More chants at pro-choice protests, May 3–May 7, June 4, 2022
A general call went out for protests at courthouses at 5pm today, prompting protests in cities across the country. Posted below are a few chants I picked up over the next few days. These are in addition to the chants from May 2, the day the Supreme Court opinion on Roe v. Wade was leaked. (A further set of chants from near justices’ houses is here.)
The next few chants come from a 200-person @nycforabortion protest in support of abortion clinics on May 7. They are protesting against people at Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral who meet on the first Saturday of every month to march to a nearby Planned Parenthood clinic and harass patients as they enter. (For a sense of how traumatizing this harassment can be for patients, see Rebecca Lentjes’s articles here and here.)
The following month (June 4), the clinic defenders confronted heavy police presence, which they reported as favoring the anti-abortionists. The new chants I heard here were “Stop harassing patients” and “Safe abortion, safe abortion, my body, my choice,” the latter sung to the tune to the chorus of “Na Na, Hey Hey, Kiss Him Goodbye” (Steam, 1969). (They’re actually singing in Eb minor, but I’ve transcribed it in E minor for easier legibility.)
