KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The threat to women's reproductive rights has never been more serious. So why, why, why are warriors in the crucial fight to preserve them giving even an ounce of effort to squabbles over personality conflicts and costumes?
This is no time for internal disputes like those that led to separate marches for reproductive rights being held just a few miles apart last week in Kansas City.
Nationally, too, there are heated differences of opinion over what one should and should not wear to a protest, or what kind of sign is OK. Isn't the whole point of choice that we can make our own decisions?
At the national level, Women's March leaders asked protesters not to show up with coat hangers, because that might reenforce right-wing talking points that abortions are dangerous. Don't wear the pink pussy hats that have been globally associated with the women's rights movement, because "many people severely impacted by these abortion bans do not have the pink body parts implied by the hats."
And no garb from "The Handmaid's Tale," they said. Because while some primarily white women see the costumes as characterizing the controlling of women's reproduction, some others, particularly women of color, say the Hulu show based on the Margaret Atwood novel failed to deal with race. In doing so, critics feel, it erases the fact that Black, poor, disabled and incarcerated women have never had reproductive freedom in this country.
In the end, the handmaid's army in Washington, D.C., left their costumes home. Good for them not letting the organizers exclude them.
But at the very moment that those working — lobbying for political support in the halls and chambers of state capitals, organizing rallies and spreading the message word of mouth and on social media — need to come together, these divisions are unfortunate.
There never should have been two rallies for the same cause on the same day in Kansas City.
Most of the hundreds who attended either one probably had no idea about division from previous conflict over past omission of Black women in the leadership of Kansas City's women's march organizing group.
Most of the people who came out last Saturday probably didn't know that the Reale Justice Network, a local Black-led grassroots group, and a local reproductive justice organization worked with Women's March, the national group, to organize the the Rally For Abortion Justice held on the Country Club Plaza.
They probably figured Planned Parenthood and a host of social justice organizations were involved, and were looking to be part of something that they are right to believe is bigger than themselves.
They most likely only cared to support efforts on every front to preserve their right to choose.
What's needed, and should have been presented last Saturday, is a focused united front. Women's rights advocates "are up for a fight," said Justice Gatson, one of the Plaza rally organizers.
In this critical moment, time wasted on tiffs with allies is just time wasted. "We are not fragmented in our purpose," Gaston said. OK, but separate rallies might give that impression. And it's just what those who opposed the effort would delight in seeing.
The Rev. Kelly Isola, who attended the rally at Kansas City's River Market because someone asked her to show up there later learned there were two. She was disappointed. "If we have a split, all it creates is confusion and does not get us where we need to be," she said. "I don't want to take sides. And to be honest, I didn't even know there were sides. We cannot expect people to come together with us when there is something under the carpet that people are tripping over."
