Kitchen Table Politics. Stacie Taranto
ascendant in the sixties. When Fitton and others could pick up a newspaper or watch TV, they saw these movements that mostly bypassed their sleepy suburban hamlets. They folded abortion into this framework—just not as a woman’s right. Much like the parish priests who introduced many women to the abortion debates in Albany, they spoke about fetuses as if they were babies outside the womb. As the right-to-life moniker underscores, they wanted civil (legal) rights for these unborn “babies.” The women wanted to protect their right to live when the babies’ own mothers and other activists and politicians, including feminists, would not.5
Pushing the state to help those in need was not a foreign concept for women raised in heavily Democratic and Catholic milieus. The Democratic Party and Catholic Church had long fought for the poor and marginalized, just as the women would later push lawmakers to protect what they perceived as another vulnerable subset of the population. If financial concerns were the cause of not wanting to carry a pregnancy to term, the women’s New Deal roots made them amenable to the state intervening on behalf of struggling families—not unlike what they had witnessed as children during the Depression.
Yet, full-time motherhood was far more central to their developing political identities. Unlike Democratic and Catholic leaders, the women spoke very little about antipoverty programs that might lower abortion rates by making it easier to raise children. Poverty was hardly visible in their homogeneous, mostly white, middle-class suburbs where single-family home ownership prevailed. Instead, they filtered everything through the prism of middle-class motherhood. They counseled adoption, if necessary, and were appalled by women refusing to use their bodies to nurture these young lives in utero. They were equally incensed by the political, feminist-backed establishment that provided cover for these women by legalizing abortion.6
Like other women in the past, they tried to establish authority in the foreign arena of electoral politics by positioning themselves as concerned mothers, an area in which they were experts. Advocates of legal abortion supposedly had the ear of state legislators and Governor Rockefeller. Opponents saw themselves as outsiders who shrewdly used the resources at their disposal to take on powerful feminist-backed insiders.7 Prodded by a deep Catholic faith and a predisposition to aid those in need, they were mothers out to save unborn “babies” from being murdered. In doing so, they practiced an updated maternalist politics (or “housewife populism,” as it has been called) in the seventies.8 Fitton and her contemporaries were not necessarily aware of those who had come before them, but it is unsurprising that they embraced a similar maternalist and populist approach. Their identities were grounded in full-time motherhood.9
The women’s heartfelt belief that fetuses were babies was seemingly confirmed by Life magazine’s exposé on gestational development in April 1965. Despite having little time to read or absorb news coverage in the sixties, many women still spoke about that issue of Life decades later. They vividly recalled its front page, which featured a photograph of a human fetus allegedly photographed in utero at fifteen weeks gestation (a little over three months pregnant). The fetus, with its hands clutched to its chest and legs almost crossed at its ankles, looked like a peaceful baby napping in a crib—a familiar sight for these mothers. The issue featured two articles (with graphics supposedly taken in utero) that encouraged readers to compare what happens in the womb to everyday life. In the final months of pregnancy, the word “baby” was used in place of “fetus,” even when it was still too early for it to survive outside the womb. The women felt validated by these scientific articles (although it later came to light that some images were taken outside the womb, not inside as claimed). Having spent years of their lives pregnant and feeling fetal movements, they were sure that legal abortion sanctioned the killing of unborn babies. It was a cause worth (temporarily) leaving their homes and children to pursue.10
Proponents of legal abortion in New York—led by female state legislators and a variety of organized women’s groups—were equally passionate and concerned about civil rights. Some of these women (and men) were self-consciously feminist; others were not. They were united by a strong conviction that abortion should be legal because deciding whether to carry a pregnancy to term and potentially become a mother was every woman’s right. In other words, the rights in question ought not to be of fetuses whose viability was dependent upon women’s bodies to nurture them (especially in this era of very primitive neonatology). Questions about whether a fetus was alive, or a baby, or how much it approximated behavior outside the womb were not paramount. Whether a woman wanted to continue a pregnancy was at stake. Abortion was a core right, a choice every woman should be able to make for whatever reason in consultation with whomever she saw fit. Proponents fought for a woman’s right to live on her own terms, with access to a safe, legal abortion that would shield her from criminal charges and a possibly life-threatening illegal procedure.11
By the early seventies, the battle lines were drawn, featuring two sides talking past each other, each ready to defend the rights they sought in the political arena. Proponents of legal abortion had the upper hand at the beginning, prompting state legislators to pass a reform law in 1970. Opponents of legal abortion were very thinly, if at all, organized in those years as many future leaders tended to their homes and children. Following the abortion debates in the news, sometimes at the behest of church leaders, and asking a question at a candidates’ night did not yet constitute a political movement. Once abortion was legalized, however, women like Margie Fitton arose. They pressured state lawmakers to overturn legal abortion in 1972, although Governor Rockefeller preserved the reform law with a veto.12
The abortion debates in New York in the late sixties and early seventies changed the nature of politics in the state. Similar developments occurred elsewhere, but New York offers early and abundant evidence of (mostly middle- and upper-middle-class white) women advocating for and against legal abortion. Despite assistance from large institutions like the Catholic Church, both sides formed grassroots coalitions across the state. (Thirty-six percent of New Yorkers identified as Catholic by the seventies, the largest such group in the state, which put the church on the forefront of local religious opposition.) Together, they unwittingly worked with one another to make “the personal political,” as radical women’s liberationists had hoped to do. Each side pursued traditional tactics such as lobbying and running for higher office, with Fitton and her allies infusing their activism with gendered political claims about home, motherhood, and family. Suburban women soon turned the elements of their everyday lives—above all, the expansive, statewide web of post-Vatican II Catholic organizations—into an effective anti-abortion network. Events in New York foreshadowed the political shifts and party realignment that took place on the national level after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, when Catholic voters like Margie Fitton began leaving the Democratic Party to vote for conservative Republicans because of issues like abortion.13
Legal Abortion: A Woman’s Right
Republican assemblywoman Constance Cook, who became Albany’s most vocal advocate for legal abortion, maintained that the reform bill only passed in 1970 because of its strong support from women. Cook had spent more than two years building a legislative coalition composed of fellow “Rockefeller Republicans” across the state and Democrats outside heavily Catholic districts in the New York City area. But the real heroes, she said, were women outside the legislature. As someone whose own feminist consciousness was raised after joining the National Organization for Women, Cook was proud she taught Betty Friedan and other NOW members how to lobby state legislators. Women also joined from good government and social welfare groups. Whether they identified as feminists or not, these different subsets united around a core tenet of the modern women’s liberation movement: that access to legal abortion was a woman’s basic right.14
Women previously had been on the periphery of these debates. Abortion had been illegal across the country since men like the crusading Anthony Comstock had made it so in the late nineteenth century. By the early sixties in New York and elsewhere, reformers—most of them men from the legal, medical, and certain progressive religious communities—were lobbying for liberalization. Many did so to protect large numbers of women from resorting to sometimes deadly illegal abortions. Wealthier women were able to fly abroad for safe legal abortions or use personal connections to persuade hospital committees to perform them for therapeutic reasons (for