Pro-life feminism is
back in the news, as I mentioned in a recent post. Writing about the history of
those activists proved to be a complicated endeavor. As I argue in a
forthcoming article, in the decade after Roe,
pro-life feminism had been a vibrant, diverse, and influential movement,
lobbying for laws protecting women again pregnancy discrimination, allowing
women to take credit in their own names, or funding childcare or contraception.
In the later 1970s, these feminists found themselves marginalized, as the
antiabortion movement formed an alliance with the New Right and Religious
Right. I did not realize how invisible these advocates were until the leaders
of an organization called All Our Lives contacted me. Recently founded, the
organization opposes abortion but favors contraception, GLBQT rights, and sex
education. My experience again raised the question of why left-leaning abortion
opponents tend to attract so little political attention.
The Second Edition of Reva
Siegel and Linda Greenhouse’s Before Roe:
Voices That Shaped Abortion Debate
Before the Supreme Court Ruling (New Haven: Yale Law Library, 2012) may
offer part of an answer to this question. Siegel and Greenhouse show that before Roe, the abortion-rights
movement worked particularly closely with Republicans, from Governor Nelson
Rockefeller to Senators Jacob Javits and Edward Brooke. Nixon’s Southern
Strategy—an effort to lure Catholic voters away from the Democratic Party—began
to redraw party positions about abortion.
Political
party realignment continued after Roe,
as the 1980 Republican Party platform became the first to endorse a fetal-rights
amendment to the Constitution. This realignment had significant consequences
for the identity and priorities of the antiabortion movement. Some movement
members had long identified themselves as conservative Republicans (Anthony
Lauinger, a leading activist in Oklahoma since the 1970s, told me that he had
worked to unite the movement and the Republican Party since the mid-1970s).
With the mobilization of religious conservatives and the gradual emergence of
the Republican Party as “the party of life,” however, the movement had new and
compelling political reasons to move to the right. In the 1970s, antiabortion
organizations struggled to raise money or establish a clearly defined place in
party politics. Over the objection of many members, the movement shifted to the
right as a matter of political necessity.
It is worth asking
whether the partnership between conservatives and abortion opponents today is a
marriage of convenience. In the 1970s, the apparent conservatism of the
antiabortion movement at least partly reflected changing political
opportunities rather than any deeper normative commitment. Is something similar
true today?
