Robin Elliott’s journey
in the abortion rights movement brought him from England to Columbia University
and finally into the front lines of the abortion wars. The director of public
relations for Planned Parenthood, Elliott worked, after 1973, to create a new
message for the abortion-rights movement. He urged Planned Parenthood to stress
individual freedom of conscience. A person could oppose abortion but could not
impose that belief on anyone else.
A similar idea found
expression in the Church Amendment, a conscience-clause law passed with
bipartisan support in 1973. As Sara Dubow argued recently at the American
Society for Legal History Conference, conscience legislation in the 1970s was
popular, uncontroversial, and widespread. In the decades to come, however,
conscience laws took their place at the center of conflict about women’s health
and religious liberty.
Dubow attributes this
shift to several larger changes in the political terrain. Bipartisan consensus
on the importance of religious freedom, the desirability of guaranteed access
to healthcare, and women's rights broke down over time. Legislators once
willing to discuss conscience without mentioning abortion were no longer
willing to do so.
This argument is as
compelling as much of Dubow’s work (see Sara
Dubow, Ourselves Unborn: A History of the
Fetus in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)). I think a few additional changes have
fueled the conscience wars. First, in the decades since Roe came down, consensus on the value of conscience has obscured
intense conflict about what choice or conscience means. Beginning in the
mid-1970s, abortion opponents seized on the ideas of choice as a way of narrowing
abortion rights. In this account, the Constitution recognized the importance of
a woman’s freedom of conscience rather than access to abortion. As the Supreme
Court expressed views of this kind in cases like Maher v. Roe, it became clear that agreement on the importance of
freedom of conscience went only so far. Those on opposing sides of the abortion
issue held dramatically different views on what that freedom involved.
Second, those claiming
freedom of conscience have defined that freedom ever more broadly. The Church
Amendment applied primarily to those who did not want to assist in abortions.
Current religious liberty claims suggest that the legality of abortion or
same-sex marriage itself represents a threat to freedom of conscience. Abortion
opponents, among others, argue that making something legal creates a risk that
believers will have to learn about, participate in, or approve of that
practice. Defined in this way, freedom of conscience almost requires a ban on
the challenged practice.
As early as 1973,
participants in the conscience wars disagreed about who could speak for
religious liberty and what that liberty entailed. Now, this conflict is more
visible and intense, but it began as early as did Robin Elliott’s
public-relations campaign.
