Our hard-won rights are being erased one letter at a time

The Guardian

02-03-2025

I type this through nervous laughter but, haha, should we all be learning how to perform abortions? Just in case? Should we all perhaps, have a little stash of mifepristone in our makeup bags, a secret number in our phone? Something is happening in the US that requires our attention. Hard-earned rights are being erased and the speed at which history is being rewritten there does not bode well for our freedoms here. We are already seeing dark reflections in the glass. This month the Observer reported how British anti-abortion campaigners are echoing US vice-president JD Vance. He claimed our new buffer zone laws, preventing protests outside abortion clinics, were an attack on the 'liberties of religious Britons', shifting focus away from the reason they were implemented to a debate about freedom of speech.
Buffer zones (intended to protect staff and women using the clinics) are being targeted in a careful campaign by conservative Christian groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a group that wants to ban abortion, opposes same-sex marriage and, in the US, has helped at least 23 states pass legislation barring trans athletes from girls' and women's events as well as drafting legislation restricting gender-affirming treatment for minors. With only 1.4% of adolescents in the US identifying as transgender, LGBTQ+ rights groups accused the ADF of 'whipping up a panic' over decisions better left to doctors, teachers and parents.
Then, on Thursday afternoon two weeks ago, the word 'transgender' and the letter T in LGBTQ+ was removed from the National Park Service's Stonewall National Monument website. This was particularly shocking for those familiar with the Stonewall Riots in 1969, a time when being gay was classified as a mental illness in the US – it had been a crime in the UK until only two years earlier.
Integral to this uprising against anti-queer police harassment were trans women, including Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. The deletion of the word from a website dedicated to one of the most important areas of gay activism works immediately to delegitimise trans people and clear the way for conservative groups to frame them as sick, or the result of a brand new contagion.
By that Thursday evening, 'queer' and the letter Q had also been disappeared from the site, along with words deemed too 'woke' on thousands of other government websites. Elsewhere, Google removed Black History Month, Women's History Month and LGBTQ+ holidays from its online calendars. It was as if a van had quietly driven across America vandalising shrines with white paint.
It's clear that the past is being erased in order to direct the future. But – a key part of our history of oppression is resistance. In the US, where abortion is again banned in 20 states (and a government website outlining reproductive rights was removed within hours of President Donald Trump taking office), young women are getting sterilised. A recent study found that tubal sterilisation visits increased 70% after May 2022 (when the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade leaked) in states likely to ban abortion. Perhaps it's ironic that one effect of 'pro-life' legislation will be fewer babies born.
That news led me to dip back into the story of the Jane Collective, a group of activists who, in the 1960s when abortion was illegal in the US, put up posters: 'Pregnant? Don't want to be? Call Jane.' First they referred women to doctors known to perform safe abortions, then they learned how to do it themselves. Women paid what they could afford and many said (in a lifetime of being dismissed or misunderstood) it was the best medical experience they'd had. Between 1969 and 1973, it's estimated that the Jane Collective provided safe abortions for more than 11,000 people. Looking out across the anxious suburbs today, I can absolutely imagine school-gate mums organising similar.
It's no coincidence that the same tactics used to restrict abortion access are used to restrict gender-affirming care, nor that they're lobbied for by the same conservative groups, who litigate loudly against trans, gay and abortion rights. It is bewildering, though, to see feminists who engage in anti-trans rhetoric offering up their own reproductive rights as a sweetener. Authoritarian movements require solidarity to resist, otherwise we're all toast.
And, with these rollbacks in the US, it feels urgent. At a rightwing conference two weeks ago, Kemi Badenoch said that 'pronouns, diversity policies and climate activism' are a 'poison'. Abortion is under attack here, too. In the decade leading to 2022, police in England and Wales recorded at least 67 cases of procuring an illegal abortion, with some women facing prosecution. Even if charges weren't brought, the impact of the investigation can cause life-changing harm to the women and their families, with children being removed from their mothers or access restricted. In January, medical leaders spoke out after an 'unprecedented' rise in women and girls being prosecuted for ending their own pregnancies – it's still a criminal offence to have an abortion without approval from two doctors, carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. In 2025. In 2025!
The more pregnancies I've had, the more noisy I get about the fact no person should be forced to continue a pregnancy against their will, or lose their autonomy and have their body policed. It feels as if it might be time to get our hands dirty, and form alliances to fight every deleted letter. Because when the words start disappearing, our rights are surely not far behind.
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