“Abortion is Not the Only Issue”

Amidst the inevitable onslaught of letters to the editor and blog posts bemoaning the millions aborted, I would like to try, on the thirty-sixth anniversary of the supreme court decision of Roe v. Wade, to create a space for recognizing the millions of women before 1973 who had no legal control over their reproduction. Seeking to complicate this space, we might recognize the current restrictions on abortion, access to birth control, and comprehensive education, the powerful triad that determines whether so many women will become pregnant.

A common complaint from my students in the class I teach at Ohio State is that the texts we read on women’s rights and experiences are outdated. Informed by images of women in suits on Wall Street, powerful images of female consumers as icons of high culture, and the compulsive representations of women in the media (no matter how, or by whom, the women are characterized), some students find that feminism is useless. Oddly, feminism’s relevance is confined to only a few questions: in a relationship, who makes the living and who cares for the home, are women still turned away when they want to be lawyers and doctors, and aren’t women sexually free now?

In the 1910s, Margaret Sanger was arrested for distributing “obscene” materials on birth control. Over forty years later, before 1965, married couples could not legally obtain information on contraceptives or contraceptive devices. And another forty years later, an American President enacted a rule that allows doctors and pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control if women having sex hurts their feelings. Progress is often seen as moving straight ahead, with only subtle regressions and set-backs that are later characterized as huge mistakes made by a people or their government. So goes the narrative of seeing so clearly years later; so why is it still so hard for women to make meaningful progress?

Not that there have not been tremendous advances. Birth control is legal. After thirty-six years, abortion is still legal, though with tightening restrictions. Rape of all kinds is seen as an outrage, but with many exceptions. But I would argue that the regressions have been substantial to the point of solidifying values that do damage and make it increasingly difficult for women to do basic things, like take a daily pill that ensures that she has control over the rest of her life.

This is where the pro-choice conversation begins today. It is not just the choice to end a pregnancy, but the choice to prevent it. Not just the choice to have a baby, but the choice to have one with your same-sex partner. Not just the choice not to have sex, but the choice to have sex with partners of your choice. This concept of choice seems to demand an awful lot; but it has been awfully long coming.