Abortion/Reproductive Rights

ABORTION/REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS. Individual socialists and reformers had promoted reproductive rights, including abortion, throughout US history, although their contributions remain, for the most part, obscure. Although abortion was legal in most states until the 1870s, public discussions rarely occurred. Folk practices managed informally and secretly by women flourished and involved dangerous, often fatal interventions, such as uterine insertions or powerful herbs such as slippery elm bark to induce miscarriages. Toward the end of the nineteenth century various “remedies” were spread surreptitiously through print advertising sponsored by early pharmaceutical companies. The Connecticut-based Carter Medical Company, for example, manufactured pills “safe and always reliable, better than ergot, oxide, tansy or pennyroyal pills.”

Under pressure from a growing medical profession, abortion became generally illegal by 1880 and its provision (except in “therapeutic” situations) a felony in every state by 1900. The criminalization of both abortion and contraception drove the practices and information further underground, discouraging even the most adventurous radical activists. Virtually alone in the field, free love advocates such as anarchist Moses Harmon circulated discreet advice in Lucifer, the Light Bearer.

After the formation of the Socialist Party of America in 1901, several sectors promoted campaigns for reproductive rights in opposition to the legal proscriptions. Margaret Sanger’s promotion of family limitation focused, however, on the dissemination of birth control information rather than abortion, which remained sub rosa as a socialist political issue. Anarchist Emma Goldman, who like Sanger worked as a nurse and midwife and encountered women who suffered injury from self-inflicted abortions, flaunted laws and endured arrest to promote contraception. She understood the risks of poorly-performed abortions, including those possibly provided by her close anarchist associate Dr. Ben Reitman. Nevertheless, she did not take a public stand against the legal restrictions. Exceptions were the few Left women who practiced medicine themselves. Marie Equi, Oregon-based radical activist and physician, practiced among working-class and immigrant women and allegedly performed abortions. Antoinette Konikow, who passed through the Socialist Labor Party, Socialist Party, and Communist Party before affiliating with the Socialist Workers Party, also applied her medical training to family limitation. Keeping her medical records in code to protect her clients and herself, she provided abortions, and wrote, published and distributed birth control information, all illegal at the time. Konikow advocated openness and control by women of their reproductive lives. Still, in the 1930s when Konikow was practicing, police raids and arrests of abortionists increased, and women who received abortions were punished by public exposure.

Edgar Keemer, a Black physician practicing in the 1930s, performed abortions for poor and desperate women. Born in Washington, D.C. in 1913, he struggled against Jim Crow conditions to get his medical degree and eventually established a successful practice serving poor and working-class women in Detroit. Called up to serve in World War II, he refused induction as after being turned down as a Navy officer because of his color. Both the NAACP and the Communist Party urged him to compromise, and he found support from a member of the Socialist Workers Party(SWP) and the ACLU. Keemer joined the SWP in 1943, wrote weekly articles for its newspaper against the segregated army and treatment of returning Black soldiers, opposing Japanese internment, and supporting the anti-colonial struggle in Africa. He continued to work three days a week as a doctor, still performing abortions. Although he resigned from the SWP, he still considered himself a “sympathizer with international socialism” and continued to risk his freedom and his medical license by performing abortions, which had become the mainstay of his practice.

After Keemer was arrested for conspiracy to perform abortions in 1956, his patients were threatened with prison unless they testified against him. No doctor and only one white female patient did. Nevertheless, Keemer was convicted and sentenced to up to five years in prison; his medical license was revoked. After fourteen months in prison, where he taught reading, worked as a librarian, and assisted in group therapy for drug addicts, he was paroled but barred from working in medicine. In the 1960s, he petitioned successfully to have his medical license restored. active in the National Association to Repeal Abortion Laws (NARAL) founded in 1969.

Since 1955, Planned Parenthood, under the medical direction of Mary Calderone, advocated legal reform, focusing exclusively on therapeutic abortion until 1969. In that year, Planned Parenthood joined the National Association to Repeal Abortion Laws (NARAL). NARAL, led at the time by physicians and activists including Edgar Keemer and Betty Friedan, called for the repeal of all anti-abortion laws. In New York, the newly-formed radical feminist Redstockings chose abortion as its first campaign and began to work toward the repeal of all state laws. Several members testified at legislative hearings in February, arguing to the point of shutting down the hearings. “We wanted to expose how the system operates in a male-supremacist way,” socialist feminist Ellen Willis explained. In the aftermath, in March 1969, the Redstockings collective staged their own “hearings” in the form of a speak-out featuring twelve women describing their personal experiences with abortion. A plan to hang from the Statue of Liberty a banner inscribed “Liberty for Women: Repeal All Abortion Laws” never came to fruition.

Meanwhile, other groups of activist women created their own networks to compete with the existing medical system, providing abortions, support, and education to tens of thousands of women. Pat McGinnis, one of the founders of the Society for Humane Abortion (SHA) in California in 1963, pledged to make information on abortion readily available to working-class women and women of color. The most dramatic development was the formation in 1969 of the Jane Collective, an affiliate of the socialist feminist Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. Civil rights, ant-war activist, Students for a Democratic Society member Heather Booth had helped a woman end an unwanted pregnancy by putting her in touch with a fellow civil-rights doctor. Others in her community at the University of Chicago heard about the abortion and similarly approached her for a referral. Booth organized a clandestine service, evaluating doctors and ensuring follow-ups, and began advertising the newly-named Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation in various political newspapers and advising women to “Call Jane.” Soon, members of the collective learned to perform surgical abortions themselves, ultimately performing abortions for an estimated 11,000 women, mostly working class and women of color, before they disbanded in 1973, following the passage of Roe v. Wade that struck down all criminal abortion laws.

Taking advantage of this major change in federal law, and honoring a Left heritage, the Emma Goldman Clinic organized in Iowa City, Iowa to provide reproductive health care, including abortion services. The clinic survived a firebombing in 1978 with only minor damage, while clients required escorts to get past anti-abortion demonstrators well into the twenty-first century.
Groups of women on the Left also mobilized against forced sterilization, a procedure that disproportionately affect poor women, women of color, and women with disabilities. Evelyn Reed, prominent in the Socialist Workers Party, had helped found the Women’s National Abortion Action Coalition in 1971, a network that opposed forced sterilization.

The United States had been among the earlies adopters of government sponsored programs beginning in the early twentieth century and implemented mainly for eugenic goals. More than 65,000 people were sterilized, most residents of mental or criminal institutions. Public opinion slowed the practice after World War II, when news of Nazi atrocities circulated in the United States. Nevertheless, well into the 1970s, significant numbers of women of color, including Native Americans, were sterilized without their consent, and many states still had sterilization laws in place. A 1965 survey revealed that in Puerto Rico, one-third of mothers aged 20-49 had been sterilized.

By the mid-1970s, Puerto Rican pediatrician Dr. Helen Rodriquez-Trias (1929-2001) organized to prevent this abuse. She helped form the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse in 1974 and the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse in 1977. She successfully established links among other advocates, including New York socialist feminists and Puerto Rican organizers, who were instrumental in securing state and federal regulations of sterilization in 1979.

Although Roe v. Wade and the regulation of sterilization practices had opened, by the late 1970s, a path toward greater reproductive rights, the forces of opposition chipped away at these gains. Individual states limited access to abortion, bowing to right-wing harassment, assaults, arson, bombings, and even murders. Fourteen states kept abortion bans on the books that could be enforced if Roe v. Wade were reversed. A counter-movement led by poor women, women of color, as well as seasoned and novice radical activists took shape, shifting the focus of reproductive rights from “choice” to the framework of reproductive justice, the insistence that issues of reproductive rights cannot be isolated from other social justice issues –economic, environmental, immigration, racial discrimination, and disability.

At the helm were the Third World Women’s Alliance (1968-1980); Boston’s Combahee River Collective; the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, which produce Our Bodies, Our Selves (1969-2011); and the explicitly radical, anti-capitalist Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU, 1969-76). Organizations such as the Black Woman’s Health Project (later “Initiative) formed in 1984. In 1978, feminist and socialist activists united more than fifty organizations in the Reproductive Rights National Network(R2N2). Its radical leadership demanded, in addition to reproductive rights, a broad opposition to racism and oppression and often promoted direct action. In 1981, six of its members were arrested at a Senate hearing on limiting abortion rights. R2N2 disbanded in 1984, after women of color challenged its leadership. By the mid-1990s, women of color had launched their own network, including many younger women. In 1997, they formed SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Coalition. Southern-based, volunteer-led, SisterSong played a significant, long-lasting and unifying role in the coalition of national Black women-led organizations. In 2015, the organization issues a statement of solidarity with Black Lives Matter, whose co-founder, Aliza Garza, began her political work in the reproductive justice movement.

Reproductive justice became the major rallying slogan of twenty-first century Left activists, inspired by the call of Black women to broaden the campaign beyond pro-choice to address “intersectional” issues such as poverty and health in general. Founded in 1993, the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF) organized to assist women in securing free or affordable abortions, made scarce since the implementation of the 1980 Hyde Amendment that prohibited the use of federal monies for abortions, including through Medicaid. Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) were among the first Left organizations that actively promoted reproductive justice, with local chapters raising money for NNAF and campaigning for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment. After the Republican 2010 capture of many state houses and legislatures, DSA organized against the many bills introduced to limit abortion rights and the shut-down of services such as Planned Parenthood.

The campaign intensified after President Donald J. Trump purposefully appointed to the US Supreme Court three new members who, he believed, would ultimately overturn Roe v. Wade and make abortion again illegal. Many Left activists protested, echoing independent socialist Senator Bernie Sanders who claimed abortion a Constitution right. Sanders and other democratic socialists promoted Medicare for All as a major step in securing reproductive justice by rolling back the Hyde Amendment and fully funding abortion and other reproductive healthcare services.

Brown, Jenny. Without Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now. New York: Verso, 2019.

Fried, Marlene Gerber. “Reproductive Rights Activism in the Post-Roe Era.” American Journal of Public Health, January 2019; p 10-14. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3518354/

Kaplan, Laura. The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminists Abortion Service. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Reagan, Leslie J. When Abortion was a Crime: Women, Medicine and the Law in the United States 1867-1973. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997.

Silliman, Jael, Marlene Fried, and Loretta Ross. Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice. 2d ed. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

Solinger Rickie, ed. Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950-2000. Berkeley, CA, University of California Press 1998.

Solinger, Rickie. Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America. Revised Edition. New York: University Press, 2019