At the heart of After
Roe is a story about when and
why conflict about abortion and gender escalated. Before writing the book, I
believed that the Roe decision itself
inevitably led to the culture wars we face now. As Gene Burns, Linda Greenhouse, and Reva
Siegel have shown, compromise on the abortion issue itself seemed impossible
well before the Court intervened. By raising the salience of the abortion
issue, however, the Court drew attention to a question that hopelessly divided
Americans. In responding to Roe, the
antiabortion movement got bigger and more sophisticated. As historian Daniel K.
Williams argues in a forthcoming book,
abortion opponents also responded to the decision by prioritizing a
constitutional amendment. Movement members ended up supporting whichever
political party endorsed their constitutional agenda. When Ronald Reagan made
the Republican Party the “party of life,” he strengthened an alliance between
pro-lifers and the political Right.
Just the same, as I document in After Roe, the Court’s 1973 decision did not immediately or inevitably eliminate compromises on other important gender issues. Indeed, in the decade after Roe, influential activists on either side of the debate viewed common-ground solutions as more important than ever, particularly on the issues of pregnancy discrimination, welfare for adolescent mothers, and even the regulation of fetal research. I argue that the polarization of these issues came later and for reasons beyond the Court’s decision, including the rise of the New Right and Religious Right and political party realignment.
The
book left me wondering about other areas of possible cooperation. At times in
the 1970s, some pro-lifers pushed for laws banning marital-status
discrimination, particularly at the local and state level. For certain movement
leaders, these laws promised to reduce abortion rates by removing the stigma of
illegitimacy and unwed motherhood. In the same period, as part of the early
push for civil-rights ordinances, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender
activists also called for bans on discrimination on the basis of both sexual
preference and marital status. For these advocates, ending marital-status
discrimination would protect gays and lesbians who could not marry while
undermining the legitimacy of state regulation of sexuality more broadly.
Agreeing
with gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender activists would, I imagine, have
exposed another fault line in the antiabortion movement. Some movement members
saw sexual irresponsibility, not abortion, as the core problem in American
society. While praising marital, procreative sexuality, others argued against
laws that punished what they considered transgressive sex, seeing these
regulations as harmful to children and mothers and coercive of abortion.
Serena Mayeri’s forthcoming work on the rise of marital supremacy in the 1970s will illuminate an important part of the story about challenges to the sexual status quo in the decade after Roe. A surprisingly diverse group of activists called for protection of the non-marital family. In order to understand the consequences and history of the marriage equality struggle, we should turn our attention to the legal history of that effort and its ultimate decline.
Serena Mayeri’s forthcoming work on the rise of marital supremacy in the 1970s will illuminate an important part of the story about challenges to the sexual status quo in the decade after Roe. A surprisingly diverse group of activists called for protection of the non-marital family. In order to understand the consequences and history of the marriage equality struggle, we should turn our attention to the legal history of that effort and its ultimate decline.
