of activism into the debate. Members of radical women’s liberation groups tended to come from the student New Left that was active in the black freedom and anti-Vietnam war movements. In February 1969, radical feminists from two New York City-based organizations, Redstockings and New York Radical Women, interrupted legislative hearings on one of Blumenthal’s reform bills. The women burst into the chamber shouting slogans such as “every woman resents having our bodies controlled by men” and “no more male legislators!”21 A month later, Redstockings held its own abortion hearings at the Washington Square Methodist Church in Manhattan. Using the consciousness-raising technique that they relied on to politicize personal grievances and experiences, the only experts allowed to testify were women who spoke about their own, often illegal abortions before a diverse audience of 300 people.22 These tactics were reinforced by the efforts of liberal feminists. Redstockings and others made front-page news, which shaped public discourse and prompted reporters to ask lawmakers about their views on abortion. The answer that many politicians gave was often related to how much attention they had received from liberal feminist groups like NOW that deployed more traditional lobbying tactics such as visiting and writing to legislators.23
By the late sixties, Assemblywoman Cook and her allies—such as Ruth Cusack and Sylvia Fields, who marshaled support for legal abortion in the same counties on Long Island that later became strongholds for the opposition—were irate. Women, the true experts on pregnancy and motherhood, were being overlooked in the abortion debates. True equality for women had to encompass being able to decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy that would affect their lives (and bodies) well into the future. Controlling reproduction was paramount as feminist groups simultaneously tried to expand opportunities for women outside the home, such as employment gains that might lead to delaying or forsaking childbearing. This thinking was encapsulated in the “right to choose” and “pro-choice” language that proponents popularized nationwide in the early seventies.24
Opponents had little to worry about until 1970, when Cook won an important victory in the State Senate. Cook and her co-sponsor, Senator Franz Leichter, a liberal Democrat from Manhattan, decided to introduce a bill in the State Senate as opposed to the Assembly where she served; its passage seemed more certain there, which could provide momentum in the lower chamber. To secure votes in the Senate, Cook agreed to insert a requirement mandating that only physicians could perform abortions. Some radical feminist groups recanted their support for the bill and campaigned against it. Liberal feminist groups, intent upon passing legislation, held firm and formed a statewide umbrella group called the Committee for Cook-Leichter. The committee persuaded the New York Post to do a full story on the bill, sent telegrams to all nonsponsors, held press conferences, and circulated instructions on how and whom to lobby in Albany. Downstate in the New York City area, the Committee for Cook-Leichter was dominated by NOW and NARAL, along with the grassroots groups run by Ruth Cusack and Sylvia Fields on Long Island. Upstate, Cook relied on women’s civic and feminist organizations, the Unitarian Universalist Church, and individual members of Planned Parenthood who had run statewide campaigns before. In contrast to Planned Parenthood members, feminists, who were relatively new to politics, did not have the infrastructure or political acumen to sustain a statewide effort. Whenever possible, Cook tried to assist them by, for example, giving Betty Friedan a list of the leaders of every women’s group in the state. Bombarded by these efforts as opponents remained comparatively silent, the State Senate passed the amended Cook-Leichter bill on 18 March 1970. Thirteen Republicans and eighteen Democrats, led by Rockefeller moderates and downstate liberals, voted for the bill; twenty Republicans and six Democrats, most in Catholic districts, voted against it.25
During these Senate deliberations, Catholic leaders were relatively silent in Albany as they continued to lose their grasp over parishioners. That spring, the church was preoccupied with another bill that would have enabled ever-expanding, underfunded Catholic schools to receive state funding. The church’s inactivity differed from its action in previous abortion debates. In February of 1967, for example, as a Blumenthal reform bill was before the legislature, a pastoral letter equating legal abortion with murder was read at every Catholic mass in the state. Parishioners were told to contact their legislators to urge them to vote against the bill, with some church bulletins describing how to do so. But pleas like this were increasingly ineffective by the late sixties. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Griswold v. Connecticut decision in 1965, which eliminated remaining sanctions against birth control, occurred amidst sexual revolutions, feminist movements, and the advent of the popular birth control pill. Meanwhile, the church’s Vatican II reforms encouraged parishioner engagement and debate. This amalgam of factors caused many Catholics to question (if not blatantly disregard) what their church said about sex and reproduction, including its warnings about abortion. Still, pastoral letters like the one from 1967 hinted at the opposition the church was capable of mounting, an influence that would weigh heavily upon devout parishioners like Margie Fitton in the years to come.26
Once the abortion bill passed the State Senate, Catholic leaders began lobbying the Assembly, ultimately leading to a failed vote on 30 March 1970. The church directed parochial school students to send anti-abortion letters to Albany. Assemblywoman Cook remembered that “nuns would stand in the halls of the Capitol and cross themselves when I’d go by.”27 The day before the vote, an anti-abortion letter from the church bishops was read at every Catholic mass in New York State. Newly elected Democratic assemblywoman Mary Ann Krupsak of Schenectady, who was Catholic and an original sponsor of the abortion bill, was called a murderer by a bishop. The pressure got to her, and Krupsak, a feminist, voted against the bill as it fell three legislators short in the Assembly.28
Cook went back to the drawing board, and with outside advocacy from the Committee for Cook-Leichter, was able to get an abortion bill passed in the Assembly and signed into law. Cook kept careful tabs on who was supporting the bill. After groups such as Ruth Cusack’s from Long Island visited legislators in the Assembly, they would report back to Cook’s office; her team would then follow up with those legislators. Cook maintained that this was how laws were passed, with all the hard work occurring before the vote. Along with the physicians’ requirement, two changes were added. Abortion would now only be legal through the first twenty-four weeks of pregnancy, and afterward only if it were necessary to save the life of the expectant woman. A woman also had to consent to having an abortion before the procedure was performed. The final bill was therefore a reform measure, albeit one far less restrictive than those proposed before Cook and other women got involved. These changes secured additional support, including from Assemblywoman Krupsak, who had buckled under pressure from the Catholic Church the last time. The Assembly’s final tally was 76 to 73 votes in favor. Governor Rockefeller signed the bill the next day on 11 April 1970.29
Cook’s involvement in NOW led her to see legal abortion as a core woman’s right; in turn, she showed fellow feminists and everyday women and supporters how to pass legislation. Cook helped unite Rockefeller Republicans across the state with liberal Democrats in districts downstate that were not heavily Catholic. Together, they made abortion a public issue as much as a women’s one. Yet, their coalition left out whole segments of the Democratic Party and eventually enabled the small conservative Republican wing based upstate to gain power in the four populous suburban counties downstate, where (mostly Catholic) opponents like Margie Fitton lived and would soon organize.30
“Church Ladies” and the Right to Life Committee
The abortion reform bill that Governor Rockefeller signed in 1970 was the most expansive law of its kind. Between 1967 and 1970, sixteen states legalized abortion to some extent through either legislation or judicial review. New York’s law went the furthest because there was no residency requirement. It became a model for groups elsewhere, as the state became a haven for those seeking safe and legal abortions in the years before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized the procedure at the federal level in 1973. Roughly 60 percent of abortions performed in New York from 1970 through 1972 were for women who did not reside there.31
Under these conditions, mounting pressure to recriminalize the procedure
