44 MARCH 2020
We Keep, and the Silence That Shouldn’t Have Been Asked For.”
In prose that was by turns confusing and moving, Russell wrote
that after a year and a half of casual texting and a handful of face-
to-face meetups, she and Parker had met for dinner in Dallas in
October 2016. She got drunk, while he, she discovered partway
through the evening, stuck to tonic water and lime. Then they
went back to his hotel room, where she continued to drink, and
they had sex.
Russell did not write that she’d told Parker she didn’t want to
sleep with him, but she strongly implied that, having downed “four
martinis and an entire bottle of wine,” she was inebriated beyond
any practical ability to consent. And, in a sweeping accusation
that extended far beyond what had happened between the two of
them in that hotel room, she called him a “predator.” She’d gradu-
ally learned, she wrote, that the way he’d treated her was part of
a pattern. Rumors about his behavior swirled in “whispers [that]
had become so loud they were more like shouts”—and unnamed
movement leaders were refusing to expose him.
Russell did not report Parker to the police, and unlike, say, the
cases of Matt Lauer at NBC or even Al Franken in the Senate, a
workplace investigation was never on the table: The activist and
the doctor operated in the same sphere, but they weren’t colleagues.
Instead, the case of Russell versus Parker has been battled out largely
on message boards and in closed-door conversations within the
insular, im passioned realm of abortion rights, among people, mostly
women, for whom the cause of bodily autonomy was a calling long
before the dawn of the #MeToo movement. Yet its tentacles stretch
much further, bringing into the open generational and, to an extent,
racial divisions in our rapidly shifting views on sexual assault—the
kinds of questions and doubts that are typically expressed only in
private. How does alcohol figure into culpability? What constitutes
appropriate sexual behavior when one person has more power than
the other? And perhaps most crucial, how absolute is the duty to
believe women—the rallying cry of #MeToo?
That the saga of Candice Russell and Willie Parker is set in the
abortion-rights world heightens the stakes, and not just for the
two of them. Sooner rather than later, one of the recent spate of
state laws prohibiting abortion after six weeks’ gestation may have
its intended consequence: provoking a ruling by the right-leaning
Supreme Court that could further erode, if not eliminate, the
rights enshrined in Roe v. Wade. Within the reproductive-justice
movement, talk of a post-Roe America is not an if but a when—
planning is well under way for how to help women in red states
get abortions when the procedure is no longer federally protected.
Indeed, with only one abortion clinic per state in six states, you
could argue that many Americans are already living in a post-Roe
reality. All of which makes Russell’s allegation against Parker a
potential chink in the armor of the movement itself—one that
could, as an activist put it, “reify the narrative that ‘abortionists
abuse women’ simply by providing abortions.”
This isn’t just a theory. Three days after Russell’s essay was pub-
lished, Life Dynamics, a Texas group known for sending “spies for
life” into abortion clinics to try to dig up information that might
be used to close them down, reveled in the allegations against
Parker, claiming on Twitter that it had proof that “thousands of
women have been sexually assaulted or raped by abortionists.
Some of the abortionists that we documented are still working!”
More recently, Gloria Gray, the owner of a Tuscaloosa, Alabama,
clinic where Parker worked last fall, told me that one of her regu-
lar protesters had begun making the baseless charge that she was
employing a “sexual molester” who’d “fondled patients.”Willie Parker and Candice Russell met in 2015,
at the Hartford, Connecticut, airport, after attending the annual
Civil Liberties and Public Policy conference. The bald-headed,
then-52-year-old Parker, who wears round, black-framed glasses
and a silver hoop in one ear, had been a featured speaker. The Latina
Russell was, at age 32, a “scholarship kid,” as she jokingly puts it—a
freelance writer and fledgling activist allowed to attend for free. As
she recalls, she sat down at the gate, plunked down her bag, and
accidentally bumped Parker. As the two chatted, other conference
attendees kept interrupting to take selfies with him.
It would be hard to overstate Parker’s prominence within the
reproductive-rights movement at the time. He was its most visible
male figurehead—indeed, its only one. A black, devoutly Chris-
tian ob-gyn born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Parker
spent the first half of his career refusing to perform abortions.
Then, in 2003, at the age of 41, he had what he has described as
a “come-to-Jesus moment.” He radically reversed course, becom-
ing not just an abortion provider but, you might say, the abor-
tion provider: a traveling doctor who—eschewing the bullet-
proof vest favored by some in his high-risk profession— zigzags
across the Deep South tending to patients, most of whom are
poor women of color, at clinics in Alabama and Mississippi.
That was only part of it. Parker posted himself up at the
movement’s front line with the same zeal with which he had
once handed out religious pamphlets as a born-again teenage
preacher. At one event after another, he cast abortion as a moral
imperative that ensures a woman’s human right to lead the life
she wants to live. This message refashioned the most contro-
versial medical procedure of our time as the Christian thing
to do—and gave the abortion-rights community a languageOne anti-abortion group reveled
in the allegations against Parker:
“Thousands of women have
been sexually assaulted or raped
by abortionists.”