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By Leigh Ann Wheeler

Demonstration protesting anti-abortion candidate Ellen McCormack at the Democratic National Convention, New York City. Photo by Warren K. Leffler, 14 July 1976. Source: Library of Congress.

Such are today’s arguments for upholding Roe v. Wade, whose fortieth birthday many of us are celebrating.

Others are mourning.

“It’s a child, not a choice!”
“Abortion kills children!”
“Stop killing babies!”

How did we arrive at this stunningly polarized place in our discussion — our national shouting match — over women’s reproductive rights?

Certainly it wasn’t always this way. Indeed, consensus and moderation on the issue of abortion has been the rule until recently.

Even if we go back to biblical times, the brutal and otherwise misogynist law of the Old Testament made no mention of abortion, despite popular use of herbal abortifacients at the time. Moreover, it did not treat a person who caused a miscarriage as a murderer. Fast-forward several thousand years to North American indigenous societies where women regularly aborted unwanted pregnancies. Even Christian Europeans who settled in their midst did not prohibit abortion, especially before “quickening,” or the appearance of fetal movement. Support for restrictions on abortion emerged only in the 1800s, a time when physicians seeking to gain professional status sought control over the procedure. Not until the twentieth century did legislation forbidding all abortions begin to blanket the land.

What happened during those decades to women with unwanted pregnancies is well documented. For a middle-class woman, a nine-month “vacation” with distant relatives, a quietly performed abortion by a reputable physician, or, for those without adequate support, a “back-alley” job; for a working-class woman, nine months at a home for unwed mothers, a visit to a back-alley butcher, or maybe another mouth to feed. Women made do, sometimes by giving their lives, one way or another.

But not until the 1950s did serious challenges to laws against abortion emerge. They began to gain a constitutional foothold in the 1960s, when the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) persuaded the US Supreme Court to declare state laws that prohibited contraceptives in violation of a newly articulated right to privacy. By the 1970s, the notion of a right to privacy actually cut many ways, but on January 23, 1973, it cut straight through state criminal laws against abortion. In Roe, the Supreme Court adopted the ACLU’s claim that the right to privacy must “encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” But the Court also permitted intrusion on that privacy according to a trimester timetable that linked a woman’s rights to the stage of her pregnancy and a physician’s advice; as the pregnancy progressed, the Court allowed the state’s interest in preserving the woman’s health or the life of the fetus to take over.

Roe actually returned the country to an abortion law regime not so terribly different from the one that had reigned for centuries if not millennia before the nineteenth century. The first trimester of a pregnancy, or the months before “quickening,” remained largely under the woman’s control, though not completely, given the new role of the medical profession. The other innovation was that women’s control now derived from a constitutional right to privacy — a right made meaningful only by the availability and affordability of physicians willing to perform abortions.

With these exceptions, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe did little more than return us to an older status quo.  So why has it left us screaming at each other over choices and children, rights and murder?

There are many answers to this question, but a major one involves partisan politics.

On the eve of Roe, to be a Catholic was practically tantamount to being a Democrat. Moreover, feminists were as plentiful in the Republican Party as they were in the Democratic Party. Not so today, on the eve of Roe’s fortieth birthday. Why?

As the Catholic Church cemented its position against abortion and feminists embraced abortion rights as central to a women’s rights agenda, politicians saw an opportunity to poach on their opponent’s constituency and activists saw an opportunity to hitch their fortunes to one of the two major parties. In the 1970s, Paul Weyrich, the conservative activist who coined the phrase “moral majority,” urged Republicans to adopt a pro-life platform in order to woo Catholic Democrats. More recently, the 2012 election showed us Republican candidates who would prohibit all abortions — at all stages of a pregnancy and even in cases of rape and incest — and a proudly, loudly pro-choice Democratic Party.

In the past forty years, abortion has played a major role in realigning our major political parties, associating one with conservative Christianity and the other with women’s rights — a phenomenon that has contributed to the emergence of a twenty-point gender gap, the largest in US history. Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that we are screaming at each other.

Leigh Ann Wheeler is Associate Professor of History at Binghamton University. She is co-editor of the Journal of Women’s History and the author of How Sex Became a Civil Liberty and Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873-1935.

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This Saturday is the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Believe me when I say that I could write for days on the significance of the decision, and even more about recent news and the current state of reproductive rights. If I tried, I could probably recount verbatim the conversation I once had with Sarah Weddington (the lawyer who argued Roe at the young age of 26!). But I won’t. For now, I will simply offer the following excerpts from Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America by Sara Dubow. To those of you who celebrate it, I wish you the happiest of Roe Days.     –Lauren Appelwick, Blog Editor

For most of the twentieth century, abortion was simultaneously proscribed and practiced. In 1953, Alfred Kinsey reported that nine out of ten premarital pregnancies ended in abortion and that 22 percent of married women had had an abortion while married. In 1955, the continuing demand for abortion motivated Planned Parenthood’s medical director Dr. Mary S. Calderone to organize a conference featuring women testifying about the hardships of dangerous and unwanted pregnancies, and physicians advocating for liberalized abortion restrictions. Whereas the American Medical Association (AMA) had led the nineteenth-century movement to criminalize abortion, it was now in the vanguard in an incipient movement to legalize it. In 1960, physicians at the AMA annual convention argued that laws against abortion were unenforceable, thus undesirable, and in 1962 the American Law Institute (ALI) endorsed the liberalization of abortion laws.

*          *          *

Not satisfied with reforms that kept the power to grant or refuse an abortion in the hands of doctors and hospital boards, grassroots activists began advocating for the repeal of all abortion restrictions. In 1969, the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) was founded at the First National Conference on Abortion Laws, and the radical feminist group Redstockings held the first speak-out on abortion.  In 1970, the New York state legislature legalized abortion, an act endorsed by Republican governor John D. Rockefeller.  In 1971, a national poll showed that more than half of Americans favored legalizing abortion, the American Bar Association issued a statement supporting the legalization of abortion up to the twentieth week of pregnancy, and the Supreme Court heard the first round of oral arguments in Roe v. Wade. On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court ended the nearly century-long prohibition against abortion in the United States. In his majority opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun made clear the Court’s desire to remove the abortion question from the abstract realms of philosophy, theology, and morality and place it in the concrete realm of law:

It's the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that recognized a constitutional right to privacy regarding reproductive freedom and struck down state laws that interfered with the right by criminalizaing certain conduct.

The effect of Roe v. Wade was to make abortion legal in most regards in the U.S. And the effect of that was to create a national divide between those who agree with legalized abortion and those who oppose it.

I was raised Catholic and grew up when world events swirled around me with a decidedly feminist air. The conflict in beliefs and perspectives between these influences has made me think about this issue in various ways at various times in my life.

I can't help myself, but I now accept the Catholic notion that life begins at conception and abortion is a mortal sin. Like murder, and other such repugnant actions, abortion moves us in a direction that is less holy, less noble.

I fully recognize the right of the Church to make drastic rulings in support of its teachings, like its automatic excommunication of Catholics who procure or obtain abortions.

But I also am schooled in law and the American ideals that value separation of church and state. What I believe as a matter of faith does not have to be the law that my government embraces, as long as that government allows me to practice my faith. Not every mortal sin must be a crime. We have decriminalized adultery. We allow divorce. There is no law against couples living together without benefit of marriage.

And I can't help but recognize that women may have moral reasons for wanting abortions, have their own religious or ethical reasons that differ from mine--that pregnancy and birth may threaten a woman's life and choosing her own life is a moral decision; that having an unwanted child may be as immoral as having an abortion; that the decision to have a child you can't afford has an ethical dimension to it.

I think the government should not be in the business of compelling one moral choice over another moral choice, unless that is necessary for a just society, for health and safety, for order and peace. I think the last three dozen years has shown that we can live with abortion rights.

And recognizing abortion rights does not necessarily lead to more deaths than making abortion illegal.

The latest information shows that fewer women are getting abortions now than at any time since 1974. There is a good blog post with facts about reproduction and family planning services at this slow-loading site. (Don't be put off by the blog header, either, please.)

Although the numbers and rate of abortion are at their lowest, the rate of decline has slowed. And a trend in reduction of family planning services has had a particularly negative effect on the poor.

And this gets me to the point I always come back to when thinking about the abortion debate. All those who support making abortion illegal are really supporting making abortion illegal for poor women. Rich women, even if abortion were illegal, will have access to abortions. They'll fly to where they are legal. They'll pay the high price of expensive doctors. And poor women will be the ones effected by the restriction; they will suffer birthing babies conceived from rape, or conceived by teenagers without access to contraceptives, or conceived unwanted and unplanned.

I remember before 1973 when abortion was illegal. I knew fellow college students who flew to New York or had the inside information on where to go if you needed an abortion. And I also knew poorer women who had "connections" to the seamier side of the community where back-street butchers offered to get rid of unwanted pregnancies.

As long as there are unwanted pregnancies, there will be abortions. Because women will rather get rid of their unwanted pregnancies than face the prospect of birth and adoption. We can hope for change, we can work on adjusting attitudes about this, but we must also acknowledge the situation as it presently is.

Making abortion illegal will not stop abortions. It will only return us to a time when there were MORE abortions, and when the effect on poor women was even greater, when illegal backstreet abortionists maimed and killed the women getting the abortions as well as the unborn babies.

In the summer of 2006, Senator Hilary Clinton said that Americans should

"unite around a common goal of reducing the amount of abortions, not by making them illegal as many are attempting to do or overturning Roe v. Wade and undermining the constitutional protections that decision provided, but by preventing unintended pregnancies in the first place through education, contraception, accessible health care and services, empowering women to make decisions…."