100 Years of Polarisation: from Plainclothes Police Officers to the Overturning of Roe v Wade
On the 24th of June, 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade (1973), a pivotal case which gave women the right to abortion up to 24 weeks. The decision protected abortion under the right to privacy and was seen as a major success for the feminist movement of the 1960s. Now, individual states are able to regulate abortion however they please.
Whilst the overturning of the case may seem like a dramatic shift in public opinion regarding abortion, it highlights the consistency of polarisation in America over the issue. This event is one in a series of legislative issues in the debate, and was a result of various factors, including arguments that the case was unconstitutional, Christian protest movements and the make-up of the Supreme Court. Throughout the debate in the US, there is a remarkable consistency to be found in the reasoning of each side, which has been maintained despite the shifts America was experiencing in the twentieth century.
Moreover, the issue of state policing of the body is not new. Between 1913 and 1926, the NYPD used women to police abortions, disguised as plainclothes police officers. Famously, Isabella Goodwin posed as a midwife to catch people offering abortion services and the women seeking their help. Like today, the abortion debate was not concretely split along a gendered line; the success of those undercover police women relied on their undermining the bodily autonomy of other women seeking abortions. The undercover abortion investigations led to few convictions, but midwives were socially ostracised when their names were published in papers as punishment.
At the time, abortion was largely advocated for by middle class progressives of the early twentieth century who raised questions about a woman’s control over her own body. This idea escalated throughout the twentieth century and became a principal rhetoric of feminism in the 1970s. In June 2022, we were reminded of its continuing prevalence. Bodily autonomy has been set against the traditional nuclear family, and has remained a point of tension between anti-abortionists and members of the abortion rights movement.
This fracture in public opinion is one that has been developing since the early twentieth century. The first birth control clinic in America was opened in 1916, but it was not until 1965 that Griswold v Connecticut invalidated local laws which prohibited the use of contraception by married couples. The fifty year gap between these two events highlights the continuing social stigma surrounding the topic of abortion and contraception. Though Griswold was a success for the feminist movement of the 1960s, fundamentalist Christian communities contested the morality of such actions. Though contraception was perhaps the lesser of two evils, it by no means quietened the voices on either side of the debate. Anti-abortionists, who had previously taken part in random acts of violence in protest, now began to form organised oppositional groups. In 1967, the Right to Life League was established by the American Catholic Bishops, and by the early 1970s, other fundamentalist media organisations had begun to intensify their public pushback against abortion rights. For example, in 1971, the founder of Sword of the Lord Newspaper, John R. Rice, wrote that the push to legalise abortion represented the corruption of America’s morals and a threat to the ideal of the nuclear family.
With the passing of Roe v Wade in 1973 came a wave of celebration from feminists across the country. Our Bodies, Ourselves, originally published in 1970, argued that Roe was a valuable tool to help expand the right to privacy to women. It shifted a woman’s position within the legal sphere, from being considered under the umbrella of men to being seen as individuals.
Supporters of abortion rights expanded on Betty Friedan’s idea expressed in The Feminine Mystique (1963), in which she detailed the American housewives’ feeling of emptiness as a result of being restricted to the role of mother, wife and homemaker. For this group, the introduction of contraception and Roe were huge steps forward for the pro-choice movement. However, they also deepened the divide with those who supported the ideal of the nuclear family, for whom both developments were seen to be contributing to the moral decay of society. As feminists celebrated, many states quickly moved to restrict the effects of Roe. For example the 1976 Hyde Amendment, passed by the House of Representatives, prohibited the use of Medicaid to fund abortion.
This continuing polarisation can be seen today, with the strictest 13 states having banned abortion altogether, whilst 19 states have kept the 24-week allowance period. However, according to a Gallup Poll, between 1975 and 2020, the percentage of Americans who believed abortion should be outlawed has remained between 13 and 23%.
The overturning of Roe v Wade in June 2022 has propelled the debate, once again, to mainstream media. However, the reversal of the decision is not an indicator of a retreat into 1950s family ideals, but rather a continuation of the long-lasting debate. In short, the ideas of the nuclear family and precedence of sanctity of life over bodily autonomy never went away. The overruling of Roe v Wade does not mark a change in the debate, but rather a change in who has the power to temporarily lead it.