In over a dozen states and the District of Columbia in the several years preceding the Supreme Court decision, there was a groundswell of judicial and legislative activity to liberalize or, in a few cases, repeal existing abortion statutes. The activity was so sudden, so sweeping, that it caught even proabortion organizers by surprise. In the words of one activist: “We rode the crest of something I still can’t define—but that something was clearly changing attitudes on the part of the American public. . . ."4 "That something" was a complex cluster of political and social forces that need to be sorted out in order to clarify—and strengthen—the misunderstood and obscure role that feminist ideas often play in reproductive rights struggles.
What were the contributions of population control politics, feminist politics, and social changes to the restoration of legal abortion in the United States? Both the women’s liberation movement and the population control establishment played instrumental roles in speeding up the process of legitimation and giving voice to the ideas that made legitimation possible. Feminists and abortion repeal activists in liberal church, political, legal, and medical circles provided the critical material and human network through which old laws could be exposed, challenged, and, for the first time, openly and collectively defied. Without that energy and organizing, it might have been years more before a Roe v. Wade got decided. Yet we still have to explain why a mass feminist movement reawakened at that moment and, unlike its predecessors, included "abortion on demand" as one of its central goals; and why a population control establishment that had for years regarded abortion with disdain suddenly lobbied for its legalization.
Contrary to common belief, the Supreme Court decision in 1973 was not the "cause" of rising abortion rates but an accommodation to social changes that began long before Roe v. Wade was decided. These changes were rooted in the same cluster of interacting conditions that produced the overall fertility decline among U. S. women that began in the early 1960s, as can be seen in Figure 3.1. They included (1) later marriage and childbearing among young women, along with their increasing levels of college attendance; (2) the rising labor force participation of young women, married and unmarried, still in low-paid jobs and in a context of high inflation during the Vietnam war years; and (3) rising divorce rates and proportions of female-headed households. These changes combined with several enduring conditions: a sexual division of labor that makes women still the primary ones responsible for children; a lack of commitment to government-funded social services, especially
104 / FERTILITY CONTROL IN THEORY AND HISTORY Figure 3-і. U. S. Total Fertility Rate, 1917-1975
child care and health care; and the need of all women to avoid unwanted pregnancy for reasons of health, sexual self-determination, and social self-actualization.
These new and old circumstances cut across class and ethnic-racial divisions, resulting in lower fertility and a greater need for safe, reliable methods of fertility control among diverse groups of women. Certainly there are social differences in fertility rates. For example, more educated women, unmarried women, divorced/separated women, and most of all, women working outside the home or looking for work have significantly fewer children than do women who left school early or do not work outside the home.5 Nevertheless, these differences merely underscore the importance of the changing conditions listed above. The conscious activity of most women in the pre-Roe period to limit their fertility, often through illegal abortion, must be understood in its social and economic setting.
While never reducible to an economic question, deciding whether to have a child has distinct economic implications. But today (as historically), the economic aspects of the question stem not from women’s in
come levels but from women’s work. The continued primary responsibility of mothers for children, along with the steadily increasing labor force participation of women, especially mothers, is the major contradiction for women under late capitalism and defines the outer limit of the social conditions determining decisions about having and not having children. As a consequence of the sexual division of labor around childbearing, the main responsibility for contraception and pregnancy lies not with "couples" but with women. This is true not only for the growing numbers of women who head families, which rose throughout the 1960s and 1970s in direct relation to rising divorce rates, but also for married working women, who make up the largest proportion of working women and the fastest-growing cohort in the labor force.6 Most of these women retain the primary responsibility for household maintenance and child care, despite working hard and long hours outside the home—a situation commonly known as the "double day."
Meanwhile, the participation rate of women in full-time and part — time work continues to rise. The increased demand for women workers, especially in the low-paid clerical and service sectors, is experienced by individual women in the context of inflation and economic crisis and the inability of families to maintain a decent standard of living on a single wage. For most working-class and even middle-class people, the costs of having a baby—obstetrician’s and insurance bills, hospitalization, clothing and diapers—are staggering. This situation inevitably affects decisions about childbearing and contraception, but women’s reproductive choices are even more constrained by a series of related economic, political, and social realities. These include severe shortages in government-funded social services, especially child care and health care; the low pay of jobs generally available to women (women still earn one-half to two-thirds of what men earn in comparable jobs); and the rise of wife battering and child abuse within the male-dominated family, which raises serious questions about that institution’s capacity to "protect" women and children. If a woman chooses to bear or raise a child outside heterosexual marriage, she encounters difficulties in securing custody or the right to participate in mothering at all. The legal and social attack on lesbian mothers suggests that although women remain primarily responsible for children, their responsibility is expected to be exercised within traditionally accepted frameworks of kinship and sexuality—that is, within heterosexual coupling and marriage.
These conditions affect women differently, depending on their class, race, age, sexual orientation, and occupation. Whether as black, Hispanic, and Asian women employed in hospitals, laundries, and sweatshops, where the worst kinds of reproductive hazards go unremedied, or as clerical workers, mostly unorganized and working without pregnancy or maternity benefits, or as welfare mothers confronted with the virtual
abolition of Medicaid funds for abortion and cuts in child health and other benefits, or as lesbian mothers fighting for child custody and against patriarchal norms of childrearing, different groups of women experience different forms of reproductive oppression. But, for many women, economic crisis and the loss of the family as a safe refuge must be understood as an important structural determinant of decisions to avoid or terminate pregnancy. Yet, declining fertility among American women in the 1960s and 1970s was not simply due to economic distress, as in the 1930s; even more, it reflected limited but real economic advances for women.7 These advances were related to the sharp rise in women’s labor force participation. Even where—as in most cases—the gains made were in low-paying, sex-segregated service and clerical jobs, they meant more resources than women had had in the decades before. The consequences for their fertility of women’s working outside the home, however, may be different for women of different classes and occupations. Let us look at these differences, keeping in mind the basic argument that the overall drop in fertility in this period is related to a general improvement in the conditions of women, of which greater economic independence is a critical aspect.
A woman’s type and location of employment, her occupational status, and her educational level—in short, her class and racial-ethnic position— affect the work-fertility relationship. Where women’s jobs are low paying, dead-end, menial, and seen as temporary or makeshift, employment outside the home may coincide with high rather than low fertility. Where they are employed in home-based industries or family-owned retailing or crafts, fertility may remain high because it is compatible with the need for more "hands" and for the mother’s presence at home. Where women’s jobs offer some "alternative gratifications," decent pay, and a modicum of security, on the other hand, low fertility is almost certain to result.8 During the "baby boom" of the 1950s when fertility rates rose sharply among all socioeconomic groups, lifetime fertility varied greatly among employed married women by occupation. Women who reached their main childbearing years in the late 1940s and early 1950s and were employed in clerical, professional/technical, and managerial/ administrative fields had significantly lower fertility than women employed as operatives, nonfarm laborers, service workers, and agricultural workers (see Table 3-1). In most societies, the former are occupations for women that require more education and hence postponed marriage and childbearing and more efficient use of contraception, as well as provide a greater sense of permanent recruitment into the labor force and possibilities for advancement. In general, demographers have found an inverse correlation between women’s level of education and their lifetime fertility.
While women’s overall labor force participation rose steadily during the postwar years, this increase reflected different realities at different
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Table 3-і. Cumulative Fertility of Employed Married Women Born 1925-29, by Occupation Group
source: U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Childspacing and Current Fertility, 1970 Census of Population Subject Reports, PC(2)-3B (August 1975), Tables 9 and 12. |
times. Starting in the early 1960s, it came to reflect not so much an increase in the absolute numbers of women working outside the home but changes in women’s life cycle and the fact that more women were working through more of their lives—before, during, and after marriage.9 Between 1950 and 1970, the labor force participation rate of white married women nearly doubled. Age also has been an important variable in structuring the pattern of women’s rising labor force participation, and the tendency for women in their prime childbearing years to spend more of those years working outside the home emerged over a decade before Roe. As Figure 3-2 shows, the 1960s experienced a qualitative leap in the labor force participation of all women, but most strikingly of those aged twenty to thirty-five. This is in contrast to the earlier increase (indicated by the graph line for I960), which was clustered among women in the post-childbearing years. By 1970, women in their early twenties, increasing numbers of them unmarried, had achieved the highest labor force participation rates of any age cohort. This trend would deepen in the 1970s and dramatically would come to include mothers in their late twenties and early thirties. But the trend was well under way in the 1960s (see Figure 3-2).
In addition, the occupational distribution of women in the labor force changed significantly during the 1960s and early 1970s. While the proportion of working women who were operatives, sales workers, and farm workers declined between 1959 and 1974, the proportion who were clerical workers increased from 30 to nearly 35 percent, or from 6.3 million to nearly 11.5 million, making clerical workers the largest and fastest-growing category of employed women. Professional and technical workers increased from 12 to 16 percent, and nonhousehold service workers from
|
16 |
18 |
20 |
25 |
35 |
45 |
55 |
65 |
|
to |
to |
to |
to |
to |
to |
to |
and |
|
17 |
19 |
24 |
34 |
44 |
54 |
64 |
over |
|
мамам мм |
1940 |
Age |
—
 |
1950 • 1960
— 1970 ■ 1977
source: Francine D. Blau, "Women in the Labor Force: An Overview," in Women: A Feminist Perspective, ed. by Jo Freeman, 2d ed. (Palo Alto, Calif.: Mayfield, 1979).
14 to 17 percent.10 Except for service workers, these women represent a more educated as well as a less childbearing-oriented population, corresponding to the growing rates of women’s college attendance during the 1960s and 1970s. The numbers and percentages of women who both attended and graduated from college began to rise around 1960 and continued rising sharply during the subsequent two decades, but most significantly during the 1960s.11 Table 3-2 indicates that the trend toward equal proportions of women and men enrolled in colleges was established by the early 1970s.
Thus the conditions we would expect to result in lowered fertility were very much in evidence in the 1960s, long before abortion became legal. While we cannot establish a direct "causal" link with rising (illegal) abortions and pill use (the pill was introduced in 1960), it is safe to assume that the growing labor force participation and college attendance of women in their childbearing years motivated at least as much as they were "caused" by those trends. This is not because childbearing and work or school are intrinsically incompatible; countless women, particularly black women, have combined them for centuries. It is because the dominant institutions for childrearing in the United States are still organized around their separation.
Because of her continued association with domestic tasks, a woman’s working conditions include the conditions of family and reproductive labor, and these in turn are shaped by class.12 The concrete impact that childbearing has on women’s lives, specifically their labor force participation, differs markedly depending on whether they are able to organize or afford substitutes for maternal child care—a question of class, culture, and public policy. With adequate income, upper-, middle-, and even working-class women may be able "to substitute purchased inputs [babysitters, housekeepers, nursery schools] for the wife’s time in child rearing." Elsewhere, extended families, neighborhood or kin networks, older siblings, or other "surrogates" may reduce what sociologists call "role incompatibility" between mothers working and taking care of children.13
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Table 3-2. Percent of Men and Women Enrolled in College, 1960-1979______________________________________________________
source: U. S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Perspectives on Working Women: Л Databook, Bulletin 2080 (October 1980), Table 39. |
But the dominant reality in the contemporary United States, more so than in any other advanced capitalist society, is that child-care alternatives for employed mothers are widely unavailable. Compelled economically and encouraged socially to work outside the home, people with children are told that infant and child care is not a public concern. This fact, which lies at the core of U. S. "family policy," has a direct bearing on fertility. A study of census data from 1977 found a relationship between fertility behavior, employment, and the availability of suitable child care. A substantial percentage (17.4 percent) of unemployed mothers with children under five years said that they would be working if they could find "satisfactory child care at reasonable cost"; nearly 25 percent of mothers of young children currently working part-time indicated their desire to work longer hours, if not constrained by the lack of child care.14 Moreover, women "who feel prevented from working" or working full-time because of the absence of low-cost child care have fertility rates and fertility expectations that are closer to those of full-time employed mothers of young children. This suggests "that fertility differentials by labor- force status would be greater if we took into account the extent to which women with young children reduce their labor-force participation as a result of child care constraint."15
Probably the most important change in the 1960s and 1970s affecting women’s position in the family, the work force, and childbearing was the phenomenon of postponed marriage, which generally results in lower fertility. During those decades, women’s age at first marriage rose, and the rate of first marriages declined.16 More telling is the growing percentage of single women under age thirty. Table 3-3 indicates that the increase in the proportion of single women under 25 had begun by 1960, although for women aged 25-29 that increase occurred in the 1970s. For younger women since 1960, this increase has been remarkable; over half of those aged 20-24 are unmarried today, compared with a little more than one — quarter in 1960. For them, as for women aged 18-19, much of the change came in the ipre-Roe years.
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Table 3-3. Percent Single (Never Married) Women by Age: I960, 1970, and 1980
source: U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Marital Status and Living Arrangements: March 1978, Current Population Reports, Series P-20, No. 338 (May 1979), Table B; and Marital Status and Living Arrangements: March 1980, Current Population Reports, Series P-20, No. 365 (October 1981), Table B. |
O’Connell and Moore present another dimension of this picture by showing that the legitimation ratio (percentage of premaritally conceived first births legitimated by marriage) in the United States reached its peak in the "baby boom" years of 1955-58, after which it began to decline, particularly for women aged 15-17 and 20-24. The most significant decline in "legitimated" pregnancies for these women was during the late 1960s and early 1970s (to 1974).17 Similarly, first-birth rates for women aged 15-24 began to decline in the 1960s, although the decline accelerated in the 1970s. Conversely, the proportion of white women who were "childless" at the ages of 25 and 30 began to climb (after having reaching an all-time low) in about 1964-65 and continued to climb dramatically through the 1970s.18
In other words, young women in the рте-Roe decade were well along in the trend of deferring marriage and motherhood to work and school that would characterize the years of legal abortion. O’Connell and Moore suggest that the availability of legal abortion was what made the decline in legitimation ratios possible. But it is more plausible, given the dates of the decline, to argue that changed social conditions for young women created a need and a demand for more readily available abortion and contraception. (Chapter 5 discusses why the two needs are inevitably bound together.)
If the age and rate of first marriage began to change by 1960, so too did the divorce rate. In fact, it starts its infamous climb at about the time the "baby boom" is ending and the contemporary rise in younger women’s labor force participation begins.19 This simply underlines the complex interrelationships of all these conditions—labor force participation, education, age at first marriage, fertility, and consequently patterns of abortion and birth control use. We cannot untangle whether women postpone marriage and childbearing because of the greater availability of jobs and educational possibilities or seek jobs and education because they are less encumbered with marriage and motherhood, for the simple reason that the two processes are mutually reinforcing. Yet the totality of these conditions adds up to a situation in which more women are spending more years of their lives outside marriage and without direct dependence on men, focused on activities other than domesticity and childrearing. To the extent (assumed rather than demonstrated) that the majority of these women remain heterosexual and sexually engaged outside marriage, the increase in their need for reliable contraception and safe abortion follows as night follows day. It particularly follows in a male-dominant culture in which women lack the resources to raise children easily on their own. And it was the case, in an increasingly pressing way, throughout the decade preceding the Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. To say this is to state the most obvious, simple fact. Yet polemicists of the twentieth-century crusade against abortion, like those of the nineteenth, disregard the basic elements of social reality in favor of misogynist moralism.
We look at the extension of these social and demographic patterns into the 1970s and their differential impact on different groups of women in the next chapter. Here, they merely lay the analytical groundwork for understanding why a rising need and demand for abortion were not the consequence of availability (legalization) so much as they were its stimulus. This analysis is reinforced when we consider the available information about birth control and abortion practices during the decades before the pill and legal abortion. It is well established that fertility declined to an unprecedented extent in the Great Depression, before the development of the pill; this was due to the deliberate use of contraception, sterilization, and abortion. An important study of white, ever-married women born between 1901 and 1910—the cohort of women who reached their prime childbearing years in the 1930s—found "a lower completed family size than any other cohort/’ in an era when the pill and the IUD were unavailable and abortion was everywhere a crime. By age fifty, around 42 percent of these women had had either one or no children, and many of the others had planned the spacing and termination of their childbearing. They did this through widespread use of the contraceptive methods that were then available—the condom, douche, withdrawal, rhythm, and diaphragm (in that order of importance). But evidence also suggests that they had high rates of surgical sterilization (often reported as "medical" in intent), and many also practiced abortion.20
If the decline in fertility during the 1930s was not caused by a "technological breakthrough," neither was the "baby boom" of the 1950s caused by a technological blackout. In both periods, effective techniques of contraception were available, including (illegal) abortion, but different social conditions determined differences in their use.21 Survey data from the "baby boom" period indicate that some 70 percent of white married couples used contraception prior to 1955. In 1955-60, there was an increase in contraceptive use among white married couples of different socioeconomic backgrounds from 70 to 81 percent, with the majority using condoms, diaphragms, or rhythm. Surveyors report that "the use or prospective use of contraception [in 1955-60] is nearly universal among fecund couples, and there are strong attitudes to support this practice. Most wives, regardless of their religion, educational attainment, or position in society, feel that it is entirely proper for couples to try to control the number and spacing of their children."22 Moreover, data on the mean age at which "baby boom mothers," who averaged 3.3 children, had their third or higher-order births suggest that even those women who had three or more children terminated their childbearing some ten to fifteen years before menopause.23 Unless these women were abstaining from sex, birth control and abortion use must have become part of a new family structure and family ideology. Regarding abortion specifically, a committee headed by Dr. Mary Calderone concluded in the mid-1950s that "the frequency of induced abortions in the United States could be as low as 200,000 and as high as 1,200,000 per year. . . . There is no objective basis for the selection of a particular figure between these two estimates as an approximation of the actual frequency."24
It is impossible to know with much precision the incidence of abortion in the days of illegality. Demographers suggest that many women in the 1950s were either failing to report abortions or reporting them as miscarriages; thus abortion, despite its illegality and despite the ideological emphasis on motherhood, was an important means of fertility control. They estimate further "that about two-thirds of all legal abortions in the early years of legalization replaced formerly illegal procedures."25 In other words, formal legalization was a response to a rising social need, expressed in women’s persistent practice during the preceding (post-"baby boom") decade. These practices occurred through underground abortion services, church and other community-based referrals, and cooperative doctors’ networks that emerged in populous cities and states in the 1960s, themselves a stark testament to growing popular demand as well as the political consciousness about abortion and women’s rights generated by a growing women’s liberation movement.
In conscious statements as well as behavior, "clearly changing attitudes on the part of the American public" prefigured and prompted Roe v. Wade. These new attitudes, like the revised state laws, undoubtedly grew out of social changes in women’s conditions. According to one study of national survey data, "the largest part of the change in abortion attitudes [toward greater approval for all reasons, including economic, being unmarried, or simply not wanting any more children] occurred before 1970, simultaneously with campaigns to liberalize state abortion laws." While the Court’s decision may have "boosted levels of approval further," it in fact reflected a dominant trend already established in popular practice and in the easing of restrictive laws in some seventeen states.26 In 1969, a Louis Harris poll of a nationwide sample indicated that 64 percent "believed that the decision on abortion should be a private one." In the same year, two separate polls among physicians showed a majority favoring repeal of abortion laws.27 This is significant because the AMA at the same time was officially taking a more conservative stand on abortion.
The conditions of, declining fertility in the 1960s and 1970s are not historically unique but resemble those surrounding American women born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Women born between 1870 and 1910 tended to postpone marriage into their mid-twenties as well as maintaining high rates of lifetime celibacy. Over 20 percent remained childless throughout their lives. This is a lower percentage of "childlessness" than demographers predict for white women at present in their childbearing years but twice as high as among the childbearing cohorts of the late 1940s through early 1960s.28 And turn-of-the~century women who did bear children had lower fertility rates, higher rates of contraceptive use, and probably higher rates of abortion (even without legality) than their daughters and granddaughters. It is not the trends of today but the "baby boom" pattern of early and teenage marriage, legitimated pregnancies, and early and more frequent childbearing that constitutes the anomaly of the twentieth century. The cold-war decades were years of American economic expansion, political repression, and, above all, the absence of a visible feminist movement or a visible female presence in the labor market. "Family life" became the only acceptable channel through which women might enter adulthood. The "absence" of abortion (of course, women continued to get abortions clandestinely) was a political and ideological, not a technological, fact, and one to which women may have felt resigned out of a sense of hopelessness rather than conviction:
"I still remember how much I didn’t want to get married. I wanted to get a job and have some things. I was afraid if I got married it would be the end of my chance for a better life. I wasn’t wrong about that either. …"
"Did you ever consider abortion?"
"Never! I could never do that. God, I remember even now how terrified I was. I kept thinking it couldn’t be true. I remember even thinking that I would take my mom’s car and drive it off a cliff. I knew he’d marry me; I never doubted that. But I didn’t want to get married. I wanted to do things and have things."29
Although women who worked outside the home in professional and clerical occupations in the 1950s had fewer children than others, they were deviant—and made to feel so.
What is particular to the lives of earlier women (1900-1919) is that they arrived at young girlhood when the labor force participation rates of women, especially young unmarried women, were growing faster than they ever had, undoubtedly affecting not only childbearing and fertility control practices but women’s consciousness. These were also years when vocal radical and feminist movements that believed in women’s right to control their bodies and the terms of motherhood spread their ideas vigorously, influencing young working-class women as well as middle-class women.30 The parallels with today should be obvious, although there are important differences as well. In both cases, fertility and abortion trends have to be understood in relation to the complex interworkings of changing social conditions and ideologically powerful political movements.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the conjunction of abortion and delayed marriage and childbearing—they are mutually reinforcing—became a pervasive social force in a context in which education, training, and jobs became viable long-term options for the majority of young women, displacing marriage and maternity, in time if not in value. In the 1970s, college enrollment among women aged 16-34 increased by 57 percent for white women and by 112 percent for black women; and the enrollment of women in undergraduate institutions for the first time exceeded that of men. By 1978, the labor force participation rate of women aged 16- 19 was 54 percent, an increase of ten percentage points from 1970; for women aged 20-24 years, it was 69 percent, an increase of eleven percentage points from 1970.31 These trends occurred within a changing capitalist economy that, from the standpoint of women’s labor, was if anything complex. In the midst of a widening recession, a deteriorating industrial base, and declining productivity in heavy industry, the singular growth areas in the American economy were business services, health services, retail trade, eating and drinking places, and state and local governments— precisely the low-paying, dead-end, and largely unorganized job sectors that employ women.32 In other words, the capitalist economy required reliable means of fertility control to support a growing demand for female labor power.
While these developments have not meant increased earnings or status or an exit from sex-segregated work ghettos, they have meant an expectation of more options and an expanded world that surely affects how young women think about marriage and childbearing. And that expectation has been powerfully enhanced for a wide range of women by the growth of feminism. Women who became activists in the women’s liberation movement were the beneficiaries of the social changes described above. In the late 1960s and early 1970s they were primarily white, middle — class, college-educated women who had begun thinking about "women’s issues" in relation to their situation as professionals or students or their involvement in other movements for radical social change, particularly the civil rights and antiwar movements.32 An active and vocal feminist movement in this period was both effect and cause of a new sense of women’s possibilities; it grew out of the social changes that were occurring for women and moved, in its vision, far beyond them. It also made "abortion on demand" a primary political goal. In so doing, the new feminists differed from previous feminist movements; their actions helped create a climate of visibility and legitimacy around abortion that did not exist for women early in the century. In turn, legal, accessible abortion, especially for young unmarried women, helped make it possible for women to postpone or reject marriage in favor of school and work, and for a feminist consciousness to grow and flourish.
The argument I am making does not locate the changes that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s within a framework of expanded "individual choices" or individual achievement, but within a new range of social conditions that redefined the terms of a "normal life" for women. We might say that the "standard of childbearing" is a "historical and moral" question, just as Marx noted regarding the standard of living. It is a product of social forces and not just of individual preferences. Thus, women’s conformity to it may reflect not only a widening of their sphere of action but also a raising of the threshold of their basic needs. In this respect, it is significant that women’s college enrollment has gone up at precisely the moment when a college degree has been devalued from a sign of prestige to an entrance-level requirement for skilled and even semiskilled jobs. It is not out of "privilege" that most people today go to college; it is part of their normal life course, if not economically necessary. Similarly, the outer limit of women’s choice to get an abortion is that while their responsibilities (not just "opportunities") for study, training, and work have greatly enlarged, those of men, or of society as a whole, for the care and rearing of children have remained virtually unchanged. There has been no liberation of women in the past decade, but a furthering and deepening of the conditions making it necessary for them to maximize control over their lives. In that context legal abortion became, by the early 1970s, an acknowledged social imperative.