Who Is Frightened of Reproductive Freedom for Women and Why? Some Historical Answers

Abstract

In addition to commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the court decision recognizing birth control as a legal right, this conference marks for me a personal anniversary: ten years have passed since the publication of my book on the history of the birth control movement. If I were rewriting that book now, I might shift its emphases somewhat, in light of the events of the last decade. First, I would underscore the historical continuity of the situation in which we find ourselves today. Reproductive rights have been one of the most consistently controversial issues in U.S. domestic politics for nearly 150 years. Second, a stable guarantee of women's reproductive freedom will require a new social consensus regarding gender and family arrangements. Third, to win reproductive choices for all women is to ask for a profound change in our whole society, and it is better to recognize the radical implications of what we are asking. Let me argue for these conclusions with a bit of history. The twenty-year anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut that this conference marks calls our attention to the fact that the political struggle for abortion rights is inseparable from a longer history of campaigns for birth control rights in general. When I was first involved in the late 1960's revival of a women's movement, and then learned that our nineteenth-century predecessors had also worked for women's reproductive freedom, I looked at first for a simple story of feminists against anti-feminists. No such luck. Moreover, oversimplifying the story into against them would disadvantage us today as well in our efforts to build effective political strategies. Women and occasionally men have attempted to regulate their fertility since ancient times, but the first political movements about reproduction occurred in the nineteenth century. In Europe a few neo-Malthusians attempted to argue for birth control to reduce the population of the poor. In the United States, underpopulation meant that there was little basis for that logic. Instead the first American reproduction struggle was the anti-abortion campaign beginning in the 1840's, led primarily by physicians, who used the abortion issue as a weapon against midwives and other popular medical practitioners. By 1880 this previously legal and extremely common practice was rendered illegal in all states-for the first time. Meanwhile, in the 1870's, the first organized expressions of pro-birth control sentiment emerged among feminists. The birth control motive was accompanied by another of equal intensity: to give women control over their sexual activity as well, and to subvert the norm that marriage entitled men to women's sexual submission. Thus the first birth control campaign, called Voluntary Motherhood, demanded for women the right to refuse sex altogether. In other words, their birth control technique was abstinence. No doubt these women were prudes by contemporary standards, but their basic premise continues today: campaigns for women's reproductive rights have usually