For feminist historian, critic, poet, and UC Berkeley lecturer Angela Hume (College Writing Programs), researching radical abortion activism in the Bay Area began unusually — with poetry. What started as an interest in what Hume called “lyric interiority”— or the ways in which queer feminist poets such as Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, and Judy Grahn wrote about the “insides of bodies” — eventually became a full-scale investigation into the Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Center and the wider network of abortion self-help movements in the Bay Area. Hume’s shift in research topic was spurred by the discovery of Pat Parker’s involvement with the Oakland Women’s Health Center, where Parker worked from 1978–1987. As Hume further pursued this thread on Parker, she began to unearth a whole network of Bay Area abortion activists involved with the Oakland Women’s Choice Clinic, and in the process discovered a newfound love for “telling [their] life stories,” as she described it. This decade-long research project culminated in the recently-released book Deep Care: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open (AK Press, 2023).

On February 28, 2024, at UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities, Angela Hume was joined by Patrice Douglass (Gender and Women’s Studies) for a conversation about Deep Care. In her introduction, Hume laid out three “story threads,” or topics of discussion, that structured her book and the book chat itself: (1) the people who ran the Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Clinic, and the radical change that arose from their efforts; (2) the Bay Area’s underground gynecology and abortion self-help movement; and (3) the rise of the Bay Area Abortion Defenders in resisting right-wing attacks on abortion clinics during the 90s. Guided by a brilliant set of questions from Douglass, Hume weaved together these three story threads to paint a vivid and compelling history grounded in community activism and resistance. Spearheaded by queer, working class, feminist activists of color, the movement unified many in a collective struggle against capitalist and white nationalist forces.

One of the most exciting areas of Hume’s research is her work on the radically unique underground gynecology and abortion self-help movement in the Bay Area, which saw laypeople, or unlicensed community members, administering successful abortions, pelvic exams, and other forms of reproductive healthcare. They were able to do this by receiving training from licensed medical professionals. The movement emphasized a “democratization” of knowledge, whereby institutionalized clinics passed knowledge and best practices into the hands of community members.

Hume pointed out that a very specific set of conditions led to the birth of Oakland’s Women’s Choice Clinic and the greater reproductive self-help movement. The clinic came from a long line of community-centered health practices, which started with the “neighborhood healthcare model.” This model emerged as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty initiative. By combining local resources with federal funding, small neighborhood health centers were built to aid underserved, impoverished communities, creating a model that would later be adopted by the Black Panther Party and eventually the Women’s Choice Clinic.

The clinic owed much of its conception to the Black Panther Party, which was formed in Oakland six years earlier, in 1966. While the Black Panther Party never established distinct reproductive health centers, the party set up numerous free medical clinics that helped community members defend themselves against structural medical malpractice and injustices by administering what Hume called “self-health survival programming.” This programming involved training laypeople to care for community members suffering from medical issues tied to racial inequality, including “malnutrition, sickle cell anemia, and coercive sterilization.” It is important to note, Hume emphasized, that the Black Panther Party owed much of its stance on reproductive justice to Black feminist activists like Tony Cade and Francis Beale, who wrote ardently about the importance of abortion and reproductive healthcare access for Black women.

By putting medical knowledge into the hands of the community, the Women’s Choice Clinic and other neighborhood healthcare centers set a precedent for teaching medical procedures and practices to community members. These efforts aimed to help those whom the state healthcare system was failing, whether because of barriers to access or distrust of medical institutions that had historically neglected or perpetrated harm against marginalized patients. As Douglass, who studies the racial dynamics of abortion law, stated in the closing section of the book chat, the self-help movement and clinic model were both essential because they were responses to historical moments in time when the law continued to “fail and fail people.” As Hume stated, even after Roe v. Wade made abortion a constitutional right in 1973, self-care practices and community abortion clinics continued to proliferate.

What made Oakland’s Women’s Choice Clinic and the broader reproductive self-help movement in the Bay Area so radical was that it epitomized what Hume called “institutionalization in the name of deinstitutionalization.” The movement was a sustained and carefully enacted effort to “institutionalize feminist knowledge” through a licensed business, like the clinic, while simultaneously “deinstitutionalizing and democratizing access” to reproductive care by using the clinic to train laypeople in self-help medical procedures. As Hume emphasized, the clinic collaborated with community members to transfer institutionalized knowledge about gynecology and abortion. This radical practice resulted in the Women’s Choice Clinic receiving criticism from neighboring health centers that did not always agree with their methods. By teaching and allowing unlicensed community members to administer procedures such as abortions and pelvic exams, the Women’s Choice Clinic was able to serve individuals abandoned by state healthcare — in particular, women of color whose reproductive rights were uniquely impacted by laws such as the Hyde Amendment. But beyond that, the clinic helped reimagine what reproductive healthcare could look like. The clinic revealed that reproductive healthcare could be just as effective in the hands of the people as it was in the hands of the state — and more effective for those whom the state had failed.

As Douglass noted during the conversation, the Oakland Women’s Choice Clinic not only revolutionized community-centered reproductive care, but also unified people and groups from all walks of life. As Hume described, the clinic itself was founded primarily by working-class women, some white and some women of color, and mostly all parents. As the landscape around the clinic became increasingly hostile due to the rise of right-wing, anti-abortion groups in the 1980s and 90s, the clinic was supported, according to Hume, by “the Bay Area Coalition for Reproductive Rights, Socialist Feminist Radical Women, Women Against Imperialism, Roots Against War, and a variety of independent queer, anti-fascist organizers and trade unionists.” The birth of the clinic was also tied to the Gay Women’s Liberation movement, and it was affected by what Hume referred to as Judy Grahn's concept of “households,” or spaces where queer women could “be together, be out, and teach skills to each other.” The Oakland Women’s Choice Clinic was actually the first in the country to set up a sperm bank for single women and lesbians and also pioneered the practice of donor-identification release.

After the book chat, Townsend Center executive director Rebecca Egger and program manager Michaela Byrne both noted that the audience in attendance was one of the most student-centered they’d seen in some time. This is no doubt partly related to the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade by the US Supreme Court in 2022, which made abortion no longer a constitutional right and has resulted in an uptick of anti-abortion laws and restrictions throughout the nation. These anti-abortion laws have gone hand in hand with violent attacks on gender-affirming care in many states. As people’s right to bodily sovereignty and autonomy becomes ever more precarious and access to life-saving medical care becomes increasingly inaccessible, Hume’s research has never been more urgent and needed. The diversity and liveliness of attendees at her book chat showed just how much her research resonates with people. In light of the current reality, it is essential to turn to Deep Care and learn from the activists who responded to the same oppressive conditions we are facing today. In witnessing their radical reimagination of reproductive healthcare, we can find a glimpse of hope and a way forward.