We met through a mutual friend who told us both, “You’ll love her. You get angry about all the same things.”

That was almost exactly correct. At the time, Joanne had just started a nonprofit to provide free diapers to families in need. Colleen was a freelance writer who had walked away from a newspaper job to work in a soup kitchen after her editor told her to stop writing so much about poverty.

We found sisterhood raging about injustice over coffee, and devising strategies for change.

Twenty years of collaboration and friendship followed. We’ve worked together, written a book together, talked each other through family crises. But we disagree on one fundamental issue. We are on opposite sides of the abortion debate that splits the country, sides that have become more fixed and hostile with the recent overturn of Roe v. Wade. Yet we never argue about abortion because that would be pointless; our positions are formed by deeply held values. We have discussed abortion more since the overturn of Roe than we did in all the years of our friendship that preceded it. These are uncomfortable though not acrimonious talks, with more silent pauses than usual. Still, through these hard conversations defined by respect and humility—largely absent from the public discourse—we have not let the two “camps” define our stances, or our friendship.

Joanne grew up in a justice-oriented, Reform Jewish household where her faith and her family supported the right to abortion. Her mother ran a reproductive health clinic that offered the full range of care including abortion services. Her father was an attorney active in the American Civil Liberties Union. Joanne became a social worker, gravitating toward supporting parents and children.

Her belief in abortion rights never wavered. Joanne believes all women should have the same options when an unplanned pregnancy occurs. Restrictions on abortion disproportionately prevent women and girls with low income from obtaining them. She also recognizes that real “choice” needs to include resources that put all children on path for success.

Colleen’s parents, neither of whom had a high school diploma, had three children in the early years of their marriage and then avoided having another for 11 years. Money was tight. Colleen’s father’s alcoholism was already causing his mental and physical decline. Nevertheless, Colleen appeared.

Observant Catholics, Colleen’s parents believed that life began at conception and that, even in their circumstances, a baby was something to celebrate. Her father was a Conservative, who railed against “welfare queens” and the “goddamned liberals” at every Sunday dinner. One day, young Colleen protested, “You shouldn’t talk like that, Daddy. It’s clear from the Gospels that Jesus was a liberal.” She aspired to spend her life as Jesus did: sticking up for people nobody wanted, particularly people in poverty.

Though she recoiled from her father’s conservativism, the Left’s reasoning on abortion was unpersuasive to Colleen. No one can prove when life begins. For Colleen, abortion risks killing a human being; and Jesus’ favorite kind of human being at that—an unwanted one.

Our partnership would not work if Colleen behaved like the most aggressive abortion opponents—or if Joanne lumped her in with that crowd. Colleen does not harass women walking into clinics. She gets as angry as Joanne at “pro-lifers” who support the death penalty. Joanne donates to advocacy groups that fight for legal abortion. Colleen does no legislative advocacy around abortion and instead works toward life-affirming policies like eradicating poverty and providing free health care. Joanne favors the same policies, not because they would affect the demand for abortion but because everyone has a right to thrive—this is something we agree on absolutely.

Neither of us remembers when Colleen came out to Joanne as pro-life, probably because it was not dramatic. To posit the possibility and protection of life before birth in progressive company is usually uncomfortable. Colleen has left groups supporting immigrant justice, socialism, and voting rights when those entities expanded focus to make statements or take actions supporting abortion rights. Comrades have yelled at her about coat hangers and accused her of not caring about women and girls who are raped. Much like the bloody fetus signs anti-abortion activists wave outside clinics, these are unfair accusations that people on the other side lack compassion. Neither of us believes the other is less of a person because we disagree about abortion.

We tend to support different candidates in presidential primaries: Colleen donated to Bernie Sanders; Joanne to Elizabeth Warren. In general elections, we both have always gotten behind the Democrat, because Democratic policies help more people thrive, especially those living in poverty, than the alternative. But we also believe that some politicians on both sides of this debate are getting a free ride. You are pro-life if you oppose abortion—with no obligation to support paid family leave, quality affordable childcare, or the many other reforms families desperately need to live and thrive. You are pro-choice if you support abortion access—regardless of whether you have done anything to work toward wage parity or push back against the closure of maternity care hospitals, which is exacerbating the already horrendous Black maternal mortality rate.

Decisions about having children do not exist in a vacuum but are influenced by a thousand cultural and economic realities. Being truly pro-life or pro-choice requires us to knock down rhetorical barriers and focus on the areas where we wholeheartedly agree: that every child has a right to be placed on a path to success and that no mother should have to sacrifice her own success to make that happen.

We are both horrified by the recklessness of the post-Roe rush to legislate. Some people are finding it impossible to get methotrexate—one of the drugs that saved Colleen’s life (twice) during cancer treatments—because it is used in some abortions. The idea that a lawmaker in the U.S. wrote legislation in 2020 suggesting a physician should “attempt to reimplant an ectopic pregnancy into the woman’s uterus”—which is medically impossible—is at best ignorant, and more likely a blatantly cavalier approach to women’s lives and health.

Laws touching on reproductive health should be written by reputable medical experts—just as legislators turn to legitimate experts in fields ranging from coastal erosion to air traffic control to draft other kinds of bills requiring specialized knowledge. We agree that progressives who are also anti-abortion have a particular obligation to speak up about the ignorance that drives so much of the movement, and harms women.

Abortion is important, and worth fighting over. But making abortion a litmus test issue is helping to steer the country in the wrong direction: one where defining what camp you are in is more important than actually creating a society where more people can thrive.

And so we go about our business working for, almost always, the same thing—the needs of oppressed people who have already been born. This is more productive than an endless argument. But it’s also harder. It requires each of us to acknowledge that people are complicated and that good people can hold beliefs we find absolutely unacceptable. It requires genuine love and humility.

We both came of age after Roe, and we both have friends who’ve had abortions. Shortly after graduate school, when Joanne was a new mother, a friend of hers contemplated abortion, largely for financial reasons. Joanne offered her a home and resources to make raising a child possible—if that was what her friend wanted. About this same time, one of Colleen’s closest friends had an unplanned pregnancy. Colleen volunteered to drop out of college and support the baby so that her friend could get a degree on schedule.

Both young women chose abortion. From extremely different perspectives, we behaved similarly: We offered a helping hand and unwavering love, regardless of our friends’ decisions. We believe that says everything about choosing friends and allies—and envisioning the kind of society we want for ourselves, and future generations.

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For this new habit of mind, I blame two things: the U.S. Supreme Court, and the literary scholar Catherine Prendergast’s searing 2021 masterpiece, The Gilded Edge: Two Audacious Women and the Cyanide Love Triangle That Shook America.

From visiting Carmel, I had heard all about Carmel’s early 20^th-century history as a colony of artists and bohemians. But I had never heard of the poet French, or understood how much the popular history of Carmel left out—until I picked up Prendergast’s book, which defies categorization. It’s a head-spinning history, a maddening mystery, and a bracingly timely reminder of how easy it is to erase the aspirations and accomplishments of women, even in avant garde Northern California.

Portrait of Nora May French. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.

The Gilded Edge begins with French’s own real-time account of her own 1907 abortion. This description, discovered by Prendergast in the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, was hard to read last fall, when I first encountered it. It is infuriating to read now, weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court canceled the constitutional right to abortion. Someone really ought to put the text on a neon billboard outside Justice Samuel Alito’s bedroom window.

French, a brilliant 25-year-old poet, “could not afford a ‘therapeutic’ abortion in a hospital even if she could convince a doctor to give her one,” Prendergast writes. So, the poet induced an abortion by swallowing pills she’d bought at a local drugstore in San Francisco. Such abortifacients, advertised in newspapers as safe and reliable, came in colored boxes with names like “Dr. Conte’s Female Pills,” and “Dr. Trousseau’s Celebrated Female Cure.” They also contained dangerous chemicals, like turpentine.

French recounts swallowing pills on a Saturday morning, and feeling nothing. The following day, she is awakened by a contraction, and then waves of spasms, nausea, and intense pain.

French had moved to San Francisco the year before, months after the earthquake, and was already succeeding as a poet and writer—winning a newspaper’s poetry contest and being published in literary journals. But if she had the baby (she had become pregnant by her married boyfriend Harry Lafler, a literary journal editor), she knew she was risking her burgeoning career, and could end up raising a child alone.

Between contractions, French wrote to Lafler. “Very dear, I have been through deep waters, and proved myself cowardly after all.” “I have gone through every shade of emotion…  It was as if we were walking together and my feet were struggling with some pulling quicksand under the grass. I would come near screaming very often.

“Motherhood! What an unspeakably huge thing for all my fluttering butterflies to drown in! A still pool, holding the sky.” “I looked into it day after day, and sometimes I could see the sky, and sometimes only my drowned butterflies. Oh—”

That is where the letter cuts off.

French did survive her abortion, and soon after relocated to Carmel, where she took up residence in the guest cottage of a married Bay Area couple with many literary friends, Carrie and George Sterling.

George Sterling styled himself as a writer (championed by Ambrose Bierce) and was a prominent member of the Bohemian Club, a famously elite male social institution with an artistic bent, and founded in 1872. But Sterling’s real business was real estate. He used his literary network to attract artists and writers to Carmel—among them Jack London and Upton Sinclair—to give the place a creative cachet that would help Carmel Development Company sell land. Prendergast shows that Sterling spent more time philandering and drinking than writing. Carrie Sterling did most of the recruitment work.

In Carmel, many bohemian men pursued the beautiful and talented French, plying her with writerly advice while seeking to co-opt her talent. George and Nora became lovers. Then, less than a year after her abortion and move to Carmel, Nora French died of cyanide poisoning. George Sterling was away. Carrie Sterling found her body. What actually happened remains a mystery.

The death of the young and pretty poet made news nationwide (“Midnight Lure of Death Leads Poetess to the Grave,” one headline crowed) and inspired copycat suicides. In the years to come, Carrie and George Sterling split up; each would later commit suicide, by cyanide. Others connected to the Carmel colony met unfortunate ends, too.

The saga took place in an era when people talked of the “New Woman” enjoying more rights and possibilities, Prendergast notes. But the reality was different, as the stories of Carrie Sterling and Nora May French demonstrate.

“Carmel was a roiling pot of exploitation. Women’s horizons were limited by the identities the men assigned them, namely scorned wife and elusive muse,” Prendergast writes. “Even when men claimed to want women who were more sexually liberated or allowed to work outside the home, all the negative consequences of the flowering of liberation were women’s alone to bear.”

The indignities these women suffered didn’t end with their deaths. Nora May French and Carrie Sterling were largely left out of the mythology of Carmel. The lecherous George Sterling, whose poetry is hackery, is still remembered as the great Bohemian writer who helped make Carmel the place it is today. (He even has a park named after him in San Francisco.)

There is no archive of French’s papers, Prendergast writes.  She located French’s letter, describing her abortion, among Lafler’s records. “Wouldn’t it be nice, I think, to see it amid a collection of other letters testifying to the length of women’s struggle for reproductive freedom, rather than among the papers of an abusive ex-­boyfriend?” the author asks in the book.

Today, at the end of our own Gilded Age, and the beginning of the post-Roe era, this story speaks all too loudly. The lesson is about more than abortion or discrimination. It’s about the human horrors of letting judges, or anyone else, determine our rights on the basis of history—especially when history omits so much.

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And such steps might just be a beginning.

A Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation event, “Can California Lead a New Reproductive Rights Movement?” delved into the role of the state and its people in efforts to restore and extend the right to abortion, and other reproductive rights. The event—at the Mercado La Paloma, a marketplace and community center in South Los Angeles—was put on in partnership with Esperanza Community Housing’s free, multidisciplinary arts festival South Central Innervisions: An AfroLatinxFuturism, which starts Saturday.

Under a backdrop of artist Dominique Moody’s painting “When We Rise, Creating Our Next LA,” the panelists spoke about what it would truly mean for California to take a forward-looking role in healthcare access.

They argued that true leadership will require building a “reproductive justice” movement, which addresses not just the legal rights of women, but larger systemic problems of racism and oppression.

Panelist Janette Robinson-Flint, executive director of Black Women for Wellness, has spoken about the differences between reproductive rights, health, and justice, and Los Angeles Times’ Sandy Banks, the moderator, started the conversation off by asking her to explain these terms, and why it matters that we define them.

“The shortcut for reproductive justice is the right to have a child and raise a child or to not have children,” said Robinson-Flint. In building such a movement, she said, the state needs to look at the intersecting questions that influence and direct your decision-making around childbearing. Are you in a place you want to be in your life? Do you have housing? A job? A healthy environment? Your answers to all these questions, she said, impact the decision on whether or not to have a child.

Barbara Ferrer, director of L.A. County Department of Public Health, built on Robinson-Flint’s answer. In 2022, she pointed out, Black women have an almost five times higher rate of maternal mortality than white women, and Black babies are dying at a rate almost four times higher than white babies.

“That should be intolerable to all of us,” Ferrer said, which is why the fight for reproductive justice must be linked to the fight to dismantle racism and oppression. “You can’t separate the issues. I’ve been doing this work for a long, long time trying to address health inequities. The collective power we have is to do the work of a justice agenda and really talk about the root causes Janette laid out.”

Does that justice lens inform the state right now?

Banks said California seems most focused on securing additional funding and protecting residents or travelers to the state to access abortion.

“I think that’s up to us,” said Ferrer. “It’s really hard because we need both”—short-term actions and a long-term agenda that distributes resources fairly across the state. But she cautions “you need to be careful that your short-term agenda doesn’t wreck the real work that needs to get done.”

Banks turned to Dr. John McHugh, an obstetrician-gynecologist who is affiliated with California’s district of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “What are the things we’re not focusing on that we should be as we build this movement?”

McHugh answered that the attacks on reproductive justice are growing and finding new targets: “The politicians that want to tell you what to do with your healthcare provider aren’t going to stop at this. They want more than that. They want more control.”

Already, he said, legislatures in other states are going after contraception and transgender care. “This issue is not just about abortion,” McHugh continued. “It’s really about controlling people. About controlling a lot of aspects about peoples’ lives.”

“Is there a sense among obstetricians and gynecologists that this is a scary time or is there a militant sense?” asked Banks. “What would you say the practitioners are feeling right now?”

McHugh said people are feeling many different things. Some are taking action—he recently saw a proposal for a floating hospital in the Gulf of Mexico to provide care. But also, he sees the fear: “Physicians and not just physicians, nurses and health care organizations, some of them are afraid and cowering and pulling back.”

For example, he’s noticed that “some doctors are afraid to provide care for patients having miscarriages or even ectopic pregnancies because of uncertainty around this.”

By Soobin Kim.

Banks agreed. “I’m hearing stories now about women who have to almost die from ectopic pregnancy before it gets to the time that now you can intervene because now it has to do with saving the mother,” she said. “If there are women who are almost dying, there are going to be women that are dying.”

Robinson-Flint observed that in this post-Roe time, health care professionals have found themselves on the front lines of a revolution. Because providers have taken an oath, she said, to provide lifesaving services to their clients, they now have a decision to make: “Will they cooperate with this regime of terror that’s going on? Will they report their clients? Will they perform services? Will they report data?” Speaking to the crowd, she emphasized, “You don’t have to cooperate. You do not have to be responsive to vigilantes who want people’s data. And you don’t have to turn people away from care you can give.”

For more than 30 million people in Texas and Oklahoma, Banks noted, California might now be their nearest abortion provider. Directing her question at the final panelist of the evening, Allegra Hill, midwife and co-owner and co-founder of Kindred Space LA, Banks asked, “How, do we meet emotional, and physical, and after-care needs of these women? Because that’s part of reproductive justice too.”

Hill called attention to California’s “full-spectrum” doulas—people who are not medical professionals but who are trained to support people through miscarriage, birth, post-partum, and more.

 “As this wave of people from out of state come here, we will have to adapt and pivot and make sure that our full-spectrum doulas are prepared to support people through traveling for a medical procedure, being separated from their own community, really meeting people here where they need the support,” said Hill.

The panelists also discussed funding for reproductive care, preventing maternal mortality (abortion access can save one-third of those lives, said McHugh), and the fall ballot measure to amend the state constitution.

Before the conversation wrapped, they responded to audience questions, as well, including one that asked if the panelists could each name a revolutionary in the healthcare field.

Banks mentioned the volunteers at Planned Parenthood. Robinson-Flint suggested that you can be a revolutionary by “exercising your autonomy”; she also cited doctors from Cuba providing healthcare around the world. Hill spoke about the “sister-friend,” somebody who can drive you to a doctor’s appointment, for instance.

And McHugh said anyone who talks about reproductive health issues is part of the reproductive justice movement.

“We need to talk more,” he said. “There’s so much shame and stigma about reproductive health issues.” But, if you feel comfortable testifying to your circle of people, McHugh said, it can “hopefully help someone else get the care they need as well.”

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