As Roe’s fortieth anniversary approaches, scholars have offered new
perspectives on the efficacy of pro-life incrementalism. As framed by the
movement, incrementalism involves a focus on small victories—legislation
restricting but not banning abortion. Incrementalists themselves claim to be
making significant headway, pointing to the proliferation of restrictions on
abortion in the states, several of which the Supreme Court has upheld. By
contrast, in a forthcoming piece, by contrast, Caitlin Borgmann argues that
incrementalism has failed to deliver on its promise to change hearts and minds.
Whether incrementalism is
succeeding, of course, depends on what its proponents have set out to achieve.
In my current project, I explore the roots and rise of antiabortion
incrementalism as an overarching strategy in the 1970s. Early incremental
efforts came primarily in the courts, as organizations like Americans United
for Life argued that new restrictions on abortion did not violate the right set
out in Roe. In the late 1970s,
activists like James Bopp, Jr. and Sandra Faucher saw great potential in an
incremental approach. Bopp, a Catholic attorney from Indiana, told me about his
instinctual aversion to abortion as an overarching philosophy for the movement.
Faucher, a liberal Democrat from Maine, described her natural discomfort with
Phyllis Schlafly. In spite of their differences, the two played an important
part in making incrementalism a philosophy, a strategy, and a battle cry. Small
victories could energize a movement disillusioned by the continuing failure of
the human life amendment and could dramatically limit access to abortion. As
importantly, incrementalism could make Roe
hollow and incoherent—protecting an abortion right that guaranteed little access
to abortion. Between 1973 and 1983, the antiabortion movement had worked to
create a right to live that would reach beyond the abortion context.
Incrementalism defined a much more modest goal—the overruling of Roe.
Measuring the efficacy of
incrementalism is a delicate business, for even in the 1970s, proponents
disagreed about what the incrementalist project entailed. Incrementalists
adopted different substantive aims and rhetorical strategies. Even as an
overarching strategy, incrementalism sent conflicting messages. Its proponents often
adopted the rhetoric of new movement allies in the Religious Right and New
Right while urging movement members to focus primarily on compromise solutions
that would limit abortion without banning it entirely. The complexity of
incrementalism points out some of the challenges in measuring whether there was
indeed a backlash to Roe and whether
reaction to the decision was particularly costly to the abortion-rights
movement. Those incrementalists from whom I took oral histories never tired of
reminding me of how they defied easy categorization, and they were right.
