The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  Abortion was common in the United States and everywhere else, as it is today. It is a universal of women’s experience and always has been: Evidence of abortion dates back to the beginnings of recorded history. But the numbers of abortions have waxed and waned in response to the availability of contraceptives and social circumstances that encouraged or discouraged childbearing. During the Great Depression, when childbearing was unthinkable for many, abortions skyrocketed. One large study found that white middle-class married women aborted one in every four pregnancies in the 1930s. The numbers dropped during World War II, when birth control devices (condoms, diaphragms, vaginal foam) circulated widely, but in the late 1950s, the rate started to climb.

  For doctors and medical workers, the woman bleeding from a botched abortion was a familiar figure in hospital emergency rooms in the 1950s and ’60s. Entire wards were given over to patients suffering from septic abortions. Women tried to abort themselves with abortifacients or irritants administered as douches: Lysol, soap, kerosene, vinegar, powdered mustard, bleach, among others. They used, or others used on them, garden hoses, syringes, telephone wire, coat hangers, nut picks, pencils, catheters, and chopsticks. They were brought into hospital wards by the hundreds, bleeding from perforated uteruses. In 1962, for instance, Cook County Hospital in Chicago treated nearly five thousand women for abortion-related complications. Police crackdowns forced women to self-abort or resort to untrained specialists, with the result that deaths increased, doubling in New York City between 1951 and 1962. In the 1960s, they accounted for nearly half of maternal mortality.3

  The idea of therapeutic abortion gained force in the early 1960s, winning support from physicians, nurses, liberal Protestants and Jews, lawyers, psychiatrists, social workers, and advocates of zero population growth. Bands of reformers formed across the country, pushing liberalizing measures in state legislatures. Two panics about birth defects intensified awareness of the need for legal abortions and broadened the idea of therapeutic from the mother’s life to her health, including her mental health (which would be threatened by the birth of a damaged child). One was the revelation that thalidomide, a drug prescribed to pregnant women from 1957 to 1961, caused severe malformations in fetuses. The other was a measles epidemic in 1965, rubella also having devastating effects on the fetus. The health exception drew additional legitimacy from Britain’s passage of a therapeutic law in 1967. In the late 1960s, reformers succeeded in securing laws for therapeutic abortion in a number of states, which set up complicated processes heavily supervised by medical committees that allowed women to end pregnancies in “hardship cases” involving rape, incest, the probability of a deformed child, or the threat of death.4

  In 1965, a sea change came about in government regulation of sexuality and reproduction when the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut struck down a draconian 1879 Connecticut statute that criminalized both the use and prescription of contraception. The decision was the fruit of four decades’ worth of militant challenges mounted by Connecticut women from the Birth Control League—a Sanger-led organization—and its successor, the PPF (Katharine Houghton Hepburn, a suffragist and mother of the film star Katharine Hepburn, started the fight in the 1920s). They periodically opened clinics for poor women to distribute contraception and birth control literature, only to be shut down by the police, arrested, tried, and found guilty. The latest conviction went on appeal to the Supreme Court and the Court struck down the Connecticut law, ruling that married couples had a right to privacy that included the right to make decisions about childbearing and contraception free of government intrusion.5

  Griswold’s right to privacy, even though it initially pertained only to the “sacred precincts of marital bedrooms,” changed the field of activity and thought around the politics of the body. Although Griswold did not make all contraception legal (that happened only in 1972, with the Court’s decision in Eisenstadt v. Baird that the state could not prohibit the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried people), the decision had the effect of loosening up access for everyone. Law students and liberal attorneys were fascinated by the broader implications of the privacy right. Among reformers, the interest began to swing from winning laws for therapeutic abortion to repealing all laws that prohibited abortion—that is, to legalizing abortion, period.

  Even before feminism took off, an argument emerged that women had a right to determine if and when they bore children. In 1963, the biologist Garrett Hardin, leading spokesman for zero population growth, proposed that abortion was a matter in which a woman, and a woman alone, should make the decision: “Any woman, at any time, should be able to procure a legal abortion for herself without even giving a reason. The fact that she wants it should be reason enough.”6 After 1967, an awareness of the connection to feminism pushed public discussion beyond the exclusive emphasis on abortion as a public health measure to abortion as a necessity for women’s freedom.

  Given the fury of anti-abortion politics in the decades after Roe v. Wade, it is hard now to grasp how mainstream the legalization movement was in the 1960s. Initially based in professional circles, it soon persuaded a moderate public, inspired by awareness of the changing needs of American families and, at the borders, protofeminist rationales such as Hardin’s. In 1966–67, the middlebrow Saturday Evening Post ran “We Should Legalize Abortion” and The New York Times editorialized for legalization. The physician who wrote for the Post stressed that a large number of married women sought abortions. But he pulled no punches about single women, arguing that no teenage girl, either—even if she had sex by choice and thus fell outside the hardship provisions—should be forced to carry a child she did not want. This writer proposed the modified choice position, that any woman should be able to have a pregnancy terminated should she want to, provided that her husband and doctor agreed.7

  The modified choice position, which spread among liberals, scaled down the autonomy of a woman’s decision: Abortion was not quite a woman’s right to decide but rather a marital, family, and medical matter. The proposed reform was an improvement on the absolute prohibition of abortion, but it left women still within the jurisdiction of male authority, either husbands’ or physicians’. Once feminists joined the cause, they denounced these consent provisions.

  Rationales for abortion reform ranged widely. Advocates cited population control, economic prudence in limiting family size, the suffering caused women and families by unwanted births, and the freedom of physicians to care for their patients as they saw fit. For all these reasons, the call for total or partial repeal of the abortion ban attracted wide support in numerous state campaigns: New Mexico, California, New York, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Connecticut, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Nebraska, and others.

  The backdrop to the swelling chorus was the sexual revolution. Birth control pills initially came on the market in 1960, at first readily available only to middle-class married women through private physicians. Their use strengthened the idea that pregnancies could be planned—which was a more palatable way of saying that sex could be freed from the fear of pregnancy. The linked demographic dynamics of smaller family size and growing numbers of working mothers encouraged couples to view the decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy as their own. In this context, the state’s interference appeared atavistic, a vestige of a moralistic Victorian past.

  But the sexual revolution was not the only force propelling support for legalization. People who lived outside the sexual revolution, culturally, morally, and socially, could also agree that abortion should be legal, not because they advocated women’s rights but because they saw abortion as a birth control measure of last resort. Physicians, whatever their politics, were generally moved to support legalization because they saw the devastating consequences of illegal abortions. Ministers and rabbis witnessed the strains unwanted pregnancies put on members of their congregations and many came to see the choice of abortion as a matter of individual conscience.

  One thread of conservative support cam
e from eugenics advocates, who held that poverty could be alleviated if the poor limited their births, thus lowering numbers on the welfare rolls. Eugenics had always had a complex relationship to birth control. Early in the century, proponents objected that legal contraception would allow “fit” women, who should be replenishing the population, to limit their births instead. But with eugenics’ reputation to salvage after the horrors of Nazi race policy, promoters moved closer to supporting birth control in their desire to curb what they saw as a population explosion in poor countries—the “population bomb”—which, they maintained, would result in catastrophic resource scarcity. This meant that when oral contraceptives were first tested in the 1950s, it was in Puerto Rico, America’s corner of the Third World. In Puerto Rico, abortions were available, too; it was so easy to get one there that American women with the money for plane tickets traveled there routinely.

  The racism and class prejudice of eugenics was close to the surface. From this perspective, abortion was a way to keep “unfit” mothers—supposedly hypersexual black women, slutty poor whites, and feckless teenagers—from having babies and lolling about on the welfare rolls to raise them. Among abortion reformers, tensions between the eugenics view on the right and the pro-woman position of feminists on the left were at first muted: Feminists, too, championed abortion as a way for impoverished women to lessen their burdens. Indeed, this empathy across lines of class and race was one reason that feminists, once they took command of the battle, invented the slogan “free abortions on demand”—the idea being that no woman should have to bear an unwanted child because she didn’t have money for an abortion.8

  The black power movement reacted by conflating all abortion reform with eugenics and branding legal abortion as a genocidal plot against African-American families. The Black Panther Party newspaper in 1970 laid into legal abortion as “a victory for the oppressive ruling class who will use this law to kill off Black and other oppressed people before they are born.” One reason was distrust of population control programs as the only form of low-cost health care the government was willing to make available to African-Americans. But this was a male-dominated movement, and the imperative to put women in their place was unmistakable. “Black women love large families,” insisted the writer for the Panther newspaper, “and the only reason they would want to eliminate them is to rid them of the pain and the agony of trying to survive.” Opposition to legal abortion merged with opposition to birth control, period. In Pittsburgh, black power militants closed a family planning clinic with bomb threats; in Cleveland they burned one. Whitney Young, leader of the moderate Urban League, reversed his organization’s long-standing support for family planning, and the head of the Florida NAACP asserted that “our women need to produce more babies, not less.”9

  The vehemence of an African-American leadership composed chiefly of men represented a historic reversal. Except for the Garveyites, twentieth-century black organizations—the NAACP, the Urban League, women’s clubs—had long supported family planning as a means of racial uplift. The militant posture—writer Michele Wallace dubbed it “black macho” in 1979—prompted some women’s irritation and sarcasm. In fact the response in the pre-Roe period was one of the first articulations of a distinct African-American feminist voice in this chapter of the women’s movement. Representative Shirley Chisholm dispatched the genocide argument with tart efficiency. “To label family planning and legal abortion programs ‘genocide’ is male rhetoric; for male ears. It falls flat to female listeners and to thoughtful male ones.” Chisholm linked the lack of safe legal abortion to class and racist structures. At a 1969 news conference she was unequivocal. From her own experiences in family planning centers in Brooklyn, her own New York City district, she maintained that black women too believed they had a right to abortion. Chisholm was typical of the African-American mainstream: Black politicians and newspapers supported abortion reform steadily. In New York and Wisconsin, it was African-American representatives who introduced repeal bills in legislatures.10

  The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), composed predominantly of black women, resisted the black power line. Johnnie Tillmon, executive director in 1971, asserted that “nobody realizes more than poor women that all women should have the right to control their own reproduction.” A Pittsburgh NWRO group ran out an interloper—it turned out he was on the payroll of the Catholic Church—who was trying to recruit them to demonstrate against local family planning clinics. “Why should I let one loudmouth tell me about having children?” one woman demanded. Frances Beal touched on an older African-American assumption about women’s reproductive control as a matter of racial uplift when she insisted, “Black women have the right and responsibility to determine when it is in the interest of the struggle to have children or not to have them and this right must not be relinquished.”11 In the idiom of African-American politics, Beal phrased her eloquent call as a race matter, a family matter, a point of common interest where men must cede the grounds of the decision to women—but in the “interest of the struggle.” It was an instance, perhaps the first, when some black women publicly contested the militant line and vied with male leaders to shape public opinion.

  Organized opposition came principally from the Roman Catholic Church. Since the 1920s, the Church had been the major opponent of contraception, holding that it interfered with the primary function of sexual intercourse and thus with natural law. The “child is the primary purpose of marriage,” Catholic teaching held, not the bond between husband and wife.12 But after Griswold, Catholic doctrine conflicted with the law of the land and stood at a far remove from the demographic trends of modern family life. For millions of American Catholics, pious practice in this matter coexisted uneasily with a recognition that contraception was widely used and legal. Priests taking confession struggled with parishioners’ overwhelming predilection to disobey. Social surveys found that Catholics used birth control almost as routinely as did non-Catholics.

  For a time, hopes rose that the Catholic hierarchy would take a more flexible position on sexual matters. The winds of change blew through the Church in 1962 with the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican convened by Pope John XXIII, known as Vatican II. Vatican II was the pope’s invitation to make the Church a force of modernity and transformation. “The gathering of bishops and theologians from around the world set an unpredictable dynamic in motion,” religious historian John McGreevy writes. “Enveloping the whole was a new sense of the church moving through history … directly addressing the problems of the current age.” In the United States, laypeople called on Vatican II’s spirit of tolerance to argue for recognizing the religious freedom of their fellow citizens to adapt a different ethics of reproduction. Boston’s Cardinal Cushing took this approach in 1965 when he refrained from opposing legislation that revised Massachusetts’s ban on birth control, distinguishing between Church law and civil law and stating that the former did not require enforcing the observance of Catholic doctrine on others.13

  Vatican II’s spirit of coexistence could have been the basis for the Church taking a hands-off position with non-Catholics in regard to abortion as well as birth control. But the post–Vatican II stand on all sexual matters hardened. The commission on contraception appointed by Pope John XXIII overwhelmingly recommended a change in teaching on contraception. But after his death, Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the hard line, dashing hopes for a shift toward moderation in sexual and reproductive matters.

  The American Church was thus backed into a corner on contraception. Retreating from a battle over contraception they clearly could not win, American prelates shifted their efforts to upholding the ban on abortion. They were extremely successful, at first pulling in Catholic conservatives but also liberals who ignored the prohibition on contraception yet accepted the teaching that abortion was the destruction of innocent life. In the wake of Vatican II’s emphasis on Catholics’ duty to the poor, liberals brought to the anti-abortion campaign an ethical imperative for the
Church to work for social conditions that would welcome every child into the world and alleviate the burdens of childbearing and child rearing on poor women. This liberal view, tying opposition to abortion to genuine concern for women and children, would not survive long.

  In every state where there was a significant Catholic presence, the hierarchy instituted a parish-by-parish effort to block reform bills. By 1970, a bellicose Catholic-driven opposition was up and organized into right-to-life groups. The Church went to great lengths, aggressively lobbying legislators by threatening to work against their reelection if they voted the wrong way. But despite the huge resources the Catholic Church had at its disposal, there was an insoluble problem: Its influence stopped short of federal appeals courts, and the courts were issuing sympathetic decisions on abortion cases with increasing frequency.14

  The result was a standoff. In many states, reformers won some kind of physician-supervised therapeutic abortion. But therapeutic laws did nothing to lower the numbers of illegal abortions: Pregnant women found it too hard to face intrusive and judgmental questions from hospital committees and went their own way, to find practitioners operating outside the law. In truth, the reformed laws were geared to protecting physicians from legal repercussions, not to helping women. Hospital abortion committees strained to keep the numbers of procedures they approved as low as possible. There were horror stories. A woman not allowed to terminate her tenth pregnancy, although she had nine living children she could not afford to support. A pregnant woman confined to her bed with polio, denied an abortion. A middle-class African-American woman from Long Island, pregnant with a rubella-scarred fetus, was approved for a therapeutic abortion, but once in the hospital had the bad luck to fall into the hands of a Catholic attending physician. He tricked her into believing the fetus was normal and sent her home, and she bore a child with multiple birth defects. Finally, there was only a minuscule number of women who actually qualified for a therapeutic abortion on the grounds of hardship: because they would otherwise die, or because they had been raped, or were victims of incest, or were bearing a malformed fetus—compared to the numbers seeking abortion for what reformers drily called “socio-economic reasons.”15