Legendary reproductive justice activist advises women to start talking openly about abortion

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Byllye Y. Avery has fought for the health care needs of women for over three decades. She’s been a stalwart for reproductive health dating back to the 1970s when she co-founded the Gainesville Women’s Health Center and Birthplace, a midwifery birthing center in Gainesville, Florida.

In 1983 she founded the National Black Women’s Health Project, which today is known as the Black Women’s Health Imperative, the first nonprofit created by Black women focusing on the health and wellness of Black women. 

Avery received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for Social Contribution in 1989 and in 2002 she launched the Avery Institute for Social Change, focusing on health care reform.

She’s spent much of her 84 years on the planet devoted to reproductive justice and addressing the health needs of people who can become pregnant—particularly Black women.

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We spoke to Avery to get her thoughts about the current onslaught of policies attacking reproductive rights in states such as Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida—policies that severely impact women of color.

“It’s very sad to me. I can remember when Roe v. Wade was passed, and I remember Judy Levy, who was one of the women I founded the Gainesville Women’s Health Center and Birthplace with, said to me, ‘Byllye, we’re going to have to fight the rest of our lives to keep this right,’” Avery says. “I thought once the Supreme Court declared something that we had it forever. She said, ‘No, this can be taken away from us.’”

The truth is from the day Roe v. Wade passed in 1973 Republicans have been working to dismantle it.

Referring to the many appointments of conservative federal judges and most recently Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, Ralph Reed, the former leader of the Christian Coalition and a campaign adviser to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush told The Washington Post, “Evangelicals developed a strategy, stuck with it, and it paid off. … The significance of this moment for that constituency is that they bet on a long-term, historical, multi-decade transformation of the federal courts in a way that would no longer be hostile to their values.” 

Avery says it’s up to those who she calls the “bleeding women,” meaning anyone of reproductive age, to figure this one out—but warns that it might take another 30 years to unravel these state laws once they pass.

She says when she speaks to groups of women, she tells them to “get their heads out of the sand,” and “make a plan.”

“Don’t think you can’t just not talk to your daughters (or anyone who may get an abortion) about this, because women don’t like to talk about abortion. And part of my conviction, whenever I stand in front of them, I know that 50% of women have had abortions. So I just speak to the issue,” Avery says.

Avery says it’s not going to be enough to carry signs; people today need to come up with their “coat hanger” for this issue. Avery is talking about the coat hanger as a symbol of why abortion rights and access matter. Women often used coat hangers to self-induce an abortion before the passage of Roe v. Wade.

Avery’s idea is for pro-choice activists to begin to “politicize birth,” essentially forcing states to pay to “support a baby up through at least the 12th grade. That’s what I would do if I was a young person.”

What a novel idea. If states want to refuse to allow abortion, then those same states need to ensure that for example, free universal high-quality daycare is available through pre-K to anyone who wants or needs it. In fact, health care should be free universally to anyone who needs it, particularly from pregnancy through adulthood. Of course, education should also be free through college, and programs such as Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) that offer food subsidies, pediatric nutrition, and breastfeeding education to help families and children through age five, should also be free and universal.

“Texas has no know idea the kind of problem they’re creating. They have absolutely no idea of the numbers of unwanted children the state’s going to have to take care of,” Avery says.

The Good Fight is a series spotlighting progressive activists around the nation battling injustice in underserved and brutalized communities by a system that often overlooks them.