Legal abortion in the 1970s was neither given nor imposed. Yet, if it was "won," it was won in a form that, like civil rights legislation, by itself could not and would not assure that abortion services were provided to any woman who needed them in a context where choice was meaningful. Abortion was and is a social necessity that grew out of pressing needs and popular practices and became legitimated through state law. Why a shift in abortion policy occurred is a story that reflects a familiar pattern of conflict and accommodation between corporate and popular agendas in the shaping of the liberal welfare state.
Most analyses of the welfare state in the United States and Britain work from an inadequate theoretical base, for they ignore the state’s concern with maintaining gender hierarchy and regulating family life. In contrast, recent feminist analysis emphasizes that the welfare state "is not just a set of services, it is also a set of ideas about society, about the family, and—not least important—about women, who have a centrally important role within the family, as its linchpin"; its policies amount to "the State organization of domestic life. "x Keeping this feminist perspective in mind, we can nevertheless adapt certain useful insights about the contradictory origins and purposes of the welfare state from neo-Marxist theories.
On the one hand, the centralized state instruments created to soften the impact of the capitalist market on families and the poor are invariably geared toward social control. Ensconced in a rhetoric emphasizing "human services" and "needs assessment," programs aimed at family and income maintenance are designed and administered to fit families and households to a particular structural and behavioral norm and to stigmatize those who deviate. The welfare state aims to reproduce the dominant class, race, and gender relations—including the "stable" male-headed nuclear family. On the other hand, the programs emerge historically out of pressures exerted from below—sometimes through organized popular movements pressing the state for protection from economic assaults (jobs, health and safety regulations, decent public schools) and sometimes through spontaneous popular practices or self-help that threaten established interests (popular health movements, illegal abortion). The fact that the programs originate as a response to these pressures, in the state’s need to accommodate or conciliate popular resistance, has meant that the programs really achieve the satisfaction of certain minimal human needs, if partially and inadequately.2
Ian Gough points out that social programs frequently seem to be the product of simultaneous pressures from conflicting classes (capital and labor), which organize separately or in coalition, to achieve "reforms" (well-known examples are workmen’s compensation and social security). This creates the illusion of a "harmony of interests" among classes; but in reality the reforms are usually "supported by different groups for quite distinct or opposed reasons" and the ruling class and the state are not moved to institute social welfare measures until popular pressure has reached the point of being virtually irresistible: ". . . it is the threat of a powerful working-class movement which galvanises the ruling class to think more cohesively and strategically, and to restructure the state apparatus to this end." Once programs are in effect, the illusion of harmony breaks down in "conflicts over the nature of the service or the way it is organized… or over the level of benefits and the conditions attached to their receipt" and finally over who controls.3
This analysis, though drawn too narrowly in terms of the conflict between the organized working class and capital, may be fittingly applied to political conflicts over reproductive health services and reproductive rights, including legal abortion. To know why abortion was nationally legalized in 1973, we have to look not only at the "actors" (feminists, liberals, population control advocates) who articulated the need for change but at the conditions that brought those actors to political consciousness.
This chapter puts Roe v. Wade in its larger social context to explain that the Supreme Court legitimated but did not initiate a rise in abortions. As with other dimensions of welfare state policy, shifts in state policies regarding abortion or fertility have usually been responses to, rather than determinants of, changes in the economic and social conditions that structure women’s work and marital patterns and birth control practices. These conditions give rise to movements and organizations that put pressure on the state to change its policies, but out of "distinct or opposed reasons."