OPINION | You Keep Saying 'Abortion on Demand.' I Don't Think You Know What It Means

by Megan Burbank

Last week, President Joe Biden got himself into a kerfuffle with reproductive rights activists when he expressed his true feelings on abortion. "I'm a practicing Catholic," he said at a meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris and Democratic governors. "I don't want abortion on demand, but I thought Roe v. Wade was right."

The response from abortion rights activists was swift and righteous, as many gently reminded the president that abortion is a broadly popular issue, and framing it with stigmatizing language is neither politically expedient nor kind to people who've had abortions. But one response left me furrowing my brow — and raised some real questions about how we understand abortion, even among people who ostensibly support it.

It came from Planned Parenthood Action Fund President Alexis McGill Johnson. "'Abortion on demand' is right-wing language that reinforces stigma and spreads misinformation. Abortion is health care. The only thing we demand is full equality. Full stop," she wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The finitude of those final two words gave me serious pause. Because while, yes, the phrase "abortion on demand" has been co-opted by right-wing activists, to me, it was familiar from something else: a rallying cry from the feminist activists who fought for abortion rights in the first place, and still employ the phrase, often as "free abortion on demand without apology."

It made me wonder how often politicians and activists across the political spectrum actually know what they're talking about when they talk about abortion, especially when they use charged language like "abortion on demand." When the language of reproductive justice is co-opted for regressive ends, do activists cede it? Or can it be reclaimed?

These are abstract questions, and I know how political messaging is made. You can't exactly sit around diagramming sentences and fretting over word choice when people's lives are being ruined by state-level public policy. But words do have meaning, and we need to be honest about where the ones we use come from.

Frankly, I've never been shocked by Biden's remarks on abortion. He is an 81-year-old Catholic who's never spoken particularly thoughtfully about it; I wouldn't expect him to start now. But Johnson's post was jarring because it echoed Biden's sentiment while seeming to critique it: Her statement didn't take issue with Biden's framing of abortion on demand as something shameful, but with his association of it with abortion rights activists. Her tweet suggested there's a right way to discuss abortion rights, and that it isn't advocating for "abortion on demand," when, in fact, advocating for abortion access that is equitable for everyone and available when needed is exactly that.

Whether you object to Biden's insinuation that abortion activists are fighting for abortion on demand, or Johnson's implication that doing so would be wrong, I don't think any of us should be surprised when centrist and even progressive lawmakers and activists don't know how to talk about abortion. They may not be regurgitating National Right to Life's talking points like their counterparts across the aisle, but the language Democrats revert to when pressed on this issue is often outmoded at best and stigmatizing at worst.

I know because I've heard a lot of it.

In the days after Roe v. Wade was overturned, I remember hearing progressive politicians — including the ones advocating for policies that meaningfully expanded access to abortion in Washington State — using outdated political language to talk about abortion. In indignant speeches, in otherwise-eloquent press releases, in earnest Q&As with constituents and journalists, safe, toothless phrases like "freedom of choice" played a starring role. Pronouns were typically gendered: People affected by anti-abortion laws were described as women. References were made to The Handmaid's Tale, which doesn't align with current thinking from intersectional feminist organizations like the Women's March.

This is the real problem, and it isn't "abortion on demand": For a long time, American politicians have not known how to talk about abortion, because for the most part, they didn't have to. In the decades following Roe, abortion was heavily stigmatized. Addressing it was seen as a political liability and a campaign killer even among pro-choice candidates. And while polling and election results show Americans support abortion rights, that wasn't broadly clear before the reversal of Roe v. Wade forced the issue. Now, we're seeing exactly how unprepared most leaders are when it comes to discussing abortion rights in any meaningful way — and how that lack of precision bleeds into progressive activism as well. Biden just happens to be the most visible part of this mess, but he's a symptom of how intractably abortion stigma has been woven into our political culture more broadly, by an opportunistic movement grappling for political power.

It's difficult to speak effectively and intelligently about something when you don't understand it well, when you're not versed in the issue, when you're part of a faith tradition that makes you feel complicated about it.

It's near impossible when you're not supposed to talk about it to begin with.

But however messy this may look right now — and it's quite a mess! — I do see open discussions of abortion at the highest levels of government as a sign of progress. Things are shifting. But if you're just beginning to care about abortion access now, it's important to acknowledge the history you stand on. And in the case of "abortion on demand," that history is complicated, and it doesn't just belong to Republicans.

As activist Renee Bracey Sherman explained on X in response to Johnson's post, calls for "abortion on demand" emerged from a political environment in the '60s and '70s, when abortion very much wasn't available to people who needed it, and "only 'therapeutic abortion' was allowed, meaning abortions needed a doctor's approval and a medical condition."

The idea of "abortion on demand" is deliberately tied to abortion access and the basic protections of Roe. It's not a particularly radical position to suggest that health care be available to people when they need it, and it's possible to express complexity around abortion without using language that bolsters conservative myths, or suggests that you oppose basic health care. If you claim to oppose "abortion on demand," you should at least know what it means.

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Featured image attributed to Steenaire under a Creative Commons 2.0 (CC BY 2.0) license.