Female Reproductive Rights

Historiography on Female Reproductive Rights in the US 1 Running Head: Historiography on Female Reproductive Rights in the US

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Historiography on Female Reproductive Rights in the US 2

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, American society underwent more fast and fundamental socioeconomic changes than at any time in its history. The industrialization of the country brought with it changes in all sphere of life--changes which, at times, appeared to pressure "civilization" as people then knew it. In the middle of those changes, the family and home--the woman's sphere--became a retreat from the moral, social, and cultural concession of the world. But if the home were to remain that haven, it would mean that women would have to persist to play the role usually assigned to them. That continuity is precisely what the feminists opposed. And birth control, perhaps more than any other matter, symbolized that opposition. Prior to the advent of responsible birth control measures, women could not dependably set limits on reproduction. The majority repeated the cycle of conception, gestation, childbirth, and postpartum recovery until death or loss of the capability to reproduce. As America moved from an agricultural to an industrial society and men's work took them out of the home and into the factory, women were left to care for the children alone and to contract with problems linked with reproduction. The cost in lives, time, physical and emotional energy, and lost prospects informed Elizabeth Cady Stanton's statements on self-sovereignty, forged powerful bonds amongst women, and set fire to the movement for birth control. Antifeminists believed that birth control would obliterate the family, nurture the "selfish impulse" of women who sought high social status, encourage moral laxity, interrupt the "natural order" of things, legitimize abortion (which they believed was murder), and intimidate "racial suicide," since numerous women who sought birth control

Historiography on Female Reproductive Rights in the US 3 were from the upper and middle classes. There was a dread that the population of the "decent" classes would diminish while that of the "rabble" that had lately migrated from eastern and southern Europe would increase. Hence, antifeminists waged a dynamic effort to limit distribution of birth control information, to support the passage of laws that criminalized this dissemination, and, most significantly, to make the definition of this "criminal" action vague enough to authorize arbitrary arrest and punishment. Feminists saw birth control as a means to alleviate the social problems of drunkenness, child and wife abuse, and women's dependence on men. Most important, they sought to reinstate to women control of their bodies--a first and essential step toward self-determination, self-respect, and personal accomplishment. The battle soon was joined. Margaret Sanger, the founder of the birth control movement in the United States, gives us a sense of that battle and the stakes concerned. “So great is the skill, so powerful the drug, of the abortionists, paid to murder mankind within the womb” 1. The cultural fission formed by the controversy over birth control and abortion, as Juvenal's satiric mention above indicates, has a long and bitter history. The appearance of the modern state, though, transformed cultural disparities into political acrimony as reproduction rights became public policy. In the United States, reproductive rights in the post World War II period became an issue of political controversy when the federal government began to fund family planning programs nationally and abroad in the sixties. The origins of the contemporary family planning movement in the United States emerged from three discrete, although often overlapping, forces. First, in the early twentieth century, Margaret Sanger and other feminists started family planning in their

Historiography on Female Reproductive Rights in the US 4 call for the substantiation of birth control. The appearance of the black civil rights movement and the woman's movement in the sixties gave momentum to the "rights" aspects of this cause. Subsequently, a eugenics movement appeared in the Progressive Era to demand that the native stock of Americans be reinforced by limiting "deviant" populations and reducing the social trouble of crime, prostitution, and illegitimacy— social ills frequently linked with "mental idiocy"—through birth control, sterilization, and immigration restriction. This eugenics movement paralleled the birth-control movement and remained a presence in modern family planning circles. Lastly, a population-control movement appeared following World War II that sought to address problems of social stability, war, poverty, and economic improvement in the United States and developing nations. Critics, often imposing their own ethical and religious principles on the policy debate, claimed that population control sought to resolve larger social problems through a technical way out—population control—rather than confronting directly problems of social difference, wealth and income redistribution, racism, and imperialism. In this long history of competing forces, Margaret Sanger (1879-1961) played a key role in the birth-control movement as it changed from a fundamental socialist cause into a liberal issue over legal rights 2. Though vaginal diaphragms, cervical caps, spermatocidal compounds, condoms, and safe periods had achieved widespread use among upper classes in the nineteenth century, Sanger undertook a campaign to reform sexual practices amongst the masses, particularly the working-class poor.

Historiography on Female Reproductive Rights in the US 5 By focusing on the social history of the birth-control movement and its rich legal history in the courts, scholars have leaned to obscure the significance of eugenics in the movement. Eugenics played a vital role in influencing Progressive thought in the first two decades of the twentieth century 3. The eugenics movement and the women's movement became strictly associated for many 4. Radical feminist Victoria Woodhull argued as early as 1891 that "the best minds of today have noted the fact that if superior people are desired, they should be bred; if imbeciles, criminals, paupers, and [the] otherwise unfit are unwanted citizens they must not be bred." This type of rhetoric led Havelock Ellis, a British eugenicist and a close friend of Sanger, to claim that "the question of Eugenics is to a great extent one with the woman question." 5. As the American Eugenics Society regarded abortion as murder, unless performed on severely medical grounds, those inclined by eugenic thought—for example, Margaret Sanger and Theodore Roosevelt—favored sterilization of the "unfit." The association between the birth-control movement and the eugenics movement remains convoluted and needs further exploration by scholars. Clearly numerous leading eugenicists refused to support the birth-control movement. In turn, Sanger refused to endorse eugenicists' calls for better classes to produce more children. Indeed, in 1925 Margaret Sanger was convinced by Edward East, a Harvard biologist and member of her Clinical Research Bureau's advisory council, not to issue an editorial attacking the eugenicists for failing to support birth control. East wrote to Sanger, "Birth Control is simply a part of a eugenically program. It is a resultant aspect of a larger whole, but it is

Historiography on Female Reproductive Rights in the US 6 the key. The mere fact that so numerous eugenicists have not been capable to think straight does not make the abstract subject itself any less valued." 6 Beginning in the early 1930s, John D. Rockefeller III also was a main sponsor of the Committee on Maternal Health for better birth-control technology, including what the committee's founder Robert L. Dickinson described as "permanent birth control sterilization without unsexing." In the thirties the committee also began widespread medical research on abortion as a means of birth control. Behind this scientific research lay eugenics arguments that saw the world. Being overrun with populations that susceptible the civilized world. Dickinson wrote to Arthur Packard of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1935: "If at this time governments were to proffer this relief [birth control] to millions of families on relief, or to the brimming population of certain Oriental countries, medical science and public health would be in doubt what to direct most of these people." Most birth-control methods, whether they are perfunctory or mechanicochemical, he wrote, are impractical, for "the indigent and for those of low intelligence, and the millions out of reach of skilled instruction." 7. Following World War II, population-control supports assumed a prominent place in family planning policy. As eugenicists played a considerable role in the populationcontrol movement, it is erroneous to describe, as one historian has, population control as "the successor to eugenics in all respect—ideologically, organizationally, and in personnel" 8. The population-control movement expressed a range of opinions relating to eugenics and the need for population control. Population control advocates usually accepted a neo-Malthusian perspective that the progression of modern medicine had

Historiography on Female Reproductive Rights in the US 7 thrown into imbalance "natural" population growth and offered food supplies and natural resources. Yet, proponents of population control differed amongst themselves over strategies for addressing this global problem. For example, John D. Rockefeller III, a key figure in the postwar populationcontrol movement, called for a dual strategy of escalating the food supply in developing nations through the so-called Green Revolution a program intended to improve agricultural production through high-yield crops as well as restraining population growth through advanced birth-control technology and birth-control programs in developing countries 9. He criticized what he perceived as intense and hysterical proponents of population control, such as General William Draper, Hugh Moore, and other "zero population" advocates. Joan Dunlop, special assistant to Rockefeller on population policy, led assail on the older leadership within the family planning movement and the Population Council. In a series of private memorandums sent to Rockefeller in 1974, she declared that "[William] Draper and [Remiert] Ravenholt, et al are hurting the U.S. abroad in deep and long term ways. They have hurt your reputation by including you completely and explicitly in their articulation of the problem. . . . For myself, I do not want to recognize my career and reputation with their policies unless I can be obviously seen as opposing them." 10 She maintained that "we must prove to the United States that it is indeed a pluralistic society and that there are other voices to be heard and other ways of looking at

Historiography on Female Reproductive Rights in the US 8 the problem." "Population planning," she stressed, "must be placed within a context of economic and social improvement." 11 In emphasizing economic development, she came to her inner concern: the role and status of women in developing nations required to be given a paramount place in economic development and population control. If the economic status of women in developing nations was improved, she argued, it would show the way to a decline in family size. Dunlop did not counter population control per se, but she insisted that it required to be placed within a framework of economic development and must espouse the cause of women's rights globally. Her call for the appointment of more women to the Population Council's board helped impulsive the final split. In late 1974 Bernard Bereleson resigned as president of the council. He was followed by resignations from other longtime council associates, including Frank Notestein. After considering Sarah Weddington to replace Bereleson, the council appointed George Zeidenstein, a former Ford Foundation field officer, to shake up the council. Zeidenstein saw himself as a "development man," not a "population man," even though he thought abortion as "one form of contraception." 12. Under Zeidenstein, the Population Council shifted its focus to issues of economic development, women's rights, and family planning. The emergence of an organized pro-life movement in the mid- 1970s spilled inexorably into partisan politics. The Roe v. Wade decision had set off pro-life opposition. In 1975 the National Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted a thirteen page "Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities." Four years later, in 1979, the National Right to Life Committee was formed with more than eighteen thousand affiliates and 11 million

Historiography on Female Reproductive Rights in the US 9 members. Courted by the New Right in the Republican Party, the pro-life movement became main political force in the presidential election of 1980, which put Ronald Reagan in the White House. While Reagan denounced abortion, he avoided efforts in Congress to enact pro-life legislation. Instead, Reagan appointees conceded the fight to the federal bureaucracy, particularly within the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control, and the United Nations. David Reardon, a pro-life advocate, provides numerous stories of women who were at an extreme troubled period in their life while they had an abortion. It was only after their life became more constant and peaceful that they came to think that they better understood what would have been the right abortion decision for them. Reardon assumes that the only correct decision throughout a period of inner peace would be to bear the child rather than have an abortion. We can be cynical of that conclusion yet learn from his observation that women think best able to make valid decisions when their lives are relatively peaceful. Although Reardon mainly describes women who came to regret their abortion decision, he does portray a small group of women who he perceives not to be troubled or harmed by the decision to have an abortion. He describes those women in quite unappealing terms (self-centered, aggressive, highly privileged) and dismisses the implication of the possibility that their lives might be enhanced by having an abortion 13. Thus, his evidence suggests that women might come to regret or authenticate their previous abortion decision while their lives become more peaceful. However, he manages to ridicule all the women who authenticate their decision to have an abortion.

Historiography on Female Reproductive Rights in the US 10 Interestingly, these women also seem to be the majority feminist women place value on their lives, as well as on the fetus. As Simone de Beauvoir pointed out, it is hard to elucidate why any women would be feminists. Reardon's hidden message that women should not authenticate their own lives when making an abortion decision is element of the social consciousness that contributes to women not valuing their own lives. Reardon's evaluation of women who validate their abortion experiences is needless in the larger context of his book. He could have made the point that lots of women come to be apologetic their abortion experience without criticizing those women who do not come to regret their abortion experience. His critique, though, brings to surface his coercive message—that he wants women to make abortion decisions in a framework in which they do not value their own lives. Pro-choice advocate Lynn Paltrow also consents that women find inner peace when they make genuine abortion decisions. In her stories, women's increased peacefulness was capable to validate their prior abortion decisions. These women, like the women described by Reardon, may have struggled with the abortion matter and only knew with hindsight, while their lives were more peaceful, that they had made the correct abortion decision. Rather than ridicule these women's values, Paltrow affirms them. Here is one story from Paltrow's brief: “Having an abortion seemed to be the most considerate and loving decision we could make, in fact, it seemed to be the only decision we could make which would still retain our life goals and plans in helping serve others as we had hoped. I was a Christian then, as I am now, and constant prayer asking for supervision through peace is how I was able to feel that God guided me toward that decision, also. Since the abortion in 1977, I

Historiography on Female Reproductive Rights in the US 11 have helped hundreds of psychologically disturbed children, counseled twice as many parents about the loving ways of parenting, become known as the expert in the field of counseling children and families traumatized by sexual abuse, and in 1979 I married a Pediatrician who has been a wonderful husband and father to our four year old boy and our seven month old boy in utero (due in August). God has given me many blessings and much peace since 1977” 14. Lots of the women described in Reardon's book and Paltrow's brief were not capable to reach an abortion decision in a thoughtful environment; they were coerced by a husband who did not want to facilitate raise a child or a Catholic family that would not permit deliberation of an abortion. Irrespective of what decision a woman eventually comes to concerning abortion, it appears that she moves closer to the aim of wisdom if she can make the decision in a passive environment that facilitates reflection. The issue then becomes what social conditions can ease a considered rather than coerced judgment. Paltrow suggests that women will make more genuine judgments in a social system in which there are few limits on abortion, because their lives will be subject to less compulsion. Reardon suggests that women will make more real judgments in an environment in which physicians cannot be remunerated for performing abortions, because the physician will not have an inducement to provide pro-abortion misinformation. They both agree that we require thinking about solving the problem of consciousness in the framework of political-social arrangements. We require finding ways to ease the coercion present in women's lives so that they can get the peacefulness to make authentic decisions.

Historiography on Female Reproductive Rights in the US 12 Though Congress thwarted numerous pro-life efforts to destabilize the federal government's commitment to family planning, it was obvious that Americans were engaged in what sociologist James Hunter called a "culture war," which spilled into the public policy arena. Bill Clinton experienced the brunt of this war over values while the Vatican, joined by Muslim militants, attacked his administration's support and involvement in the Cairo Conference on Population, held in August 1994. The singular complexity in the widening chasm between pro-choice and antiabortion forces is that much of the issue is bound up in religious beliefs. American citizens have at all times held in high regard the concept of separation of state and church, but the abortion issue is trying the strength of that concept as perhaps no other issue in our nation's history. Anti-abortionists, most of whom are not aggressive in their opposition, believe intensely that life begins at conception, a belief beached in religious ideology. Indeed, for some that belief expands to their opposition to any form of birth control because, in their view, that is disrupting God's plan. Because of that, it is difficult, if not impossible, for the anti-abortionists to stand another viewpoint or to accept any compromise, such as waiting periods or parental notification. Most pro-choice advocates, on the other hand, consider that it is each individual woman's right to make a decision about terminating a pregnancy and that the choice is constitutionally protected by a right to privacy. Thus, it would appear to be necessary to need that free, nondirective pregnancycounseling must be available at all health facilities that proffer reproductive services. In addition, sex-education classes must provide the space for young women to discuss reproductive issues explicitly and freely. Rather than offer nondirective sex education,

Historiography on Female Reproductive Rights in the US 13 United States schools characteristically offer little or no information concerning reproductive health issues. Additionally, current administration policy (which Congress is trying to overturn) refuses to authorize publicly funded family-planning clinics from even discussing the prospect of terminating a pregnancy through abortion. Existing counseling is consequently quite directive rather than open.

Historiography on Female Reproductive Rights in the US 14 Reference:

1. G. Ramsay, Juvenal and Persius ( Cambridge, Mass., 1918), 31. 2. Gloria Moore and Ronald Moore, Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement:A Bibliography, 1911-1884 ( Metuchen, N.J., 1986) 3. Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics ( New York, 1990) 4. Mark Heller, Eugenics:Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought ( New Brunswick, 1963). 5. Kevles DJ. In the name of eugenics: genetics and the uses of human heredity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985, 84, 86. 6. Reed, James. From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society since 1830. New York: Basic Books, 1978, 135 7. Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right, London, 1980, 395-98. 8. Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right, London, 1980, 395 9. Warren Weaver, Memorandum, 1 January 1952, RG 2, Box 1, RFA. 10. Suzanne A. Onotaro, "The Population Council and the Development of Contraceptive Technologies", Research Reports from the Rockefeller Archive Center, Spring 1991, 1-2 11. Hugh Moore Fund, The Population Bomb ( New York, 1954) 12. Katherine Brownell Oettinger, Children's Bureau Chief:A Pioneer in the Twentieth Century, Oral History ( 1985) 13. David Reardon, Aborted Women: Silent No Morexxii ( 1987), 138-41.

Historiography on Female Reproductive Rights in the US 15 14. Lynn Paltrow, Amicus Brief: Richard Thornburgh v. "American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists", 9 Women's Rts. L. Rep. 3, 22 ( 1986).

Bibliography Susan Brownmiller `In Our Time: Memoirs of a Revolution.` Dial Press, New York (1999). Alice Echols `Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975.` University of Minn. Press (1989). Ruth Rosen, `The World Split Open` Penguin Group, New York (2000).