Boston Globe: Rebecca Hart Holder has always known the war on women is bigger than abortion

By Yvonne Abraham | Originally Published by the Boston Globe

A leader in the battle for reproductive rights is stepping down. She’s confident the war can be won.

Rebecca Hart Holder has always seen this for what it is.

The head of Reproductive Equity Now, who steps down later this month after nine transformative years, has long seen the big picture when it comes to abortion rights.

Reversing Roe was never about just rolling back the federally-protected right to an abortion. As Hart Holder often points out, it is the key to reversing decades of wider advances for women: “It is about saying women do not have the fundamental right to control their own destiny.”

The 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs decision made it possible for GOP zealots to reach into women’s lives, no matter where they live. Women have since died because they couldn’t get the care they needed. States with bans are targeting health providers elsewhere for providing abortion medication. But it isn’t going to stop there.

“Abortion is the tip of the spear,” Hart Holder said. “They want to take away birth control access. They want to regulate IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies to control who can become a family.”

The MAGA cult that currently runs the country is all about pulling us backwards, especially when it comes to women. Its leaders truck in creepy pro-natalism and eugenicism, seeking to confine women to the home and make it difficult to escape their hyper-masculine husbands. They’re also trying to make it harder for women to vote, most recently with the SAVE Act, the voter suppression bill that recently passed the House.

They’re not hiding anything. The Vice President of the United States has been a leading proponent of this stuff. Project 2025 laid out detailed plans to roll back women’s autonomy here and across the planet. Increasingly mainstream “thinkers” like Nick Fuentes are saying the repulsive things out loud, and millions are listening.

“The number one political enemy in America is women,” the white nationalist said last week, “because women constrain everything, every conversation, every man, everything.”

How do you fight all of this?

In Massachusetts, you do it by shoring up our state’s position as a beacon of reproductive freedom, Hart Holder said.

“We know that this is an attempt to…make women second class citizens, but we also know that it is possible to protect care and expand access,” she said.

In her time as head of Reproductive Equity Now, she led successful battles to expand access to contraceptives, and to repeal an archaic abortion ban that had been made moot, but which nonetheless remained on the books. By 2020, Hart Holder and others knew a Roe repeal was inevitable: They got legislation passed that expanded abortion access and enshrined it in state law. In 2022 and 2025, she helped push legislation that made it harder for other states to target Massachusetts health professionals who provide reproductive and gender care.

Now Hart Holder is stepping away. This work is all consuming, and her two daughters, aged 9 and 11, need more of her these days than the job allows her to give them.

She leaves a bigger organization than she joined. It has expanded into Connecticut and New Hampshire, and now offers a legal hotline for patients and providers worried about being targeted by abortion opponents.

Hart Holder has done all of this, and more, with remarkable empathy and optimism.

Kate Dineen had never met Hart Holder in 2021, when her pregnancy went wrong, her baby suffering a stroke in utero that he could not survive. Doctors here said they could not provide Dineen with care because of a state law prohibiting abortions after 24 weeks, so she had to travel to Maryland for the procedure, a process that was enormously expensive, and needlessly cruel. Later, Dineen emailed Hart Holder out of the blue, asking how she could help save other women from the pain she’d endured.

Hart Holder replied right away, signing that first email, “in solidarity and anger.” Together, they successfully lobbied to clarify the law to help doctors here provide care in cases like Dineen’s.

“I was blown away by her compassion,” Dineen said.

That’s Hart Holder. In our many conversations over the years, she has always combined incandescent anger at attacks on women’s rights with an iron determination to hold the line.

“There is reason to be angry, to sometimes feel despair, but despair is not what carries this work forward,” she told me recently. “Hope isn’t passive, it’s practical. And it doesn’t mean we win every time, but it means we keep fighting.”