In my latest reading of Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Kristin Luker discusses California's Therapeutic Abortion law during the 1960's and the pro-choice movement's reactions to it.
As
I said yesterday in my post about Luker's book, the nineteenth century
had laws against abortion that still permitted abortion to save the life
of the mother, but medical doctors were given the latitude to perform
an abortion when they deemed it to be necessary. When medical
advancement dramatically reduced the number of instances in which
abortion would need to be performed to save the mother's life, people
turned a critical eye towards practicing abortion for the sake of the
mother's mental health, and there was a push to interpret anti-abortion
laws more strictly.
California's Therapeutic Abortion law
in the 1960's was a reaction to this, and it sought to preserve medical
doctors' latitude in performing abortions. Not only was this a move to
protect doctors, but it also addressed another relevant concern at the
time: the rubella epidemic, which was causing severe birth defects
(blindness, deafness, heart problems, mental disability, etc.), and some
believed that abortion should be an option in this case because of the
taxing responsibility of raising a child with such defects, and perhaps
also because of the potential that the child could not have much quality
of life (I may have read the latter reason in this book, but I can't
find where, so it may not be there). Governor Ronald Reagan
signed the bill into law, after successfully pushing for a symbolic
concession to the anti-abortion movement (and I don't exactly understand
what that concession was). (UPDATE: From what I read in Luker, it seems that Reagan was against
allowing abortion on the ground that it was for the embryo's own good,
on account of the embryo's defects.) The law itself was not for abortion on
demand, but, overall, in the law's aftermath, doctors agreed to perform
far more abortions than they refused.
But there were women who did
not think that California's Therapeutic Abortion law went far enough.
They favored the repeal of all anti-abortion laws, not merely reforming
them, and some women thought that California's law treated them as
chattel. And they did not believe that a medical doctor should
have the final say about whether or not they'd have an abortion, but
that they themselves should have the final say, for pregnancy and having
children affected their lives. On page 97, Luker quotes a
pro-choice woman who said: "When we talk about women's rights, we can
get all the rights in the world----the right to vote, the right to go to
school----and none of them means a doggone thing if we don't own the
flesh we stand in, if we can't control what happens to us, if the whole
course of our lives can be changed by somebody else that can get us
pregnant by accident, or by deceit, or by force."
On page 100,
Luker states that the organization of the pro-choice group, Society for
Human Abortions, was when a number of women became unwilling to regard
abortion as something that should be weighed in light of interests
outside of the woman herself: "Until SHA was organized, women seemed
willing to live with a situation in which their rights to control their
own bodies was defined as only one of several competing rights, such as
the rights of the husband (or whoever was the father of the embryo), the
right of the state to regulate sexual morality by regulating the
consequences of sexual intercourse, and the right of the state to
control the production of potential citizens. It may very well be true
that women were not happy about sharing their right to control their own
bodies with various competing claims; but the interesting fact remains
that until SHA was formed, they did not choose to exert organized
political pressure on their own behalf."