The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  By the late 1960s, reformers could see that the strategy of state-by-state change was fruitless. Catholic groups tirelessly drove back reform bills. This happened in Arizona, North Dakota, and Michigan.

  Consolidating forces in 1969, reformers organized the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) and targeted several states where prospects looked good to repeal the abortion ban altogether. New York state was at the top of the list, because of the moderate Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller and liberal strength in the legislature. The battle in New York turned out to be savage. A supporter in the state assembly, the Republican Constance E. Cook, mentioned later that she had not expected an explosion when the bill came to the floor: “I didn’t really have a sense at that time that we had done something momentous, since it was long overdue.” Catholic opposition knew no bounds, presaging right-to-life tactics routinely used in the next decade. On the day the bill passed, the Republican majority leader wept as he read aloud the “Diary of an Unborn Child,” a literary legacy of a fetus, which concluded: “Today, my parents killed me.” Regardless of the attacks, however, NARAL’s careful, patient lobbying strategy paid off: The New York bill was the first actually to legalize abortion, and the most liberal in the country. Between 1970 and 1973, women seeking abortions traveled to New York City by the thousands. Alaska and Hawaii followed New York.16

  Immediately, the Catholic hierarchy launched a drive to revoke the New York law. To reformers, it was evident that if lasting victory could not be secured even in New York, the legislative strategy was pointless. Physicians and repeal groups stepped up to the task of pushing on the legal front, bringing test cases crafted to maximize the chances of favorable decisions in the courts—the one realm where Catholics could make no headway. In one day alone in May, federal courts issued four declaratory judgments. In an era rife with every kind of protest, referring women for abortions and performing them became acts of civil disobedience, the arrests intensifying the legal action. A. Frans Koome, for example, a Seattle physician who worked with a local abortion rights group, notified the governor of Washington that he was performing abortions and would continue to do so. (Police refrained from arresting him to avoid a cause célèbre.) Whenever reporters contacted him over the next year, he provided a tally: 22 done the week he sent the letter to the governor, 29 the next week, 3,000 over the course of the year.

  Civil disobedience was no lark: It involved substantial risks, especially for physicians. That spring, Jane Hodgson, an obstetrician and chair of Minnesota’s American Medical Association committee on abortion, asked the federal district court to enjoin Minnesota from applying state law so that she could perform a therapeutic abortion on a young mother of three who was pregnant with a rubella-scarred fetus but whose application a hospital committee had denied. When the court refused on procedural grounds, Hodgson went ahead anyway, announcing the news to the press and notifying the police. Her May 1970 arraignment was the first time a licensed physician was indicted for performing an abortion in a hospital. Subsequently tried and convicted, Hodgson was at risk of losing her medical license until the Roe decision mooted the trial’s outcome.17

  With a number of favorable rulings in appeals courts, hopes rose for a judicial remedy, a ruling from the Supreme Court that would legalize abortion in one swoop.

  Women’s liberation entered the abortion battle relatively late. At first radicals left the issue to NOW: Even the repeal demand was reform, not revolution, and it involved the painstaking, slow business of changing the law, an accession to the power structure. On the fringe, Shulamith Firestone’s vision of test tube babies for the modern woman supplanted interest in working for reproductive rights for the same old female bodies that had been getting pregnant and giving birth for centuries.18

  But in 1968–69, radical feminists jumped into the fight, accelerating the action and changing the terms of debate. While strong proponents like Garrett Hardin insisted unequivocally that the abortion decision was a woman’s to make, and a woman’s alone, they saw doctors’ and husbands’ consent provisions as a politically necessary compromise. The male professionals who led the repeal movement had always framed it as altruistic, coming to the aid of needy women and their families. Radical feminists changed the tenor of popular action from a battle to rescue somebody else (the pregnant woman) to one led by women fighting for themselves. They pushed out and strengthened the principle of a woman’s right to autonomous decision-making and infused it with a militant rejection of all measures short of total repeal of the abortion ban. The principle was that a woman had the right to choose abortion at any time, including late pregnancy, whatever the reason. She belonged to herself; the state—or her husband or doctor—had no right to tell her what to do with her body.19

  Sharp differences broke out over tone and tactics. But the arguments engendered dynamic combinations rather than rifts. A united front came together, in fact the most cohesive front this second wave of feminists ever formed. Feminist referral groups linked up, for instance, with the already vigilant Clergy Consultation Service, founded in 1967 by Howard Moody, pastor of the liberal Judson Memorial Church in New York City’s Greenwich Village, an organization that came to involve more than a thousand clerics nationwide. Rabbis and Protestant ministers operated openly in defiance of the law, sending women to willing physicians or providers, with local abortion reformers and sympathetic lawyers ready to step in if and when there was trouble. Ties developed among counselors, repeal groups, and the older, secretive world of physicians providing abortions outside the law. In Chicago, a women’s liberation group founded Jane, an underground service that referred scores of women to physicians. When they discovered that some of the practitioners were not accredited, they decided to train themselves to provide abortions. Jane claimed to have performed thousands of procedures.20

  Full-fledged militance arrived when New York Redstockings disrupted a 1969 public forum in Manhattan about the bill then pending in the state legislature. Redstockings denounced the panel of experts slated to speak, a lineup consisting of only one woman—who was a nun—and fourteen men. “The only real experts on abortion are women,” avowed a leaflet the protesters distributed. “Women who have known the pain, fear, and socially imposed guilt of an illegal abortion. Women who have seen their friends dead or in agony from a post-abortion infection. Women who have had children by the wrong man, at the wrong time, because no doctor would help them.” The New York hearing was the first event where women insisted on putting themselves at the center of the proceedings. A month later, Redstockings held its own evening of testimonials from women who themselves had had abortions. Intimate material, already familiar from consciousness-raising groups, went public. Predictably, the stories were electrifying: humiliations at the hands of doctors, the shame of bearing an illegitimate child, lovers’ betrayals. It was a turning point. After this, feminists’ determination to make the female self the final point of reference of the debate—rejecting the perennial position of the Other whom male leaders referred to—was the driving dynamic of legalization politics.21

  Once women’s liberation was involved, the political daughters rephrased abortion from a family issue involving a married couple to an issue that concerned single women and sexual freedom. Of course, single women had always sought abortions, but because sexually active women outside marriage were viewed as morally tarnished figures, repeal discourse shunted them to the side. Wives and mothers, shadowed by concerned husbands and physicians, were the featured figures of sympathy.22 But radical feminists brought home the tight connections between abortion and young women’s lives in the sexual revolution. In pro-repeal rhetoric after 1969, sympathy for the hard-pressed mother, disastrously pregnant again, merged with a defense of the rights of adventurous, lovelorn, and traduced young women—girlfriends, lovers, and casual pickups—dismayed to find themselves pregnant. The scenarios in Lucinda Cisler’s 1969 description of how women unintentionally got pregnant came from dramas o
f courtship and pleasure, not marital negotiations: Women didn’t want to appear cheap with a new lover, Cisler explained, so they pretended they were swept away by passion and didn’t use birth control. A young woman might use pregnancy as a factor to negotiate with a man about commitment, bringing an ambiguous relationship to a crisis point of decision.23

  The shift from she-who-was-described to she-who-speaks injected fresh evidence of the centrality of bodily integrity to women’s freedom. In Garrett Hardin’s lacerating objections in 1968 to compulsory pregnancy, the pregnant woman still existed at a remove from the writer, described as an abstract figure who found herself in an abstract dilemma.24 With the turn to personal testimony, the abortion-seeking woman took on a life, dragging life’s messy details into the debate. Women got pregnant for a myriad of reasons, and there were a myriad of reasons why unwanted children would be intolerable burdens.

  The stories unleashed a storm of female honesty—never something a culture welcomes. Feminists showed how entirely the predicament bore down on the woman herself, disrupting her entire existence. They wrenched the decision about what to do away from the dyad of doctor/patient, or husband/wife, or man/woman and made it hers alone. An intrepid man at the Redstockings hearing tried to stem the tide of stories by bringing in a man’s rights—what were his rights over a fetus he fathered? he demanded. He was told unequivocally: “Women have the ultimate control over their own bodies.” Physicians testifying in Abele v. Markle, a feminist-initiated challenge to a Connecticut statute, talked about their experiences treating actual women with unwanted pregnancies, describing the impact on persons worthy of respect. The law “operated to treat women as chattel, as breeding animals without regard for their rights as human beings and with complete disregard of decent everyday respect,” contended the chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.25

  The maxim of a woman’s right to choose lit a fire under a great pile of misogynist and patriarchal assumptions and laws. As it spread, it became one of the most attractive ideas that second-wave feminism bequeathed—not only to the country but to the world. For one, it brought to light an age-old assumption buried in women’s cultures: that it was up to the pregnant woman to decide whether to continue her pregnancy. For another, it moved body politics formally into the regime of rights and pressed the question of self-ownership, raised in the nineteenth century by Stanton and Mill as one of legal and economic standing, into the realm of corporeal dignity. Body politics turned into a political principle with wings, poised to fly across borders and oceans in widening feminist discussions in the 1970s and ’80s.26

  Insistence on physical integrity as a prerequisite for women’s liberty went back to Mary Wollstonecraft’s desire to see little girls running around like boys. The Owenites, Fourierists, and Stanton in her advocacy of voluntary motherhood; Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, and the birth control movement they led in the 1910s: These were the historical antecedents. But the abortion campaign was more assertive than any previous movement, because it was grounded in radical feminism’s frank assertion that female sexuality was desirable in itself and could be separated from childbearing. The insight was that enforced pregnancy closed the door on any assurance women might have that they could exist outside the family jurisdiction. The threat that an unintended pregnancy had to be carried to term effectively consigned them to the possibility that involuntary motherhood could descend at any moment, putting childbearing before the requirements of the female self.

  On these grounds, liberals and radicals converged, and the legalization movement became a collaboration of political mothers and daughters. It was one flashpoint where NOW, early on, was willing to join the radicals in a daughterly, defiant stance. Already at the second NOW national convention in 1967, the adoption of a strong plank for repeal precipitated a walkout by moderates who thought it was too much for middle America and wanted to work in a more “patient, determined and diplomatic” mode.27 But the majority of members tolerated the schism and held to the pro-repeal position.

  Feminists across the spectrum made the central question that of women’s choice. They drove home the point: It was a woman’s body; why should a husband or a doctor have to vet her decision? By 1970, the checks and balances that took the decision away from women included combinations of physician’s agreements, mandatory hospitalization, husbands’ and parents’ consent, and state residence requirements—cumbersome regulations that made abortion more difficult to get and more expensive. The anxiety that underlay all qualifications was that legal abortion would prompt women to have sex willy-nilly, knowing that if something went wrong they could end their pregnancies any old time. The requirement to make getting an abortion hard, supervised by supposedly responsible people like husbands and doctors, was a particular issue in the state legislatures, which because of the dearth of female office-holders—this was 1970–71—were overwhelmingly male. One Colorado lawmaker traced the fault line. The public was comfortable, he thought, if the question was put in terms of balancing two rights, between the woman’s health and welfare and the potential life of the fetus. “But if one asks whether a woman ought to have the unfettered right to control her reproduction,” he maintained, the response was a resounding no.28

  Yet the evidence points the other way. Feminists in the early 1970s won a strong public following on the abortion question, even as the right-to-life movement ramped up its crusade. Americans moved toward, not away from a woman’s right to choose. Mainstream Protestant denominations began to come around. In 1969–70, for example, the United Methodist Church came out for decriminalization and abortion “on request”; the Presbyterians went on record supporting abortion in hardship cases; and the liberal wing of the Lutheran Church affirmed that a woman could responsibly choose an abortion. Even the Baptist General Convention, later a bastion of right-to-life politics, called for change.29

  Physicians, overwhelmingly male, took the rap from feminists for wanting to maintain control and refusing to recognize women’s autonomy. And it is true that although a solid majority of doctors supported legal abortion and were instrumental in the reform movement, they tended to believe that they should be the wise, benevolent gatekeepers and supported physicians’ consent provisions. One point in the 1970 AMA debate on which doctors could agree was that they should not provide abortions “in mere acquiescence to the patient’s demands”—that is, the wishes of the irresponsible, impulsive female patient who couldn’t be trusted with such a grave decision. Yet a poll of thirty-three thousand physicians taken immediately after the Roe decision was announced showed that while the majority had “deep reservations,” the picture changed radically when one looked at the generations: Seventy-five percent of doctors thirty-five years or under were in favor.30

  With watered-down repeal bills passed in several states in 1970, the future seemed to lie with heavily hedged legalization. Regardless, feminists ratcheted up their language, stressing the negative implications of moderate reform. They attacked opponents as not only antimodern, antisexual, antifamily, and antiliberal, but also as antiwoman. Hospitalization and residency requirements drew fire. Residency was not a requirement for any other medical procedure, feminists pointed out; you did not have to live in a state to get a tonsillectomy there. As for being in a hospital, most abortions were straightforward, simple procedures, easily performed in outpatient clinics.

  NOW made free abortion on demand one of three planks of the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality march.31 Abortion on demand was an over-the-top proposal, with no chance of becoming a reality. Like the call for twenty-four-hour child care (another demand) in a country that had scarcely given a penny for any kind of child care, free abortion was a delusory goal when you could hardly get a Pap smear for free. It was surely one of the worst slogans that ever circulated in the women’s movement; it practically begged for opposition to materialize. The last part, “on demand,” raised the psychological stakes, imbuing feminist abortion politics with the abs
olutist tone of late 1960s antiwar politics and early 1970s race politics.

  On the other hand, as pure propaganda the slogan resonated, a hammer hitting steel, with the newly discovered bedrock certainty that women had a right to determine their reproductive lives. And “free”—as in “no cost”—had its own logic, not entirely off the mark when funding for Medicare and Medicaid made publicly supported health care seem within reach. Free abortion also gestured toward poor and working-class women’s needs for low-cost, nonintrusive procedures. Indeed “free” and “on demand” rallied the troops at just the points where the right to abortion, once it was secured constitutionally, turned out to be the most vulnerable. Once antichoice zealots had to contend with Roe v. Wade, they would turn to chipping away the unimpeded access that “on demand” and “on request” affirmed by inserting parental and spousal consent provisions into state laws everywhere they could find a crack. The abortions that Medicaid provided for poor women and girls were the closest abortion came to being free; and they would be the first to go when conservatives regrouped and trained their sights on depleting Roe’s meaning.