The #MeToo Case That Divided the Abortion-Rights Movement
On a 92-degree morning in September, three clinic escorts gathered in the meager shade of a tree outside the Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives. They arrive here at 8:30 a.m. on the dot, regular as clock-punchers, on the three days a week the Huntsville clinic is open to perform abortions. The women and girls arrive dressed for comfort in sweatpants and shower slides, carrying pillows from home or holding the hand of a partner or friend. The escorts, meanwhile, wear brightly colored vests and wield giant umbrellas to block the incoming patients from the sight, if not the sound, of the other group that comes here like clockwork: the protesters.
Sometimes there are as many as a dozen. This day there were four: one woman, three men, all white. Four doesn’t sound like that many until you’re downwind of them maniacally hollering: Mommy, don’t kill me! You’re lynching your black baby! They rip their arms and legs off! They suffer! They torture them!
But escorts are made of stern stuff. Josie, with her short snow-white ponytail and T-shirt spangled with buttons (fearless flawless feminist, abortion is normal), doesn’t get paid to defend, as she puts it, “these patients, these doctors, this staff.” Nevertheless, that’s her job. Among those Josie has sworn to protect is Willie Parker, an ob-gyn who has worked here for the past several years and who, until recently, was a hero of the reproductive-rights movement.
Last fall, while trying to defend Parker—not in this parking lot, but in the no-less-divisive wilds of Facebook message boards—Josie got dragged into a dispute that has shaken the reproductive-rights movement, from its uppermost reaches to its grassroots volunteers. One of Josie’s fellow escorts was called “trash” after she spoke up for Parker; others were told they didn’t deserve to be escorts. The people hurling the insults were not pro-lifers but fellow abortion-rights foot soldiers: How dare Josie—how dare anyone—not believe Candice?
On March 25, 2019, the activist Candice Russell posted a 3,300-word essay on the website Medium titled “To All the Women Whose Names I Don’t Know, About the Pain We Share, the Secrets We Keep, and the Silence That Shouldn’t Have Been Asked For.” In prose that was by turns confusing and moving, Russell wrote that after a year and a half of casual texting and a handful of face-to-face meetups, she and Parker had met for dinner in Dallas in October 2016. She got drunk, while he, she discovered partway through the evening, stuck to tonic water and lime. Then they went back to his hotel room, where she continued to drink, and they had sex.
Russell did not write that she’d told Parker she didn’t want to sleep with him, but she strongly implied that, having downed “four martinis and an entire bottle of wine,” she was inebriated beyond any practical ability to consent. And, in a sweeping accusation that extended far beyond what had happened between the two of them in that hotel room, she called him a “predator.” She’d gradually learned, she wrote, that the way he’d treated her was part of a pattern. Rumors about his behavior swirled in “whispers [that] had become so loud they were more like shouts”—and unnamed movement leaders were refusing to expose him.
Russell did not report Parker to the police, and unlike, say, the cases of Matt Lauer at NBC or even Al Franken in the Senate, a workplace investigation was never on the table: The activist and the doctor operated in the same sphere, but they weren’t colleagues. Instead, the case of Russell versus Parker has been battled out largely on message boards and in closed-door conversations within the insular, impassioned realm of abortion rights, among people, mostly women, for whom the cause of bodily autonomy was a calling long before the dawn of the #MeToo movement. Yet its tentacles stretch much further, bringing into the open generational and, to an extent, racial divisions in our rapidly shifting views on sexual assault—the kinds of questions and doubts that are typically expressed only in private. How does alcohol figure into culpability? What constitutes appropriate sexual behavior when one person has more power than the other? And perhaps most crucial, how absolute is the duty to believe women—the rallying cry of #MeToo?
That the saga of Candice Russell and Willie Parker is set in the abortion-rights world heightens the stakes, and not just for the two of them. Sooner rather than later, one of the recent spate of state laws prohibiting abortion after six weeks’ gestation may have its intended consequence: provoking a ruling by the right-leaning Supreme Court that could further erode, if not eliminate, the rights enshrined in . Within the reproductive-justice movement, talk of a post- America is not an but a —planning is well under way for how to help women in red states get abortions when the procedure is no longer federally protected. Indeed, with only one abortion clinic per state in six states, you could argue that many Americans are already living in a post- reality. All of which makes Russell’s allegation against Parker a potential chink in the armor of the movement itself—one that could, as an activist put it, “reify the narrative that ‘abortionists abuse women’ simply by providing abortions.”
