[Photo (c) Terrisa Bukovinac]

We had the pleasure of interviewing pro-life activist Terrisa Bukovinac back in September 2020, when she was executive director of Pro-Life San Francisco. Since then, Terrisa has founded Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU) and made headlines with non-violent direct action. This post was originally published in two parts, on 29 November and 6 December 2020.

If you are feeling weary or dispirited about the future of the pro-life movement, you would do well to interview Terrisa Bukovinac, founder and executive director of Pro-Life San Francisco. If you didn’t have fire in your belly before the interview I guarantee that you will by the end of it. Terrisa is what many consider an ‘atypical’ pro-lifer: she’s an atheist, a member of the US Democratic Party and firmly left-liberal in outlook. Some of what Terrisa proposes is quite different from our way of approaching things. We think it’s good to have our own views challenged, and Terrisa did so in a very thought-provoking way when I spoke with her on Zoom recently. I began by asking her how she got involved in pro-life activism. 

Terrisa describes her younger self as ‘basically a pro-choice youth’. She was also religious, believing in an afterlife and divine justice. A friend challenged her on the issue of abortion. ‘I always had a sensitivity to animals and he would be like, “How can you care about the dolphins if you don’t care about unborn children being killed in the womb?” and I thought […] what unborn children? It’s just a clump of cells. I had debated abortion before in high school but I’m not sure that I ever allowed myself to think about it in those terms, that it could be viewed as violence against another creature. It really caused me to kind of rethink the morality of it’. 

In spite of this, Terrisa remained pro-choice. She was also still religious – a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. And then she wasn’t religious, and she found that she was no longer pro-choice either. She explains: ‘it was really losing my faith […] losing that idea of a life after death and divine justice, that made me rethink the abortion issue, like what is my life, what is the meaning of my life, what gives our lives value, what is a good justification for killing someone, all these kinds of moral questions that you have when you no longer have a faith answer, when you have to figure it out. And the conclusion that I came to was that there is no real objective distinction morally between a human being and a person and that, you know, preborn human beings are in fact human beings, that’s not something that is really contestable’. But she kept her convictions to herself for ‘many years’, given the social stigma of being pro-life, ‘especially as a liberal and as an atheist’. Until she discovered the organisation Secular Pro-Life, and other non-religious pro-lifers. ‘And I thought, oh, this is a thing, this makes sense to other people, and then I was exposed at that point to way more of the arguments involved in the pro-life/pro-choice debate’. She credits her atheism with her getting involved in political activism. ‘I felt marginalised as a secular person, especially in America. There were some states then – it might be different now – where you couldn’t even hold public office as an atheist […] and that kind of discrimination really made me feel more political than I had ever felt before, like the need to give myself a voice in the political sphere and secular people in general’. Terrisa’s animal rights activism also encouraged pro-life advocacy. ‘Because of my work in the animal rights movement, because I knew that on-the-ground activism is so crucial, I thought, OK, now is the time to take what I know in the pro-life world and what I know in the animal rights community and try to merge the two and do something about it’. Pro-Life San Francisco was launched in October 2016. ‘I intended us initially to just be a small group […] but immediately it was this hot button issue, and all of a sudden Refinery29 is calling me and lots of other major media wanting the perspective of a pro-life liberal, so that’s put us all in the spotlight, and forced me to consider what it’s really going to take to address this issue, not just having a club of thinkers but a club of doers that can not just do something in my community but can set an example for the rest of the movement and for our nation’. 

Ireland has several different pro-life organisations, each with its own outlook and approach. I ask Terrisa if she has any advice on how different groups can work together on the issue of abortion. She begins by commiserating with me on the 2018 referendum result (she worked for a while in Dublin with the Love Both campaign). ‘In Ireland […] the differences [between the different pro-life organisations] seemed, at least from an outsider, much more marginal’, in contrast to the US, where ‘you have separate political parties and totally separate ideologies trying to work together, and hopefully it will be like that in Ireland if it isn’t already, because that is the sign of the strength of any social justice movement’. The importance of working together is something Terrisa brings up repeatedly. ‘If we allow those differences to come between us and being able to effectively work on the goal, then that is detrimental to everyone’. She also notes that being involved in other social justice movements can help build skills which transfer to pro-life activism. The conversation briefly touches on the issue of racial justice, something which Terrisa actively supports. She says that there is pressure to cut off pro-lifers who don’t openly support racial justice, but she emphasises the importance of working together with people, even if you profoundly disagree with them on other issues. She’s blunt about this. ‘We have to be able to set aside the other issue. If we make it all-encompassing we are delaying victory in either one of those causes, so in order to work on racial justice issues I have to work with people who I think literally kill babies and in order to work on pro-life issues I have to work with people who are literally racist’. Publicly demonstrating pro-life unity is vital in Terrisa’s view. ‘Somebody has to go in and tell the narrative that even though we’re different, we’re the same. And that has to be done through social media, through letters, through showing people […] that that kind of unity is taking place’. 

Irish pro-life organisations are mainly made up of people who belong to certain religious groups or who share certain religious views. I ask Terrisa how such organisations can be inclusive of non-religious pro-lifers. ‘Well they need to say it explicitly. They need to say, we are open to secular people, atheists, agnostics’ – not just the well-worn phrase, ‘people of all faiths and none’, although she thinks that’s a good starting point. ‘The Christian pro-life movement can be very, very hostile to non-traditional pro-life types’, she continues. ‘And I just want to illustrate that by saying, imagine yourself or a religious person, a religious pro-lifer, but they exist in a world where the pro-life movement is all atheist, and every time they go to an event, people are like, “Hmm, we’re hoping that you’ll leave the Church any day now and we can’t wait for you to come over to our side, we know you’ll ditch that religion eventually”, and then there’s tons of speeches that are like, waving the LGBT flag, and “Let’s everybody stand up and pledge allegiance to science and reason outside of faith”.’ She acknowledges that it is difficult for people ‘within that faith bubble’ to see it as anything other than loving and accepting, ‘but that’s not what it looks or feels like to a person who’s not religious’. She points out that most non-religious people came to be so ‘from being formerly religious, and generally through a pretty painful deconversion process’. She thinks that there is ‘a total lack of understanding there and the only way to remedy that is to bring secular people or left-leaning people or pro-LGBT people or those types of people into the movement, like to say, “Hey, I know that you might feel a little uncomfortable here but I want to make sure that you do feel comfortable here, so just tell me everything you need”.’ That, and letting the ‘atypical’ pro-lifers take leadership of the pro-life movement, because ‘magnifying their voices is what is going to diversify our movement’

It has been suggested that young adults in the US tend to be more pro-life than their parents’ generation, while also more secular and socially liberal. If this is so, how is the secular pro-life movement is interacting with this demographic change. ‘Well’, she replies, ‘we like to think in a lot of ways that Secular Pro-Life is leading the demographic change, at least on the life issue’. When she first got involved with the pro-life movement there were six million non-religious pro-lifers in the US; ‘now we’re looking at at least twelve million’. She ascribes this change to a number of things, including increased secularism, increased visibility on the part of pro-lifers, advances in ultrasound technology and an ‘increase in understanding of basic science’. The biggest problem in the US context, as Terrisa sees it, is ‘the alignment of the abortion industry with liberal, progressive values. And what we see is that the abortion industry – NARAL, Planned Parenthood – their advertising and their promotion almost completely revolves around other left-leaning issues that we know young people care deeply about, that the Republicans […] are just not able to address in any meaningful way’. However, polling indicates that late-term abortion is a significant concern for many millennials. ‘The point is, we have to give them a voice here. There’s almost no real outlet for that position if we’re not building a movement and we’re not showing people like me, like Herb [Geraghty], and projecting that through social media and […] doing whatever we can to get that message out there, then people like us will continue voting Left and just allowing this abortion extremism to not just happen in the US but then to emanate across the world, because when it happens here it happens everywhere’. 

Terrisa is an active member of Democrats for Life of America, and I’m keen to ask her more about the situation facing pro-life Democrats, considering that their party’s presidential and vice-presidential nominees – Joe Biden and Kamala Harris – are extremely pro-choice. As ever, Terrisa is an optimist. ‘The situation in the Democratic Party is the worst it’s ever been on abortion, but that does present an opportunity for us. Kamala Harris is super pro-abortion. She’s been supported by NARAL and Planned Parenthood since her very early days. She’s been instrumental in passing pro-choice legislation in California’. Harris was also responsible for the illegal raid on the home of pro-life journalist David Daleiden. In 2015, Daleiden released undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood employees discussing the sale of foetal remains. Immediately after the videos were released, Harris met with Planned Parenthood executives. A few days later, Daleiden’s home was raided (illegally, according to Terrisa) and his content seized. The criminal case brought against Daleiden for illegally recording the videos (Terrisa maintains that he was ‘fully within his rights’) is ongoing. In contrast to Kamala Harris, Joe Biden has changed his stance on the abortion issue over time, going from being ‘historically pretty pro-life’ to ‘personally pro-life and politically pro-choice’ to now supporting full, taxpayer-funded abortion, apparently without term limits. On 20 September, the day before our interview, Democrats for Life of America took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, calling on their party to moderate its position on abortion. Terrisa and her fellow pro-life Democrats believe that while their party’s position is so extreme, they will ‘continue to lose elections to Republicans and to cede large swathes of the south and red states to the Republican Party’, preventing them from advancing such issues as racial justice, police reform, climate change and LGBT rights. But Terrisa is optimistic about the future of Democrats for Life: ‘you look at Republicans for Choice, they’ve just dissolved […] That organisation has no future’. Democrats for Life, on the other hand, has had ‘unprecedented growth this year, and I think that that shows that not only do we have a future, we have a winning future’. 

Were there better Democratic candidates available from a pro-life point of view? 

‘Well, Tulsi Gabbard was one of the candidates in the primaries and she took a position against third-trimester abortion, and I believe taxpayer-funded abortion, and that is pretty progressive considering the other choices that we had, but she was automatically labelled as a conservative basically, Trojan horse of the Democratic Party. Hopefully she still has a very bright future in politics and will come even more to the pro-life side over time and leverage that as an opportunity’. However, in the 2019 and 2020 primaries, ‘we didn’t see any particular candidate that we could get behind. We’re hopeful for John Bel Edwards [Democratic governor of Louisiana] and he hopefully might make a run in 2024, but we think right now it’s a matter of building a bench from a more city council, local and state positions. Those are the positions that we’re going to need to develop into those house, senate and presidential roles’. Terrisa feels that pro-life Democrats spent far too long ‘playing nice’ with their party, but that ‘all those nice conversations, dug us this horrible hole of abortion extremism’. She illustrates this by pointing out that the US is ‘one of the only countries in the world that allows abortion up until birth for any reason’. She tells me that the University of California, San Francisco supplies ‘late-term, viable human foetuses’ to ‘several projects’ on a monthly basis. ‘In order to do the abortions for research they can’t use foeticides because it compromises the foetal tissue for research, so all of those abortions are done, either live dismemberments or born-alive labour inductions, and then I guess killed through dissection or whatever, we don’t know’. Getting accurate information about these practices is a challenge. ‘There’s so much we don’t know because this is allowed to happen, and it happens by the tens of thousands every year in our country’. (See here for more information.)

This is the level of extremism that the Democratic Party currently supports. Terrisa points out that ‘the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act was blocked by Democrats eighty times in 2019 alone’. I’m reminded of all the Irish TDs who voted against an amendment which would ensure pain relief for babies being aborted. ‘Playing nice with the abortion industry and those that are taking campaign contributions from them is not going to work. They have to be pressured, they have to be constantly reminded that there’s a constituency that disagrees with them. And if that’s not visible, if that’s not diverse, then it doesn’t matter, but if it is, and you constantly give them even just the impression that there is considerable resistance on the issue, it’s going to make a difference’. This is relevant to the Irish context also: ‘Ireland really is in a position now where you’re going to have more, more and more effort from the other side to expand abortion further and further beyond twelve weeks. […] You have to start causing the drama for them now. They cannot feel comfortable’.

Terrisa has expressed support in the past for Operation Rescue, a controversial pro-life group known for their protests at abortion clinics. I ask her what forms of nonviolent direct action could work now, without them turning into a PR disaster. I’m slightly taken aback by her answer. ‘You’re never going to avoid a PR disaster. You have to go straight into it. You have to lean into that PR disaster. You need a PR disaster. If you don’t have a PR disaster you have nothing’. Controversy is what gets media attention, not positive, uplifting pro-life stories. ‘The point is to drive that controversy, the point is to cause disruption and that means PR scandals’, she laughs. She says that we should use every nonviolent tool available to us. ‘My tool of choice is the megaphone. I think that it is very under-utilised in the movement. When people hear you speaking with a megaphone they automatically assume you know what the hell you’re talking about, because 99% of the people in this world will never do that […] They’re forced to pay attention. It disrupts the status quo’. She tells me that Pro-Life San Francisco have approached companies that handle the ‘medical waste’ (foetal remains) from abortion facilities ‘and we have protested them and encouraged them to break their relationships with Planned Parenthood, and that has worked’. Other attention-grabbing actions have included resisting attempts to arrest them for being ‘sidewalk advocates’ during the coronavirus pandemic. Terrisa is also a believer in taking legal action whenever possible. ‘The press pretty much doesn’t care if you’re holding a protest, but if you’re holding a protest and you’re suing someone at the same time, even if it ends up being frivolous, that is a great way to get visibility and to disrupt. […] There are lots of resources for developing nonviolent direct action tactics and there are literally thousands of ways that we can directly put ourselves in between the oppressor and the unborn’. 

I’m curious to know what Terrisa thinks is the most effective way to persuade secular pro-choicers of the pro-life position. ‘The most effective way to reach a secular person’, she replies, ‘is to demonstrate as much sameness as possible. So if you look like you’re totally religious and you’re giving secular arguments, it kind of doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, it’s not the facts or what you’re saying that’s going to compel people, it’s how much they believe you’re like them. And that’s what all the evidence suggests. I think we’ve spent way too much time trying to be polite and be the bigger, classier side. That’s not helpful. All it does is make us look so different from the other side. When they’re screaming for justice and we’re like, “Let’s have a polite conversation”, we’re in different worlds, and we’re the ones fighting for justice, we’re the ones who should be screaming. And I think that we pride ourselves too much on being so different from them that we’ve lost our ability to reach them. And I think that politeness is a major problem. Well yeah, if you’re having a private conversation with someone, sure, but we’re trying to ignite and win a worldwide movement for human rights. That is not going to be achieved through a few polite conversations’. She qualifies this: ‘ I don’t want to tell people who to be and I want people to express themselves however they feel comfortable, but the best way to break down that barrier of confirmation bias is to not look like a religious person and to not sound like one’. 

Does she have a target audience when she’s trying to convince people of the pro-life position? ‘The audience is as many people as you can reach in the general community as possible – press, general people, people who’ve had abortions, people who are pro-life, people who are pro-choice. You want to anger people who are pro-choice, you want to put a fire under them. Literally, we have got to show that we’re serious about this. So that’s really the goal. The goal isn’t just a particular group of people necessarily, it’s like, “Look America, look San Francisco, this issue isn’t settled”. That’s the message. We’re fighting – join us.’ She continues: ‘The other goal of that is to attract other people to your cause. So it’s to bring visibility to the issue, force people to think about it, but also to bring people who already agree with you on the issue out to say, look, there’s a movement, it’s not just about you thinking this at home, you need to come do something with us’. 

What are Pro-Life San Francisco focusing on at the moment? ‘We’re focusing on UCSF [University of California, San Francisco], we’re trying to end the live dismemberment and the foetal tissue research programmes happening there and using that as an example to the world, like this is a global issue, this is the worst aspects of abortion extremism – outside [of] the Uighurs – that we encounter in the world. And all of the pro-abortion rhetoric and policy and the manufacturing of RU 486, all of that emanates from the University of California, San Francisco. They are in this on a global level, and so if our community, San Francisco, which is obviously very left-leaning and traditionally very pro-choice, if we can get a significant movement going here, like if we can show enough pressure, or even just give the impression that we’re thousands of people, that might be enough to force them to have to comment on this, to have to try to explain why they do what they do, and all of that would help us inch closer to actually getting people to care about this issue. And I think once people look at it, once people realise we’re doing thousands of live dismemberments on viable babies in this country, then we’re going to be able to roll that back a little. And when you roll that back a little in a place like this, it’s really game over for the abortion industry as a whole’.

Finally, what are Terrisa’s hopes and plans for the future? ‘I want to end legal elective abortion in America in my lifetime. I definitely want to have an influence over global abortion politics and I want to change the way that humanity views unborn life. I want us to, in general, as a world community, respect life at its earliest stages, just like we do after they’re born, generally speaking’.