access to a safe, legal abortion that would shield her from criminal charges and a possibly life-threatening illegal procedure.11
By the early seventies, the battle lines were drawn, featuring two sides talking past each other, each ready to defend the rights they sought in the political arena. Proponents of legal abortion had the upper hand at the beginning, prompting state legislators to pass a reform law in 1970. Opponents of legal abortion were very thinly, if at all, organized in those years as many future leaders tended to their homes and children. Following the abortion debates in the news, sometimes at the behest of church leaders, and asking a question at a candidates’ night did not yet constitute a political movement. Once abortion was legalized, however, women like Margie Fitton arose. They pressured state lawmakers to overturn legal abortion in 1972, although Governor Rockefeller preserved the reform law with a veto.12
The abortion debates in New York in the late sixties and early seventies changed the nature of politics in the state. Similar developments occurred elsewhere, but New York offers early and abundant evidence of (mostly middle- and upper-middle-class white) women advocating for and against legal abortion. Despite assistance from large institutions like the Catholic Church, both sides formed grassroots coalitions across the state. (Thirty-six percent of New Yorkers identified as Catholic by the seventies, the largest such group in the state, which put the church on the forefront of local religious opposition.) Together, they unwittingly worked with one another to make “the personal political,” as radical women’s liberationists had hoped to do. Each side pursued traditional tactics such as lobbying and running for higher office, with Fitton and her allies infusing their activism with gendered political claims about home, motherhood, and family. Suburban women soon turned the elements of their everyday lives—above all, the expansive, statewide web of post-Vatican II Catholic organizations—into an effective anti-abortion network. Events in New York foreshadowed the political shifts and party realignment that took place on the national level after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, when Catholic voters like Margie Fitton began leaving the Democratic Party to vote for conservative Republicans because of issues like abortion.13
Legal Abortion: A Woman’s Right
Republican assemblywoman Constance Cook, who became Albany’s most vocal advocate for legal abortion, maintained that the reform bill only passed in 1970 because of its strong support from women. Cook had spent more than two years building a legislative coalition composed of fellow “Rockefeller Republicans” across the state and Democrats outside heavily Catholic districts in the New York City area. But the real heroes, she said, were women outside the legislature. As someone whose own feminist consciousness was raised after joining the National Organization for Women, Cook was proud she taught Betty Friedan and other NOW members how to lobby state legislators. Women also joined from good government and social welfare groups. Whether they identified as feminists or not, these different subsets united around a core tenet of the modern women’s liberation movement: that access to legal abortion was a woman’s basic right.14
Women previously had been on the periphery of these debates. Abortion had been illegal across the country since men like the crusading Anthony Comstock had made it so in the late nineteenth century. By the early sixties in New York and elsewhere, reformers—most of them men from the legal, medical, and certain progressive religious communities—were lobbying for liberalization. Many did so to protect large numbers of women from resorting to sometimes deadly illegal abortions. Wealthier women were able to fly abroad for safe legal abortions or use personal connections to persuade hospital committees to perform them for therapeutic reasons (for example, if the pregnancy allegedly threatened the woman’s mental or physical health). One estimate in the sixties claimed that there were roughly 8,000 legal abortions in the United States each year, versus 800,000 to 1,000,000 illegal ones. Faced with these numbers, sixteen states legalized abortion in some form between 1967 and 1970. Movements in New York began along these lines, with male reformers partnering with liberal Democrats in the state, such as assemblyman Al Blumenthal of Manhattan’s left-leaning Upper West Side.15
Blumenthal’s unsuccessful attempts to legalize abortion in 1966 and 1967 illustrated that he and fellow Democrats could not guide a bill through the state legislature. Democrats had little representation upstate and were a minority in both the State Assembly and Senate. Their base was downstate, and even there it was split: heavily Jewish and African American districts in the New York City area backed legal abortion; Catholic ones like where Margie Fitton grew up did not. A bill would have to be sponsored by moderate Republicans who controlled the state’s GOP and were in the majority in both houses (as opposed to the minority of conservative Republicans in New York’s GOP, most of whom were based upstate). Moderate Republicans, notably including Governor Rockefeller, embraced the feminist notion that women had a right to legal abortion, linking it to their party’s historical embrace of personal liberty and small government. Efforts to legalize abortion hastened in New York after Constance Cook—a moderate, strategically chosen because she was the only Republican woman in the Assembly—was invited to Betty Friedan’s apartment in 1967 to discuss legislative strategies.
Cook, who represented the Ithaca area upstate, was changed by that meeting; she joined NOW soon after and began to see abortion through a feminist lens.16 Cook was tired of sitting through male-dominated abortion debates in Albany. When, for example, the Assembly held hearings on one of Blumenthal’s unsuccessful reform bills that narrowly failed in 1968, Cook soured on being in a room full of men dictating “what women’s lives shall be.”17 As Cook looked into crafting her own bill, she was convinced by fellow NOW members to pursue a repeal measure (i.e., removing abortion from the legal code entirely) instead of reform. Both would legalize abortion, but repeal would decriminalize it in all circumstances, while a reform bill would, as Blumenthal had done, outline various circumstances in which abortion was legal. Feminists argued that reform would open the door for men in power to set those terms and police them as they saw fit. Ever the pragmatic legislator, Cook also felt that women were “never going to get … aroused politically” and lobby their state representatives about reform bills that could “require them to go to a committee of doctors, then to go to a committee of hospital administrators, and then to have consultations with psychiatrists or social workers or priests.”18
Cook was sustained by grassroots support from women outside the legislature—often from those who might have been opponents’ neighbors in the suburbs of New York City. In 1969, as Cook was trying to get a repeal bill out of committee, Blumenthal brought another reform measure to the floor of the Assembly for a vote. He failed yet again, this time after Martin Ginsberg, a Republican from Long Island, gave a last-minute speech about his fight with polio. Cook and other women were outraged. What should have been a debate about their reproductive rights turned into a well-televised sound bite of Assemblyman Ginsberg claiming that if he could thrive with a debilitating disease, so too should unhealthy fetuses be given a chance to do so rather than being aborted. At that point, nursing professor Sylvia Fields, who lived in Ginsberg’s district, organized 350 of his constituents into what she called the Nassau [County] Committee for Abortion Law Repeal. Dr. Ruth Cusack, a nutritionist who had fought for repeal since she was a doctoral student years before at the University of California at Berkeley, assembled 150 people in neighboring Suffolk County. Both groups included organized feminists and a range of other women, from sympathetic housewives and mothers to professionals like Fields who, as a nurse, had seen the sometimes deadly impact of illegal abortion. The two organizations gathered 2,500 signatures on Long Island to try to move legislators into the repeal camp.19
A new group, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), also formed in 1969 to push for repeal on a broader scale. Most of NARAL’s leadership came from New York, and they agreed to focus on Cook’s repeal bill, which, if passed, could be replicated in other states. NOW’s Betty Friedan, a New Yorker, spoke at NARAL’s inaugural meeting, remarking that it was “the first … decent conference” on abortion because “women’s voices [were] heard and heard strongly.”20
Radical
