At 88, Gloria Steinem has long been the nation’s most visible feminist and advocate for women’s rights. But at 22, she was a frightened American in London getting an illegal abortion of a pregnancy so unwanted, she actually tried to throw herself down the stairs to end it.
Her response to the Supreme Court’s decision overruling Roe v. Wade is succinct: “Obviously,” she wrote in an email message, “without the right of women and men to make decisions about our own bodies, there is no democracy.”
Steinem’s blunt remark cuts to the heart of the despair some opponents are feeling about Friday’s historic rollback of the 1973 case legalizing abortion. If a right so central to the overall fight for women’s equality can be revoked, they ask, what does it mean for the progress women have made in public life in the intervening 50 years?
“One of the things that I keep hearing from women is, ‘My daughter’s going to have fewer rights than I did. And how can that be?’” says Debbie Walsh, of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “If this goes, what else can go? It makes everything feel precarious.”
Reproductive freedom was not the only demand of second-wave feminism, as the women’s movement of the ’60s and ’70s is known, but it was surely one of the most galvanizing issues, along with workplace equality.
The women who fought for those rights recall an astonishing decade of progress from about 1963 to 1973 including the right to equal pay, the right to use birth control, and Title IX in 1972 which bans discrimination in education. Capping it off was Roe v. Wade a year later, granting a constitutional right to abortion.
Many of the women who identified as feminists at the time had an illegal abortion or knew someone who did. Steinem, in fact, credits a “speak-out” meeting she attended on abortion in her 30s as the moment she pivoted from journalism to activism — and finally felt enabled to speak about her own secret abortion.
“Abortion is so tied to the women’s movement in this country,” says Carole Joffe, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco medical school who studies and teaches the history of abortion. “Along with improved birth control, what legal abortion meant was that women who were heterosexually active could still take part in public life. It enabled the huge change we’ve seen in women’s status over the last 50 years.” Joffe says many women, like her, now feel that the right to contraception could be at risk — something she calls “unthinkable.”
One of them is Heather Booth. When she was 20 and a student in Chicago, a male friend asked if she could help his sister obtain an abortion. It was 1965, and through contacts in the civil rights movement, she found a way to connect the young woman, nearly suicidal at the prospect of being pregnant, to a doctor willing to help. She thought it would be a one-off, but Booth ended up co-founding the Jane Collective, an underground group of women who provided safe abortions to those in need. In all, the group performed some 11,000 abortions over about seven years — a story recounted in the new documentary “The Janes.”
Booth, now 76, sees the Roe v. Wade upheaval as a chilling challenge to the triumphs of the women’s movement.
“I think we are on a knife’s edge,” she says. “On the one hand, there’s been 50 years of a change in women’s condition in this society,” she adds, recalling that when she was growing up, women could only respond to employment ads in the “women’s section,” to list just one example.
“So there’s been an advance toward greater equality, but … if you ask about where we stand, I think we are on a knife’s edge in a contest really between democracy and freedom, and tyranny, a dismantling of freedoms that have been long fought for.”
Of course, not every woman feels that abortion is a right worth preserving.
Linda Sloan, who has volunteered the last five years, along with her husband, for the anti-abortion organization A Moment of Hope in Columbia, South Carolina, says she values women’s rights.
“I strongly believe and support women being treated as equals to men … (in) job opportunities, salary, respect, and many other areas,” she says. She says she has tried to instill those values in her two daughters and two sons, and upholds them with her work at two women’s shelters, trying to empower women to make the right choices.
But when it comes to Roe v. Wade, she says, “I believe that the rights of the child in the mother’s womb are equally important. To quote Psalm 139, I believe that God ‘formed my inner parts’ and ‘knitted me together in my mother’s womb.’”
Elizabeth Kilmartin, like Sloan, volunteers at A Moment of Hope and is deeply pleased by the court’s decision.
In her younger years she considered herself a feminist and studied women’s history in college. Then, over the years she came to deeply oppose abortion, and no longer considers herself a feminist because she believes the word has been co-opted by those on the left. “No women’s rights have been harmed in the decision to stop killing babies in the womb,” Kilmartin says. “We have all kinds of women in power. Women aren’t being oppressed in the workplace anymore. We have a woman vice president … It’s just ridiculous to think that we’re so oppressed.”
Cheryl Lambert falls squarely in the opposing camp. The former Wall Street executive, now 65, immediately thought back to the gains she made earlier in her banking career, becoming the first woman to be named an officer at the institution she worked for. She calls the court decision “a sucker punch.”
“My thought was, what era are we living in?” Lambert says. “We are moving backwards. I’m just furious on behalf of our children and our grandchildren.”
Lambert herself needed an abortion as a young mother when the fetus was found to carry a genetic disease. “I thought it would get easier, not harder, to have an abortion in this country,” she says.
Now, she and many other women fear a return to dangerous, illegal abortions of the past — and a disproportionate impact on women without the means to travel to abortion-friendly states. Still, many are trying to see a positive side: that as bleak as the moment may seem, change could come via new energy at the ballot box.
“We’re in it for the long haul,” says Carol Tracy, of the Women’s Law Project in Philadelphia.
Steinem, too, issued a note of resolve.
“Women have always taken power over our own bodies, and we will keep right on,” she wrote in her email message. “An unjust court can’t stop abortion, but it guarantees civil disobedience and disrespect for the court.”
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AP Reporter Maryclaire Dale contributed to this report.
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For AP’s full coverage of the Supreme Court ruling on abortion, go to https://apnews.com/hub/abortion.
Justices’ past abortion views, in their own words and votes
WASHINGTON (AP) — More than a month ago, a stunning leak of a draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito indicated that the Supreme Court was prepared to take the momentous step of overruling the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade from 1973 and stripping away women’s constitutional protections for abortion.
And that’s just what the court’s conservative majority ended up doing Friday in a ruling likely to lead to abortion bans in roughly half the states.
When the court heard arguments in the abortion case from Mississippi in December, it was clear to observers that there was substantial support among the conservatives for overturning Roe and a second decision that had established and reaffirmed a woman’s right to an abortion.
But even before those arguments and Friday’s decision, the justices had much to say in public about abortion over the years — in opinions, votes, Senate confirmation testimony and elsewhere.
The vote was 6-3 to uphold Mississippi’s law banning most abortions after 15 weeks, but Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t join his conservative colleagues in overturning Roe. He wrote that there was no need to overturn the broad precedents to rule in Mississippi’s favor.
Alito, in the final opinion Friday, wrote that Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that reaffirmed the right to abortion, were wrong had and to be overturned. Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — the diminished liberal wing of the court — were in dissent.
A look at some of the justices’ earlier comments through the years:
ROBERTS
Roberts voted to uphold restrictions in two major abortion cases, in the majority in 2007 to uphold a ban on a method of abortion opponents call “partial-birth abortion” and in dissent in 2016 when the court struck down Texas restrictions on abortion clinics in a case called Whole Woman’s Health. But when a virtually identical law from Louisiana came before the court in 2020, Roberts voted against it and wrote the opinion controlling the outcome of the case and striking down the Louisiana law. The chief justice said he continues to believe that the 2016 case “was wrongly decided” but that the question was “whether to adhere to it in deciding the present case.”
At his 2005 confirmation hearing, he said overturning precedent “is a jolt to the legal system,” which depends in part on stability and evenhandedness. Thinking that an earlier case was wrongly decided is not enough, he said. Overturning a case requires looking “at these other factors, like settled expectations, like the legitimacy of the Court, like whether a particular precedent is workable or not, whether a precedent has been eroded by subsequent developments,” Roberts said then.
In the same hearing, Roberts was asked to explain his presence on a legal brief filed by the George H.W. Bush administration that said Roe’s conclusion that there is a right to abortion has “no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution.’’ Roberts responded that the brief reflected the administration’s views.
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JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS
Thomas voted to overturn Roe in 1992, in his first term on the court, when he was a dissenter in Casey. Since then, he repeatedly called for those rulings to be overturned.
In 2000, he wrote in dissent when the court struck down Nebraska’s ban on “partial-birth abortion.” Recounting the court’s decision in Roe, he wrote, “In 1973, this Court struck down an Act of the Texas Legislature that had been in effect since 1857, thereby rendering unconstitutional abortion statutes in dozens of States. As some of my colleagues on the Court, past and present, ably demonstrated, that decision was grievously wrong. Abortion is a unique act, in which a woman’s exercise of control over her own body ends, depending on one’s view, human life or potential human life. Nothing in our Federal Constitution deprives the people of this country of the right to determine whether the consequences of abortion to the fetus and to society outweigh the burden of an unwanted pregnancy on the mother. Although a State may permit abortion, nothing in the Constitution dictates that a State must do so.”
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BREYER
Breyer has been the lead author of two court majorities in defense of abortion rights, in 2000 and 2016. He has never voted to sustain an abortion restriction, but he has acknowledged the controversy over abortion.
Millions of Americans believe “that an abortion is akin to causing the death of an innocent child,” while millions of others “fear that a law that forbids abortion would condemn many American women to lives that lack dignity,” he wrote in the Nebraska case 21 years ago, calling those views “virtually irreconcilable.” Still, Breyer wrote, because the Constitution guarantees “fundamental individual liberty” and has to govern even when there are strong divisions in the country, “this Court, in the course of a generation, has determined and then redetermined that the Constitution offers basic protection to the woman’s right to choose.”
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ALITO
Alito has a long track record of votes and writings opposing abortion rights, as a jurist and, earlier, a government lawyer.
Alito has voted to uphold every abortion law the court has considered since his 2006 confirmation, joining a majority to uphold the federal “partial-birth” abortion law and dissenting in the 2016 and 2020 cases.
As a federal appeals court judge, he voted to uphold a series of Pennsylvania abortion restrictions, including requiring a woman to notify her spouse before obtaining an abortion. The Supreme Court ultimately struck down the notification rule in Casey and reaffirmed the abortion right in 1992 by a 5-4 vote.
Working for the Reagan administration in 1985, Alito wrote in a memo that the government should say publicly in a pending abortion case “that we disagree with Roe v. Wade.” Around the same time, applying for a promotion, Alito noted he was “particularly proud” of his work arguing “that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.”
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SOTOMAYOR
Sotomayor joined the court in 2009 with virtually no record on abortion issues, but has voted repeatedly in favor of abortion rights since then. Last September, when the court allowed Texas’ restrictive abortion law to take effect, Sotomayor accused her colleagues of burying “their heads in the sand.” She was in the majority in the Texas and Louisiana abortion clinic cases.
Sotomayor’s displeasure with the court’s recent Texas ruling was evident at a virtual appearance she made. “I can’t change Texas’ law, but you can,” she said.
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KAGAN
Kagan also has repeatedly voted in favor of abortion rights in more than 11 years as a justice. She is also arguably the most consistent voice on the court arguing for the importance of adhering to precedents and can be expected to try to persuade her colleagues not to jettison constitutional protections for abortion.
Kagan was in the majority when the court struck down the Texas and Louisiana restrictions on abortion clinics. More recently, Kagan called Texas’ new abortion law “patently unconstitutional” and a “clear, and indeed undisputed, conflict with Roe and Casey.”
Kagan had already grappled with the issue of abortion before becoming a justice. While working in the Clinton White House she was the co-author of a memo that urged the president for political reasons to support a late-term abortion ban proposed by Republicans in Congress, so long as it contained an exception for the health of the woman. Ultimately, President George W. Bush signed a similar late-term abortion ban without a health exception. The Supreme Court upheld it.
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JUSTICE NEIL GORSUCH
Gorsuch has perhaps the shortest record on abortion among the nine justices. He was in the majority allowing Texas’ restrictive abortion law to take effect. In dissent in 2020, he would have upheld Louisiana’s abortion clinic restrictions. As an appeals court judge before joining the Supreme Court in 2017, Gorsuch dissented when his colleagues declined to reconsider a ruling that blocked then-Utah Gov. Gary Herbert from cutting off funding for the state branch of Planned Parenthood. But Gorsuch insisted at his Senate confirmation hearing that he was concerned about procedural issues, not the subject matter. “I do not care if the case is about abortion or widgets or anything else,” he said.
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JUSTICE BRETT KAVANAUGH
Kavanaugh’s name was added to President Donald Trump’s shortlist of Supreme Court candidates shortly after Kavanaugh sided with the administration in a 2017 case involving abortion. Trump chose him for the court the following year. As a justice, Kavanaugh dissented from the Louisiana decision and voted to allow the new Texas law to take effect, though he has taken a less absolutist stance than some of his conservative colleagues. In the Louisiana case, for example, Kavanaugh wrote that more information was needed about how the state’s restrictions on clinics would affect doctors who provide abortions and seemed to suggest his vote could change knowing that information.
Kavanaugh’s most extensive writing on abortion came while he was a judge on the federal appeals court in Washington. The Trump administration had appealed a lower court ruling ordering it to allow a pregnant 17-year-old immigrant in its custody to get an abortion. The administration’s policy was to decline to help those minors get abortions while in custody.
Kavanaugh was on a three-judge panel that postponed the abortion, arguing that officials should be given a limited window to transfer the minor out of government custody to the care of a sponsor. She could then obtain an abortion without the government’s assistance. The full appeals court later reversed the decision and the teenager obtained an abortion. Kavanaugh called that decision out-of-step with the “many majority opinions of the Supreme Court that have repeatedly upheld reasonable regulations that do not impose an undue burden on the abortion right recognized by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade.”
Kavanaugh was criticized by some conservatives for not going as far as a colleague, Judge Karen Henderson, who stated unambiguously that an immigrant in the U.S. illegally has no right to an abortion. At his appeals court confirmation hearing, Kavanaugh dodged questions on his own personal beliefs on Roe.
Kavanaugh voted to allow the Texas law to go into effect last September, but during oral arguments in November he appeared to have doubts about its novel structure and whether it would lead to a spate of copycat laws on abortion and other rights protected by the Constitution.
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JUSTICE AMY CONEY BARRETT
Barrett’s one public vote on the Supreme Court concerning abortion was to allow the Texas “fetal heartbeat” law to take effect. She also cast two votes as an appeals court judge to reconsider rulings that blocked Indiana abortion restrictions.
In 2016, shortly before the election that would put Trump in office, she commented about how she thought abortion law might change if Trump had the chance to appoint justices. “I … don’t think the core case — Roe’s core holding that, you know, women have a right to an abortion — I don’t think that would change,” said Barrett, then a Notre Dame law professor. She said limits on what she called “very late-term abortions” and restrictions on abortion clinics would be more likely to be upheld.
Barrett also has a long record of personal opposition to abortion rights,co-authoring a 1998 law review article that said abortion is “always immoral.” At her 2017 hearing to be an appeals court judge, Barrett said in written testimony, “If I am confirmed, my views on this or any other question will have no bearing on the discharge of my duties as a judge.”
Although Barrett allowed the Texas law to take effect, she joined Kavanaugh during oral arguments in raising skeptical questions about its structure, asking about provisions of the law that force providers to fight lawsuits one by one and, she said, don’t allow their constitutional rights to be “fully aired.”