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CHAPTER 3

Abortion and Female Political Mobilization

Margie Fitton was one of the women politicized by the abortion debates in New York. Sometime around 1968, as the state legislature was considering legalizing abortion, Fitton decided to attend “candidates’ night” at St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic Church in Rockland County. The event was hosted by Father Ed Nutter, a young priest who arrived at St. Anthony’s the year before and immediately tried to engage parishioners along the lines suggested at Vatican II. The forum was supposed to introduce candidates running for elective office. Fitton had always been interested in politics, dating back to her childhood in upper Manhattan when her mother worked for U.S. representative Vito Marcantonio, a noted labor advocate. She had never been active in politics herself, nor did she have time to be. As a busy homemaker, she mostly went to candidates’ night to get a rare evening out of the house. She did not intend to say a word. Like many women in her generation, Fitton was uncomfortable speaking out. Nobody had encouraged her to go to college or have ambitions beyond the family. The ability to raise children full time in the suburbs was accomplishment enough.¹ As she explained, “for us to do anything public was an alien thing.”²

But Fitton was disturbed by what she had read about the abortion debates in Albany, so when Republican Eugene Levy, a contender for the State Senate, showed up at candidates’ night, she did the unthinkable: she asked him how he felt about abortion. Few people discussed the topic in private, let alone in public. She was upset, however, that the press was not asking enough about it. Fitton and other women who went on to oppose legal abortion in New York State did not pay much attention to politics in these family-centered years. Coverage of the abortion debates in Albany—as they saw it, the killing of innocent babies—was an exception. The topic hit home for these mothers.While Fitton did not believe that legislators would legalize murder, she could not remain silent. Standing up to pose her question, she recalled feeling “so isolated. I felt the tension in the room, and my voice was trembling. Even after I sat down … I felt like a crazy lady from West Nyack [in Rockland County].”³ Levy gave a meandering answer, which was perhaps inevitable in a church that was firmly against legal abortion and ministered to a large swath of potential voters. After entering the State Senate in 1969, he was forced to face the issue. Like many Republicans in the downstate suburbs, in what was then Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s territory, Levy initially voted for legal abortion. He changed course in the mid-seventies in response to mounting pressure from constituents like Fitton.⁴

She and other women stepped out of their comfort zones and organized against abortion after their state legalized it in 1970 because they saw it as a matter of life and death—an understanding shaped by their Catholic faith and the rights revolution spreading across the country. For decades, Catholic leaders had denounced abortion (and artificial forms of birth control) by maintaining that life begins at conception. After Vatican II, this message filtered down to devout Catholics like Fitton (who had ten children) through Sunday sermons and parishioner groups. Several rights-based movements for African Americans and oppressed groups also were 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 example, if the pregnancy allegedly threatened the woman’s mental or physical health). One estimate in the sixties claimed that there were roughly 8,000 legal abortions in the United States each year, versus 800,000 to 1,000,000 illegal ones. Faced with these numbers, sixteen states legalized abortion in some form between 1967 and 1970. Movements in New York began along these lines, with male reformers partnering with liberal Democrats in the state, such as assemblyman Al Blumenthal of Manhattan’s left-leaning Upper West Side.¹⁵

Blumenthal’s unsuccessful attempts to legalize abortion in 1966 and 1967 illustrated that he and fellow Democrats could not guide a bill through the state legislature. Democrats had little representation upstate and were a minority in both the State Assembly and Senate. Their base was downstate, and even there it was split: heavily Jewish and African American districts in the New York City area backed legal abortion; Catholic ones like where Margie Fitton grew up did not. A bill would have to be sponsored by moderate Republicans who controlled the state’s GOP and were in the majority in both houses (as opposed to the minority of conservative Republicans in New York’s GOP, most of whom were based upstate). Moderate Republicans, notably including Governor Rockefeller, embraced the feminist notion that women had a right to legal abortion, linking it to their party’s historical embrace of personal liberty and small government. Efforts to legalize abortion hastened in New York after Constance Cook—a moderate, strategically chosen because she was the only Republican woman in the Assembly—was invited to Betty Friedan’s apartment in 1967 to discuss legislative strategies.

Cook, who represented the Ithaca area upstate, was changed by that meeting; she joined NOW soon after and began to see abortion through a feminist lens.¹⁶ Cook was tired of sitting through male-dominated abortion debates in Albany. When, for example, the Assembly held hearings on one of Blumenthal’s unsuccessful reform bills that narrowly failed in 1968, Cook soured on being in a room full of men dictating “what women’s lives shall be.”¹⁷ As Cook looked into crafting her own bill, she was convinced by fellow NOW members to pursue a repeal measure (i.e., removing abortion from the legal code entirely) instead of reform. Both would legalize abortion, but repeal would decriminalize it in all circumstances, while a reform bill would, as Blumenthal had done, outline various circumstances in which abortion was legal. Feminists argued that reform would open the door for men in power to set those terms and police them as they saw fit. Ever the pragmatic legislator, Cook also felt that women were “never going to get … aroused politically” and lobby their state representatives about reform bills that could “require them to go to a committee of doctors, then to go to a committee of hospital administrators, and then to have consultations with psychiatrists or social workers or priests.”¹⁸

Cook was sustained by grassroots support from women outside the legislature—often from those who might have been opponents’ neighbors in the suburbs of New York City. In 1969, as Cook was trying to get a repeal bill out of committee, Blumenthal brought another reform measure to the floor of the Assembly for a vote. He failed yet again, this time after Martin Ginsberg, a Republican from Long Island, gave a last-minute speech about his fight with polio. Cook and other women were outraged. What should have been a debate about their reproductive rights turned into a well-televised sound bite of Assemblyman Ginsberg claiming that if he could thrive with a debilitating disease, so too should unhealthy fetuses be given a chance to do so rather than being aborted. At that point, nursing professor Sylvia Fields, who lived in Ginsberg’s district, organized 350 of his constituents into what she called the Nassau [County] Committee for Abortion Law Repeal. Dr. Ruth Cusack, a nutritionist who had fought for repeal since she was a doctoral student years before at the University of California at Berkeley, assembled 150 people in neighboring Suffolk County. Both groups included organized feminists and a range of other women, from sympathetic housewives and mothers to professionals like Fields who, as a nurse, had seen the sometimes deadly impact of illegal abortion. The two organizations gathered 2,500 signatures on Long Island to try to move legislators into the repeal camp.¹⁹

A new group, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), also formed in 1969 to push for repeal on a broader scale. Most of NARAL’s leadership came from New York, and they agreed to focus on Cook’s repeal bill, which, if passed, could be replicated in other states. NOW’s Betty Friedan, a New Yorker, spoke at NARAL’s inaugural meeting, remarking that it was “the first … decent conference” on abortion because “women’s voices [were] heard and heard strongly.”²⁰

Radical feminists in New York injected new forms of activism into the debate. Members of radical women’s liberation groups tended to come from the student New Left that was active in the black freedom and anti-Vietnam war movements. In February 1969, radical feminists from two New York City-based organizations, Redstockings and New York Radical Women, interrupted legislative hearings on one of Blumenthal’s reform bills. The women burst into the chamber shouting slogans such as “every woman resents having our bodies controlled by men” and “no more male legislators!”²¹ A month later, Redstockings held its own abortion hearings at the Washington Square Methodist Church in Manhattan. Using the consciousness-raising technique that they relied on to politicize personal grievances and experiences, the only experts allowed to testify were women who spoke about their own, often illegal abortions before a diverse audience of 300 people.²² These tactics were reinforced by the efforts of liberal feminists. Redstockings and others made front-page news, which shaped public discourse and prompted reporters to ask lawmakers about their views on abortion. The answer that many politicians gave was often related to how much attention they had received from liberal feminist groups like NOW that deployed more traditional lobbying tactics such as visiting and writing to legislators.²³

By the late sixties, Assemblywoman Cook and her allies—such as Ruth Cusack and Sylvia Fields, who marshaled support for legal abortion in the same counties on Long Island that later became strongholds for the opposition—were irate. Women, the true experts on pregnancy and motherhood, were being overlooked in the abortion debates. True equality for women had to encompass being able to decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy that would affect their lives (and bodies) well into the future. Controlling reproduction was paramount as feminist groups simultaneously tried to expand opportunities for women outside the home, such as employment gains that might lead to delaying or forsaking childbearing. This thinking was encapsulated in the “right to choose” and “pro-choice” language that proponents popularized nationwide in the early seventies.²⁴

Opponents had little to worry about until 1970, when Cook won an important victory in the State Senate. Cook and her co-sponsor, Senator Franz Leichter, a liberal Democrat from Manhattan, decided to introduce a bill in the State Senate as opposed to the Assembly where she served; its passage seemed more certain there, which could provide momentum in the lower chamber. To secure votes in the Senate, Cook agreed to insert a requirement mandating that only physicians could perform abortions. Some radical feminist groups recanted their support for the bill and campaigned against it. Liberal feminist groups, intent upon passing legislation, held firm and formed a statewide umbrella group called the Committee for Cook-Leichter. The committee persuaded the New York Post to do a full story on the bill, sent telegrams to all nonsponsors, held press conferences, and circulated instructions on how and whom to lobby in Albany. Downstate in the New York City area, the Committee for Cook-Leichter was dominated by NOW and NARAL, along with the grassroots groups run by Ruth Cusack and Sylvia Fields on Long Island. Upstate, Cook relied on women’s civic and feminist organizations, the Unitarian Universalist Church, and individual members of Planned Parenthood who had run statewide campaigns before. In contrast to Planned Parenthood members, feminists, who were relatively new to politics, did not have the infrastructure or political acumen to sustain a statewide effort. Whenever possible, Cook tried to assist them by, for example, giving Betty Friedan a list of the leaders of every women’s group in the state. Bombarded by these efforts as opponents remained comparatively silent, the State Senate passed the amended Cook-Leichter bill on 18 March 1970. Thirteen Republicans and eighteen Democrats, led by Rockefeller moderates and downstate liberals, voted for the bill; twenty Republicans and six Democrats, most in Catholic districts, voted against it.²⁵

During these Senate deliberations, Catholic leaders were relatively silent in Albany as they continued to lose their grasp over parishioners. That spring, the church was preoccupied with another bill that would have enabled ever-expanding, underfunded Catholic schools to receive state funding. The church’s inactivity differed from its action in previous abortion debates. In February of 1967, for example, as a Blumenthal reform bill was before the legislature, a pastoral letter equating legal abortion with murder was read at every Catholic mass in the state. Parishioners were told to contact their legislators to urge them to vote against the bill, with some church bulletins describing how to do so. But pleas like this were increasingly ineffective by the late sixties. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Griswold v. Connecticut decision in 1965, which eliminated remaining sanctions against birth control, occurred amidst sexual revolutions, feminist movements, and the advent of the popular birth control pill. Meanwhile, the church’s Vatican II reforms encouraged parishioner engagement and debate. This amalgam of factors caused many Catholics to question (if not blatantly disregard) what their church said about sex and reproduction, including its warnings about abortion. Still, pastoral letters like the one from 1967 hinted at the opposition the church was capable of mounting, an influence that would weigh heavily upon devout parishioners like Margie Fitton in the years to come.²⁶

Once the abortion bill passed the State Senate, Catholic leaders began lobbying the Assembly, ultimately leading to a failed vote on 30 March 1970. The church directed parochial school students to send anti-abortion letters to Albany. Assemblywoman Cook remembered that “nuns would stand in the halls of the Capitol and cross themselves when I’d go by.”²⁷ The day before the vote, an anti-abortion letter from the church bishops was read at every Catholic mass in New York State. Newly elected Democratic assemblywoman Mary Ann Krupsak of Schenectady, who was Catholic and an original sponsor of the abortion bill, was called a murderer by a bishop. The pressure got to her, and Krupsak, a feminist, voted against the bill as it fell three legislators short in the Assembly.²⁸

Cook went back to the drawing board, and with outside advocacy from the Committee for Cook-Leichter, was able to get an abortion bill passed in the Assembly and signed into law. Cook kept careful tabs on who was supporting the bill. After groups such as Ruth Cusack’s from Long Island visited legislators in the Assembly, they would report back to Cook’s office; her team would then follow up with those legislators. Cook maintained that this was how laws were passed, with all the hard work occurring before the vote. Along with the physicians’ requirement, two changes were added. Abortion would now only be legal through the first twenty-four weeks of pregnancy, and afterward only if it were necessary to save the life of the expectant woman. A woman also had to consent to having an abortion before the procedure was performed. The final bill was therefore a reform measure, albeit one far less restrictive than those proposed before Cook and other women got involved. These changes secured additional support, including from Assemblywoman Krupsak, who had buckled under pressure from the Catholic Church the last time. The Assembly’s final tally was 76 to 73 votes in favor. Governor Rockefeller signed the bill the next day on 11 April 1970.²⁹

Cook’s involvement in NOW led her to see legal abortion as a core woman’s right; in turn, she showed fellow feminists and everyday women and supporters how to pass legislation. Cook helped unite Rockefeller Republicans across the state with liberal Democrats in districts downstate that were not heavily Catholic. Together, they made abortion a public issue as much as a women’s one. Yet, their coalition left out whole segments of the Democratic Party and eventually enabled the small conservative Republican wing based upstate to gain power in the four populous suburban counties downstate, where (mostly Catholic) opponents like Margie Fitton lived and would soon organize.³⁰

“Church Ladies” and the Right to Life Committee

The abortion reform bill that Governor Rockefeller signed in 1970 was the most expansive law of its kind. Between 1967 and 1970, sixteen states legalized abortion to some extent through either legislation or judicial review. New York’s law went the furthest because there was no residency requirement. It became a model for groups elsewhere, as the state became a haven for those seeking safe and legal abortions in the years before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized the procedure at the federal level in 1973. Roughly 60 percent of abortions performed in New York from 1970 through 1972 were for women who did not reside there.³¹

Under these conditions, mounting pressure to recriminalize the procedure grew, with Margie Fitton’s participation increasing after she brought up the topic at candidates’ night at her church. Seeing that she was passionate about the topic, Fitton’s pastor, Father Ed Netter—who led St. Anthony’s Parish to become a hotbed of anti-abortion activism in Rockland County—asked her to attend a meeting with people from upstate New York associated with Ed Golden. In 1967, Golden had started an umbrella organization to connect anti-abortion activists across the state; in 1972, it was officially incorporated as the New York State Right to Life Committee (RTLC). Golden’s efforts allowed local actors like Margie Fitton, who joined St. Anthony’s anti-abortion group in Rockland County, to adopt uniform messages and tactics. Doing so strengthened opponents’ bargaining power as they moved to overturn the abortion reform law.³²