Republicans Are Trying to Ban Speech About Abortion Pills. Activists Are Vowing ‘Mass Defiance.’
“We are going to break these laws all day, every day, and help the people around us to do the same,” reproductive rights activist Amelia Bonow told Jezebel.
Amelia Bonow spent the Fourth of July talking to strangers about abortion pills at a lemonade stand in front of the Supreme Court. About ten days after the institution ended the federal right to abortion, the founding director of Shout Your Abortion gathered friends and volunteers to dress in red, white, and blue and hand out popsicles and lemonade, while spreading the word that, thanks to an activist doctor based in Austria, people in all 50 states can order abortion pills—pregnant or not, regardless of local laws. People cooled off with paper fans printed with the words “ask me about abortion pills” superimposed on a mifepristone tablet, while others carried signs saying, “We will aid and abet abortion.”
Bonow is part of a movement to reclaim the language from the Texas abortion ban, S.B. 8, which deputized private citizens to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion in the state. To Bonow, “aid and abet” can mean any number of things that, for the time being, remain legal—from donating to abortion funds and indie clinics, to sharing information about pills. When actor Busy Philips got arrested as part of a pro-choice demonstration outside the Supreme Court on July 1, she was wearing SYA’s “I will aid and abet abortion” T-shirt. (Granted, it’s much safer for a white celebrity in D.C. to wear such a shirt than an activist in Texas.)