It's Not Just Abortion, Stupid: Progressives and Abortion

Reproductive Rights as a Mosaic

The history of abortion and American political culture since 1973, then, is one in which opponents have been strikingly successful, not only in imposing massive restrictions on access to abortion, but in making the procedure so stigmatized and controversial that even progressives shy away from defending it. How could reproductive rights activists talk about abortion in ways that resonate with the general public and re-engage the left? In the preRoe era, the reproductive rights movement occupied the moral high ground because women by the thousands were maimed and dying from botched illegal abortions. To defend abortion today—for the simple reason that most women of reproductive age are sexually active and therefore sex needs to be separated from procreation—has proved extremely challenging. Twenty-five years ago, Ellen Willis offered an insight about the emotional power of the antiabortion movement that still seems true today:

a lot of people who intellectually abhor everything the antiabortionists stand for are emotionally intimidated by their argument. The right-to-lifers’ most dangerous weapon is...their ability to confuse and immobilize potential opponents by tapping the vast store of sexual guilt and anxiety that lies just below this society’s veneer of sexual liberalism. Patriarchal culture, with its deeply anti-sexual ideology, has existed for some five thousand years; the radical idea that people have the right to sexual freedom and happiness has been a significant social force for little more than a century.

Willis’s words suggest that the best way to support abortion may be to situate this support within a much broader progressive platform of sexual and reproductive rights. From a reproductive freedom standpoint, the past thirty-two years since Roe v. Wade have been doubly disastrous. We have seen not only a massive weakening of Roe itself—which hangs by a thread legally and which is supported by a bare majority of Americans, but, equally as unfortunate, the necessity to play defense on abortion, which has derailed the promising agenda of a much more expansive and liberatory movement. One of the earliest abortion rights groups, in fact, was CARASA—Committee for Abortion Rights and against Sterilization Abuse—a response to the practice (in some states in the 1960s and 1970s) of physicians’ sterilizing poor, often non-English speaking women without their knowledge.

When NOW, the first mass organization to emerge from second wave feminism, first organized in 1967, support for child care and maternity leaves were as prominent in its “Women’s Bill of Rights” as was reproductive freedom. Similarly, from the early 1970s to this day, one can find in the remaining freestanding women’s health clinics—perhaps the single most enduring accomplishment of second wave feminism (and where, along with Planned Parenthood clinics, most abortions in this country still take place) —abortion services as well as contraception, and sometimes prenatal care as well. Staff members in these clinics typically endorse (and often assist in) adoption, validate the decision of intentional childlessness, make referrals for infertility treatment, and affirm homosexual and bisexual clients in their sexual identities.

In short, the logic of seeing abortion as just one part of the mosaic of reproductive and sexual rights and services is not simply that it is persuasive to others. It is also the most authentic position of the reproductive freedom movement itself. One of the most eloquent expressions of this connection between abortion and other reproductive events was made by Rachel Atkins, a physician assistant and abortion provider, and for many years the director of the Vermont Women’s Health Center (and now vice president of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England). In a frequently quoted statement, she noted, “There aren’t two different kinds of women sitting in our waiting room—women who have abortions and women who have babies. They’re the same women at different times in their lives.”

One of the greatest costs for the reproductive freedom movement of not locating its support for abortion in a larger context is the void it leaves for opponents to fill. For example, Feminists for Life, an antiabortion group, has recently conducted a cross-country college tour, in which its speakers called for child care for student parents and contrasted its position to that of “prochoicers” who “only” advocate abortion. The audiences for these talks, the overwhelming majority of whom were born well after the 1960s and 1970s, are presumably oblivious to the long tradition of support for childcare within progressive feminism.