Book Review | Without Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now by Jenny Brown

By Meg Morrigan

Without Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now was published in October 2019 as part of a collaboration series of books between Jacobin Magazine and Verso Books, which offer socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. It was written by feminist activist, National Women’s Liberation organizer, and former Labor Notes editor Jenny Brown. The 150-page book is highly relevant in the shadow of upcoming Supreme Court rulings that threaten to overturn Roe vs. Wade, and offers an accessible primer on abortion from a woman’s liberation perspective. However, for this transgender Marxist reviewer, Brown’s political analysis leaves something to be desired. 

Demystifying Abortion

The bulk of the book is distributed over four chapters: “Abortion: The Basics,” “History,” “Ideas and Analysis,” and “Strategy.” Chapter 1 opens with a detailed description of a vacuum aspiration abortion. This passage is one of many throughout the book that provide brief but lucid descriptions of abortion processes such as dilation and curettage, pill abortions, and various DIY methods used through the generations. These passages enact one of the hallmark strategies of abortion activists historically — demystifying abortion processes, to destroy the taboo and increase the number of people who can perform them — and are one of the book’s biggest successes.

A Materialist History

The book’s next success is the history and materialist analysis it offers. Brown starts with the century of early American history when abortion was legal, then explores the roots of abortion restriction—not in religious oppression like many believe, but in industry. It was the fledgling industry of medical doctors who drove anti-abortion sentiment into the Protestant Church to supplant midwives and “doctresses,” who provided most of the routine care of the time. The following outlaw, underground period of abortion leads into the beginnings of a narrow abortion reform movement (allowing abortion in certain “extreme cases”) and the coinciding repeal effort led by the woman’s liberation movement. Furthermore, Brown points out the racist history of abortion legislation and reproduction coercion, underlining the intersection between women’s and racial oppression.

Frequently, Brown displays how “mainstream” views of abortion were guided by ruling-class interests. For example, she outlines the tendency of politicians to now support abortion bans, now abortion reform, depending on whether capitalist interests demanded population growth or decrease. However, this is also the first hint of the book’s weakness: it stops short of drawing the conclusion that the need for population growth or decline is a particular problem of capitalism.  She correctly sees reproductive justice as a labor issue — the unpaid labor of social reproduction — but points to patriarchy and white supremacy as the forces of oppression, without demonstrating how those forces are inherent to capitalism.

Liberalization of a Movement

Brown bemoans the liberalization of the women’s liberation movement into a single-issue campaign for legal abortion. She correctly sees the successes in the abortion struggle as fruits of the mass movement, not as some gift or “gold standard” handed down by the courts. She sees the dilution of the feminist program as conservative, reactionary, and anti-liberation, and she’s right.

However, Brown appears to desire, if not a return to the 60’s and 70’s, a resurgence in 60’s and 70’s-style activism. She rests her model for struggle on a return to the women’s liberation movement, and though this may be better than the liberal legal battle that dominates the struggle today, it is also short-sighted. This is the primary weakness in Without Apology: the emphasis on the women’s liberation model at the expense of a wider sex- and gender-liberation model. 

Wider Liberation Model Needed

The women’s liberation model, crystallized today on womensliberation.org (where Jenny Brown is an organizer), views patriarchy, and even men themselves, as the primary source of oppression. Their demands focus on getting men to do an equal amount of housework, with a secondary emphasis on social welfare programs. This approach still assumes that the family unit is the best, or only, model for social reproduction – a view which comes with an unavoidable amount of gender-essentialism and heteronormativity.

Despite a sentence in Chapter 1’s section “Who Gets Abortions?” which admits that trans men, “and others who do not identify as women,” are also beneficiaries of abortion rights, Brown frequently equates those who can get pregnant to women and those bearing penises to men. Brown does not offer further thoughts on how reproductive justice and the policing of bodies might affect or intersect with the rights and self-determination of trans people. And she offers no insight whatsoever into how reproduction struggles might affect people in non-heterosexual relationships.

This is why a women’s liberation model is not enough to build a mass movement for reproductive justice today. The legacies of the liberation movements of the past century have created a new material condition, and LGBTQ+ rights and liberation are becoming increasingly vital. In much the same way that the women’s liberation movement captured the radical spirit of young women fifty years ago, today’s youth and activist layers will be mobilized by a radical agenda for universal liberation on all axes of oppression. 

A sex- and gender-liberation model demands nothing less than complete bodily autonomy for all people. This includes not only the inalienable right to birth control and abortion, but universal, free healthcare for all, including gender-affirming care. While this model demands programs that make parenting more accessible, like paid family leave and access to reproductive medicine and adoption, it also demands an end to the assumption of the nuclear family as the default for social reproduction. This means high-quality, universal child care that goes beyond daycare and the often depressing fostering system we currently have, towards a system of socialized child rearing that guarantees every child a stable home and education. It means public cafeterias to reduce housework for all workers, not just women. The sex- and gender-liberation model unites the entire working class and points towards a fundamental rupture with capitalism, while the woman’s liberation model cannot and does not.

The Role of Socialists

Brown spends some time in Without Apology discussing the ways in which the former soviet-bloc countries had better track records on legalizing abortion and birth control than capitalist countries, seemingly recognizing socialism as a better structure for recognizing reproductive justice, but does not say much about why it is important for socialists to be at the forefront of the struggle. This is because her framing of this situation in the terms of women’s liberation fails to unite the multi-racial, multi-sexed, multi-gendered, working class under a banner for complete liberation from capitalist tyranny and its patriarchal, racist, heteronormative tentacles.

Today’s movement for reproductive justice needs socialist leadership. Just as the liberation movements of the 60’s and 70’s were catalysts for many important victories, today’s struggle necessitates radical programs that connect the bodily oppression of individuals by the state, to the tradition of familial relations, and the unpaid work of social reproduction, to the system of capitalist exploitation that is the main framework. Socialists must connect these intersecting struggles into a united war against capitalism.