Feminists of the 1960s and 70s were hardly the first to address issues of problematic pregnancy and abortion. Their nineteenth and early twentieth century foremothers also took a strong, if--to many today--unexpected stand. Since at least the late 1980s, prochoicers and prolifers have disputed the precise content and meaning of early feminists’ stance on abortion and pregnancy.
The dispute most surely flared in 2006, when known prolifer Carol Crossed purchased Susan B. Anthony’s birthplace in Adams, Massachusetts with hopes of turning it into a museum. Some prochoicers objected that prolifers were deceiving and pushing their way onto territory where they decidedly did not belong. Despite the controversy, the museum is well on its way, with a broad range of supporters.Â
This is, I think, as it should be. I conclude this from twenty years of researching abortion as an early feminist concern. While I cannot here do justice to the abundant, many-voiced early feminist literature on abortion, I can briefly outline a consensus shared by everyone from anarchist, free-thinking “free lovers” to Women’s Christian Temperance Union members.Â
Like some who identify as feminists today, early feminists opposed abortion out of a belief that life began at conception and acquired human rights at that point. The context of this belief was something parallel to a present-day consistent life ethic.Â
They did not oppose abortion simply in deference to its illegality. They nonviolently challenged many quite legal practices, such as the denial of women’s right to vote, marital rape, and legal bans on open discussion and provision of family planning. Early feminists were deeply concerned about the danger to women’s lives from unsafe procedures. At the same time, they spoke about any abortion that killed a woman as a taking of two lives, not one.
Today's prolifers and prochoicers will obviously differ in how much they can relate to early feminist opposition to abortion. However, people on both "sides" will likely resonate with the early feminist analysis of the societal problems implicated in unintended pregnancy and abortion, along with the solutions they offered.
Early feminists demanded, and even themselves created, greater social supports for pregnant and parenting women and their children. Single mothers and their children were ruthlessly denied food, clothing, shelter, and health care on the grounds that this was aiding and abetting “immorality.” Many single mothers could not survive without going into prostitution. Married mothers, too, struggled in isolation with such difficulties as domestic violence and economic insecurity. If they were middle or upper class, they faced enforced economic dependence; if working class, toxin-riddled, unsafe jobs that failed to pay living wages or allow for healthy child care practices. As happens today, pious rhetoric about the sacredness of marriage, home, and family frequently obscured these difficulties.Â
Early feminists squarely held men responsible for any children they conceived, inside or outside marriage. They called men to responsibility in an even more radical way, starting with antislavery documentation of sexual and reproductive outrages white men committed against African American women and children. As Matilda Joslyn Gage stated, no “subject lies deeper down into woman’s wrongs” than “the denial of the right to herself.”Â
Although this might seem very strange to today's prochoicers, when early feminists spoke of a woman's right to her own body, for them this did not include a right to abortion. A woman's body-right did encompass other practices they likely endorse--and that many prolifers likely do, too.Â
Early feminists agreed that at the very least, woman’s right to her own body meant her right to choose whether, when, and with whom she wished to have penis-vagina sex and thus face the possibility of conception. It definitely included a right to thorough sexual/reproductive health education.
Against widespread contempt for “old maids” like Susan B. Anthony, early feminists defended women’s right and ability to choose a generative singlehood. Some extended woman’s body-right to contraception and even to “Alphaism,” or sexual practices other than penis-vagina sex. Some, like Drs. Emily Blackwell and Elizabeth Cushier, openly chose “Boston marriages,” or committed same-sex domestic partnerships.
This “herstory” holds two-at least two--big lessons for today’s common ground movement. First, many prochoicers and prolifers alike can validly claim these pioneering feminists as foremothers. Substantial numbers in both “camps” share a consciousness of women’s and already-born children’s rights arising from shared historical sources.Â
Second, if people from both “sides” share this consciousness, they can together contemplate the early feminist analysis of causes and solutions for unintended pregnancy and abortion. They can ask: How does this analysis fit and no longer fit the present? To what particular collective as well as individual responsibilities does it invite us?Â
What if a strong prochoice-prolife coalition demanded a toxin-free environment, a better child support enforcement system, a living wage, paid family leave, and universal health care, including prompt access to quality prenatal care, and drug rehabilitation for those who need it? What if we redesigned schools, workplaces, places of recreation, and houses of worship to be truly family-friendly, to all kinds of families?
In regard to abortion itself, today’s prolifers and prochoicers obviously draw the parameters of a woman’s body-right differently. For many prolifers, pregnancy interconnects two equally valuable bodies and lives. For many prochoicers, pregnancy is a matter of one body and life, the woman’s, and/or perhaps a fully realized life nurturing a potential life inside of herself. But why can’t both “sides” at least cooperate on defending a woman’s body-right before conception?
Comprehensive sex education already enjoys a broad base of public support. It can incorporate strong messages of male responsibility and nonviolence towards women and children, as well as teaching young women the assertiveness and self-respect vital to making positive decisions about their bodies and lives.
And rooted as it is basic civil liberties of speech, association, religion, and privacy, freedom of conscience in pregnancy prevention is another potentially large area of common ground. This includes the right to personally choose, or not choose, from among the various reversible or permanent contraceptiv e methods, fertility awareness/natural family planning, abstinence/celibacy, and sexual practices other than penis-vagina sex, whether in the context of straight or gay relationships.Â
I'm not one of them, but I hope people with religious or ethical objections to any of these practices can agree that it is not government’s place to decide how any of us do or do not exercise this right—even if government is responsible for ensuring that everyone can exercise it freely.
At the same time, I would like skeptical prochoicers to consider that prolifers may already be more supportive of woman's body-right than expected. I personally have advocated this right for years, and know other prolifers who have done the same. We are not isolated cases. According to a national public opinion survey by the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, eight in ten respondents who identified as prolife supported women’s access to contraception. In the Christian Science Monitor, pollster Nate Silver recently noted the “ increasing number of pro-life, pro-gay marriage Americans, particularly among Generation Y’ers.”
If prolifers and prochoicers both take up and work steadily on these shared reproductive justice responsibilities, both at the collective and individual levels: what will our descendants be talking about and doing in a century or two? What places will unintended pregnancy and abortion have and not have in their society? I for one would love to know!
