Following the leak of a draft US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe vs Wade, the ruling that guaranteed the right to an abortion, many women looked to history for lessons in defiance. As the writer Lola Olufemi reminded us, feminist networks have always been there to help “the next person” who needs an abortion, and “we have never been passive in the face of states that want us dead”. She was damn right to do so. Resistance begins with mutual care, as the women I shared my own abortion with in 1988 taught me.
At the end of the day, we sat together in the dusty conservatory of a large Victorian house in south London, drinking sweet tea. Two women, around the same as age as me, told me they had come on the ferry from Ireland the day before, and shared a room in a bed and breakfast around the corner the night before. They didn’t know each other until they stepped on the boat. Along with an older woman in her 40s and a girl, probably not yet 18, we were the patients of the morning shift.
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