Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP
Anti-abortion demonstrators protest outside Fiserv Forum on July 15, 2024, the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
At first, I was creeped out by the middle-aged woman holding a sign on a Milwaukee sidewalk last week that said “RNC LOVES BABY MURDER,” and the young man by her side holding one with Trump’s face under the words “BABY KILLER.” The man shouted in my general direction, “Name one abortion restriction Donald Trump supports. I’ll wait!”
They were from a group called Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising—anti-abortion absolutists of the left. In my line of work, it rarely pays to dismiss people as out-and-out loons. My first instinct with these folks, though, was to give them a wide berth. I thought of LaRouchies, or the self-anointed Maoist messiah Bob Avakian. Or was this some devious right-wing bank shot, aimed at discrediting the left? I had in mind to ask a few clarifying questions, then scoot.
The last thing I expected was that, within a half-hour, I’d come to profoundly respect them, and want to have them for friends. My conversation with them was the only interesting thing I absorbed at the Republican convention last week. And what I learned there may have the power to deliver Democrats the November election.
I WAS ALREADY IN A PRICKLY MOOD at the prospect of having to head back into the belly of the beast one last time, for Trump’s acceptance speech, so I started grilling the sidewalk progressives. I really acted like a jerk. First, I asked the young kid what he thought of Lina Khan’s work at the Federal Trade Commission.
“What do you mean?” he replied. Triumph!
I followed up: guaranteed minimum income?
“I’m for a guaranteed basic income, and I think Andrew Yang has done great work on this. I think his initial study did very well.”
OK. This was more interesting. I tried an open-ended question: What positions does he hold that don’t have to do with abortion?
“I’ll start with the fact that we have 7,000 cops in this city. Who are walking behind me right now. We saw them kill a man in this city.”
The man in question, Samuel Sharpe Jr., lived in a park with his dog a mile from the arena, and apparently became agitated when police from Columbus, Ohio, saw him holding a knife. They shouted at Sharpe to drop the weapon, and when he instead lunged at a passerby, they opened fire and killed him. It surely would not have happened had there been the local cops on that beat, who knew that Sharpe was harmless.
To keep my mind occupied at the RNC, I’d been reading shoulder patches, collecting law enforcement jurisdictions like Pokémons. By that point, I was up to 27, from McAllen, Texas, to “Conservation Warden.” (Collect ’em all!) So by now we were bonding. By the time we moved on to the subject of the Christian right, I felt like we were actually friends.
I said: “You’re lying down with fleas here. You don’t have good allies. They’re the worst people in the world.”
The kid replies: “They really are. It sucks. I hate it so much.”
The woman: “We’re literally in hell every day.”
Interested? You ain’t seen nothing yet. Remember two weeks ago when I shared with you evidence in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 of fissures within the Trump coalition that Democrats could exploit? Wait until you see what happens when pro-life Republicans are shamed with the fact that the political party they thought was their ride-or-die ally was actually selling them out.
THE FIRST THING YOU NEED TO ACCEPT if you want to have a productive conversation with Will Reynolds and Terrisa Bukovinac is that for them, it is simply axiomatic that embryos are people.
I ask if there should be funerals for them. Terrisa replied by sharing her pride at having “recovered the remains of 115 dead babies outside an all-term abortion center in Washington, D.C.” the week of the Dobbs decision. This was a very big deal among pro-life activists, almost as much to some as Dobbs itself. Five, they claim, were “slaughtered” in their third trimester. “Justice for the Five” is what pro-lifers are pursuing to honor their, um, memory. On Terrisa’s presidential campaign website, an “In Memoriam” page has their gruesome photographs.
Terrisa Bukovinac of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising
Ah, right. Terrisa’s presidential campaign. This is the part of the conversation where I earned their respect, and when I decided, paradoxically, that they are not nuts, but absolutely fascinating.
Terrisa nonchalantly mentioned that she ran against Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination, and I played along—again, snarkily—suggesting she might have a chance soon to replace him. She replied, “I’m not really running for president. I was running to get around censorship laws. As a federal candidate they cannot censor my ads, and as an anti-abortion activist I run explicit ads.”
“That’s what Ellen McCormack did in 1980,” I said.
“You know about Ellen McCormack! I’m following in her footsteps.”
Now we’re really friends. For them, it’s a gratitude beyond gratitude that someone is nerdy enough to swim in this shared pool of esoterica. For me, it’s my delight as a connoisseur of committed people, who live lives of radical authenticity and freedom, like the Catholic priests who stole draft cards from selective service offices with homemade napalm, and then patiently waited for the police to arrive to carry on their moral witness from prison.
The lives these two lead are very radical.
Three months earlier, Will, who is 18, was kicked out of the house by his evangelical parents for being gay. He wears a yarmulke and talis, a convert to Judaism living out his understanding of the Torah—though not a “messianic Jew,” he hastens to add, a distinction I don’t know what to make of, but because he is brilliant and eloquent and passionate, I would love to hear him explain some day, because I’m sure it would be interesting.
I ask Terrisa what she does for a living, but—this is it. This week, they’re sleeping on a concrete floor. Their group, Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, has 5,000 members, “maybe more.” There’s no sustainable donor base, and certainly not foundation support. It is activism with Margaret Mead’s faith: “Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world,” and all that.
I ask her about strategy. Waving a hand in the air for emphasis, oblivious for now that it holds a cappuccino-colored model of a 22-week-old fetus, she explains that she has two goals. First, “to grow the pro-life leftist movement, to get the pro-life leftists to be seen, and to stop being shamed into silence.” (She refers to the third of Democrats who in polls “already kind of identify as pro-life.”) Second, “to take direct action like I learned in the animal rights movement, where I got started.”
I could not agree with them less and will never agree with them. I state outright that I believe legal abortion is a profound step forward for human dignity and freedom and equality. I’m not a fan of “agree to disagree” conversations when it comes to things I consider basic human rights, which is where I would class legal abortion. I certainly can groove to thrill interviewing the most out-there right-wingers—but only behind a hard shell of emotional distance.
But this was different. I’ve never had a conversation quite like it.
First, maybe, because what they believe—embryos should be treated the same as actual people—is so radical that I can’t imagine it ever fully being achieved in practice. Therefore, I can let this go and just get on with being fascinated.
Second, I was able to say to them that I think what they believe is nuts, in a way I could never to a pro-life activist on the right, because I’ve come to respect them. I know they are thoughtful, non-neurotic, emotionally attuned people—not, as so often on the right, damaged people who latch onto right-wing ideology to deny the nuance and complexity and pain of the world and retreat into fantasies of prelapsarian innocence.
That, in fact, is what we talk about next. I tell Will about my work as a historian and journalist studying the right, and how I’ve taken great pains to figure out what the “pro-life” movement is ultimately all about. I start by saying that there’s an enormous amount of bad faith in the pro-life movement, and Will chimes in, “Of course there is.” I say that, the deeper I get, the more I understand that the abortion issue is really a useful tool to hasten the ultimate aim of right-wing politics: to preserve traditional hierarchies and ward off fear of complexity, nuance, and the inherently scary nature of modern life—he nods enthusiastically—“and not letting women be free to have sex.”
“I agree with you,” he says. “I absolutely agree with you.”
I bring up what I had considered to be a brilliant policy critique, expecting he would have no good answer to it: that the end of Roe has shown us that in the hothouse of an emergency room, you have to extend professional trust and respect to physicians and not legislate a line between “saving a baby’s life” and “killing a baby,” in a way the renders doctors terrified to practice medicine on pregnant people in the first place.
But Will agrees, and lays out a thoughtful analysis about how the mother’s life can sometimes trumps the fetus’s life as a sort of justifiable homicide. He says that thoughtful pro-life legislators can work through these trade-offs, like they do on any other vexing policy issue, and that the problem is “states in the Deep South—and I’m from Tennessee, so I know this kind of thing—who were not prepared for the overturning of Roe, so you have cattle farmers writing laws about abortion! And let’s be clear, that has led to the deaths of people … While I would say we need to ban abortion, there also needs to be robust protections for, like you said, professional responsibility …”
But those cattle farmers are the allies you’re stuck with now, I point out, and both of them sigh.
FINALLY, I ASK WHAT IT’S BEEN LIKE for them this week. And this is the part of the discussion relevant to every last Democrat in the country.
“This week …” Terrisa says, trailing off in a tone of anguish.
Will: “Oh. My. God.”
Terrisa: “This week has honestly been one of the most heartbreaking weeks for me as an activist.” She shares the story of the Republican conventioneer who literally assaulted her, and tried to wrestle her megaphone away.
I ask what made them so mad. At first, I presumed it was the presence of progressives on their turf, after hours of vitriol poured out about the diabolical enemy from the convention podium.
“No,” she replies. “I mean, that might be part of it, but the bulk of it, I’ve reflected”—and it dawns on me, and I finish her point:
“Oh! They don’t want the issue here.”
Her eyes light up at the shared recognition. “They don’t! And I think that it’s so much more comfortable knowing that they don’t have to talk about it. How many people in the GOP have been complicit in abortion decisions?”
I looked over at the blood-red words “BABY KILLER” emblazoned over Donald Trump’s grinning jackal face. It was an issue in the background of the RNC to which I really hadn’t been paying attention. An order had been sent forth, which was operationalized by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), “who used to be so great on the life issue, we’ve worked with her office so many times over the years,” Terrisa said. As the convention’s platform committee chairperson, Blackburn systematically shut down any attempt to put a single word concerning abortion in the party manifesto.
In other words, as Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising and your pro-abortion correspondent both agree, Republicans don’t care about unborn children anymore, now that it no longer serves their goal of engineering an authoritarian republic. “This was a politically expedient issue, the past 50 years, because it was so easy: All you’ve got to do is say, ‘I’m going to appoint Supreme Court justices.’ But this is the first election post-Roe. And what we know is these people are fucking cowards. They don’t actually have principles. Because if they did, they would preserve the platform that they had. And I’m not afraid to stand here and say it. I’ve told Mike Johnson, Kevin McCarthy, Matt Gaetz, to their face”—
“You’d expect Mike Johnson to be all in!”
“I know. They’ve sold out the only moral high ground they had at all.”
These fanatics, however, without skin in the Republican Party’s long game, have not.
“The hostility that I’ve experienced here from just holding up this fetal model and saying, ‘You know abortion is murder,’ and calling out the platform because it does not have protections for these babies: They don’t want to hear it. They want to shut you down.”
Any support from Republicans at all? “A couple have been”—then, with perfect timing, a clutch of victims, one in one of those Nancy Reagan red dresses, hoofs past and Will does his thing:
“ARE YOU ACTUALLY PRO-LIFE OR ARE YOU A FUCKING LIAR? … You have blood on your hands! Shame on you!”
“Oh, we agree with you, but we’re fighting on the inside,” they reply. Like they’re infiltrators in the Vichy government from the French Resistance, I think.
Will, fresh off the exhilaration of the confrontation, has the last word on that one: “They are definitely fascists.”
FASCIST OR NOT, REPUBLICANS UNQUESTIONABLY went far out on a limb, promising that they would redeem our alleged modern iniquity by ending Roe v. Wade. When it ended, they found themselves stuck in a dangerous place—dangerous because the promise was so cheap to make, but so damningly expensive once they had to put it into practice.
In the 1970s, I document in my book Reaganland, conservatives anguished by the shellacking of a Republican nominee in 1964 who ran explicitly on unpopular policies like crushing unions, decimating regulations, and redirecting the nation’s bounty from the working class to the deserving rich, came up with a strategy instead of delivering souls to the polls by organizing the discontents of culturally conservative folks around issues like homosexuality and “abortion on demand.” Sex, one of those New Right strategists summarized, was the “Achilles’ heel” of the Democratic Party.
Now it could be the Republicans’ Achilles’ heel, too.
It turns out Republicans like sex too. Or if they don’t much care for it themselves, they now find themselves forced to attract an electorate with a taste for it, who fear being forced into childbirth just because those cynics accidentally got what they wanted. More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones, as Truman Capote once reminded us.
These two activists sleeping on a concrete floor have scored a bank-shot accomplishment, it turns out. By actually believing that embryos are “babies,” they show the rest of us how vulnerable Republicans are to losing this fragile coalition—most especially Donald J. Trump.
Organizations whose conflicts and contradictions are papered over by mass devotion to a strongman, be they Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the societies sutured together as “Yugoslavia” by Josip Broz Tito, or Donald Trump’s Republican Party, prove staggeringly vulnerable once the strongman is removed. Maybe we can force this one’s vulnerability while the strongman is still in place.
Joe Biden’s most profound misstep in that infamous debate with Donald Trump wasn’t a slurred word or forgotten name, it was when he answered a softball question about abortion with a dribblingly incoherent sentence about his concern for a woman killed by an undocumented immigrant. For me, that was the final straw that suggested to me Biden was harmful to the cause of defeating Trump. Now, we will have as our candidate an effective spokeswoman on the issue. Her talking point, and ours, writes itself:
Were Republicans actually pro-life, or were they [expletive deleted] liars? Those of you who thought they meant it, now that there are two parties that aren’t fighting over abortion: Why not give the one that’s actually competent and cares about your future a shot?
It’s Project 2025 Summer here at The Infernal Triangle! I’m studying the whole thing for a series of columns. If you want to share your expertise on one of the federal departments the Heritage Foundation wants to weaponize or gut, contact me at infernaltriangle@prospect.org.
