New York Is the First City To Fund Abortion Directly. Let's Make Sure It's Not the Last

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announcing the handshake agreement with City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, that will be ratified formally, to make New York City the first city in the country to fund abortion services for women needing financial support.

By Alicia Johnson. First published on Rewire.News

Last week, abortion access advocates in New York made history. When the ink dries on next year’s budget, New York will become the first city in the country to directly fund abortion by allocating $250,000 to the New York Abortion Access Fund (NYAAF), which supports anyone who is unable to pay fully for an abortion and is living in or traveling to New York state by providing financial assistance and connections to other resources. This funding will help ensure that every person is able to decide when and whether to become a parent regardless of their income, type of insurance, or citizenship status.

In the face of increasing attacks on abortion access throughout the country, New York City’s commitment to funding abortion sends a powerful message—one that activists in other cities and states can push for.

This is an essential step as we work toward ending the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for most abortions. And we know it won’t be the last: Advocates in progressive cities like ours can seize the opportunity to turn supporters into champions, to advocate for policymakers who talk the talk about abortion access to also walk the walk. Even in progressive states, people face barriers to abortion access. Some people have federal insurance coverage that does not cover abortion care (including members of the military, veterans, and other federal employees), cannot use their insurance for privacy or safety reasons, or cannot afford an abortion despite insurance coverage (such as due to a high deductible). For individuals with low incomes, additional expenses such as travel, unpaid time off work, and child care can push abortion care entirely out of reach, and/or force them to choose between basic necessities (like rent and food) and paying for an abortion. Due to systemic barriers in health care, this especially impacts individuals who are Black, Latinx, immigrants, refugees, or transgender/gender nonconforming.

Directly funding abortion care is a concrete action to support people who need abortions and an important statement that the cruel and unjust Hyde Amendment can no longer stand. As New York City Council Member Carlina Rivera tweeted after the funding was announced, “Before Roe v. Wade, NYC was a haven for women who wanted the freedom to choose. It’s time for our City to be that beacon for the country once again.”

We are celebrating this week thanks to a strong coalition of advocates working together to develop a grassroots and political strategy. NYAAF could not have accomplished this victory without the leadership of the National Institute for Reproductive Health (NIRH), the consistent vision and bold messaging of All* Above All, the grassroots mobilization of WHARR: Women’s Health and Reproductive Rights, and the contributions of many others committed to lifting barriers to abortion care.

The Fund Abortion NYC coalition first came together in fall 2018, led by NYAAF and NIRH, to develop a strategy to pursue City Council funding for abortion care. This campaign grew out of informal conversations with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene about the possibility of funding, which led to the decision to launch an official campaign. With our combined political savvy, grassroots power, communications strategy, and understanding of the abortion funding landscape, we created a powerful force that offered a concrete policy action for policymakers who had long supported abortion access with their words. We found a champion in Council Member Helen Rosenthal, who helped us navigate the City Council budget process. Through lobbying and grassroots mobilization, we laid the groundwork and got our message in front of as many City Council members and citywide elected officials as we could.

New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer at New York City Hall's rally to include abortion care funding in the city's 2020 budget. | Susan Watts/Office of New York City Comptroller Image via City & State New York.

The Fund Abortion NYC coalition built a powerful infrastructure. So when six-week abortion bans in Ohio, Mississippi, and Georgia and a near-total ban on abortion in Alabama galvanized New York policymakers to protect access to local care, we were well poised to connect them to direct action. We are especially grateful to City Comptroller Scott Stringer and Council Members Carlina Rivera and Margaret Chin, the co-chairs of the NYC Council Women’s Caucus, who made abortion funding one of their top priorities in the city budget. NYAAF and the Fund Abortion NYC coalition spoke at rallies, recruited new supporters, circulated a petition with thousands of signers, spoke with the press, and mobilized our base to make calls and send emails to council members.

In the end, the New York City Council was willing to help make abortion a reality for all of us, not just some of us. New York City’s fiscal year 2020 budget will include $250,000 for the New York Abortion Access Fund to support people facing financial and logistical barriers to abortion care.

Politicians and advocates across the country should look to local abortion funds and abortion access advocates to guide the way and identify ways to fund abortion in their own cities and states. We hope New York is just the beginning, and we invite organizers to look to organizations like All* Above All for a justice-oriented vision to repeal Hyde, and the National Institute for Reproductive Health for proactive local policy models.

The momentum to repeal Hyde goes beyond direct abortion funding: In the same week that New York made history by funding abortion, Maine also became the latest state to stand up to the Hyde Amendment by passing a law that requires both public and private insurance that covers prenatal care to also cover abortion care.

Let’s keep up the momentum. Our collective power can shift resources and culture, and create greater access to abortion care.

Many Americans Viewed New York Harbor's Lady Liberty as a False Idol of Broken Promises

A message tacked to the Statue of Liberty after the September 11, 2019 terrorist attack. via

By Angela Serratore. First published on Smithsonian.com as ‘The Americans Who Saw Lady Liberty as a False Idol of Broken Promises’.

It was a crisp, clear fall day in New York City, and like many others, Lillie Devereaux Blake was eager to see the great French statue, donated by that country’s government to the United States as a token of friendship and a monument to liberty, finally unveiled. President Grover Cleveland was on Bedloe’s Island (since renamed Liberty Island), standing at the base of the statue, ready to give a speech. Designed in France, the statue had been shipped to New York in the spring of 1885, and now, in October 1886, it was finally assembled atop its pedestal.

“Presently the veil was withdrawn from her beautiful calm face,” wrote Blake of the day’s events, “and the air was rent with salvos of artillery fired to hail the new goddess; the earth and the sea trembled with the mighty concussions, and steam-whistles mingled their shrill shrieks with the shouts of the multitude—all this done by men in honor of a woman.”

Blake wasn’t watching from the island itself, though—in fact, only two women had been invited to the statue that day. Blake and other members of the New York State Women’s Suffrage Association, at that point New York’s leading women’s suffrage organization, had chartered their own boat in protest of the exclusion of women not just from the statue’s unveiling, but from the idea of liberty itself.

Blake’s protest is one of several highlighted at the new Statue of Liberty Museum, which opened earlier this month on Liberty Island. While the statue’s pedestal did at one point hold a small museum, the new space’s increased square footage allowed historians and exhibit designers to expand the story of Lady Liberty, her champions and her dissenters.

“In certain people's retelling of the statue and certain ways it gets told, it often seems like there's a singular notion, whether it's the statue as a symbol of America or the statue as the New York icon or the statue as the beacon of immigration,” says Nick Hubbard, an exhibition designer with ESI Designs, the firm responsible for the staging of the new museum. But as the newspaper clippings, broadsheets, and images in the space themselves explain, the statue—and what it symbolized—wasn’t universally beloved, and to many, it was less a beacon of hope than an outright slap in the face.

This map appeared in the magazine Puck during the Empire State Campaign, a hard-fought referendum on a suffrage amendment to the New York State constitution—the referendum failed in 1915.

The French bequeathed the statue itself as a gift, but it was up to the people of America to supply it with a pedestal. After both the state of New York and the federal government declined to fund the project, New York World publisher Joseph Pulitzer announced he would use his paper to raise $100,000 (more than $2 million in today’s currency) for the pedestal. The proposition was straightforward: Mail in a donation, get your name printed in the paper. Stories abounded of small children and elderly women sending in their allowances and their spare change, and the heartwarming tales of common folk supporting the grand project captured the front pages of Pulitzer’s paper and the imagination of the country, largely cementing the idea that the Statue of Liberty was, from the beginning, universally beloved by Americans.

Immediately, though, cracks emerged in this façade. Blake and the nearly 200 other women who sailed to Bedloe’s Island issued a proclamation: “In erecting a Statue of Liberty embodied as a woman in a land where no woman has political liberty, men have shown a delightful inconsistency which excites the wonder and admiration of the opposite sex,” they pointed out. President Cleveland, during his speech, took no notice of the women floating directly below him, Blake brandishing a placard bearing the statement “American women have no liberty.” Suffragists around the country, however, noticed, and the statue for them became both a symbol of all they didn’t yet have and a rallying point for demanding it. In later decades, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton visited the statue, and after a 1915 measure to give women the right to vote in New York failed at the ballot box, a group of suffragists used a 1916 visit by Woodrow Wilson to drop thousands of ‘Votes For Women!’ leaflets at the statue via biplane.

The statue’s unveiling dominated headlines for weeks before and after the official date, and the ‘Cleveland Gazette’, an African-American-run newspaper with a circulation of 5,000, was no exception. On November 27, 1886, a month after the statue opened to the public, their front page ran an editorial titled “Postponing Bartholdi's statue until there is liberty for colored as well.”

“Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean,” the Gazette argued, “until the ‘liberty’ of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man in the South to earn a respectable living for himself and family, without being ku-kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed. The idea of the ‘liberty’ of this country ‘enlightening the world,’ or even Patagonia, is ridiculous in the extreme.”

Hubbard says including a section of the Gazette editorial in the exhibit was crucial to communicating that the Statue of Liberty posed—and still poses—an ongoing series of questions about American values. “We really had to set up the idea that the statue is sort of a promise, it represents and is a symbol of basic American and foundational American ideas,” he says. “It sets up that promise but then even from the beginning there are people who say, ‘But wait, that promise is not necessarily fulfilled.’”

A Liberty bond (or liberty loan) was a war bond that was sold in the United States to support the allied cause in World War I. Subscribing to the bonds became a symbol of patriotic duty in the United States and introduced the idea of financial securities to many citizens for the first time. The Act of Congress which authorized the Liberty Bonds is still used today as the authority under which all U.S. Treasury bonds are issued. via Wiki Reader

While the Statue of Liberty has, for most of its time in New York’s harbor, been framed as a symbol of immigration in America, at the time of its assembly, the country was just beginning to formally limit the number of people who could immigrate each year. In 1882, the federal government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first large-scale immigration law and one that explicitly made the case for prioritizing—and restricting—immigrants based on race. Chinese-American writer Saum Song Bo responded to the Pulitzer solicitations of funds for the statue’s pedestal by sending a letter to the New York Sun:

“I consider it as an insult to us Chinese to call on us to contribute toward building in this land a pedestal for a statue of Liberty,” Bo wrote. “That statue represents Liberty holding a torch which lights the passage of those of all nations who come into this country. But are the Chinese allowed to come? As for the Chinese who are here, are they allowed to enjoy liberty as men of all other nationalities enjoy it? Are they allowed to go about everywhere free from the insults, abuse, assaults, wrongs and injuries form which men of other nationalities are free?”

It’s this idea that “liberty” is far from a fixed word with a fixed meaning that lies at the heart of the Statue of Liberty Museum’s experience. “When the designers were thinking of the statue, of course how people interpreted liberty and what it meant was already very complicated and contested,” says Hubbard. Incorporating those perspectives in the exhibit allows the space to make the point that now, more than 100 years after the Statue of Liberty’s torch first alighted, Lady Liberty still stands over New York harbor as a symbol of where the nation has come and how far it still has to go.