Real Men Love Babies: Protest Speech and Masculinity at Abortion Clinics in the Southern United States

Abstract

This article examines the politicized space outside the abortion clinic as a site where gender ideologies about male roles and responsibilities in abortion are contested, using anti-abortion protest rhetoric that targets men accompanying women. Protesters attempt to elicit reactions from men using gendered stereotypes, in hopes that men will change their minds about or prevent an abortion. Anti-abortion protest speech uses mixed messages about masculinity, strength, and fatherhood to shame male companions for their support of abortion. Protesters’ rhetoric constructs men as inherently responsible for preventing abortion, where only by leaving the clinic space can these men gain power, controlling their reproductive futures by controlling their female companion’s. However, men reacted in different ways to the words shouted by protesters: by ignoring them, agreeing with them, or occasionally by initiating physical or verbal altercations. I find that male companions often employ tropes of patriarchal masculinity within attempts to perform supportive masculinity in response to protest speech, while protesters simultaneously use patriarchal masculinity and contemporary gender ideologies on responsible fatherhood in attempts to prevent abortion. These conflicting rhetorical themes and diverse reactions are indicative of larger struggles in the U.S. pro-choice and pro-life movements about the role of men in abortion.

Introduction

In the United States, like elsewhere, abortion is a politically fraught and morally debated aspect of healthcare (Ginsburg & Rapp, 1995). More state laws restricting abortion have been passed between 2011 and 2015 than at any other time since the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the first trimester nation-wide. These restrictions, which include the implementation of waiting times, clinic building requirements, mandatory state counseling and ultrasound viewing, have resulted in clinic closures across the country (Guttmacher, 2016), creating vast inequalities in access to abortion care that disproportionately affect low-income populations and people of color (Roberts 2015; Silliman et. al., 2004). Furthermore, there has been a dramatic increase in the growth of clinic protesting and violence at abortion clinics (Guttmacher 2018; Kumar et al. 2009). In a recent National Clinic Violence Survey (2018), the Feminist Majority Foundation found that ‘23.8% [of clinics] surveyed experienced one or more incidents of severe violence or threats of severe violence…[such as] blockades of clinic entrances (9.1%), stalking (7.3%), facility invasions (6.8%), death threats (3.2%), and physical violence (3.2%).’

The abortion clinic itself is often the site where these political, moral, and religious contestations play out, where the daily presence of abortion protesters and state laws combine to make accessing abortion services difficult. This is most visible in the space surrounding abortion clinics, where the first amendment free-speech rights of protesters and rights of patients are constantly in contention (Hostetler 1997; Jerman & Jones 2014). This space is the setting in which anti-abortion protesters attempted to engage people in conversation while they were walking into the two independent abortion clinics¹ where I conducted research in North Carolina (N.C.). This population includes both women² having abortions and their companions³, who may be romantic partners, friends, family members, or acquaintances; companions often function as drivers for patients post-procedure or are there to provide support.

Recent studies have considered the importance of accompaniment in providing social support and increasing abortion access (Altshuer et. al 2016; Nguyen et. al, 2018; Ostrach & Cheyney 2014), while research in the N.C. context has dealt with language in state-mandated abortion counseling scripts for the Woman’s Right to Know Act (Buchbinder, 2016), and the ways that abortion providers and activists engage with laws around free speech (Mercier et al., 2016). This article focuses on the language used by anti-abortion protesters in attempted interactions with people entering abortion clinics. Many companions are men, and they are frequently targeted in protestors’ speech in gender-specific ways. This article analyzes the relationship between protest speech and masculinity. I aim to understand how protest speech draws on multiple and often contradictory cultural values associated with masculinity in attempts to appeal to or shame men accompanying women to their abortion procedures.

Protest Speech as Social Action

Clinic protest language offers a window into the ways that people are differentially targeted by anti-abortion protesters. During ethnographic research in 2017 at two abortion clinics in N.C., I found that anti-abortion protesters used identity categories such as gender, race and class in their verbal attempts to convince women not to have an abortion. Research on the development of the anti-abortion activist movement explores the growth of direct-action advocacy, which is based on the belief that anti-abortion activists⁴ must work to save individual pregnancies before they are aborted at clinics (Ginsburg, 1989; Munson, 2008). This kind of protest typically takes the form of sidewalk counseling, prayer vigils, street preaching, or clinic ‘rescues’ outside of abortion clinics (2008); direct-action advocacy was occurring at both clinics where I conducted research.

Linguistic anthropologists have explored the idea that speech can accomplish social action (1962), and social theorists have noted the ways that people perform or ‘do’ gender, through both speech and interpersonal interactions (Butler, 1988; West & Zimmerman 1987). Here, I consider how protest speech allows for simultaneous and conflicting performances of gender, as persons interpellate, or come to recognize themselves as subjects, of protesters’ speech (Althusser, 2006). Interactional messaging is a part of direct-action advocacy, whereby people are meant to recognize themselves as both subjects and actors and to perform a specific action in response: changing their or the woman’s mind about having an abortion. While protesters did not necessarily know relationships between persons arriving at the clinic, protesters often guessed at relationships until someone responded. For example, one day a male protester calling to a man walking in said, “whether you the brother, whether you the uncle, whether you the baby daddy, whether you the father-in-law…” The ability to recognize oneself as the intended subject or target of protest speech was often the reason people told me they engaged with the protesters. Interview subjects frequently said, ‘it was just that one guy that I heard yelling at me,’ when describing the one statement that stood out amongst all the other noise, that they heard directed specifically at themselves.

While anthropologists have pointed to the ways that female gender identity is constructed by and implicated in the abortion debate (Csordas, 1996; Ginsburg, 1989), the abortion clinic itself is a place where social meanings of masculinity and fatherhood are enacted, challenged and socially reproduced both through language and social interactions between protesters and male companions (Bederman, 1996). The goals of anti-abortion protest speech have shifted dramatically over the years, largely based on changes in social and political context. In Kristin Luker’s comprehensive history of abortion, she details the ways that the anti-abortion movement in the nineteenth century grew from physicians attempts to save women from their own ignorance and to consolidate control over the reproductive process for the medical establishment (1985). Luker also connects the development of the pro-choice and pro-life social movements to changing cultural discourses on gender roles and labor rights (1985). Furthermore, Faye Ginsburg’s historical analysis of the anti-abortion movement as a single-issue, grassroots movement notes how the 1970s, and especially the legalization of abortion, initiated many people into right-to-life activism (1989), while the 1980s saw an increase in direct-action for anti-abortion activists (Wilson, 2013).

Ziad Munson’s more recent work on the pro-life political movement in the U.S. takes a contrary approach, finding that the pro-life social movement cannot be inherently reduced to a single set of views on gender or conservative politics, and that people are initiated to the movement through diverse political and moral commitments (2008:133). I find these histories to be useful in considering contemporary anti-abortion rhetoric, as they highlight the thematic tropes on masculinity used in anti-abortion rhetoric often draw from diverse political perspectives, utilizing contemporary social views on gender in conjunction with conservative and patriarchal gender role ideologies. The examples I use from anti-abortion speech present men’s participation in abortion as emasculating, shameful, weak and irresponsible, while simultaneously emphasizing male patriarchy, toxic masculinity, responsible fatherhood, and strength as characteristics that men inherently possess. To illustrate the ways that anti-abortion speech at clinics reproduces and mixes gender stereotypes about masculinity and reproduction, I analyze how protest speech deals with themes such as choice, responsible fatherhood, strength, and violence, in order to convince men to prevent the abortion of the woman they accompanied.

I argue that gender ideologies in pro-life discourses highlight both the ways that gender is inherent to cultural conceptions of reproductive roles as social responsibilities and is important to understanding how male involvement in reproduction is valued and impugned through gendered discourse. By recognizing themselves as the subject of this speech, men are identifying with a construction of gendered personhood, which may invoke feelings of shame, guilt, or weakness about their current performances of masculinity. Reactions against this speech, which may take the form of violence or aggression, both reify conceptions of toxic or patriarchal masculinity as well as perform supportive reproductive partnership. This interactional space functions in many ways as a ‘moral laboratory’ (Mattingly, 2014), whereby men’s attempts to reject constructions of masculinity articulated by protesters may be performed through the same patriarchal gender ideologies they purport to contradict. Interactions within this vexed space offer important ways to understand masculinity as a contested concept, which often involves the reification of stereotypes about masculinity. I draw on the connections of masculinity and violence in both speech and responses to speech to consider the consequences of anti-abortion rhetoric for men involved in abortion procedures, as well as the ways this might shape both women’s and men’s experiences with abortion.

Intersectionality: Speech Linking Gender, Race and Class

It is important to note that although this paper is explicitly dealing with the issue of gender in anti-abortion speech, racial and class stereotypes are often embedded within gendered rhetoric. Considering the ways that multiple, overlapping identity categories are used to form the basis for anti-abortion protesters’ attempts to engage people walking in shows how the abortion clinic serves as a site for competing ideologies and moral figuring that go beyond reproductive decision-making. Ideas about gender are often inextricably connected to other identity categories (Crenshaw, 1991), and people are often subjected to comments by anti-abortion protesters that simultaneously incorporate their gender, race, class, and religion, in an attempt to indicate that they are the target of the speech. It is therefore difficult to determine if they are reacting negatively to stereotypes about gender, race or class, as these might all be simultaneously conjured by protesters. I argue that cultural stereotypes about race, class and gender are often inextricable in cultural discourses about masculinity. This also increases the possibility that men might identify with protest speech, recognizing their own internalized notions of masculinity in protesters’ words. For example, protesters might try to elicit a response from someone by referring to him as a “strong, black man,’ or by commenting that he should ‘get a second job, a third job,’ simultaneously utilizing race, gender, and class stereotypes that are both explicit and implicit in both comments.

References to race such as ‘unborn lives matter,’ and ‘abortion is Black genocide’ are frequently both written on signs and directed toward African American patients and companions, by protesters who may or may not share a racial identity with them. Based on survey responses, the patient and companion populations at Abortion Care Clinic A and B are approximately 50% African American and 30% white⁵. Protesters often self-identified racial affiliations during interactional messages, in attempting to discuss racial issues about abortion; they primarily identified as African American, white, and Hispanic. Throughout the paper, I refer to the speakers and persons they are addressing primarily by gender. I note when protesters mention racial affiliations of themselves or persons they are addressing as being important to the content and context of this speech. In the following examples of protest speech, most speakers are African American men, addressing men who are of varying racial identities⁶. I selected these recordings as they are the clearest examples of interactional messaging, as opposed to chants, songs, sermons or prayers which often included multiple speakers and were not directed at individuals. However, the themes of choice, responsible fatherhood, strength, shame, and violence were present in spoken and written activist messages from a variety of protesters in N.C.; signs reading ‘real men love babies’ and ‘men regret lost fatherhood’ were shown at multiple clinics and written on billboards in N.C.

Methods and Fieldwork Context

I conducted the research for this project over the span of two years, totaling eighteen-months of fieldwork at two independent abortion clinics in N.C., which I am calling Abortion Care Clinic A and B. The clinics I studied are located in two cities in N.C⁷. The number of protesters varied by day at both clinics, with one to fifteen protesters present on weekdays and fifty to one-hundred protesters on Saturdays. Protesters were affiliated with a variety of different religious communities, prayer ministry groups, crisis pregnancy centers⁸, street preachers, and national pro-life organizations. Religious groups included church-affiliated activist groups of varying denominations, such as: Evangelical, Baptist, Church of God and Christ, Catholic, Non-Denominational, etc.

This larger research project includes interview data from patients, companions, clinic volunteer escorts, and clinic staff, a survey of affective responses to clinic protesters, participant observation data recorded as daily fieldnotes, online textual analysis of public pro-life websites and social media posts, and audio recordings of public protesting⁹. To conduct participant observation outside of abortion clinics, I volunteered for three months as a clinic escort and for three months as a legal observer the next year. As a volunteer escort in the summer of 2017, my role was to walk with people into the clinic, holding up an umbrella to shield them from the view of the protesters; I did this five days a week for three months, and wrote daily fieldnotes which included protest speech. As a clinic escort, I was not allowed to speak to or engage with the protesters.

As a legal observer in the summer of 2018, my role was to monitor violations by protesters of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act (1994)¹⁰, such as trespassing, blocking clinic entrances, harassment, use of amplified sound in violation of city noise ordinances, or property damage. I volunteered as a legal observer on Saturdays; this was the day clinics requested observers because of the greater number of protesters. In conjunction with my volunteer legal observer role, I audio recorded protest speech for linguistic analysis. I recorded audio on days with varying numbers of protesters, recording each morning from 8–11a.m., when protesters were outside of the clinic. I revised this strategy as I reached concept saturation, as many protesters would say the same things from week to week. I then only recorded speech when someone arrived, as this was when protesters directed speech at individuals.

In my role as legal observer, it was understood by both parties that I was there to keep a written, as well as visual record of happenings outside of the clinic – specifically if anyone was violating the FACE Act. This role was not completely without tension, as protesters were aware that I was there at the request of the clinic and considered me a supporter of the clinic. My role in no way stopped protesters from talking to me or sharing their views about abortion and what they were there to do, as protesters stated their intentions to reach not only women seeking abortions, but also companions, volunteers, and staff with their messages. During the time I was observing I was not allowed to engage with either the protesters or escorts, a rule which I (imperfectly) followed. Protesters were also very insistent that I ‘write down what they say too,’ and keep an accurate record of what happened outside of the clinic, to ‘tell the truth.’ I have attempted to live up to this charge in both my research as well as my capacity as a legal observer, recording violations by all parties present.

Protest speech is considered public speech, as it takes place on public property. Furthermore, audio and video recording are prevalent practices at abortion clinics that regularly experience protest activity. For clinics with volunteer escorts, who regularly walk outside of the clinic property boundary to direct people into the parking lot, both escorts and protesters often wear bodycams and carry their phones; they record interactions with each other and with people entering the clinic to document potential verbal or physical threats or harassment. Both protesters and escorts stated that this is for their safety, but these videos are also posted to social media to support activist messaging for both pro-choice and anti-abortion activists.

After the completion of my fieldwork, I transcribed the audio recordings of public protest speech and categorized them in NVivo¹¹, according to predominant themes that protesters used including kinship, religion, murder/death, gender, race. I then developed a subset of codes such as ‘men, masculinity, father(hood), fight, strong’ to compare speech across themes and analyze the content of this speech in connection with fieldnotes and interview narratives about experiences with protesters. This methodology enabled me to look at speech both as individual interactions and to analyze it within a larger social and political environment. A limitation of this research is that I did not interview protesters about their use of particular rhetorical strategies; although other scholars have interviewed protesters as part of research on the U.S. pro-life movement (Ginsburg, 1989; Maxwell, 2002; Munson, 2008). Additionally, this article contains limited analysis of the reactions of men to anti-abortion rhetoric, which is an important area for future research.

It’s a Man’s Choice

The following speech, recorded at Abortion Care Clinic A, shows how a man’s choice is constructed as intimately connected to a woman’s choice – the man’s choice to be a supportive partner can ultimately change a woman’s choice to have an abortion.

Fathers! Come talk to us. They say that 12% of women who have abortions die early. Who’s to say that your wife is not the one in that statistic? You brought your wife here. You’re supposed to protect her! Come out here fathers! I’m talking specifically to you! It’s not just a woman’s choice, it’s a man’s choice! You have the choice to support that child! You have the choice to take her and do the right thing! You have to give her what she needs!

One of the ways in which anti-abortion rhetoric framed the need for men to prevent women from having abortions was to reframe abortion from a woman’s reproductive issue to a man’s reproductive issue. The pro-choice political movement in the United States primarily uses rhetoric that frames abortion as a woman’s choice, with slogans such as ‘my body, my choice’ and ‘a woman’s right to choose,’ where the final decision to have an abortion does not include men, but is about women’s bodily autonomy (Andaya & Mistal, 2016). In recent years, the cooption of the language of choice has been increasingly used as a rhetorical strategy in anti-abortion direct-action. For example, a female, African American protester yelled the following at two men who had been in and out of the clinic that morning:

I’m so glad to see all these men out here! If you believe them [pro-choice people] they’ll say that men don’t have nothing to do with it. I beg to differ. It takes two. It takes two…If you’re a man and you’re on the inside, come out! Talk to one of these men! Talk to them - we will help you. If you are sitting in that waiting room and the woman is back there, text her. Tell her ‘Hey! Wait! Let’s talk to these people.’

The ways that men are constructed within this discourse both implicates men as a primary responsible party, as well as a primary reproductive decision-maker. While this construction of men as a primary reproductive decision-maker reifies tropes of patriarchal masculinity, with men having primary control over family composition, the suggestion that men need to be included in conversations about family planning reflects more contemporary social views of male responsibility in reproduction (Oudshoorn, 2004; Wentzell & Inhorn, 2014). By emphasizing men’s roles in abortion, protesters are drawing on these contemporary discourses about pregnancy ‘tak[ing] two’ to convince men that they have a larger role in the abortion decision.

Additionally, men’s choices are often directly linked to women’s choices in anti-abortion rhetoric. Protesters often highlight how women would be making another decision if the men involved in the pregnancy would ‘step up.’ For example, a male protester yelled at a man:

She chose to tell you. She chose not to have her friend bring her here today. She chose to let you handle this situation. She was waiting on you sir, to talk her out of it. She was waiting on you to put up a good argument. She was waiting on you to sound sincere. Don’t allow them to rip your family apart. Don’t allow them to separate you sir. Go back in and rescue your family. Go back in and be the hero. She’s waiting on you to be the hero.

Another male protester yelled at a man walking into the clinic, ‘Be bold sir. The men we talk to, they went inside and got their lady, and went home, and they’re doing well.’ On Saturdays, the clinic was often crowded, and many companions would wait outside in the car, particularly if they were watching children, on the phone, or smoking. Anti-abortion protesters would often attempt to talk to companions while they were waiting, sometimes utilizing caregiving relationships and affective connections of motherhood or fatherhood in their targeted discourses. One male, protester yelled at a man in his car:

Go back in and rescue your family. Don’t sit in the car because the heat got too hot for ya. I understand if it’s too hot in the kitchen you leave but understand that this is not a kitchen. This is a death camp.

Language constructing men as responsible for the abortion decision by anti-abortion protesters often use language around men being ‘heroes’ who can choose to ‘save’ or ‘rescue’ the pregnant woman, the baby, and the family from the evils of abortion. This idea of the man as the hero overemphasizes the male role in reproduction, as well as harkens back to language used to justify the illegalization of abortion by physicians who sought to save women from themselves (Luker 1984). It also draws on religious discourses about ‘saving’ souls from evil, through saving the body from the ‘sin’ of participating in abortion (Jantzen 1999). These discourses construct a hierarchical relationship between the pregnant woman, in a vulnerable position, who requires saving, and male companions, who must do the saving (Lowe & Page, 2020). This prescription of a path of masculine action in ‘saving’ the baby is suggested as a way to perform masculinity through action in the space of the abortion clinic, a place which has been thoroughly constructed as feminine through U.S pro-choice political rhetoric. Moreover, failures to ‘save the baby’ or ignoring the protesters, often elicits shifts in rhetoric about choice to focus on weakness, and failure masculinity of companions.

Strong Men = Strong Fathers

One morning, a male protester called to a man walking in: ‘Save your baby brother! Be a man! The most manly act that you can perform today is saving your own child.’ Here, masculinity is equated with responsible fatherhood. In Reich’s article on masculinist discourses on abortion, she notes that cultural meanings and expectations of fatherhood are intertwined, whereby responsible fatherhood relies heavily on ‘cultural expectations of competent masculinity as requiring men to be good providers’ (2008:13). In anti-abortion rhetoric, protesters often equate strength, manhood and fatherhood, in order to convince companions to engage in a dialogue with them and ultimately intervene in the abortion. Raewyn Connell’s work has highlighted the ways that masculinity is stratified, as hegemonic masculinity produces unequal relations both between men and women as well as between other men (1995, 2005); these conceptions of masculinity show the need to consider how masculinities are produced through interpersonal interactions, such as those between protesters and male companions (Carabí & Armengol, 2014; Connell, 2012). For example, one male protester yelled at a man waiting in the parking lot:

Father, be strong! Come out here and flex your muscles with us! Be a man! A man that cares for his family, a man that cares for his wife, a man that cares for his kids, a man that cares for himself! Come talk to us father! You! Come out! There are men out here supporting a woman’s choice, they are on the wrong side! The men out here on this side of the fence are strong! We’re mighty because we serve a great god! We serve a god who loves us! We serve a god who anoints us! We serve a god who empowers us! Come out here fathers! Come talk to us fathers!

This quote directly speaks to the hierarchies created by speech which in turn reinforce notions of hierarchies of masculinity in reproduction. The protester identifies the clinic property line as the boundary between strong and weak male behavior towards reproduction; the protesters are put forward as examples of strong men preventing the abortion of potential, future offspring, while men supporting access to abortion, exemplified here by the clinic volunteers and companions supporting abortion, are depicted as weak and emasculated. By equating masculine behavior with notions of the father as the family patriarch, who has primary authority in making decisions about the family composition, anti-abortion protesters draw on and reify cultural discourses of hegemonic masculinity.

While the anti-abortion protesters’ speech draws distinctions between types of masculine behavior, they also draw on discourses about affective and embodied relationships between the father and the fetus. This construction of the fetus as already part of a heteronormative family, created by the father, reifies cultural notions of men’s roles as reproducing the species through reproducing themselves (Reich 2008). For example, one protester yelled, ‘Come out sir. We can help you. That’s your seed, your own seed. That’s your heritage man. Don’t let her go!’ In the following quotation, the male, protester was attempting to talk to a man sitting in his car with a child.

Sir you’re a good father already, you’re a good uncle already, that won’t change. You already know what you are doing. You are already experienced parent. You’re an experienced person. You understand how to operate the little ones, one more won’t change anything. In fact, that one that you’re about to kill might be the very one that gives you your last cup of water.

In this example, anti-abortion protesters appeal to an already accepted fatherhood identity, as well as existing affective relationships with one’s children to create a comparison with a potential, future child. The desire to reproduce and extend one’s family is naturalized through anti-abortion speech as one inherent to masculinity and fatherhood. By drawing on these dominant cultural discourses of masculinity and fatherhood, protesters’ discourses may resonate with common cultural constructions of male personhood, invoking feelings of shame or inadequacy in men who already identify as fathers.

It is important to note that while protesters’ narratives on masculinity present rejecting abortion as an act of responsible fatherhood, they frequently utilized negative constructions of masculinity to make the same points. One protester yelled at a man sitting in his car, ‘Sir, I understand that you may be able to drink this problem away and forget about it. Why? Cause it’s an inconvenience [for you].’ Cultural tropes, like that of the drunk father, ‘use words to enact our affective responses’ (Fay, 1994), in this case potentially eliciting shame or anger from the man in the car. Protesters also used negative constructions of masculinity when addressing women accompanied by men. One male protester yelled at a woman and man walking in: “Yes, mother, you may be angry that your man got you pregnant. That young man is saying ‘Go and abort your child, I’ll love you forever.’ Not so. He’s going to leave you anyway.” Being an irresponsible father was frequently invoked by protesters to describe the actions of men who were sitting outside in their cars, rather than taking action and ‘stepping up’ to raise a family, by preventing abortion.

Furthermore, protesters’ narratives often comprised both negative and positive constructions of masculinity and fatherhood simultaneously. For example, cultural discourses on deadbeat fathers are explicitly connected to racial stereotypes about masculinity in America, with ideas of fathering children out of wedlock being an example of a negative cultural stereotype about Black fatherhood (hooks, 2004:97). While the cultural discourse on men as deadbeat fathers, including both having children outside of wedlock and not being able to provide for them, is one that is typically viewed as a negative stereotype (Bernard 1981), protesters’ narratives often include ways of redemption within the narrative. As one African American male protester shouted at an African American man standing outside:

My youngest brother has three children out of wedlock. He’s not married to any of his wives, of his mothers, but the oldest son today was dropped off today to college. You can’t tell me that God won’t make a way. The father stepped up to do his part. It is the will of God that every man takes his rightful place. It is the will of God that every man show himself a man. Be strong, be very courageous, get your baby off, save the baby!

By claiming these stereotypes can be overcome through a performance of responsible fatherhood, the protester simultaneously employs a negative, cultural stereotype towards the man he is addressing and encourages him to reject and defeat the stereotype by making another choice than abortion. In this way, preventing a pregnant partner’s abortion is a way of reclaiming masculinity and overcoming negative stereotypes about Black manhood and fatherhood.

These often contradictory messages about masculinity and stereotypes of male behavior highlight how protest speech is largely a gendered performance, designed to bring about social action while reinforcing gender ideologies on masculinity and fatherhood. Protesters leverage contradictory gender stereotypes simultaneously to convince men to prevent abortion. Men at abortion clinics might feel shame at being unable to live up to these cultural discourses on masculinity, which they are subject to both inside and outside of the space of the clinic. As male companions ignore or reject ideas about masculinity from protesters, they could be seen as performing the role of supportive male reproductive partner or as a responsible father, by choosing to care for their existing children with limited resources. While this might be one of the ways in which men at clinics see themselves, when confronted with negative cultural discourses on masculinity, weakness, and stereotypes of irresponsible fatherhood, men might still experience feelings of shame, annoyance, or anger in response to hearing discourses directed at them by strangers. In the following section, I address how these cultural discourses shape men’s participation in abortion experiences.

Fighting Words: Active Interactions

Black man - get up and get in the fight. You still have a fight left in you. It is not over for you. God’s blessing is tied to your actions today. Right now, he has his aim on you, and he sent men here just like you created in God’s image, to tell you that you can make it.

Calls to take action and prevent abortion at the clinic, like the one above, usually go unanswered, as most people ignore the protesters, or at most tell them to ‘shut up and leave me alone.’ Volunteer escorts attempt to prevent engagement with protesters, as these interactions have the potential for heightened conflict. While there were patients who said they had done things like ‘curse them out,’ or who otherwise engaged with the protesters, more often women mentioned that their companions confronted the protesters. This might be because patients were more focused on getting inside to get the procedure done, or that they are in a more sensitive position than their companions. Furthermore, the potential for violent conflict was cited by multiple volunteer escorts as a primary reason that they are outside. Escorts provide a barrier between protesters and people entering the clinic, and keep an eye on companions, who many escorts stated were more likely to engage with protesters. One escort told me that ‘[the protesters] don’t seem to realize that I’m out there for them too, because they piss people off, and they don’t know what kind of day someone is having.’

The ways in which companions attempt to perform supportive roles are also deeply influenced by cultural discourses on masculinity. Although most companions stated that their role was to support the person having an abortion, there was also a protective component to this role, which may or may not be gendered. Both male and female companions would mention how they attempted to protect the woman they accompanied from protesters saying things like ‘I shielded her’ and ‘I just didn’t want them to say anything to harm my friends’ feelings.’ This connects back to notions of ‘saving’ in a similar way to those in protesters’ proscriptions; while companions might not believe their role is to save women from having abortions, they might view their role as saving the woman they accompanied from the protesters.

In previous examples, I highlighted how some ways that protesters target male companions through speech are contradictory; they simultaneously utilized negative cultural stereotypes of men as deadbeat, irresponsible, and weak fathers and valorized men as strong, decisive actors, controlling the reproductive experience. All speech by protesters was meant to elicit a response, as if people responded then the protesters had at minimum made their message heard. As protesters attempted to convince companions to prevent abortion, protesters might also incite them to react in anger or violent confrontation. This connects to what legal reproductive justice advocates call ‘fighting words.’ Fighting words are ‘words which by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace’¹².

Protest speech that targets male companions through verbal attacks on their masculinity or calls for violent responses could be considered examples of fighting words. Examples of this include things like ‘You ain’t no real man. Real men don’t kill babies,’ ‘Come out here and flex your muscles with us,’ or ‘Go in and drag your wife out of that clinic.’ Sedgwick notes that phrases like these are designed to shame men, as they denote that there is something wrong with the way someone is performing their masculinity or more deeply, something is wrong with them as a person (1993:5). Such phrases may shame men into performing masculinity in various ways, such as recognizing the need to perform the suggested action (preventing abortion) or through violent reaction towards the protesters.

The ways that companions perform supportive masculinity through violent or aggressive confrontation with anti-abortion protesters, reflects the idea that masculinity itself might be toxic, rather than a specific type of masculinity being toxic, as masculinity becomes an unachievable gender expectation that attempts to control men’s behavior (de Boise, 2019). As men are verbally subjected to cultural discourses proscribing aggressive male behavior in preventing abortion, they may respond to these discourses in ways that reify these constructions of masculinity, such as through aggression or violence towards protesters.

At the clinic, anti-abortion speech sometimes prompted action from companions that was verbally or physically aggressive. For example, one day a male companion walked in after the woman he was accompanying while still screaming a series of profanities back at the protesters as he closed the door. The staff member at the front desk asked him if he was okay and he angrily replied, ‘they out there just trying to get fucked up.’ One morning, a companion with his hand in a cast told me in the waiting room, ‘I didn’t really understand or know anything about what was happening here, and I wasn’t prepared for the protesters. I told them that I was about to have two broken hands if they didn’t stop trying to talk to me.’ Another woman waiting for an ultrasound told me, “When we were driving in here, my man was like, ‘oh I hope they say something to me,’ and he was ready for a fight, and I was like, ‘you can’t be fighting people, that’s a good way to go to jail.’”

Though instances of physical violence are not common, they did happen. In one story of violent interaction between a male companion and male protester, escorts described to me how a shouting match escalated to the point where the companion punched the protester, who then tackled him. The clinic volunteers and protesters both called the police. Although no criminal charges were ultimately filed, some of the other protesters at the clinic expressed to escorts that this was a ‘save’ because the woman accompanied by this man was unable to have an abortion that day. This example of the potential violence that protest speech incites, shows the tangible impacts that protesters’ speech might have on various people’s experiences with abortion.

Discussion and Conclusion

This paper has explored the ways in which men are targeted through anti-abortion protest speech, in order to think about the consequences of male companions being subject to cultural discourses on weakness, masculinity and responsible fatherhood during the clinic encounter. While anti-abortion protest speech seeks to construct masculinity and responsible fatherhood as a rejection of abortion and taking primary responsibility for making the ‘right’ choice, male companions often reject this construction of masculinity either by ignoring protesters or reacting in angry or violent confrontation to protesters’ words. This second reaction can be seen as its own performance of masculinity, which simultaneously rejects and employs the gendered roles and responsibilities the protesters are valorizing, such as protecting or ‘saving’ women, or by showing strength and aggression against protesters. As such, attempts to reject protesters’ constructions of masculinity may both reinforce these gendered ideologies, while men challenge these patriarchal ideologies about men’s roles in reproduction and responsible fatherhood.

In other words, there is no consistency in the content of protesters’ discourse on masculinity, as appeals to masculinity contain contradictory constructions of masculinity. By mixing various constructions of masculinity, anti-abortion protesters attempt to create affective responses in male companions by drawing on cultural discourses on masculinity, fatherhood, and strength. The consequences of affective reactions to this kind of speech are difficult to discern. Attacks on the masculinity of the male companions may be internalized as feelings of shame or guilt at being unable to live up to cultural constructions of masculinity, especially if men walking into the clinic identify with some or all of the gendered constructions in the protester’s narratives. While the failure to perform any and all of these constructions of masculinity is seen conversely by pro-choice volunteers and clinic staff as being a supportive partner, and therefore a positive expression of masculinity, men might feel shame even if they believe they are doing the right thing in this situation. This shame might be felt for various and contradictory reasons, like being a passive participant in abortion, failure to perform the responsibilities of fatherhood, an inability to provide for their potential offspring, or the need to protect their partner.

In attempting to address abortion stigma, these cultural discourses on masculinity and men’s roles in abortion are important to thinking about how people internalize cultural stereotypes as stigma. While male companions may be spurred into angry or violent retaliation against the protesters, most do not engage with the protesters. Yet in interview and survey responses, many men expressed frustrations about not being able to do anything in response to the protesters, and most people remembered specific content that protesters had shouted at them, often weeks later. This indicates the importance of looking closely at what protesters are saying, as experiences with protesters are often the bulk of companions’ abortion clinic experience. While patients are having an abortion, companions might be sitting outside waiting, listening to protesters’ prolonged attempts to speak with them. The ways in which male companions respond to anti-abortion protesters can shape both the experiences of the women they are accompanying, as well as their own internal experiences. As social support has been found to be important in the abortion experience, the ways that men might be affected by negative cultural discourses on masculinity, fatherhood and men’s participation in abortion can influence the ways that they view themselves as able to provide support, as well as their role in reproductive decision-making.

Author Bio

Whitney Arey is a PhD candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Brown University. Her 18-month ethnographic study of abortion decision-making in North Carolina asks how interpersonal relationships impact the abortion experience within the politically contested abortion clinic space. She is currently a recipient of the Society for Family Planning Emerging Scholars Research Fellowship, and former recipient of the Brown Population Studies Training Center National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development T-32 Fellowship. She has presented this research at interdisciplinary forums at the American Anthropological Association Annual Conference, Albany Medical School Conference on Reproductive Ethics, Population Association of America Annual Conference. She is a current biannual contributor to Somatosphere, on how current issues are important topics for medical anthropological research.