Population controllers
are some of the most fascinating characters to appear in After Roe. Some of these activists, like former Columbia
student Judy Senderowitz, saw themselves as committed feminists. Others
presented family planning as a necessary step in saving the environment. Some,
like Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, saw reproductive rights as a side issue.
Older population controllers even argued that women’s-rights questions were a waste of
resources for a movement dedicated to stopping the nation from populating
itself to death.
In After Roe, the population controllers’ story illuminates the
changing relationship between the movements for legal abortion and women’s
liberation. From the beginning, women played a crucial role in demanding legal
access to abortion. Just the same, the early movement for abortion rights often
shied away from women’s-rights arguments, and the relationship between the two
movements was often rocky. At a time when women’s liberation remained
controversial and women struggled for respect in the workplace, movement
pragmatists believed that they would get results faster if they could convince
voters and judges that legalizing abortion would have other desirable effects.
Arguing that women had a right to abortion said nothing about how everyone else
would benefit from legalization. By sometimes focusing on lower welfare costs,
environmental benefits and reduced illegitimacy rates, movement members hoped
to reach a larger audience.
All of that changed
when the population-control movement found itself buried in scandal in the
later 1970s. Sterilization abuse at home and abroad persuaded many observers
that population policies were irrevocably racist and coercive. As population
control became more controversial, feminists gained new influence in what would
become the pro-choice movement. Population controllers also began staying away from
the abortion issue, seeing it as another controversy that they could ill
afford.
It seems that the
implosion of population control had ramifications beyond the issues of abortion
and family planning. In the 1970s, leading population organizations often
advocated for abortion and family planning, environmental protection, and
immigration limits. By contrast, organizations that lobby today for immigration
limits, like NumbersUSA and the Federation for American Immigration Reform
(FAIR), almost never discuss environmental issues. Conversely, groups like the
Sierra Club consistently avoid arguments about the environmental damage some
tie to overpopulation. Nor does FAIR or NumbersUSA identify family planning as
a way of preventing the kind of harm members associate with immigration.
These changes came partly
because both parties cemented their positions on abortion and family planning
by the 1980s. While leading politicians in each party could be found on either
side of the abortion issue for much of the 1970s, in the 1980s, it became costly for a candidate to depart from a party’s official position on
reproductive issues.
I imagine that the
story of party positions on immigration and environmental issues is equally surprising
and rich. In the 1970s, it was far from obvious that environmentalism would be
primarily embraced by Democrats. If we understood how the parties established a
position on environmental issues and immigration in the decades after Roe, we might discover some of the lost
possibilities for advocacy on either issue.
