As abortion
opponents held different goals for movement incrementalism, before and after Roe, abortion-rights supporters had
strikingly different identities and priorities. One issue, particularly
explosive in contemporary historiography, involves the role of
population-control politics in the pre- and post-Roe movement. As I have shown, population-control arguments played
an important part in the pre-Roe
rhetorical strategy of the movement (see Mary
Ziegler, The Framing of a Right to Choose:
Roe v. Wade and The Changing Debate
on Abortion Law, 27 Law and History
Review 272 (2009)). Abortion-rights pamphlets from the 1970s often
highlight the benefits of legalizing abortion: the reduction of welfare costs,
illegitimacy rates, and overall population growth. Movement leaders like Larry
Lader and Richard Bowers worked within the population control movement. Others,
like Judy Senderowitz, the feminist leader of Zero Population Growth, combined
commitments to curbing population growth and legalizing abortion.
The meaning
of the abortion-movement’s relationship to demands for population control was
anything but straightforward, however. In the 1970s, population controllers
themselves were diverse. Reva Siegel and Linda Greenhouse describe the commitment
to sexual freedom evident in the work of organizations like Zero Population
Growth, Inc. Donald Critchlow and Matthew Connelly have traced the movement’s
ties to past demands for eugenic legal reform and government control of
reproduction. Throughout the 1970s, different constituencies contested the
identity and values of their movement. Some rifts tended to be generational.
Older leaders more often had ties to earlier eugenic organizations or shared
concerns about the relationship between population growth in the Third World
and cold war politics. College students, by contrast, viewed the population
control movement as a rallying cry for environmental stewardship, sexual
freedom, and responsible childbearing within the white middle class.
Struggle about
the meaning of the population control cause bled into battles within the
abortion-rights movement. Were arguments for abortion based on population
control merely politically expedient, or did these claims instead reflect the
substantive beliefs of members of the abortion-rights movement? Were population
arguments inherently incompatible with claims that abortion was a fundamental
right for women? Gradually, feminists took positions of leadership and
downplayed claims based on population control, at times, denying that related
arguments had ever played a part in abortion rights advocacy. Significantly,
the abortion-rights movement began rewriting its own history and the history of
the population-control movement. Population control, in this account, involved
government control over reproduction, something that a feminist abortion-rights
movement had never endorsed. Perhaps the most controversial issue in this new
narrative involved race and abortion, a subject I will take up next.
