our current political logjam. Ideally, it might even contribute to making “democracy” a more meaningful concept again.