had never given electoral politics much thought. Debates over New York State’s abortion reform law of 1970 were just the wake-up call many Catholic homemakers needed.
PART II
AWAKENINGS
CHAPTER 3
Abortion and Female Political Mobilization
Margie Fitton was one of the women politicized by the abortion debates in New York. Sometime around 1968, as the state legislature was considering legalizing abortion, Fitton decided to attend “candidates’ night” at St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic Church in Rockland County. The event was hosted by Father Ed Nutter, a young priest who arrived at St. Anthony’s the year before and immediately tried to engage parishioners along the lines suggested at Vatican II. The forum was supposed to introduce candidates running for elective office. Fitton had always been interested in politics, dating back to her childhood in upper Manhattan when her mother worked for U.S. representative Vito Marcantonio, a noted labor advocate. She had never been active in politics herself, nor did she have time to be. As a busy homemaker, she mostly went to candidates’ night to get a rare evening out of the house. She did not intend to say a word. Like many women in her generation, Fitton was uncomfortable speaking out. Nobody had encouraged her to go to college or have ambitions beyond the family. The ability to raise children full time in the suburbs was accomplishment enough.1 As she explained, “for us to do anything public was an alien thing.”2
But Fitton was disturbed by what she had read about the abortion debates in Albany, so when Republican Eugene Levy, a contender for the State Senate, showed up at candidates’ night, she did the unthinkable: she asked him how he felt about abortion. Few people discussed the topic in private, let alone in public. She was upset, however, that the press was not asking enough about it. Fitton and other women who went on to oppose legal abortion in New York State did not pay much attention to politics in these family-centered years. Coverage of the abortion debates in Albany—as they saw it, the killing of innocent babies—was an exception. The topic hit home for these mothers.While Fitton did not believe that legislators would legalize murder, she could not remain silent. Standing up to pose her question, she recalled feeling “so isolated. I felt the tension in the room, and my voice was trembling. Even after I sat down … I felt like a crazy lady from West Nyack [in Rockland County].”3 Levy gave a meandering answer, which was perhaps inevitable in a church that was firmly against legal abortion and ministered to a large swath of potential voters. After entering the State Senate in 1969, he was forced to face the issue. Like many Republicans in the downstate suburbs, in what was then Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s territory, Levy initially voted for legal abortion. He changed course in the mid-seventies in response to mounting pressure from constituents like Fitton.4
She and other women stepped out of their comfort zones and organized against abortion after their state legalized it in 1970 because they saw it as a matter of life and death—an understanding shaped by their Catholic faith and the rights revolution spreading across the country. For decades, Catholic leaders had denounced abortion (and artificial forms of birth control) by maintaining that life begins at conception. After Vatican II, this message filtered down to devout Catholics like Fitton (who had ten children) through Sunday sermons and parishioner groups. Several rights-based movements for African Americans and oppressed groups also were ascendant in the sixties. When Fitton and others could pick up a newspaper or watch TV, they saw these movements that mostly bypassed their sleepy suburban hamlets. They folded abortion into this framework—just not as a woman’s right. Much like the parish priests who introduced many women to the abortion debates in Albany, they spoke about fetuses as if they were babies outside the womb. As the right-to-life moniker underscores, they wanted civil (legal) rights for these unborn “babies.” The women wanted to protect their right to live when the babies’ own mothers and other activists and politicians, including feminists, would not.5
Pushing the state to help those in need was not a foreign concept for women raised in heavily Democratic and Catholic milieus. The Democratic Party and Catholic Church had long fought for the poor and marginalized, just as the women would later push lawmakers to protect what they perceived as another vulnerable subset of the population. If financial concerns were the cause of not wanting to carry a pregnancy to term, the women’s New Deal roots made them amenable to the state intervening on behalf of struggling families—not unlike what they had witnessed as children during the Depression.
Yet, full-time motherhood was far more central to their developing political identities. Unlike Democratic and Catholic leaders, the women spoke very little about antipoverty programs that might lower abortion rates by making it easier to raise children. Poverty was hardly visible in their homogeneous, mostly white, middle-class suburbs where single-family home ownership prevailed. Instead, they filtered everything through the prism of middle-class motherhood. They counseled adoption, if necessary, and were appalled by women refusing to use their bodies to nurture these young lives in utero. They were equally incensed by the political, feminist-backed establishment that provided cover for these women by legalizing abortion.6
Like other women in the past, they tried to establish authority in the foreign arena of electoral politics by positioning themselves as concerned mothers, an area in which they were experts. Advocates of legal abortion supposedly had the ear of state legislators and Governor Rockefeller. Opponents saw themselves as outsiders who shrewdly used the resources at their disposal to take on powerful feminist-backed insiders.7 Prodded by a deep Catholic faith and a predisposition to aid those in need, they were mothers out to save unborn “babies” from being murdered. In doing so, they practiced an updated maternalist politics (or “housewife populism,” as it has been called) in the seventies.8 Fitton and her contemporaries were not necessarily aware of those who had come before them, but it is unsurprising that they embraced a similar maternalist and populist approach. Their identities were grounded in full-time motherhood.9
The women’s heartfelt belief that fetuses were babies was seemingly confirmed by Life magazine’s exposé on gestational development in April 1965. Despite having little time to read or absorb news coverage in the sixties, many women still spoke about that issue of Life decades later. They vividly recalled its front page, which featured a photograph of a human fetus allegedly photographed in utero at fifteen weeks gestation (a little over three months pregnant). The fetus, with its hands clutched to its chest and legs almost crossed at its ankles, looked like a peaceful baby napping in a crib—a familiar sight for these mothers. The issue featured two articles (with graphics supposedly taken in utero) that encouraged readers to compare what happens in the womb to everyday life. In the final months of pregnancy, the word “baby” was used in place of “fetus,” even when it was still too early for it to survive outside the womb. The women felt validated by these scientific articles (although it later came to light that some images were taken outside the womb, not inside as claimed). Having spent years of their lives pregnant and feeling fetal movements, they were sure that legal abortion sanctioned the killing of unborn babies. It was a cause worth (temporarily) leaving their homes and children to pursue.10
Proponents of legal abortion in New York—led by female state legislators and a variety of organized women’s groups—were equally passionate and concerned about civil rights. Some of these women (and men) were self-consciously feminist; others were not. They were united by a strong conviction that abortion should be legal because deciding whether to carry a pregnancy to term and potentially become a mother was every woman’s right. In other words, the rights in question ought not to be of fetuses whose viability was dependent upon women’s bodies to nurture them (especially in this era of very primitive neonatology). Questions about whether a fetus was alive, or a baby, or how much it approximated behavior outside the womb were not paramount. Whether a woman wanted to continue a pregnancy was at stake. Abortion was a core right, a choice every woman should be able to make for whatever reason in consultation with
