The following sections are excerpts from this book:
Contraceptives were largely illegal in the colonies. After the United States was formed, most states enacted laws prohibiting the advertising, sale, and distribution of contraceptives. As a practical matter, while there were a large number of convictions under the anti-contraceptive laws, contraceptives and information about birth control were widely distributed.
Ironically, many states outlawed contraceptives, but permitted early-stage abortion.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Anthony Comstock, a politician known for his adherence to Victorian standards of morality, decided to do something about what he saw as the problem of vice. In his view, contraceptives allowed for adultery and the spread of venereal diseases. By force of will, he was able to get a bill through Congress called “Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.” The act specifically defined information about contraceptives as obscene. Anthony Comstock was appointed special agent of the Post Office, with the authority to track and destroy illegal mail and bring offenders to justice. Within a few years, twenty-four states passed equally harsh laws against contraceptives. Connecticut passed the most restrictive chastity laws in the country, making it a crime for even a married couple to use contraceptives.
Margaret Sanger took it as her mission to overturn the Comstock laws. One of eleven children, she was born to a mother who was perpetually pregnant. Margaret trained as a nurse and married an architect. Using contraceptives, she limited the number of her own children to three. Working in New York’s Lower East Side sensitized her to the plight of women who “wore themselves out with continuous childbirth.” Because they were denied safe and effective contraceptives and safe abortions, women passed suggestions among themselves, including “herb teas, turpentine, steaming, rolling downstairs, inserting slippery elm, knitting needles, and shoe hooks.”[i]
After watching a desperate young woman die from a self-induced abortion, Margaret made up her mind to do something. Her resolve was strengthened after caring for another woman who nearly died after a difficult birth. The woman knew another pregnancy would kill her, so she asked the doctor if there was some way she could prevent another pregnancy. The doctor said, “You want to have your cake and eat it too, do you? Well, it can’t be done.”[ii] He advised her to tell her husband to sleep on the roof.
Three months later, Margaret’s telephone rang. The woman’s husband called to tell Margaret that his wife was once again pregnant. Evidently he hadn’t wanted to sleep on the roof. Margaret rushed to their house to find the woman in a room surrounded by her young children. Margaret was unable to save her. She soon slipped into a coma and died. That was it—Margaret could not take any more. She instituted training for women on reproduction, birth control, and sexuality, and tried to spread information about birth control the only way she could, by writing a column in a socialist newspaper.
She was soon arrested and charged with violating the Comstock Act. If found guilty, she could be sentenced to forty-five years in prison. The district attorney who charged her with criminal activity claimed that her crime—disseminating information on birth control—was the moral and legal equivalent of throwing bombs and committing murder.
To avoid conviction and prison, Margaret fled to Canada, where she continued writing about the need to educate women about birth control. Eventually, she returned to the United States to stand trial, defending herself by saying that no woman could call herself free unless she could control her own reproduction and decide when—and if—she became a mother. Because of an outpouring of public support on her behalf, she was not convicted.
She opened a controversial birth control clinic that grew into today’s Planned Parenthood.
In 1936 the Comstock Laws were amended to allow doctors to disseminate contraceptives to patients. Over the next few decades, the Comstock laws were further limited. A landmark Supreme Court case, Griswold v. Connecticut, struck down Connecticut’s law making it illegal for any person to use contraceptives.[iii] Griswold, the director of Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, was brought to trial for giving information to married couples about contraceptives. In what was considered at the time a controversial ruling, the Supreme Court held that the Connecticut law infringed on a married couple’s constitutional right to privacy. The hitch was that there is nothing explicitly in the Constitution about privacy. The Supreme Court, however, held that the various guarantees within the Bill of Rights created penumbras, or zones, that established a right to privacy.
In 1950, when Sanger was in her eighties, she took the step that probably did more to change the lives of twentieth-century women than any other: She raised $150,000 for the research to develop a safe and effective birth control pill. In 1960, the first oral contraceptive, Enovid, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, although it would be a few more years before the pill would be widely available. It was probably not a coincidence that the wide availability of the pill coincided with the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
The last of the Comstock laws were not struck down until 1972, when the Supreme Court decided a case called Eisenstadt v. Baird, finding that unmarried couples had the same rights to contraceptives as married couples.[iv]
One of the ironies of the laws surrounding reproduction in the early twentieth century was that while birth control and abortions were illegal, there were an abundance of laws allowing the government to forcibly sterilize citizens. In 1924, Virginia passed a law allowing for the sterilization of inmates in institutions supported by the state. Carrie Buck was considered feebleminded—a common word at the time for disorders of the mind. Carrie, who was committed to the State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, was the daughter of a “feebleminded” mother who lived in the same institution. Both Carrie and her mother were judged to be promiscuous on the grounds that both had children out of wedlock. When Carrie was eighteen years old, the state sought to have her sterilized on the theory that as long as she was capable of bearing children, she was a menace to society because she would likely bear similarly feebleminded children. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of Virginia to forcibly sterilize Carrie, thereby legalizing eugenics.[v]
Soon after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Buck v. Bell, a dozen other states passed their own sterilization laws. The largest percentage of forced sterilizations was carried out in the South. Although all races and both genders were forcibly sterilized, it wasn’t long before the victims were primarily female. Initially, the sterilized girls were generally white, single, and sexually active, with a low IQ. Susan Cahn, a professor of women’s history, explains this by stating that sexually active poor white women procreating in large numbers threatened the social order in the South because of the embarrassment of sexually promiscuous whites failing to live up to stereotyped views of whites as morally superior and hence fit to be the ruling class. Promiscuous white girls inverted the usual ideas—prevalent everywhere but particularly so in the South—that white women embodied a special purity. Promiscuous was understood to mean having a baby without being married.
Authorities, in selecting those to be sterilized, often conflated feebleminded with promiscuity, and in fact, promiscuity was taken as proof of feeblemindedness. In the words of the doctor and administrator of a state-run institution for the feebleminded,
It is well known that feebleminded women and girls are very liable to become sources of unspeakable debauchery and licentiousness which pollutes . . . the minds and bodies of thoughtless youth at the very threshold of manhood.[vi]
The problem was how to understand promiscuous white girls who did not appearfeebleminded. The theory arose that promiscuous white girls must have borderline intelligence—while not visibly feebleminded, they must have low intelligence because nothing else explained their behavior, and hence, they were good candidates for forced sterilization.
By the 1940s and 1950s there was a shift, particularly in the South, with authorities more often targeting African American females as candidates for forced sterilization. The reason for the shift was that for the first time, welfare became widely available to African Americans. In response, there arose the stereotype of the welfare mother, typically characterized as an African American woman deliberately cheating the state by bearing too many children. Ronald Reagan is credited with exploiting the pejorative phrase “welfare queens,” which he applied to women on welfare who—according to implication—were too lazy to work, choosing to have babies as a means to increase their government income.
In an effort to locate candidates for sterilization, state social workers entered black communities and attempted to learn the names of women who might “benefit” from sterilization. The black communities mounted a silent resistance, refusing to cooperate and provide names. So state governments disguised what they were up to. If a poor woman or pregnant teenager went to a public clinic for birth control, prenatal care, or an infection, a public health worker might evaluate her as a prospect for sterilization and refer her to the welfare department. Some authorities purposely misled individuals about the nature of the operation they were about to perform, saying that a medical condition required treatment. Many surgeons used events like childbirth or appendectomies to perform sterilizations—often without permission. One notorious obstetrician automatically and without permission sterilized a woman after her third child. Another—the only obstetrician in Aiken County, South Carolina, who accepted Medicaid—required welfare patients to agree to sterilization after childbirth or he would refuse them as patients. Many women were told they had to undergo sterilization or risk losing their jobs or welfare benefits.
When complaints about women being forced to undergo unwanted sterilizations became so numerous that the ACLU formed a division called the Reproductive Freedom Project. Eventually, this division handled issues of contraceptives and abortion as well.
The first abortion rights advocates were doctors—male doctors to be precise—because in the early part of the twentieth century, very few women were part of the medical profession. Those opposed to abortions on moral grounds accused doctors of being businessmen and profiting by performing abortions. In fact, doctors first began advocating for safe and legal abortions because they were alarmed by the large numbers of women who died each year as a result of botched illegal abortions.
As of 1970, illegal abortions were the leading cause of maternal death in the United States, whereas legal abortions performed by a medical professional were extremely safe. A frequent estimate was that badly-botched abortions resulted in about five thousand maternal deaths each year. Most were married with children left behind at their deaths. The reality was that a woman desperate for an abortion would obtain one, and if she could not find a safe and legal abortionist, she would put herself at risk with an unlicensed abortionist. In response to the public health menace of so many unsafe abortions, jurisdictions such as New York, California, Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington, DC, repealed criminal sanctions for abortions, hence legalizing the procedure as long as it was performed by a licensed doctor. While there was much religious opposition to decriminalizing abortion, there were some religious leaders, including those in Catholic circles, such as Reverend Robert Drinan, dean of the Boston College Law School, who believed that abortion should be placed in the category of adultery—an act condemned by the Church as immoral but not criminally punished.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that many feminists took up the cause of abortion, repeating Margaret Sanger’s oft-quoted statement that no woman could call herself free unless she could control her own reproduction and decide when—and if—she became a mother. Ruth was always open about her personal views on abortion, perhaps born of her experience in Sweden watching the Sherri Finkbine case unfold. It was clear to Ruth that a woman with enough money to buy a plane ticket would be able to obtain a safe and legal abortion. Criminalizing abortion, therefore, simply meant restricting the choices of lower-income women.
Critics accused Planned Parenthood and the ACLU of practicing eugenics because of the rationalization that abortion and contraceptive laws—as a practical matter—fell only on the poor. Many African Americans, in fact, were afraid that the pro-choice movement would amount to another assault on the reproductive organs of black women by forcing them to have abortions. From the time of slavery through to the forced sterilizations of the twentieth century, black women knew how it felt for the government to control their reproductive organs. Scholar Dorothy Roberts argues that every indignity a woman suffers today when she is denied control of her reproductive organs can be found in the lives of slaves, who were often forced to reproduce to produce more slaves and who endured the indignity of being treated as procreative vessels.[vii]Even the current debate pitting a mother’s welfare against that of her unborn child was also expressed during slavery as the understanding that a slave woman’s life was of less value than the babies she was expected to produce.
The philosophy of the ACLU and Planned Parenthood was that a woman should have complete control over her own reproductive organs without governmental interference, whether the woman wanted to prevent a pregnancy, end a pregnancy, or avoid forced sterilization.
As Ruth Bader Ginsburg put it, “No one is for abortion. People are for a woman’s ability to decide what her life’s course will be.” [viii]
NOTES
[i] Alan Gutmacher, Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (New York: Pergamon Books, 1938), 89.
[ii] Ibid., 91.
[iii] Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965).
[iv] Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972).
[v] Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927).
[vi] As quoted by Susan K. Cahn, Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 163.
[vii] Dorothy E. Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998), 23.
[viii] Goldberg, “Second Woman Justice,” 43.
[ix] Weisberg, “Susan’s Choice.”
[x] Allen Pusey, “Ginsburg: Court Should Have Avoided Broad-Based Decision in Roe v. Wade,” A.B.A. J., May 13, 2013.
[xi] Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
[xii] Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “Some Thoughts on Autonomy and Equality in Relation to Roe v. Wade,” N.C. L. Rev 63 (1985): 373.