[Bertha] Barnes was on birth control pills, but gave them up because of high blood pressure. When she went to a Galveston clinic to be fitted for an intrauterine device, she was told that their schedule was full. When her contraceptive foam ran out, she did not have the $5 for a new supply. That […]

The legalization of abortion following Roe v. Wade had a crucial, positive impact on the life choices available to all women. However, its contribution to women’s basic health and well-being was most dramatic for poor women, who disproportionately are women of color. For it oc­curred in a context involving major changes in the composition of […]

Out-of-wedlock childbearing—involving the decision neither to get an abortion nor to marry—remains more prevalent among working-class and poor than among middle-class teenagers. While the majority of mid­dle — and upper-class pregnant teenagers, even in predominantly Catholic areas, terminate their pregnancies in abortion, the likelihood is much greater that working-class teenagers will carry their pregnancies to […]

Legalization, public funding, and public legitimacy have contributed to a significant rise in abortions in the United States since 1970 (see Figure 4-1). The proportion of pregnant women who legally terminate their pregnancy has risen steadily, from 19 percent in 1973 to 30 percent in 1979, an increase of 58 percent in six years.2 As […]

Unly a generation ago, social assumptions about the consequences that must follow from premarital sexual activity and premarital conception were radically different from what they are today. In the "baby boom" years of the 1950s, social norms prescribed that an out-of-wedlock concep­tion lead inexorably to marriage and the bearing of a "legitimate" child. A group […]

Birth control politics throughout most of the twentieth century in America have been laced with a tension between the ideas and methods of popular organizers and mass movements on the one hand and those of liberal reformers and sympathetic medical and legal professionals on the other. "Abortion on demand" and "a woman’s right to control […]

When President Dwight D. Eisenhower was asked in 1959 about the federal government’s relation to birth control, he replied: "I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or governmental activity or function or responsibility. . . . That’s not our business." Four years later, however, President John F. Kennedy […]

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 […]

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 […]

The historical analysis of abortion prohibition and eugenic steriliza­tion laws illustrates the argument that state policies to control fertility are policies directed at women’s sexual autonomy and reproductive free­dom as well as at control of population quantity and "quality." These policies take different forms for women of different classes, yet the denial that any women […]