In 1973 I attended the classroom baby shower of a pregnant classmate who had to drop out of school at 15. When she showed up to our fiftieth high school reunion, her low-income job in the New York City court system confirmed all our fears about teenage pregnancy: You lose your opportunities. Of course, many young single mothers make their dreams come true, and lots of us who avoided motherhood were obstructed in our goals. But when the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973, during my sophomore year, it heralded new dreams for the first generation of girls to benefit from the revolutionary wins of American feminism: birth control, abortion, and later the chance to live as a lesbian without giving up all the keys to the kingdom.
By 1977, the dream came to a crashing halt. The Hyde Amendment deprived women of federal funding for abortion, effectively making abortion inaccessible to those on Medicaid, those in the military, federal employees, and those living on reservations. The Supreme Court claimed that we could have “rights” without the ability to access them. And so free abortion on demand only really existed in the United States for the four years between Roe and Hyde.
At age 22, in 1980, I joined the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA), part of the fledgling reproductive rights movement, which aimed for broad access to reproductive care. Our bottom line was to assert women’s control over their own bodies, including their right to abortion, and to defy sterilization pushed on poor women around the world. Our multi-issue approach to women’s freedom stood in stark contrast to the single-issue focus on legal abortion offered by the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), founded in 1969, or by NOW Abortion Rights Committee.
Being in CARASA was its own education. I was among the younger women there, and my colleagues were mostly older lefties, some in sectarian parties, some in the newly articulated “socialist feminist” category, some young academics who had been on the periphery of Students for a Democratic Society and the Weathermen. And most of them were straight. While I was deeply into the sexy, complex, and culturally explosive lesbian underground of New York, these straight women, though revolutionary, had a serious problem. Whereas I could find sex and love in my political movements, which ate up many nights and weekends, they often could not. If you can’t find love and sex in your movement, how long can it last?
Meanwhile, right-wing politics was changing too. The traditionally monied Republican Party merged with newly politicized evangelical Christians, successfully electing Ronald Reagan in 1980 to slash taxes. The party owed the Christians a big debt, and Reagan, who had been “pro-choice” when he was governor of California, did a 180 and clasped hands with the people wearing tiny fetus lapel pins. As a young reporter for the feminist and gay press, I took the “New Right” as my beat and attended anti-abortion events wearing a dress and a cross around my neck, while also doing clinic defense, accompanying women into abortion clinics past the jeers of protesters: “That child could grow up to be a priest!” The workshops I attended as a stealth reporter were hard to take seriously. At a panel on the dangers of Our Bodies, Ourselves, the best-selling pamphlet created by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the speaker warned us: “They tell you people have sex like animals, and then they tell you to have sex with animals.” She was a shrill, extremely Caucasian woman with teased hair and a Southern accent. The people trying to destroy my future were previously unfamiliar to me, a New York native. They seemed out of it, hysterical, and uptight. They seemed ridiculous, and their politics were kitsch.
As abortion rights declined throughout the Reagan years, new outrages like spousal consent, parental consent, and mandatory displays of fetal heartbeats became enshrined in conservative parts of the country, and violence against abortion clinics included firebombing and the murder of practitioners. The grassroots movements for abortion rights morphed into expensive legal campaigns, professional lobbyists, candidate PACs, and paid clinic staff.
As we struggled to hold back the rising right, I came to the bitter conclusion that as long as men did not mobilize for abortion rights, the grassroots movement would not last. The New Right had everyone on the march against our rights, and we were operating at half capacity. I blamed men.
Well, Amy Littlefield’s new book, Killers of Roe: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights, sobered me up with a sharp slap of reality. Littlefield, a longtime journalist covering abortion and trans rights, was propelled by Dobbs to ask herself anew why people opposed abortion, and how those people won. Littlefield’s literary device is to assume the persona of a historical detective, in the mold of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, searching for the perpetrator responsible for the death of abortion rights. Ultimately the answer is cumulative. She finds a combination of sincere religious actors on both sides, sleazy politicians from both parties, and a series of bad decisions by abortion advocates, rooted in emerging marketing and branding industries. And she finds her evidence not just in the archives, but by speaking to, arguing with, and listening to principal players, many in their final years of life.
Committed to seeing anti-abortion advocates as fully human, Littlefield seeks out as many interviewees as she can, navigating the human frailty that is found whenever any individual is taken seriously. She talks to Robert Bauman, the closeted gay Republican who thought up the original Hyde Amendment denying abortion to poor women, and who then got exposed for hiring a 16-year-old boy for sex. On the other side, she grapples with pro-choice Republican Robert Packwood, who voted for abortion rights and seems to have sexually harassed every woman he ever met. While the activists are religious, most of the politicians turn out to be opportunists in some form, like 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who supported an abortion ban but secretly got one for his teenaged daughter while his wife worked for Planned Parenthood. Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden went through their anti-abortion phases but bounced back, being both Catholic and opportunistic. Jesse Jackson opposed abortion as eugenics and then switched when he ran for president.
Pro-lifers seemed ridiculous, and their politics were kitsch.
The people Littlefield holds most responsible for destroying basic autonomy for women in America are the tenacious and well-funded leaders of the anti-abortion movement and the increasingly sophisticated strategies they employed over five decades. For years she had assumed that religious abortion opponents hated women and believed in some inherent right to control and punish us. Through a series of meetings with elderly Catholic leaders of the early anti-abortion movement, like Joe Manning and Paul Haring, she came to better understand their psychology. Statistically, she tells us, most people believe what their parents believe, especially when those assumptions are religious. Religion drives these men — and the women who support them — to fight abortion in order to elevate themselves spiritually. In 2022, the Supreme Court’s Catholic majority overturned Roe.
But she also shows that religious activism wasn’t unidirectional. The church’s lines on reproductive rights were challenged — a 1960s effort to modernize the Catholic Church got traction but foundered when church officials feared losing control of their flock. Pope Paul VI ultimately doubled down on “his opposition to birth control and abortion, emphasizing that every time a married couple had sex, they needed to remain ‘open to the transmission of life.’” Littlefield also writes about Catholics for Choice, founded in 1973, which has pointed out that “63% of US Catholics believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.” Frances Kissling, the organization’s former director, spent her life making visible the resistance that so many Catholic women had privately practiced.
Littlefield visits Kissling to explore her unusual career, and is hard on her, with cause. The activist comes under examination for a famous episode during the early struggle against Hyde. Forty years ago, Kissling called the police on the midwife responsible for the death of Rosie Jimenez. Jimenez was a working-class woman who couldn’t afford a legal abortion without sacrificing her money for college, and therefore put herself in the hands of an unlicensed practitioner, another Brown working-class woman. Jimenez became activists’ main example of the lethality of denying Medicaid funding for abortion, and Kissling took down the only culprit truly vulnerable to attack — the midwife. Littlefield takes this as a sign of early movement fractures between middle-class white women and poorer women of color. She and Kissling spend a lot of time debating movement strategy, with Kissling, who is all too familiar with American religiosity and conservatism, playing the pragmatist. Kissling and Littlefield argue over the mainstream abortion movement’s focus on the law, rather than on reinstating Medicaid for poor and Latinx women like Jimenez. This argument strikes me as its own kind of failure, for assuming that our problem was not having one perfect analysis and one united strategy. I think history shows us that, because people are different, it’s not effective to force everyone to toe a single political line. The key is for each part of a movement to build campaigns that work toward winnable demands. It was the abandonment of grassroots action itself, in any direction, that contributed to our losses.
Kissling introduces Littlefield to Maria Antonieta Alcalde Castro, and here we get a glimpse of the road not taken by the reproductive rights movement in the U.S. Alcalde Castro was executive director of Ipas Latin America and the Caribbean, a regional reproductive justice nonprofit when this book was written (she has since been appointed Director General of the International Planned Parenthood Federation). Alcalde Castro suggests that the decentralized organizing taking place in Mexico, ranging from illegal pill distribution to street protest, has created a progressive trajectory toward abortion rights, just as the U.S. ship is sinking. In 2023, Mexico decriminalized abortion. Alcalde Castro’s comments are critical of nonprofits like Planned Parenthood and NARAL that have huge budgets, teams of marketers and branders, and large donor bases. Why did the vibrant early reproductive rights movement cede ground to these bland corporate nonprofits? As the leader of a Catholic grassroots pro-choice movement, Kissling tells the author that “there were decisions that needed to be made about what were we going to focus on, and the decision was, we were going to focus on the risk of a Constitutional amendment banning abortion. We were not going to focus on the Hyde Amendment. And the principal person responsible for that messaging decision was Roger Craver.”
Littlefield sits down with some paid strategists of the single-issue abortion rights movement and takes them to task for a range of strategic failures. Most disturbing is her interview with Craver, a fundraising consultant hired by NARAL, perhaps the quintessential single-issue abortion organization. Using the same direct-mail campaign strategy inaugurated by the Reagan coalition, Craver depended on the short, scary subject line rather than the nuanced argument. Craver had short-term success in 1977, raising money for NARAL off the loss of Medicaid funding for abortion, but the outrage didn’t last long. Obviously, the NARAL donor pool was not made up of the same people who had lost their rights to Hyde.
Littlefield examines that contradiction through detailed conversations with the marketers, corporate heads, and board members who curtailed political breadth as a way to facilitate fundraising, focusing strictly on the single issue of legalized abortion instead of on questions of access and quality of care. This moment shows a phenomenon I’ve observed across many political struggles: When grassroots movements win basic rights and then can’t protect them from givebacks, key activists become salaried and grassroots demands become policy that has to be administered — and all this infrastructure requires funding. The sources of this money — corporations, foundations, and the government — require a lot of energy to maintain, and encourage organizations toward more conservative and repetitive strategies. And, as Littlefield shows, when these organizations tried to appeal to the institutional and well-to-do individual donors who responded to scare tactics like Craver’s, they left behind elements of the abortion battle that mostly affected the poor, and they further marginalized the broader reproductive rights agenda.
PR consultants are dictating the parameters of the possible.
In a disturbing interview, Faye Wattleton, the former president of Planned Parenthood, who came into leadership in 1978 at the age of 34, describes regional pressures to avoid the racial politics of Hyde. “This was a white organization,” Wattleton tells Littlefield, “a good portion of which did not want the organization to be involved with abortion at all.” Though she acknowledges that consultant David Garth advised Planned Parenthood to move its focus from the courts to electoral politics, where more people might have been engaged, the organization was trigger shy, and “a task force created by the board recommended the organization focus on public relations and litigation.”
There is no need for an organization to be driven by its publicity arm, unless that organization is trying not to offend donors. As I was told by Michelangelo Signorile, the onetime chair of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) media committee, that radically democratic organization produced ideas, and “whatever actions came out of the floor — whatever demonstrations, whatever decisions for a protest — we [the media committee] just then took it and said, ‘Okay, how do we work this?’” The opposite has been true for the mainstream abortion rights movement, with PR consultants dictating the parameters of the possible. Littlefield reveals that the relationship between abortion rights funders and organizations became unequal, with branding concerns dominating decision-making.
Today, everywhere, we see wealth determining what cultural institutions, media outlets, corporations, universities, artists, and political parties can do. Whether it is my university signing a morally repugnant agreement with Trump chilling speech on race, trans people, and anti-Zionism, the 92nd Street Y censoring writers who are in solidarity with Palestine, or NYU Langone hospitals restricting trans health care — the U.S. administrative class says what they need to say to get over with the money source.
Toward the end of the book, Littlefield considers the many flawed human beings who talked to her about the death of abortion rights:
By listening, I had learned that my suspects weren’t villains like the ones Miss Marple often encountered. They were human beings. And it was their humanity that gave me hope. Because if they were humans, their ideas could be defeated by other humans. Studying their playbook showed me they hadn’t done anything special. They had worked hard, sometimes harder than our side and often in imitation of it. They were motivated by the sense that they were losing to the devil and by an enduring belief in heaven and the righteousness of their cause that allowed them to persevere, even when victories were limited.
There is one element of the reproductive rights struggle left out of Littlefield’s analysis. Because the book is focused on the killers of Roe, rather than on parts of the reproductive rights movement that Littlefield admires, we don’t really get to reckon with our own failures. For example, the Reproductive Rights National Network, active during the 1970s and absent from this book, had no uniform message, approach, signage, or rhetoric — neatly fitting Alcalde Castro’s vision of decentralization — but that diversity made its work almost illegible to the outside world. We in the multi-issue reproductive rights movement failed for so many reasons: The opposition was too powerful, and a vision of women’s freedom was not integrated into people’s daily lives. But of course the big nonprofits also failed.
I wished here that Littlefield had offered new strategies, had perhaps interviewed people who are driving women needing abortions across state lines, who are shipping mifepristone legally or illegally. And I would have liked to hear from today’s leaders in other movements about where abortion and broad reproductive rights fit into their actions, since abortion now falls below visibility in a world of U.S.-funded genocide, deportations, and war.
In the end, there may not be a smoking gun in the loss of abortion rights in America. Yes, the religious people who built the anti-abortion movement did a good job, and the political opportunists bartered with our bodies. No, the complexities of women’s autonomy were not viable fodder for corporate airwaves. No, men didn’t help. No, feminists couldn’t figure out how to get enough power to overcome structures of exclusion and diminishment — but was that even possible? In the end, the people who wanted to force women to give birth perhaps had a level of hegemonic power that no tactic could override.
As we seek successful strategies in the future, one lesson is for sure — giving up what you know to be true from your own experience to build a smoother relationship with money and politicians is a losing proposition, and it always has been. In the early reproductive rights movement, we knew that restricting ourselves to a single marketable issue did not reflect the complexity of people’s lives. Building successful movements depends not on marketing strategies or courting unaffected donors, but on friendships, communities, and relationships where original thought and fearless action can flourish. Roe may be dead, but the reproductive rights movement is due for a revival.
Sarah Schulman’s most recent books are The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity (Thesis/Penguin Random House) and the novels Maggie Terry and The Cosmopolitans (Feminist Press).
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