45it sorely needed. The abortion storytellers’ organization Shout
Your Abortion sold T-shirts bearing Parker’s face. The novel-
ist Jodi Picoult modeled a character on him. In 2017, Parker
would publish his own book, a memoir called Life’s Work: A
Moral Argument for Choice.
One reason Parker was so beloved is that he never acted supe-
rior. Exalted as he became, he never lost his easy affability or his
appetite for conversation; even in the procedure room, he’s known
for keeping up a steady stream of comforting small talk. That day
in Hartford, he offered to save Russell a seat on the plane—he
was in boarding group A; she was in C—which was not unusual.
It was Parker being Parker. But to Russell it was a big deal. On
the plane, she shared a story she’d written for HuffPost; he com-
pared it to the work of James Baldwin. (She had to Google the
name in the airplane bathroom.) Parker told her he was work-
ing on his memoir—maybe he could send her some chapters to
read? When we met in a Tuscaloosa hotel’s conference room in
September, about six months after she posted her essay, Russell
relived the thrill of the request: Here was “the Gloria Steinem of
the movement, and he wants to be writing partners?” she recalled
thinking. “This is awesome.”
Russell’s own come-to-Jesus moment—though she’d never
describe it as such—had occurred a couple of years earlier, after
she finished a bartending shift at a place she calls “Ye Olde Irish
Hooters.” When she got into her car and turned on the radio, the
news was all about the Texas legislation later known as H.B. 2,
which proposed banning abortion after 20 weeks, among other
restrictions. This was 2013. State Senator Wendy Davis was soon
to become famous for filibustering the bill in her hot-pink Mizu-
nos. Sitting in her car listening, Russell thought, “They’re talking
about abortion like it’s this horrible thing. They don’t know what
they’re talking about.”
She drove straight to Austin, 200 miles south, changed into a
dress that was in her trunk, and marched into the capitol rotunda,
where she waited in line for hours to testify about her abortion
before the state Senate. Russell had gotten pregnant after dating
her then-boyfriend for only a month and a half and, at 21, had had
an abortion without regret—she views the procedure as the key
to her future, and her personal freedom. Making her story more
powerful, Russell is what anti-abortion activists call an “abortion
survivor.” When her mother was 14 and about to have what would
have been her third abortion, she decided at the last minute to keep
her baby, Candice. Russell’s narrative flipped the pro-life assump-
tion that no one who’d almost been aborted would ever terminate
her own pregnancy.
Eventually, telling this story—and that of her second abor-
tion, which she had at age 30—became a sort of job for Russell.
As a member of the advocacy group We Testify (an arm of the
National Network of Abortion Funds), she shared her account
with reporters at The New York Times, The Guardian, and CNN.
But in 2015, when she met Parker, Russell was still looking
for a way into the movement, volunteering at local Texas organi-
zations without gaining much traction, she told me. Curled up
in an armchair, Russell looked dramatically different from the
bright-eyed, sprightly woman in Facebook photos taken back
then. She seemed deeply fatigued, with dark circles under her
eyes, and she was noticeably heavier: Russell had had gastric-
bypass surgery in 2009, shedding almost 180 pounds to become,
at 5 foot 2, a petit size 4. But since the night with Parker, she
said, she’d gained some 80 pounds, which she attributed mostly to
alcohol. Still, a certain dorm-room girlishness remained, with her
chipped black nail polish and black floral dress; flashes of wit and
charisma made it easy to imagine the funny, “boisterous” woman
Parker says he was initially charmed by.
After that flight together, Russell said, Parker became a “very
close and personal friend,” thanks to a bond based on shared
childhood trauma. As he wrote in his memoir, Parker and his
five siblings grew up on food stamps. Their mother was twice
hospitalized after psychotic breaks and eventually was diagnosed
with manic depression.
Russell’s own mother was a stripper and sometime sex worker,
and was addicted to meth and heroin, she says. By the time Russell
was a preteen, she had been abandoned to live with her stepfather
and two half-siblings. But during a brief reappearance, her mother
sold her 12-year-old daughter for sex—one of multiple incidences
of sexual abuse in her childhood, Russell says.
Russell herself struggles with mental illness, she told me, and
in the months leading up to her October 2016 get-together with
Parker, she’d been diagnosed with severe PTSD due to childhood
trauma. She’d been looking forward to confiding in Parker about
this at dinner that night, in fact. On the handful of occasions
when they’d met in person, the two had had hours-long conversa-
tions, she said, in which she told him “things I hadn’t even told
my [ex-]husband.”Listening to Parker describe his relationship with Russell
is like listening to a record played backwards: A completely differ-
ent sound comes out. At 5 foot 11, Parker is barrel-chested and
physically imposing, a presence that is offset by his signature
collection of professorial bow ties and ascots. But the day we
met, at a Manhattan sidewalk café, the city was sweltering, and
he wore a crisp button-down, no tie. As he talked, in long blocks
of uninterrupted speech, he frequently removed his glasses to
mop his brow.
What Parker said he knew about Russell, you could learn at
a cocktail party: She was from Seattle, had been married, had a
stepson she was still in contact with. Their conversations, he said,
covered music, the Seattle Seahawks, their activism, Russell’s vari-
ous jobs—over time, she was appointed to the board of NARAL
Pro-Choice Texas and hired as an executive assistant by the National
Network of Abortion Funds. She “absolutely” never opened up
to him about her childhood trauma or mental-health problems,
he said. If she had talked about her mother, he likely would have
shared about his own, he added, “but we didn’t have that kind of
fluency.” Their interactions were “too inconsistent for me to become
a close confidant to her,” and he said he never asked her to read
his book-in-progress.
Parker got married for the first time in August 2018, seven
months before Russell posted her story, to a 54-year-old flight
attendant with whom he now lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.