| From Abortion politics in the United States and Canada: Studies in public opinion | |
| Edited by Ted G. Jelen and Marthe A. Chandler (Westport, Conn. : Praeger, 1994. pp. 20-26.) |
|
| HQ 767.5 U5 A267 1994 |
ISBN 0275945618 |
Both the term "grass roots" and the term "social movements" apply far more to abortion opponents than to proponents. Staggenborg (1991) has shown, both before and after Roe, the difficult and often failed attempts [of abortion legalization advocacy groups] to maintain a grass-roots presence and the local activities characteristic of authentic social movements. McCarthy (1987:33) describes the pro-choice movement in terms neatly fitting the core premises of the "resource mobilization" perspective. Groups supporting legal abortion are characterized by paid functionaries, formal bureaucracies, and philanthropic funding. "Its relative lack of usable social infrastructures compared with the pro-life movement leads it to depend far more heavily upon modern mobilization technologies in order to aggregate people and resources." McCarthy (1987:33) concludes that it "can be safely said that pro-life is more dense in numbers, more grass-roots in nature, more variegated in organizational form" than pro-choice organizations. McCarthy found (1987:59) that the membership of a main abortion rights social movement organization, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL, originally the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws), were highly educated (55 percent with some graduate training), rarely active in local chapters (only 13 percent, and 60 percent explicitly said they would not join), and most (77 percent) did not know if any of their friends were members. Indeed, McCarthy describes the membership of each of the major groups associated with the protection of legal abortion -- the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women (NOW), Planned Parenthood, and Population Control groups -- as comprised of large numbers of isolated members whose involvement is limited to paying dues and receiving newsletters. Their isolated members can only be mobilized for "one shot emergency appeals which can be elegantly coordinated with legislative and movement struggle" (1987:60).
Pro-choice attempts to create stable grassroots groups have been generally unsuccessful. Both pre- and post-Roe, legal abortion groups had and have, in McCarthy's phrase, "thin infrastructures". A cofounder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (Lader, 1973:vii) recalled that until the late 1960s their movement was a "lonely" one consisting of "only a few clusters in a few states". Staggenborg (1991:57) writes that it was Roe itself that "created legitimacy for the movement". Rubin (1987:1) characterizes the legal abortion movement not as a "grass roots" campaign but as a "litigation campaign", where pressure group activity was "tailored to fit the format of a lawsuit but specifically designed to produce broad social change rather than to vindicate the private rights of the parties". Litigation campaigns originate not with grass-roots groups but with elites who control significant economic and social resources. Rubin points out (1987:3) that litigation campaigns are extremely costly: "To control, organize, and manage a carefully selected sequence of cases, it is also necessary to have sizable resources in money, legal talent, and experience. Funding is especially important, for litigation is expensive." In litigation campaigns, the characteristic resource is not grass-roots volunteers but routine access to elite networks. Ordinary people start social movements; elites start litigation campaigns.
Litigation campaigns are relatively new. Faux (1988:233-36) describes what she calls, for that time, the novel strategy of the "Association for the Study of Abortion" which, with an active membership of only 20 (Staggenborg, 1991:15), solicited and orchestrated "amici curiae briefs" from medical, professional, academic, religious, and women's groups. The only failure was the attempt to organize briefs from black women and from prominent American women who had had abortions. Faux (1988:234) recalls that the coordinator "felt the idea died mostly because abortion was still enough of a taboo in the United States to dissuade women from taking so personally revealing a stand". (It was not until eighteen years after Roe that a book -- Angela Bonavoglia's The Choices We Made [Random House, 1991] -- was published in which public personalities discussed their own abortions.) Faux does not offer any explanation why the brief by black women failed, though elsewhere Fried (1990:Introduction) suggests that the mainstream pro-choice movement -- specially NARAL and NOW -- failed to "mobilize women of color" on the grass-roots level because it narrowly serves the interests of white middle class women.
The Association for the Study of Abortion obtained forty-two briefs, a record at the time, showing that abortion movement activists, in Staggenborg's phrase (1991:13, 17), were "'in no way outsiders" to national and local centers of power. Their abortion opponents lacked this movement centralization and commanded no similar elite support. The Supreme Court received only four pro-life briefs: Americans United for Life, National Right to Life, LIFE (the League for Infants, Fetuses and the Elderly), and "certain physicians of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists". While very few Americans would recognize the three groups signing pro-life briefs, signers of pro-Roe briefs included well-known and prestigious professional groups, such as the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Women's Association, NOW, the National Board of YWCAs, as well as many prominent women. Staggenborg (1991:37) describes as especially important resources for legal abortion proponents the American Civil Liberties Union and the Law Center for Constitutional Rights. She acknowledges that legal abortion lacked widespread grass-roots support: "It was important that the victory was achieved by movement participation in an arena in which the counter-movement was comparatively weak."
Lader, a cofounder of NARAL, recalled that the elective abortion found constitutional in Roe "came like a thunderbolt.…It was even more conclusive than any of us had dared to hope". In short, the evidence strongly supports Rubin's description of legal abortion activists as conducting a "litigation campaign" (1987:1) rather than starting a "social movement". Staggenborg (1991:33) reports that when the "National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws" began in 1969 they had no more than five hundred individual contributors and only eighteen "organizational members," who planned strategy and tactics without consulting even their small membership. A member of the first abortion activist group, the "California Society for Humane Abortion" (1961), told Staggenborg (1991:47), "Really, our major accomplishment was in talking about abortion, saying the word out loud rather than using euphemisms". At that time abortion lacked the moral legitimacy necessary to generate a vital grass-roots movement. Staggenborg's (1991:29) informants recalled that "the word 'abortion' could barely be mentioned in public when the movement began".
But while abortion was still considered disreputable (Davis, 1985:xiii), and thus outside conventional politics, legal abortion activists had routine access to powerful political support. The immediate bridge was the growing government interest in population control and the putative threat to American national security posed by a growing Third World population (Donaldson, 1990:25, 27). Donaldson (1990:32) recalls that in the early 1960s "worries about the Soviet Union and the possibility of Communist inspired revolutions in the Third World were widespread in government and foreign-policy circles". Funding for population control in the Agency for International Development began with a modest $2.1 million dollars in 1965 and quickly reached $185 million by 1980 (also Back, 1989:107). The founders of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Law (Staggenborg, 1991:25) were mostly "single-issue activists with backgrounds in the family planning and population movements" who later added a women's rights framework to their campaign. These single-issue activists had ready access to wealthy donors and (Staggenborg, 1991:33) they "routinely received large donations". Back (1989:108) reports that by 1969 global population had become such a salient issue that "even the question of domestic overpopulation started to arouse concern, prompting Congress to establish a Commission on Population Growth and the American Future which included among its recommendations legal abortion and its public funding for poor women".
The abortion activists' ties (Staggenborg, 1991:3) to the population movement were especially important for fund-raising. Staggenborg (1991:19) found a large overlap in the memberships of NARAL and Zero Population Growth (ZPG), noting that "the movement for legal abortion was very small during this period and so needed ZPG's help". Lader, a cofounder of NARAL, was a ZPG board member and author of (1971) Breeding Ourselves to Death. Lader also persuaded Betty Friedan that the newly formed National Organization for Women should endorse legal abortion, which NOW did in 1967. Tribe (1990:44) observes that while legal abortion now "virtually defines the women's movement", in her 1963 classic work The Feminine Mystique Friedan does not even mention abortion. Staggenborg (1991:20) reports that Friedan's decision committing NOW to abortion advocacy provoked considerable conflict within NOW and did not necessarily represent a majority position. Clarke Phelan, coordinator of NOW's task force on abortion, recalled, "There was no networking [about the decision]. There were phone calls for those that could afford them, but no regular communication" (Staggrenborg, 1991:20). When NOW endorsed legal abortion, many delegates resigned (Tribe, 1990:45).
Even later, some chapters tried to remove abortion from NOW's "Bill of Rights for Women" because it made their work on other issues in their own communities more difficult. In fact, in 1972 two former members of NOW, one expelled because she objected to including legal abortion in NOW's bill of rights, founded Feminists for Life of America (FFL). The inside cover of the FFL quarterly Sisterlife explains that "FFL continues the work of over a century of pro-life feminism, working for a society in which women are enabled to make life-affirming choices for themselves and their children. Feminists for Life of America is a member of the Seamless Garment Network, and supports the Network's mission of opposing the violence of war, abortion, poverty, euthanasia, and the death penalty".
Because the pro-choice movement remained highly dependent on the population control organizations, grass-roots feminist groups were not able to successfully contest its increasingly single-issue focus (Back, 1989:154ff; Davis, 1985:121, 2; Staggenborg, 1991:110). Staggenborg (1991:44) reports that while "some of my informants confessed a bit of embarrassment in looking back at their own rhetoric, at the time they thought of themselves as part of a larger movement that was challenging basic social, economic, and political institutions. Legal abortion was simply a part of the larger revolution they thought was near. Their goal was to create participatory democratic institutions that would serve human needs rather than corporate interest". More specifically, they wanted to create a nonprofit, high-quality health care delivery system. But those interested primarily in a single-issue population control approach rejected any feminist linkage of legal abortion with political and economic reforms. Before Roe, differences between single-issue abortion movement groups and feminist groups were often intense. After Roe, feminist groups had trouble sustaining any linkage between legal abortion and a more comprehensive approach that ensured that women with problem pregnancies and in difficult circumstances had more choices than abortion.
No longer were there prominent pro-choice groups expressing concerns about the misuse of abortion as a way of controlling the welfare costs of minority and poor populations. For example, after Roe, the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse and the Reproductive Rights National Network had difficulty attracting either funds or members, and both became defunct. Feminists seeking to promote legal abortion within a "multilssue approach," especially for "women of color," were told that a comprehensive approach was a luxury and were accused of having a "holier than thou attitude" (Staggenborg, 1991:120). Davis (1985:19-20) more pointedly contrasts feminist approaches to abortion with the "anti-poverty ideology that pervades" the "population control enterprise". Within the "population control enterprise", Davis includes demographers, epidemiologists, public health bureaucrats, drug companies, family planning counselors, and abortion clinics as well as explicit population control groups. These groups, she claims (1985:19-20), share a dominant metaphor of "control by technology" and "a narrow belief in the salvation of rationality, of limiting births as a necessary and sufficient tool of progress". Back (1989:154) warns, "If the principles of family planning and population control are carried to their ultimate logical conclusion, then they will inevitably conflict with many of the principles of other movements who generally support family planning aims". He cautions that population control elites do not openly oppose social welfare policies that encourage childbirth among the poor (such as welfare, maternal benefits, free education) only because at present "this would be tactically unwise" (1989:l54). Since supporting legal abortion is not synonymous with supporting "pro-choice", perhaps sometime soon someone will write "Seeking a Sociologically Correct Name for Abortion Proponents".
Francome (1984:210) has observed a worldwide pattern where economic elites quickly come to support abortion as a way of controlling births among the "unproductive" classes. In the United States the great disparity in elite status between pro- and anti-abortion groups can be quickly shown by a breakdown of the amici curiae briefs filed in the July 3, 1989, Supreme Court decision Webster v. Missouri Reproductive Services which, because it partially returned abortion legislation to the state legislative level, represented a new stage in the controversy. There was massive professional activity against Webster, from organizations that include the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Academy of Pediatricians, the Population Council, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the Sierra Club, and many more (see Kelly, 1990:692-93). In contrast, pro-Webster briefs came from few professional groups (and only from those formed specifically to dissent from parent organizations, such as the American Association of Pro-Life Pediatricians).
Although there is presently a pronounced tendency within the social movement literature to describe the movement opposing abortion as a "counter-movement" driven by "antifeminist" sentiments (Staggenborg, 1991:188), this judgment stems more from presuppositions than from actual historical or social survey evidence (Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, 1992:76ff., "Abortion and Gender Role Attitudes"). Besides, an early theoretical closure prevents scholars and others from noting the increasingly complex coalitions sought by some in the movement. It will be some time before the final outcome of the abortion controversy will safely allow commentators to decide which aspects of the social movement organizations it gave rise to warrant the adjective "counter" and "antifeminist" and which warrant different descriptions entirely.