Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

  Like its 19th-century precursor, the 1980s antiabortion campaign would exhibit signs of punitive excess, as once again the achievement of modest reproductive liberties for women was greeted with an outpouring of repressive outrage. In the hundreds of legislative initiatives and referenda that followed, opponents of women’s reproductive freedom often seemed intent on forcing far more than the repeal of Roe. Some proposed outlawing abortion even when a woman’s life was in danger, an extreme stance that was hardly part of the pre-Roe laws restricting abortion. Others wanted to require that the woman get her husband’s permission before she proceed; still others wanted her to submit to a mandatory lecture from her doctor, too. Other proposals included forbidding any birth control device that might possibly work after fertilization, banning basic birth control information even from public libraries, and allowing total strangers to file a court order prohibiting a woman from having an abortion. In Utah, lawmakers wanted abortion providers sentenced to up to five years in prison; in Louisiana, the legislature called for a mandatory ten years of hard labor; in Massachusetts, a twice-introduced state bill demanded the electric chair.

  As the reproductive rights backlash deepened, journalists, clergymen, and lawyers joined it. In the last two years of the ’80s alone, more than fifteen hundred articles on abortion appeared in the major dailies, and the newsweeklies devoted more space to abortion than any other social policy issue. (These articles rarely explored the needs or views of the millions of women hurt by the national attack on abortion; instead, they moralized, wondered if female reporters should even be allowed to cover the abortion debate, and worried about how the abortion battle might “hurt” various politicians.) The American Bar Association voted to rescind its pro-choice policy in 1990, only seven months after it had approved it. Even moderate religious denominations—the American Baptist, Presbyterian, United Methodist, and Episcopal churches, among them—backed away from formerly pro-choice positions. The Catholic bishops pulled out all the stops, hiring Hill & Knowlton, the nation’s largest public relations firm, to launch a $5 million publicity drive against abortion. The New York archdiocese proposed a new order of nuns, the Sisters of Life, that would be devoted exclusively to opposing abortion. New York’s John Cardinal O’Connor issued a twelve-page advisory notifying Roman Catholic politicians that they risked excommunication if they supported a woman’s right to an abortion. New Jersey bishop James McHugh declared that from now on, Catholic politicians who disagreed with the Church’s stance would be barred from speaking at church events or holding church office. The Archbishop of Guam vowed to excommunicate any senator who opposed an extreme bill that outlawed virtually all abortions on the island. And Bishop Rene Gracida of Corpus Christi, Texas, excommunicated the director of a family planning center in town, and promised a similar fate for a worker at another clinic if she didn’t quit her job.

  By the end of the decade, the antiabortion campaign hadn’t overturned Roe, draconian legislative proposals had been mostly defeated or reversed, and public support for legal abortion had only risen. Nonetheless, the relentless publicity, litigation, harassment, and violence had gone far toward a de facto elimination of access to abortion for much of the female population.

  The climate of fear discouraged an already reluctant medical establishment from offering the procedure. By 1987, 85 percent of the nation’s counties had no abortion services. According to a nationwide survey, the number of rural abortion providers dropped by more than 50 percent between 1977 and 1988—and 20 percent of the decline occurred after 1985. And the pool of doctors trained or seeking training to perform abortions was drying up. North Dakota and South Dakota had only one abortion provider each, and in at least a dozen states, from Mississippi to Maryland, women had to cross state lines to get an abortion. In Missouri, women seeking abortions were traveling all day across the state and camping in the parking lot of the lone family planning clinic in St. Louis that performs second-trimester abortions. At Kansas City’s Truman Medical Center—even before the Webster decision banned abortions at this public hospital—the number of abortions performed fell from 484 in 1986 to 49 in 1988. A lack of demand was not the cause. The number plunged because one of the two doctors performing abortions at the hospital was so harassed he moved to California, and the other doctor was picketed so many times by antiabortion protesters that he lost his lease. Even major metropolitan areas were affected. The Cook County Hospital, the largest provider of health services for Chicago’s poor, refused to provide abortion services, and in 1990 the country’s new board president, who had pledged to restore services during his election campaign, backed off under pressure from abortion opponents on the board. That same month the Illinois Masonic Medical Center, one of the few hospitals in the state that offered abortions through the second trimester of pregnancy, shut down these services under pressure from the Catholic church, which said it wouldn’t sell the hospital a plot of land that it needed in order to expand unless it complied with the church’s demands on abortion.

  For the tens of millions of women who depended on publicly financed health care, even the few abortion clinics that were still operating were beyond reach. Federal funding was no longer available to the more than a quarter of a million women on Medicaid who sought abortions each year. And all but a dozen states had banned abortions funded from their coffers, too, by the close of the decade. (Moreover, eight states passed laws in the early ’80s restricting even private insurance coverage of abortions.) In Michigan, a state ban on Medicaid-funded abortions that went into effect in 1988 caused the number of abortions to plunge by 10,300, or 23 percent, by the following year. It was as if Roe had never existed.

  The handful of private agencies that dispensed minimal abortion funding were overwhelmed with appeals from desperate women; the Chicago Abortion Fund had to turn away hundreds of women each year. Rosie Jimenez, a twenty-seven-year-old single mother on a college scholarship, had six months to go before completing her teaching credentials when she discovered she was pregnant. She had to cross the border to Mexico to find abortion services she could afford. The cheap, illegal operation killed her. When Spring Adams, a 13-year-old Idaho girl on welfare, was raped and impregnated by her father in 1989, her mother could find only one doctor in the entire state willing to perform the second-trimester abortion—and he refused to waive the cost. Unable to afford his fees (Idaho banned the use of Medicaid funds for all abortions unless the mother’s life was threatened), Spring’s mother went on a desperate nationwide search. She finally found a clinic in Portland, Oregon, that agreed to take on her daughter’s case and waive all but $200. But two days before Spring was to board the Greyhound bus to Portland, her father—who opposed abortion—shot her to death with an assault rifle.

  The antiabortion movement also made it harder to learn about the few clinics performing abortions that were still in business. The high court’s 1991 ruling muzzled women’s health providers who received federal funds. Federally funded sex-education classes under the Adolescent Family Life Act withheld all information on abortion and birth control from students. And meanwhile public school administrators, fearful of threats from antiabortion groups, shut down courses that did provide such information. In Minnesota by 1989, less than half of the city’s high schools offered any sex education—a direct response to pressure from the state’s strong antiabortion lobby. Antiabortion lobbies pressured the media to reject family-planning clinic ads and cancel public-service programming on abortion services, too. Whether as a direct response to such pressure or simply to head off controversy, dozens of newspapers, radio stations, television networks, college and high-school publications, yearbooks, and even football game programs began rejecting or banning outright notices and advertisements for family planning services and even basic informational announcements from pro-choice groups.

  On the other hand, broadsides against abortion were available for viewing inside take-out pizza boxes and even on sports videos. Domino’s Pizza chairman Thomas
Monaghan saw to it that his company delivered flyers to diners with the latest information on antiabortion rallies. New York Giants owner Wellington Mara produced the Champions for Life video, which he distributed to schoolchildren via the American Life League. “Now with the abortion death squads allowed to run rampant through our country,” Giants player Mark Bavaro (one of six team stars in the film) advised young fans, “I wonder how many future champions will be killed before they see the light of day.”

  A NOW ad that simply offered the time and place of a national march for reproductive rights was rejected as “too controversial” by twenty-six radio stations in five of the nation’s largest media markets. The Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post refused to run the Fund for Feminist Majority’s ad for a pro-choice film, Abortion for Survival. (And women who wrote to the Los Angeles Times to protest the decision received back a letter from its advertising department, advising them they were just puppets of a “certain orchestration” by feminist interests.) On the other hand, USA Today was willing to run a huge ad for the American Life League—on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade—that called on raped women not to have abortions. And the networks had no problems airing segments of the controversial, and misleading, antiabortion film The Silent Scream, which purported to show a fetus at twelve weeks. The media’s corporate advertisers, fearful of antiabortion boycott threats, didn’t make it any easier for broadcasters to offer news programming on abortion. An ABC radio special on abortion, hosted by Barbara Walters, couldn’t find a single sponsor.

  The antiabortion movement also succeeded in inspiring massive cutbacks in public and private support and funding for birth control clinics and other family planning services besides abortion. Federal and state aid for family planning services fell by $50 million between 1980 and 1987. The Vatican ordered the Sisters of Mercy hospitals system, the largest nongovernmental provider of medical services in the country, to halt all sterilization, the leading method of birth control for Catholics. Under pressure from the “right-to-life” lobby, many corporations, charities, and foundations withdrew their financial assistance to family planning, too. In 1988, United Way stopped funding Planned Parenthood, and in 1990, under pressure from the Christian Action Council, AT&T cut off its contributions, too (after twenty-five years), claiming that shareholders had objected to the agency’s association with abortion—even though 101 percent of its shareholders had voted in favor of funding Planned Parenthood.

  The curtailment of family planning funds led, ironically, to more abortions among younger and poor women, as the lack of birth control services drove up the numbers of unwanted and teen pregnancies. By 1990, the National Center for Health Statistics was reporting an increase in the teenage birthrate, reversing an eighteen-year decline. In California, health professionals estimated that the $24 million cutback in family planning state funds in 1989—which shut down clinics for teenagers and shrank staff and operating hours at many centers—translated into about a thousand additional pregnancies and five hundred additional abortions each week before the funds were eventually restored.

  Laws in thirty-four states that restricted young women’s access to abortion by requiring parental notification or consent didn’t stop young women from having sex; they only succeeded in increasing trauma and the teenage birthrate—and forcing delays that caused young women to have riskier and costlier second-trimester abortions. After the Minnesota parental consent law was enforced, the birthrate for fifteen-to-seventeen-year-old girls rose nearly 40 percent. By contrast, the birthrate for eighteen to nineteen year olds in the state, who were not affected by the law, rose only 0.3 percent in the same period. The percentage of Minnesota teenagers seeking second-trimester abortions after the law passed rose 27 percent. And parental consent laws only drove frightened young women seeking abortions underground, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Becky Bell, a seventeen-year-old Indianapolis girl, died in an illegal abortion in 1988 after she was refused a legal operation because she was too afraid to ask her parents’ permission. After Seventeen ran a 1991 article about Becky Bell, letters flooded in from girls with their own frightening stories to tell. A twelve year old wrote about a friend who met the same fate as Bell. A Wyoming teenager reported that she had resorted, too, to an illegal abortion in desperation. The doctor “humiliated” her, she recalled, and “the conditions were most likely very unsanitary because I hemorrhaged for months. Finally, a friend took me to the hospital and I had an emergency D and C. This most likely saved my life.”

  The waiver “option” that the parental consent laws offered—in lieu of parental permission, teenage girls could seek a judge’s approval to have the operation—was little option at all. It was too complicated and distressing for many teenage girls. This “judicial bypass” procedure often required young women to solicit medical affidavits and legal counsel, to tell their story to as many as two dozen strangers, and to put up with postponements of as much as a month, a disaster for the many teenage girls who were already far along in their pregnancies. And at the end of this lengthy legal process, they were still at the mercy of judicial whim. While some states issued thousands of waivers a year, in a state like Indiana, where antiabortion sentiment ran high on the bench, only six to eight judicial waivers were granted annually.

  Plenty of judges wouldn’t even take judicial bypass cases. In Massachusetts, twelve of the sixty Superior Court judges routinely refused to hear teenage girls’ appeals for abortions; in Minnesota, bypass hearings were available at only two locations. The girls’ confidentiality rights were also violated—in some cases their appeals were heard in open courtrooms and their names and addresses were entered into the record, a violation of the consent laws’ stipulations. Many judges subjected young girls to lengthy and intimidating interrogations or angry moral lectures. Did she realize she was killing a “child”? Did she know that the fetus had “eyes”? Judges who opposed abortion sometimes had literature of bloody fetuses prominently displayed in their chambers while they questioned the girls. Or they tried to stave off the operations by delaying their decisions and forcing young women into the next trimester. One judge waited a month to issue a ruling; another judge ordered the court stenographer not to type out the transcript, in an attempt to hold up a girl’s appeal of his decision denying her an abortion.

  The antiabortion crusade also diminished women’s reproductive options for the future, by virtually closing down federal and private research on birth control. By the end of the decade, only one corporation was still funding research on contraception—down from two dozen in the 1960s and 1970s. Insurance companies retreated, too, and by 1990 none of them were willing to cover clinical testing of most contraceptives. A 1990 Institute of Medicine study found that the United States, which had once been a world leader in contraceptive research, had fallen critically behind the rest of the industrialized world in birth control development and was now endangering the future of “contraceptive choice” in the country.

  Antiabortion threats also halted research on abortifacients. Sterling Drug, which had one abortion drug under development in 1986, hastily dropped it. Upjohn Co. canceled its abortion drug and closed its contraceptive research program in 1985, after right-to-life groups launched a boycott. And the Population Council discontinued its research on the French abortion pill RU-486. In 1989, the FDA banned importation of RU-486 for private use, under pressure from such congressional abortion opponents as Jesse Helms, Henry Hyde, and Robert Dornan. In 1990, the makers of the abortion pill, Roussel-Uclaf, stopped supplying it to the only U.S. clinical research team ever to test it. And these researchers, at the University of Southern California, found support from their medical peers evaporating, too; although most doctors they approached originally expressed interest, soon the physicians were calling back to say the study was “too controversial” for their participation. Meanwhile, when a shareholder proposed that the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co. simply study the possibility of making RU-486, the drug company’s
executives hastened to the Securities and Exchange Commission to have the proposal excised from the company’s proxy statement. They succeeded and shareholders never even had a chance to vote on it. Only one American company, the tiny New Jersey firm Gyno-Pharma, admitted, for less than twenty-four hours, that it might consider marketing RU-486; and after threats of boycotts rumbled from the antiabortion lobby, company officials immediately disavowed any interest in the drug.

  FETAL RIGHTS: MOTHER VERSUS FETUS

  The antiabortion iconography in the last decade featured the fetus but never the mother. In the movement’s literature, photographs, films, and other props, the whole “unborn child” floats in a disembodied womb. The fetus is a conscious, even rambunctious tyke, the mother a passive, formless, and inanimate “environment.” The fetus is the occupant, the mother its temporary living quarters. One right-to-life committee even produced an “unborn child’s diary,” in which a precocious fetus penned ruminations about flowers and confided, “I want to be called Kathy.” The Willkes’ manual instructs the movement’s participants to make a point of using “humanizing terms . . . such as ‘this little guy,’” when referring to the fetus—and phrases like “place of residence” when talking about the mother. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, creator of The Silent Scream—a film in which the truly silent cast member is the mother—describes the fetus in The Abortion Papers as “the little aquanaut,” a child in “intrauterine exile” who is “bricked in, as it were, behind what seemed an impenetrable wall of flesh, muscle, bone and blood.” At least the pregnant woman is envisioned as an occupied house; the antiabortion metaphor for the woman who aborts is a bombed-out shell: “Her body is a haunted house where the tragic death of a child took place,” Joseph Scheidler writes.