The Fall of Roe by Elizabeth Dias

Author:Elizabeth Dias
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

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THE WAR OVER Wen laid bare a central tension of Planned Parenthood. The organization was both a health care provider and a political juggernaut. Amid the frenzied politics of the Trump era and the ever-growing restrictions in the states, balancing those two functions had become increasingly difficult. Planned Parenthood was a sprawling operation, a federation of fifty-three affiliated but separate state operations, with a nearly unmanageable financial structure, according to some board members. Each affiliate operated independently, with its own leaders and board, and fundraising apparatus to pay for staff, medical equipment, and services for uninsured patients. They paid dues to the national office, which focused more on campaigns, politics, and lobbying. And now, three years after they thought they would live in Hillary Clinton’s America, every part of the operation was under attack.

A divided mission wasn’t a challenge faced by Planned Parenthood’s opponents, who had purely political groups, like the Susan B. Anthony List, and largely separate networks of crisis pregnancy centers. Planned Parenthood offered health care, with services that included breast cancer screening and vasectomies. The pregnancy crisis centers largely offered non-medical-grade sonograms, classes on baby care, free diapers, and other kinds of social support. They were not, nor did they aspire to become, the kind of world-class medical system that Wen had dreamed of making Planned Parenthood into.

As Planned Parenthood scrambled, longtime board member Alexis McGill Johnson took the reins as interim president. Almost immediately, she renounced Wen’s efforts to minimize the organization’s work providing abortions. “I think when we say, ‘It’s a small part of what we do,’ what we’re doing is actually stigmatizing it,” she told The Washington Post. We are a proud abortion provider.” One of McGill Johnson’s first acts was to announce that Planned Parenthood was withdrawing from the Title X program due to Trump’s new rule. That action only underscored the risks abortion rights faced in this changed national landscape. Republican governors were signing an unprecedented wave of abortion bans into law. And now, Kavanaugh was on the court, replacing Kennedy, who ruled in favor of federal abortion rights, with a justice who posed a potential threat to those rights. “A lot of us are awakening to the fact that if you are wealthy, if you live in the New York ZIP code or California ZIP code or Illinois ZIP code, your ability to access reproductive health care is not in jeopardy in the same way that it is in other states,” McGill Johnson said.

Her early months were spent working to stabilize Planned Parenthood and rebuild trust within the organization after the infighting of Wen’s tenure. Then McGill Johnson began to reimagine the organization entirely. Richards, a daughter of the Democratic Party, had focused on building political power. Wen, a public health expert, had emphasized its health care services. McGill Johnson, who built a career combating bias and discrimination, decided to prioritize racial equity.

Lori Alexis McGill was a self-described “movement baby,” born five months before Roe, sandwiched between second-wave feminism and Black Power.

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