DON’T KILL ME, mommy!” A grown man clutching a crucifix shouts these words over and over, as he tries fruitlessly to push through a line of women guarding the Sacramento Pregnancy Consultation Center. He is just one of the many “warriors” in Operation Rescue’s “National Day of Rescue II”—the title that the antiabortion group chose for its dramatic sequel, an April 1989 nationwide siege of family-planning clinics.
But the spear carriers on location here have been outflanked by feminists. Operation Rescue’s northern California caravan set out for the clinic at dawn, only to find the doors barred and the center’s defenders circled around the building, their arms linked in a human chain. Frustrated, the Operation Rescue men resort to force, twisting wrists, kicking shins. As they push, they praise the Lord but they also curse the women; mingled among the “amens,” the words “whore” and “dyke” can be heard more than once. A man in a baseball cap presses his face before a woman hoisting a pro-choice sign. “I’ll smash you through the window,” he says, making a fist. But the press is watching; he keeps his clenched hands at his side.
Down the block, Operation Rescue’s “Prayer Support Column,” a largely female auxiliary, is lined up in neat rows along the sidewalk. The wives and daughters of the “warriors” stand very still, their lips whispering “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” their palms raised toward heaven. “We’re not allowed to speak,” one of the women says when approached for an interview.
Across the street, Russell Walden III takes a break from the skirmish. A stocky man with sad eyes, he mops his brow as he offers some personal history. Waldens I and II, he says, were both city tax assessors, community pillars; he’s the first to fall from the family line. Muddling along in a series of odd jobs, mortuary assistant and wild-animal caretaker among them, Walden III joined Operation Rescue after he met some of the group’s members—in a county jail cell. They were there for trespassing on clinic property; he was there on a drunk driving charge. When they offered him some paralegal work, he accepted and joined their campaign.
“My wife almost had an abortion a few years ago but I stopped her,” he says. “I said, ‘No, no, no.’” They had four kids and his wife didn’t want another; when she went to the clinic anyway, he followed her into the examination room, where she was lying in a hospital gown. “I came in and snatched her and I said, ‘Let’s get out of here. Now!’ I’m not going to let her be anywhere where I’m not.” She had the baby, but later she left him. Tears fill his eyes as he says this. He wipes them away and explains, “I’m crying for the unborn babies.”
While he’s talking, Don Grundemann, a gaunt young chiropractor in an army jacket, joins the conversation. His girlfriend had an abortion without even asking him, he says. “What I think is, the woman didn’t want a child like me.” Abortion, Grundemann says, is women’s way of getting even: “In a subliminal way, it’s revenge against men. Men have treated women shabbily and now the women’s movement has struck back in overkill.”
• • •
IN 1986, Randall Terry, a twenty-six-year-old used-car salesman from upstate New York, launched Operation Rescue. His mission: to padlock the doors of the nation’s family-planning clinics. Like the “anti-vice” crusade against contraception and abortion in late Victorian America—also led by an underemployed New York salesman, Anthony Comstock, who also raided women’s health clinics—Operation Rescue attracted thousands of young men who, one way or another, felt locked out themselves by a world that no longer seemed to have a productive place for them. Contrary to the popular image of the antiabortion lobby as a group of grizzled Christian elders, the Operation Rescue men (and the majority were men) most often resembled the youthful and angry “Contenders” that the Yankelovich researchers had identified. Virtually all of Operation Rescue’s leaders and about half its active participants were in their early twenties to midthirties, and the vast majority belonged to the lower income brackets. These were men who belonged to the second half of the baby boom, who had not only missed the political engagement of the ’60s but had been cheated out of that affluent era’s bounty. They were downwardly mobile sons, condemned by the ’80s economy to earn less than their fathers, unable to afford the ballooning mortgages or to put food on the table without their wives’ help.
The media would define the struggle over abortion as a moral and a biological debate—when does life begin? Doubtless for many uneasy about abortion, that was the central issue. But the peculiarly fierce animosity that Terry and his followers brought to the battle over women’s reproductive freedom was fueled by passions other than philosophy or science. While they may well have been “crying for the unborn babies,” these men were also hurting from severe economic and social dislocations in their lives—changes that they so often blamed on the rise of independent and professional women. As they lost financial strength at work and private authority at home, they saw women gaining ground in the office, challenging their control of the family at home, and even taking the initiative in the bedroom. As resentment over women’s increasing levels of professional progress became mixed with anxiety over the sexual freedoms women had begun to exercise, they developed a rhetoric of puritanical outrage to castigate their opponents.
For public consumption, the spokesmen of the militant antiabortion movement called feminists “child-killers” and berated them for triggering “breakneck” abortion rates. But more revealing was what they said under their breath: their whispered “whores” and “dykes” were perhaps their more telling epithets. Sexual independence, not murder, may have been the feminists’ greater crime.
To men like John Willke, president of the National Right to Life Committee, legal abortion assailed not only the fetus but the primacy of male family control. Pro-choice women, he charged, “do violence to marriage,” because they “remove the right of a husband to protect the life of the child he has fathered in his wife’s womb.” “God didn’t create women independently,” Father Michael Carey, the keynote speaker at the National Day of Rescue II rally in San Jose, declared, a point that he would hammer home throughout his address. What was most distasteful about these abortion rights activists, he said, was their insistence that women be free to make reproductive choices without consulting their husbands. If these “feminist-infected” women have their way, he warned his audience, men “won’t be allowed to decide about abortion.” In his 1986 Men and Marriage, George Gilder most forthrightly expressed the fear underlying much of the male anxiety about female reproductive freedom. The feminists’ successful campaign for birth control and abortion, he wrote, “shifts the balance of sexual power further in favor of women,” depletes male patriarchal “potency,” and reduces the penis to “an empty plaything.”
So often in the battle over the fetus’s “right to life” in the ’80s, the patriarch’s eclipsed ability to make the family decisions figured as a bitter subtext, the unspoken but pressing agenda of the antiabortion campaign. The desire to defend traditional paternal authority surfaced again and again in the many “father’s rights” lawsuits filed to stop abortions in the decade, where plaintiffs were typically husbands struggling with wives who wouldn’t listen or wouldn’t comply with their commands or had recently filed for divorce. In the case of Eric Conn of Indiana, his wife sued him for divorce only hours before he lodged his complaint on behalf of the fetus. “I just didn’t like being threatened and told what to do,” David Ostreicher, a Levittown orthodontist and another “father’s rights” litigant, told the court. Not only did his wife seek an abortion against his wishes, he said, but she was also challenging the premarital agreement he had insisted that she sign—an agreement that would leave him with most of the marital assets. In upstate New York, the twenty-six-year-old sailor who sued to stop his fiancée’s abortion in 1988 was also trying to stop a separate decision she had just made—not to marry him.
The men of the antiabortion movement may have said they were just trying to staunch the runaway pace of abortions in this country, but the rate wasn’t really escalating. In fact, American women have been terminating about one in three pregnancies for at least the last hundred years; the only real difference post-Roe was that women were now able to abort unwanted pregnancies legally—and safely. And while the number of legal abortions did increase between 1973 and 1980, it then promptly leveled off and was even declining by the early ’80s. From 1980 to 1987, the abortion rate fell 6 percent.
The real change was women’s new ability to regulate their fertility without danger or fear—a new freedom that in turn had contributed to dramatic changes not in the abortion rate but in female sexual behavior and attitudes. Having secured first the mass availability of contraceptive devices and then the option of medically sound abortions, women were at last at liberty to have sex, like men, on their own terms. As a result, in the half century after birth control was legalized, women doubled their rates of premarital sexual activity, nearly converging with men’s by the end of the ’70s. (At the same time, men’s premarital sexual encounters increased much more slowly, at about half the pace of women’s.) By 1980, a landmark sex survey of 106,000 women conducted for Cosmopolitan found that 41 percent of women had extramarital affairs, up from 8 percent in 1948. In fact, women’s sexual behavior and attitudes had changed so much that they were now close to mirroring men’s. “The woman we’re profiling,” Cosmopolitan observed in its introduction to the survey, “is an extraordinarily sexually free human being” whose new bedroom expressiveness constitutes a “break with the old double standard.”
Women also became far more independent in their decisions about when to have children, under what marital circumstances, and when to stop. In these decisions, the biological father increasingly didn’t have the final say—or much of a say at all. Women’s support for motherhood out of wedlock rose dramatically in the ’80s. The 1987 Women’s View Survey found that 87 percent of single women believed it was perfectly acceptable for women to bear and raise children without getting married—up 14 percent from just four years earlier. Nearly 40 percent of the women in the 1990 Virginia Slims poll said that in making a decision about whether to have an abortion, the man involved should not even be consulted. And more women were making unilateral, and irrevocable, decisions about family size, too. Sterilization became the leading form of female birth control in the ’80s, chosen by nearly one in six American women. This was, again, a one-gender development. In the ’80s, men’s sterilization rate increased by a mere 1 percent. Until 1973, married men and women sought vasectomies and tubal ligations in equal numbers; by the second half of the ’80s, women accounted for nearly two-thirds of all sterilizations among married couples.
To many men in the antiabortion movement, the speed with which women embraced sexual and reproductive freedom could be frightening. And unlike the rise of the gender voting gap or the increasing number of women at work, this revolution in female behavior had invaded their most intimate domain. “Males have almost completely lost control of procreative activity,” Gilder wrote; it is “now dependent, to a degree unprecedented in history, on the active pleasure of women.” No wonder, he observed, so many men “resist abortion on demand.” Men who found these changes distressing couldn’t halt the pace of women’s bedroom liberation directly, but banning abortion might be one way to apply the brakes. If they couldn’t stop growing numbers of women from climbing into the sexual driver’s seat, they could at least make the women’s drive more dangerous—by jamming the reproductive controls.
• • •
The political imagery of the ’80s antiabortion movement bore all the hallmarks of the New Right ideology that had preceded it. In its war-torn psychological landscape, the enemy was feminism, the weapon was aggressively moralistic rhetoric, and the strategy for reclaiming the offensive was largely semantic. Like the New Right men, antiabortion leaders saw feminists as figures of frightening size and power. “The harridans,” antiabortion advocate Tom Bethell called them in The American Spectator—women who “howled” and “scream[ed] with awesome ferocity.” In his 1988 antiabortion work, Grand Illusions, George Grant portrayed pro-choice women and clinic counselors as “contorted, wildeyed” Furies guarding the “Altar of Convenience” with a “frenzied rage.” Planned Parenthood, he said, is an institution that dwarfs the Pentagon; its mighty force “has muscled into virtually every facet of modern life.” Antiabortion leader Father Norman Weslin felt the same way. He said he had served as a paratrooper and “commander in charge of nuclear weapons” in the U.S. Army for twenty years, but “that was bush league,” compared with the feminist foes he faced now.
To stake out the commanding position, to remake themselves into true “activists,” the antiabortion men resorted to the verbal tactics pioneered by the New Right. In Joseph Scheidler’s Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion, a primary text of the militant antiabortion movement, the Pro-Life Action League director underscored the importance of “controlling” the language on abortion. When speaking to the press, his manual instructed, “[R]arely use the word ‘fetus.’ Use ‘baby’ or ‘unborn child.’ . . . You don’t have to surrender to their vocabulary. . . . They will start using your terms if you use them.” The Willkes’ Abortion: Questions and Answers, which became the bible of antiabortion activists, stressed the same objective: “Let’s be positive, if possible,” the book asserted. “We are for protection for the unborn, the handicapped, and the aged. If possible, don’t accept the negative label ‘antiabortion.’”
In their battle for verbal control, antiabortion activists also co-opted their enemy’s vocabulary and images. The Willke handbook urged followers to borrow the “feminist credo” of “right to her own body” and apply it instead to aborted female fetuses. At antiabortion demonstrations, “The baby has to have a choice!” became a favorite chant. “Little Ones,” an Operation Rescue protest song, called for “Equal rights/ Equal time/For the unborn children.” Women didn’t choose to have abortions; they were “Women Exploited By Abortion,” the name of the national antiabortion group that promised to counsel the “victims” of abortion. Antiabortion literature portrayed abortion providers as quasi rapists who subjected young women to untold horrors, then snatched their money and drove off in limousines. By identifying women as victims of their own right to an abortion, the antiabortion movement did more than debase the rhetoric—it reinforced the backlash thesis. The cause of women’s liberty was once again defined as the cause of women’s pain. Women who were unhappy, the movement’s spokespersons contended, were probably suffering the residual effects of “postabortion syndrome,” the new ailment that the antiabortion movement claimed plagued the female population.
By and large, antiabortion leaders denied that they were hostile to women’s rights, but their actions spoke louder. National Right to Life leader John Willke said he supported equality—while opposing the Equal Rights Amendment; soon the National Right to Life board recanted its once neutral position on the amendment. Pro-Life Action League director Joseph Scheidler said, “I have no problem with women’s rights;” he just wanted to make women’s lives “less painful” by sparing them the physical and mental agony of abortion. Yet at a 1986 antiabortion conference, he vowed to inflict “a year of pain and fear” on any woman who disagreed with him.
The leading figure of the decade’s militant antiabortion crusade, Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, was likewise careful to skirt the issue of women’s equality in his many public speeches. Restricting women’s freedom wasn’t part of his agenda, he assured the press; he was only trying “to save the mothers and their unborn babies.” But the story of Terry’s political evolution suggests a more complex and personal set of motives—in which the campaign for women’s rights figured prominently.
“I was conceived out of wedlock. I could’ve been aborted. I hope and think that my parents wouldn’t have, but I’m just real glad they didn’t even have the choice.”
RANDALL TERRY
Randall Terry was raised in the suburbs of Rochester, New York, birthplace of Susan B. Anthony and launching pad for the nation’s first wave of feminism 150 years ago. But his relationship to feminist activism would involve more than the coincidence of geography and history. Terry was the eldest son in a family that, on his mother’s side, had produced politically vocal and self-determined women for three generations. From the start of the century, when his maternal great-grandmother disobeyed a parish priest and quit the Catholic church, the DiPasquale women had been outspoken, progressive, and feminist. “Randy Terry’s backlash against women’s rights may be more intimate than people realize,” says Dawn Marvin, former communications director of the Rochester chapter of Planned Parenthood—and Randall Terry’s aunt. “He was raised at the knee of feminists.”
Terry’s three aunts, Diane, Dawn, and Dale, agitated for civil rights, peace and, especially, women’s equality. During the ’70s, the sisters on the close-knit maternal side of the family launched a women’s welfare-rights program, the first women’s studies program at Buffalo State University, a women’s arts collective, a women’s talk show, a women’s consciousness-raising group, and a women’s health clinic. But more than any feminist issue, their cause was reproductive freedom. Diane wrote and spoke on campuses in favor of legal and safe abortions. Dawn stood in the rain for hours seeking signatures for a petition to legalize abortion in New York State. Dale put her picture on a citywide bus ad campaign for birth-control education.
The sisters’ activism was grounded in painful personal experience. Each of the four sisters had an unplanned pregnancy as an unwed teenager before abortion was legal; Randy, in fact, was the product of one of them. In one case, a condom failed. In another, a boyfriend said he’d pull out and didn’t. Whatever the “mistake,” the women paid. Dawn gave up a college scholarship and an arts career to marry a man she did not love, a man who smashed her jaw with his fists during her pregnancy. Diane gave up plans for an Ivy League education and spent the final months of her senior year in high school searching for an illegal abortion; she was five months pregnant by the time she found a willing “doctor” who took her $500, injected her with saline, and abandoned her in a stranger’s house. She nearly bled to death.
• • •
“OUR DIEHARD enemies are almost totally feminist,” Terry says. A young man of twenty-nine with a baby face and gangly limbs, he is hunched on the curb outside Operation Rescue’s Binghamton, New York, headquarters. Behind him is “command-central,” a musty three-room suite with walls covered with water stains and photos of bloody fetuses. Inside one office cabinet, “Baby Choice” floats in a jar. This embalmed fetus often accompanies Terry to press conferences, dressed in swaddling clothes and laid out in a tiny shoe-box “coffin.”
“Radical feminism gave birth to child killing,” he says. “They were the ones out in the streets demanding their rights—NARAL, NOW, with their lies and their false propaganda that the media lapped up obediently and spewed back out to the American people. Lies.” But then, most reporters are “tools of NOW,” too, he says. “Radical feminism, of course, has vowed to destroy the traditional family unit, hates motherhood, hates children for the most part, promotes lesbian activity.” He offers an example: Margaret Sanger, birth control pioneer and founder of Planned Parenthood. She was a “whore,” he says. “She was an adulteress, and slept all over the place, all over the world, with all kinds of people.” It’s not just abortion he opposes; Terry says he would like to ban all contraception—and, of course, call a halt to all premarital sex. He says he intends to deliver his own daughter to the wedding altar with her virginity intact.
A few hours later, Terry heads home. His wife, Cindy, a thin woman with almost translucent skin, meets him at the door, their three-year-old daughter, Faith, clinging to her side. “I told her you don’t talk,” Terry tells his wife, jerking his thumb at me. She reports that the lawn mower won’t start. He gives the ignition cord a few yanks and, when the motor kicks in, turns the job over to her. He retires to the living room couch and, propping up his feet, recalls with a nostalgic sigh that it was this very day a year ago that he reached his media zenith: “I would have been in a hotel resting, getting ready for the limo to pick us up and take us to the ‘Morton Downey, Jr.’ show.”
His rise to “national media star,” as he puts it, was meteoric; a few years before the Downey limo arrived, he was selling jalopies in an upstate used-car lot. As the lawn mower bellows outside, Terry recounts the critical events in his young life that led to sudden fame.
At sixteen, he lit out for California to “find” himself and become “a rock and roll star.” A talented pianist and guitarist, an accelerated honors student just four months from graduation, he dropped out in the winter of 1976 and hitchhiked west. “I was a young rebel,” he recalls. “I was born out of time, almost,” a “holdout” of the ’60s.
He was also fleeing a tension-filled home. His father, Michael Terry, was an unhappy schoolteacher, a gifted classical vocalist whose singing career had evaporated after he dropped out of music college and then entered a shotgun wedding at twenty. The marriage was a difficult one and Michael Terry often turned his violent temper on his eldest son. The night before Randy left home, his father beat him up.
Terry never reached California and the trip was a disappointment; 1976 turned out to be a little late for the quintessential “on-the-road” experience. “I wanted to know answers,” he says. But “in the ’70s, people just wanted to get high.” He got as far as Galveston, Texas, where he camped out on the beach, smoking dope and playing air guitar, until a vagrant stole his backpack and all his possessions. He returned home, clutching a Gideon Bible he had acquired on the way.
Back in a suburb of Rochester, he took the only job he could find, scooping ice cream at the Three Sisters, a local snack stand. From time to time, a lay minister from the nearby Elim Bible Institute would stop in to testify about Christ. Finally one night, Terry was converted. Vowing to become a religious leader, he quit the ice-cream stand and enrolled at Elim to train for the ministry.
But his diploma from Elim, an unaccredited school, didn’t help him in his search for even a decent job. He sold tires and flipped burgers at McDonald’s. During the recession, he was laid off twice. Married by then, he couldn’t afford a home—he and Cindy had to live, like charity cases, in a vacant church trailer. When he needed to pay medical and sometimes even grocery bills, he had to borrow money from Cindy’s mother. While Terry would later blame working women for “the destruction of the traditional family unit,” it was his wife’s job at a florist shop that helped the young Terry family through this lean period. It was not until Terry started Operation Rescue, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations started rolling in, that he was able to make a living wage—and send his wife home.
The “vision” for Operation Rescue, he recalls, came to him in a prayer meeting in the fall of 1983. It was a “three-point plan”: blockade clinics, counsel women against abortion, and provide homes for unwed mothers. He led several clinic raids, but his campaign didn’t register on the media monitors until July 1988, when he descended on Atlanta and a captive national press corps, which was in town for the Democratic National Convention. In the week-long siege that followed, 134 protesters were arrested, Terry “made the networks,” and his star status was all but guaranteed.
As Terry arrives at the apex of his story, Cindy returns to the house, her mowing finished, to prepare the family supper. After a while, she wanders into the living room. “I told her you don’t like media people, so she shouldn’t expect to get any comment from you,” Terry tells his wife. But Cindy seems willing enough to talk. She tells how she met Randy at Elim, where she was “just studying to be a better Christian.” She wasn’t attracted to him at first, she says, but she had learned in her Christian Womanhood class that “blind love” can lead to “bad marriages.” Randy, on the other hand, says he was drawn to Cindy at once—he liked that “she was quiet.”
Cindy Dean grew up in Manchester, a small town in upstate New York. She worked as a waitress and barmaid at the local Sheraton Hotel, but she yearned for more. “I didn’t want my life to be a total failure,” she says. So at twenty-three, she enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, “one of the best cooking schools in the United States,” she points out. She was one of a few female students in training to be chefs; she was breaking into “a male-dominated profession,” she says proudly. “I was really into it. I had real excellent grades because, you know, I wanted to make something of my life.” She began working at a French restaurant in Rochester, creating fancy pastries and soon managing the entire kitchen staff. Then she met a group of born-again Christians. They eventually converted her—and convinced her she should quit school.
“We need to wrap it up,” Randy says, interrupting her story. “I want to eat.” They move to the dining room, where he sits at the head of the table and Cindy serves. He lectures her for having “burned the beans.” After supper, he retires to the living room with a video of the TV movie about Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, Guts and Glory. As Cindy clears the dishes, she confides that it was she who first had the idea to picket in front of the clinics. She had great difficulty getting pregnant—it took five years—and she came to resent women who so effortlessly conceived yet aborted. By herself, she took to marching in front of the Southern Tier Women’s Services, the local family-planning clinic in Binghamton. With a handmade placard in her hands, she called out to women, “Don’t kill your baby. I’ll take it. I can’t have a baby.” Alex Aitken, a clinic employee at the time, recalls of Cindy, “In the beginning, she was a fairly strong personality. She would approach anyone.”
One day, though, Randy appeared at her side. Soon, Aitken recalls, Cindy “just disappeared from the scene.” In her place, Terry patrolled the parking lot, literally throwing his weight against car doors to stop women from entering the clinic. Once he found out the identity of a patient and burst into the waiting room, screaming her name over and over like the hero in The Graduate. Another time, clinic workers recall, he posed as a clinic “counselor” and led a sixteen-year-old girl to what he claimed was “our other office,” actually his own office suite. There, he showed the teenager gory films about the supposed aftermath of abortion—infertility, madness, and death—until the frightened girl led.
By 1985, Terry had organized a group of church supporters, and they were making daily visits to the clinic. They sprayed the door locks with Krazy Glue and followed the employees to and from work. One day, they stormed the clinic, smashed the furniture, ripped out the phones, and locked themselves in the counseling room. The police had to break the door down with a crowbar. During still another protest, one of the Operation Rescue activists, a young man, leaped in a window and punched a five-months-pregnant woman in the stomach. She was taken to the hospital in an ambulance—and miscarried three weeks later.
Terry never got very far with the other two points in his “three-point plan.” By 1989, Operation Rescue had set up only one counseling service for young and needy pregnant women, the Crisis Pregnancy Center. It showed intimidating antiabortion films to the teenagers it lured with a Yellow Pages ad promising free pregnancy tests. The day I visited, the only real service it offered needy mothers was a few packets of infant formula and two hand-me-down cots. As for the homes for unwed mothers, Terry set up only one, the House of Life in Pennsylvania. It took in only four pregnant girls before shutting down. The reason? The couple operating the home announced that they were too busy preparing for their own baby’s birth.
The antiabortion warriors were the backlash’s most blatant and violent agents. At their instigation, between 1977 and 1989, seventy-seven family-planning clinics were torched or bombed (in at least seven instances, during working hours, with employees and patients inside), 117 were targets of arson, 250 received bomb threats, 231 were invaded, and 224 vandalized. With time, the attacks only accelerated. In April 1991, the numbers of bombings and arson attacks had already exceeded the figure for the full year of 1990. Clinic patients were harassed and even kidnapped; staff members received death threats at sixty-seven family-planning centers and endured assault and battery attacks at forty-seven centers. Antiabortion arsonists blinded a clinic technician with chemicals before setting fire to the Concerned Women’s Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. A staff doctor at another clinic was maimed when her morning newspaper was booby-trapped. The executive director of Planned Parenthood in Minnesota was struck repeatedly and choked. At a Youngstown, Ohio, clinic, a worker suffered a concussion when twenty-five antiabortion picketers stampeded the building. The employees of still other clinics were beaten, taken hostage, hit by protesters’ cars, and, in one case, even the clinic director’s dog was poisoned.
The story of the campaign against abortion in the years since Roe is a well-known one: the more than fifty bills proposed to restrict Roe the very first year of its existence; the 1974 effort to pass a constitutional amendment banning it; the successful 1976 Hyde Amendment blocking federal funding for abortions; the increasingly active role played by the Republican presidents of the ’80s; the subsequent hundreds of legislative maneuvers that led to prohibitive rules and consent and notification regulations in more than thirty states; the countless legal challenges to Roe, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1989 Webster decision—ironically, on the eve of Independence Day—that upheld state restrictions on abortion. And finally, the 1991 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allowed the government to prohibit federally funded clinics from even speaking about abortion when counseling pregnant women.
But, in spite of its high profile, the campaign never became a mass movement. One national poll after another clearly demonstrated that the majority of Americans supported Roe v. Wade. In fact, the Webster ruling only served to increase the pro-choice margin. A majority now favored Roe in every region of the country, in every age group, in both political parties, and in the Catholic church. Only one group of Americans claimed a majority that wanted to see that court decision overturned: white followers of TV evangelists.
The unwavering public support for Roe only makes sense in the wider context of American history; the landmark ruling is simply a return to status quo. The right to an abortion—practiced in one form or another since colonial times—had never been restricted until the last half of the late 19th century. And not until then did aborting a pregnancy before “quickening” (several months after conception) even assume a moral taint. As birth control historian Kristin Luker observes, “Ironically, then, the much maligned 1973 Supreme Court decision on abortion, Roe v. Wade, which divided the legal regulation of abortion by trimesters, was much more in line with the traditional treatment of abortion than most Americans appreciate.”
In 1800, abortion was legal in every state and popular opinion on it largely neutral. It was only after the midcentury rise of the women’s rights movement that abortion became a battleground. As women pressed for such simple family-planning reliefs as “voluntary mother-hood”—which proposed that wives be free to refuse sex occasionally for health reasons—doctors, legislators, journalists, and clergymen countered with a far more extreme campaign against all forms of birth control. Suddenly, the New York Times was crammed with stories deploring abortion as “the evil of the age.” Suddenly, the American Medical Association (then a fledgling organization that was trying to establish its credentials by putting midwives and other female abortion providers out of business) was launching a massive public relations campaign against this “criminal” and “irresponsible” practice, even offering an annual prize for the best antiabortion book. Suddenly, clergymen were declaring abortion a grave sin. Suddenly, “purity” crusaders were storming abortion clinics and dragging their mostly female operators to court. By the end of the 19th century, this backlash against reproductive rights would result in a federal ban on all birth control distribution (upheld until well into this century) and the outlawing of abortion (except to save a woman’s life) in every state.
Perhaps it is inevitable that even the most modest efforts by women to control their fertility spark a firestorm of opposition. All of women’s aspirations—whether for education, work, or any form of self-determination—ultimately rest on their ability to decide whether and when to bear children. For this reason, reproductive freedom has always been the most popular item in each of the successive feminist agendas—and the most heavily assaulted target of each backlash. During the feminist revival of the early 20th century, the birth control movement that Margaret Sanger launched enjoyed far broader appeal than any other plank of the women’s rights campaign, cutting across class and race lines. As women’s rights and peace activist Crystal Eastman wrote in 1918 of her feminist contemporaries, “Whether we are the special followers of Alice Paul, or Ruth Law, or Ellen Key, or Olive Schreiner, we must all be followers of Margaret Sanger.”
Like its 19th-century precursor, the 1980s antiabortion campaign would exhibit signs of punitive excess, as once again the achievement of modest reproductive liberties for women was greeted with an outpouring of repressive outrage. In the hundreds of legislative initiatives and referenda that followed, opponents of women’s reproductive freedom often seemed intent on forcing far more than the repeal of Roe. Some proposed outlawing abortion even when a woman’s life was in danger, an extreme stance that was hardly part of the pre-Roe laws restricting abortion. Others wanted to require that the woman get her husband’s permission before she proceed; still others wanted her to submit to a mandatory lecture from her doctor, too. Other proposals included forbidding any birth control device that might possibly work after fertilization, banning basic birth control information even from public libraries, and allowing total strangers to file a court order prohibiting a woman from having an abortion. In Utah, lawmakers wanted abortion providers sentenced to up to five years in prison; in Louisiana, the legislature called for a mandatory ten years of hard labor; in Massachusetts, a twice-introduced state bill demanded the electric chair.
As the reproductive rights backlash deepened, journalists, clergymen, and lawyers joined it. In the last two years of the ’80s alone, more than fifteen hundred articles on abortion appeared in the major dailies, and the newsweeklies devoted more space to abortion than any other social policy issue. (These articles rarely explored the needs or views of the millions of women hurt by the national attack on abortion; instead, they moralized, wondered if female reporters should even be allowed to cover the abortion debate, and worried about how the abortion battle might “hurt” various politicians.) The American Bar Association voted to rescind its pro-choice policy in 1990, only seven months after it had approved it. Even moderate religious denominations—the American Baptist, Presbyterian, United Methodist, and Episcopal churches, among them—backed away from formerly pro-choice positions. The Catholic bishops pulled out all the stops, hiring Hill & Knowlton, the nation’s largest public relations firm, to launch a $5 million publicity drive against abortion. The New York archdiocese proposed a new order of nuns, the Sisters of Life, that would be devoted exclusively to opposing abortion. New York’s John Cardinal O’Connor issued a twelve-page advisory notifying Roman Catholic politicians that they risked excommunication if they supported a woman’s right to an abortion. New Jersey bishop James McHugh declared that from now on, Catholic politicians who disagreed with the Church’s stance would be barred from speaking at church events or holding church office. The Archbishop of Guam vowed to excommunicate any senator who opposed an extreme bill that outlawed virtually all abortions on the island. And Bishop Rene Gracida of Corpus Christi, Texas, excommunicated the director of a family planning center in town, and promised a similar fate for a worker at another clinic if she didn’t quit her job.
By the end of the decade, the antiabortion campaign hadn’t overturned Roe, draconian legislative proposals had been mostly defeated or reversed, and public support for legal abortion had only risen. Nonetheless, the relentless publicity, litigation, harassment, and violence had gone far toward a de facto elimination of access to abortion for much of the female population.
The climate of fear discouraged an already reluctant medical establishment from offering the procedure. By 1987, 85 percent of the nation’s counties had no abortion services. According to a nationwide survey, the number of rural abortion providers dropped by more than 50 percent between 1977 and 1988—and 20 percent of the decline occurred after 1985. And the pool of doctors trained or seeking training to perform abortions was drying up. North Dakota and South Dakota had only one abortion provider each, and in at least a dozen states, from Mississippi to Maryland, women had to cross state lines to get an abortion. In Missouri, women seeking abortions were traveling all day across the state and camping in the parking lot of the lone family planning clinic in St. Louis that performs second-trimester abortions. At Kansas City’s Truman Medical Center—even before the Webster decision banned abortions at this public hospital—the number of abortions performed fell from 484 in 1986 to 49 in 1988. A lack of demand was not the cause. The number plunged because one of the two doctors performing abortions at the hospital was so harassed he moved to California, and the other doctor was picketed so many times by antiabortion protesters that he lost his lease. Even major metropolitan areas were affected. The Cook County Hospital, the largest provider of health services for Chicago’s poor, refused to provide abortion services, and in 1990 the country’s new board president, who had pledged to restore services during his election campaign, backed off under pressure from abortion opponents on the board. That same month the Illinois Masonic Medical Center, one of the few hospitals in the state that offered abortions through the second trimester of pregnancy, shut down these services under pressure from the Catholic church, which said it wouldn’t sell the hospital a plot of land that it needed in order to expand unless it complied with the church’s demands on abortion.
For the tens of millions of women who depended on publicly financed health care, even the few abortion clinics that were still operating were beyond reach. Federal funding was no longer available to the more than a quarter of a million women on Medicaid who sought abortions each year. And all but a dozen states had banned abortions funded from their coffers, too, by the close of the decade. (Moreover, eight states passed laws in the early ’80s restricting even private insurance coverage of abortions.) In Michigan, a state ban on Medicaid-funded abortions that went into effect in 1988 caused the number of abortions to plunge by 10,300, or 23 percent, by the following year. It was as if Roe had never existed.
The handful of private agencies that dispensed minimal abortion funding were overwhelmed with appeals from desperate women; the Chicago Abortion Fund had to turn away hundreds of women each year. Rosie Jimenez, a twenty-seven-year-old single mother on a college scholarship, had six months to go before completing her teaching credentials when she discovered she was pregnant. She had to cross the border to Mexico to find abortion services she could afford. The cheap, illegal operation killed her. When Spring Adams, a 13-year-old Idaho girl on welfare, was raped and impregnated by her father in 1989, her mother could find only one doctor in the entire state willing to perform the second-trimester abortion—and he refused to waive the cost. Unable to afford his fees (Idaho banned the use of Medicaid funds for all abortions unless the mother’s life was threatened), Spring’s mother went on a desperate nationwide search. She finally found a clinic in Portland, Oregon, that agreed to take on her daughter’s case and waive all but $200. But two days before Spring was to board the Greyhound bus to Portland, her father—who opposed abortion—shot her to death with an assault rifle.
The antiabortion movement also made it harder to learn about the few clinics performing abortions that were still in business. The high court’s 1991 ruling muzzled women’s health providers who received federal funds. Federally funded sex-education classes under the Adolescent Family Life Act withheld all information on abortion and birth control from students. And meanwhile public school administrators, fearful of threats from antiabortion groups, shut down courses that did provide such information. In Minnesota by 1989, less than half of the city’s high schools offered any sex education—a direct response to pressure from the state’s strong antiabortion lobby. Antiabortion lobbies pressured the media to reject family-planning clinic ads and cancel public-service programming on abortion services, too. Whether as a direct response to such pressure or simply to head off controversy, dozens of newspapers, radio stations, television networks, college and high-school publications, yearbooks, and even football game programs began rejecting or banning outright notices and advertisements for family planning services and even basic informational announcements from pro-choice groups.
On the other hand, broadsides against abortion were available for viewing inside take-out pizza boxes and even on sports videos. Domino’s Pizza chairman Thomas Monaghan saw to it that his company delivered flyers to diners with the latest information on antiabortion rallies. New York Giants owner Wellington Mara produced the Champions for Life video, which he distributed to schoolchildren via the American Life League. “Now with the abortion death squads allowed to run rampant through our country,” Giants player Mark Bavaro (one of six team stars in the film) advised young fans, “I wonder how many future champions will be killed before they see the light of day.”
A NOW ad that simply offered the time and place of a national march for reproductive rights was rejected as “too controversial” by twenty-six radio stations in five of the nation’s largest media markets. The Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post refused to run the Fund for Feminist Majority’s ad for a pro-choice film, Abortion for Survival. (And women who wrote to the Los Angeles Times to protest the decision received back a letter from its advertising department, advising them they were just puppets of a “certain orchestration” by feminist interests.) On the other hand, USA Today was willing to run a huge ad for the American Life League—on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade—that called on raped women not to have abortions. And the networks had no problems airing segments of the controversial, and misleading, antiabortion film The Silent Scream, which purported to show a fetus at twelve weeks. The media’s corporate advertisers, fearful of antiabortion boycott threats, didn’t make it any easier for broadcasters to offer news programming on abortion. An ABC radio special on abortion, hosted by Barbara Walters, couldn’t find a single sponsor.
The antiabortion movement also succeeded in inspiring massive cutbacks in public and private support and funding for birth control clinics and other family planning services besides abortion. Federal and state aid for family planning services fell by $50 million between 1980 and 1987. The Vatican ordered the Sisters of Mercy hospitals system, the largest nongovernmental provider of medical services in the country, to halt all sterilization, the leading method of birth control for Catholics. Under pressure from the “right-to-life” lobby, many corporations, charities, and foundations withdrew their financial assistance to family planning, too. In 1988, United Way stopped funding Planned Parenthood, and in 1990, under pressure from the Christian Action Council, AT&T cut off its contributions, too (after twenty-five years), claiming that shareholders had objected to the agency’s association with abortion—even though 101 percent of its shareholders had voted in favor of funding Planned Parenthood.
The curtailment of family planning funds led, ironically, to more abortions among younger and poor women, as the lack of birth control services drove up the numbers of unwanted and teen pregnancies. By 1990, the National Center for Health Statistics was reporting an increase in the teenage birthrate, reversing an eighteen-year decline. In California, health professionals estimated that the $24 million cutback in family planning state funds in 1989—which shut down clinics for teenagers and shrank staff and operating hours at many centers—translated into about a thousand additional pregnancies and five hundred additional abortions each week before the funds were eventually restored.
Laws in thirty-four states that restricted young women’s access to abortion by requiring parental notification or consent didn’t stop young women from having sex; they only succeeded in increasing trauma and the teenage birthrate—and forcing delays that caused young women to have riskier and costlier second-trimester abortions. After the Minnesota parental consent law was enforced, the birthrate for fifteen-to-seventeen-year-old girls rose nearly 40 percent. By contrast, the birthrate for eighteen to nineteen year olds in the state, who were not affected by the law, rose only 0.3 percent in the same period. The percentage of Minnesota teenagers seeking second-trimester abortions after the law passed rose 27 percent. And parental consent laws only drove frightened young women seeking abortions underground, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Becky Bell, a seventeen-year-old Indianapolis girl, died in an illegal abortion in 1988 after she was refused a legal operation because she was too afraid to ask her parents’ permission. After Seventeen ran a 1991 article about Becky Bell, letters flooded in from girls with their own frightening stories to tell. A twelve year old wrote about a friend who met the same fate as Bell. A Wyoming teenager reported that she had resorted, too, to an illegal abortion in desperation. The doctor “humiliated” her, she recalled, and “the conditions were most likely very unsanitary because I hemorrhaged for months. Finally, a friend took me to the hospital and I had an emergency D and C. This most likely saved my life.”
The waiver “option” that the parental consent laws offered—in lieu of parental permission, teenage girls could seek a judge’s approval to have the operation—was little option at all. It was too complicated and distressing for many teenage girls. This “judicial bypass” procedure often required young women to solicit medical affidavits and legal counsel, to tell their story to as many as two dozen strangers, and to put up with postponements of as much as a month, a disaster for the many teenage girls who were already far along in their pregnancies. And at the end of this lengthy legal process, they were still at the mercy of judicial whim. While some states issued thousands of waivers a year, in a state like Indiana, where antiabortion sentiment ran high on the bench, only six to eight judicial waivers were granted annually.
Plenty of judges wouldn’t even take judicial bypass cases. In Massachusetts, twelve of the sixty Superior Court judges routinely refused to hear teenage girls’ appeals for abortions; in Minnesota, bypass hearings were available at only two locations. The girls’ confidentiality rights were also violated—in some cases their appeals were heard in open courtrooms and their names and addresses were entered into the record, a violation of the consent laws’ stipulations. Many judges subjected young girls to lengthy and intimidating interrogations or angry moral lectures. Did she realize she was killing a “child”? Did she know that the fetus had “eyes”? Judges who opposed abortion sometimes had literature of bloody fetuses prominently displayed in their chambers while they questioned the girls. Or they tried to stave off the operations by delaying their decisions and forcing young women into the next trimester. One judge waited a month to issue a ruling; another judge ordered the court stenographer not to type out the transcript, in an attempt to hold up a girl’s appeal of his decision denying her an abortion.
The antiabortion crusade also diminished women’s reproductive options for the future, by virtually closing down federal and private research on birth control. By the end of the decade, only one corporation was still funding research on contraception—down from two dozen in the 1960s and 1970s. Insurance companies retreated, too, and by 1990 none of them were willing to cover clinical testing of most contraceptives. A 1990 Institute of Medicine study found that the United States, which had once been a world leader in contraceptive research, had fallen critically behind the rest of the industrialized world in birth control development and was now endangering the future of “contraceptive choice” in the country.
Antiabortion threats also halted research on abortifacients. Sterling Drug, which had one abortion drug under development in 1986, hastily dropped it. Upjohn Co. canceled its abortion drug and closed its contraceptive research program in 1985, after right-to-life groups launched a boycott. And the Population Council discontinued its research on the French abortion pill RU-486. In 1989, the FDA banned importation of RU-486 for private use, under pressure from such congressional abortion opponents as Jesse Helms, Henry Hyde, and Robert Dornan. In 1990, the makers of the abortion pill, Roussel-Uclaf, stopped supplying it to the only U.S. clinical research team ever to test it. And these researchers, at the University of Southern California, found support from their medical peers evaporating, too; although most doctors they approached originally expressed interest, soon the physicians were calling back to say the study was “too controversial” for their participation. Meanwhile, when a shareholder proposed that the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co. simply study the possibility of making RU-486, the drug company’s executives hastened to the Securities and Exchange Commission to have the proposal excised from the company’s proxy statement. They succeeded and shareholders never even had a chance to vote on it. Only one American company, the tiny New Jersey firm Gyno-Pharma, admitted, for less than twenty-four hours, that it might consider marketing RU-486; and after threats of boycotts rumbled from the antiabortion lobby, company officials immediately disavowed any interest in the drug.
The antiabortion iconography in the last decade featured the fetus but never the mother. In the movement’s literature, photographs, films, and other props, the whole “unborn child” floats in a disembodied womb. The fetus is a conscious, even rambunctious tyke, the mother a passive, formless, and inanimate “environment.” The fetus is the occupant, the mother its temporary living quarters. One right-to-life committee even produced an “unborn child’s diary,” in which a precocious fetus penned ruminations about flowers and confided, “I want to be called Kathy.” The Willkes’ manual instructs the movement’s participants to make a point of using “humanizing terms . . . such as ‘this little guy,’” when referring to the fetus—and phrases like “place of residence” when talking about the mother. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, creator of The Silent Scream—a film in which the truly silent cast member is the mother—describes the fetus in The Abortion Papers as “the little aquanaut,” a child in “intrauterine exile” who is “bricked in, as it were, behind what seemed an impenetrable wall of flesh, muscle, bone and blood.” At least the pregnant woman is envisioned as an occupied house; the antiabortion metaphor for the woman who aborts is a bombed-out shell: “Her body is a haunted house where the tragic death of a child took place,” Joseph Scheidler writes.
To a remarkable degree, the antiabortion movement succeeded by the end of the ’80s in bringing much of the medical and legal establishment around to its vision of the fetus and mother. The fetus would become the primary patient in the prenatal operating room, the full citizen in the lawbooks, and the lead plaintiff in the courtroom. In fact, by the close of the ’80s, a fetus actually had more legal rights in some areas than a live child.
Doctors drafted the first lines in the fetal declaration of independence. In 1982, a group of obstetricians and geneticists met in California and agreed that they had made sufficient medical advances in the still highly experimental practice of fetal surgery to treat the fetus as an independent “patient.” At the same time, in the equally experimental field of infertility treatment, doctors were also treating the fetus as if it were a baby with a separate existence from the mother. In the waiting rooms of in-vitro fertilization centers, doctors posted “baby pictures” of their embryos—“Our Katy,” read the caption of one of the many murky sonograms plastered on the walls of the Pacific Fertility Center in San Francisco. Some infertility specialists even offered videotapes of “our children”—footage of barely fertilized eggs—and enthused about how “the sonographic voyeur, spying on the unwary fetus, finds him or her a surprisingly active little creature.” In fact, some infertility doctors were beginning to act as if the fetus really were their baby. At the Jones Institute of Reproductive Medicine, Dr. Howard Jones claimed custody of a patient’s embryo; the woman had to sue him in federal court to force him to release it.
For the infertility specialists, humanizing the embryo just made good business sense—it helped to distract from their abysmal record in making actual babies. As a 1988 congressional study found, in-vitro fertilization centers had a success rate of less than 10 percent, and half the centers had never produced a live birth. Nonetheless, the doctors managed to extract tens of thousands of dollars from their average patient—for medical procedures that in most cases weren’t even insured.
Fertility doctors weren’t only elevating fertilized eggs to infant status; they were also reducing female patients to “the uterine environment,” or “the incubators,” as these specialists so often put it—and increasingly treating them like guinea pigs. Just as doctors in the late Victorian era turned women’s wombs into “Chinese toy shops” (in the word of one physician of the time)—by jamming them with hot irons, injection needles, or, most popularly, leeches—women who sought help at infertility centers in the ’80s were pumped full of barely tested and risky fertility drugs, injected with unscreened semen, and subjected to unregulated and even life-threatening procedures. At least ten women died from complications stemming from in-vitro fertilization treatment. The DiMiranda Institute, a foundation that monitors infertility services, was fielding complaints from women on a daily basis by the late ’80s: women whose ovaries had swollen to the size of grapefruits from the popular fertility drug Perganol, women who caught venereal disease from the contaminated sperm in artificial insemination labs, women who went in for minor laser treatment and came out with hysterectomies. Gina DiMiranda, the institute’s director, founded the agency after she nearly died herself, when an infertility specialist prescribed an untested steroid regimen. She ended up hospitalized in critical condition with a 105-degree fever, massive infections, and uterine and rectal bleeding.
Lawmakers and judges were also moving to elect the fetus to citizenship. For the first time in American history, legislators and state courts began to define the fetus as a legally independent “person” rather than an entity whose interests were inseparable from its mother’s. A New Hampshire court even deemed the fetus a “household resident” who could collect on a homeowner’s insurance policy. By the mid-’80s, a majority of states had passed “feticide” laws that extended wrongful death statutes to the fetus. Some states went even further. A Louisiana law defined fertilized eggs as fully formed humans. Courts, too, were pushing the bounds of personhood to prefetal stages. In a 1989 divorce case, a Tennessee circuit judge ruled that a couple’s frozen pre-embryonic clusters of four to eight cells were legally their children and couldn’t be destroyed.
While these early feticide laws primarily defended the fetus from an intruding third party—a drunken driver or mugger who accosted the mother—the laws and court rulings that arose in the second half of the decade were directed with increasing exclusivity, and wrath, at the mother herself. If the early legislative and judicial decisions separated mother and fetus, then the later ones set mother and fetus against each other.
By the late ’80s, state legislators around the nation were seeking to apply child abuse laws to the fetus to protect it from an offending mother. On the federal level, California’s U.S. Senator Pete Wilson crusaded for the Child Abuse During Pregnancy Prevention Act. “Surely the most sordid and terrifying story is that of exploding child abuse through the umbilical cord,” he told his fellow lawmakers. Meanwhile in the states, a raft of “fetal neglect” bills flooded the legislatures. The proposals called for the prosecution of women whose behavior during pregnancy was deemed negligent of their fetuses—behavior that included everything from not following doctors’ orders to eating the wrong foods to giving birth at home. Other legislative initiatives sought to criminalize alcohol use by pregnant women and to imprison repeat pregnant offenders for as much as twenty-five years. In many states, it became routine for juvenile courts to claim “custody” of the fetuses of low-income pregnant women whose prenatal practices might constitute harm; then, at birth, the children were declared state wards and whisked away.
The general public eventually joined the campaign. By 1988, half of the people surveyed in a Gallup poll agreed that pregnant women who drank, smoked, or refused obstetrical surgery should be held legally liable. Stores, restaurants, and even subways posted lecturing signs about proper consumption. Medical and legal scholars proposed mandatory Breathalyzer tests for seemingly tipsy pregnant women, mandatory screenings of the fetus (with criminal penalties for those who resisted), and arrests for those who didn’t follow nutritious diets. In this environment, total strangers felt free to approach pregnant women in public places and accost them for buying a six-pack at the grocery store or ordering a single glass of wine at dinner. In Seattle in 1991, a pregnant woman who ordered a single drink in a bar was hounded and lectured by two waiters—so vigorously that she sued. The local newspaper columnist, however, applauded the waiters’ vigilance. That same year, a Seattle health club ordered a pregnant bus driver with sore muscles out of its hot tub. She needed written permission from her doctor, the club’s officers insisted. (The woman had, in fact, checked beforehand with her doctor, who had approved the regimen.)
As the fetus’s rights increased, the mother’s just kept diminishing. Poor pregnant women were hauled into court by male prosecutors, physicians, and husbands. Their blood was tested for drug traces without their consent or even notification, their confidentiality rights were routinely violated in the state’s zeal to compile a case against them, and they were forced into obstetrical surgery for the “good” of the fetus, even at the risk of their own lives.
Here are just a few of the many cases from the decade’s pregnancy police blotter and court docket:
In Michigan, a juvenile court took custody of a newborn because the mother took a few Valium pills while pregnant, to ease pain caused by an auto accident injury. The mother of three had no history of drug abuse or parental neglect. It took more than a year for her to get her child back.
In California, a young woman was brought up on fetal neglect charges under a law that, ironically, was meant to force negligent fathers to pay child support. Her offenses included failing to heed a doctor’s advice (a doctor who had failed to follow up on her treatment), not getting to the hospital with due haste, and having sex with her husband. The husband, a batterer whose brutal outbursts had summoned the police to their apartment more than a dozen times in one year alone, was not charged—or even investigated.
In Iowa, the state took a woman’s baby away at birth even though no real harm to the infant was evident—because she had, among other alleged offenses, “paid no attention to the nutritional value of the food she ate during her pregnancy,” as an AP story later characterized the Juvenile Court testimony. “[S]he simply picked the foods that tasted good to her.”
In Wyoming, a woman was charged with felony child abuse for allegedly drinking while pregnant. A battered wife, she had been arrested on this charge after she sought police protection from her abusive husband.
In Illinois, a woman was summoned to court after her husband accused her of damaging their daughter’s intestine in an auto accident during her pregnancy. She wasn’t even the driver.
In Michigan, another husband hauled his wife into court to accuse her of taking tetracycline during her pregnancy; the drug, prescribed by her physician, allegedly discolored their son’s teeth, he charged. The state’s appellate court ruled that the husband did indeed have the right to sue for this “prenatal negligence.”
In Maryland, a woman lost custody of her fetus when she refused to transfer to a hospital in another city, a move she resisted because it would have meant stranding her nineteen-month-old son.
In South Carolina, an eighteen-year-old pregnant woman was arrested before she had even given birth, on the suspicion that she may have passed cocaine to her fetus. The charge, based on a single urine test, didn’t hold up; she delivered a healthy drug-free baby. Even so, and even though the Department of Social Services found no evidence of abuse or neglect, state prosecutors announced that they intended to pursue the case anyway.
In Wisconsin, a sixteen-year-old pregnant girl was confined in a secure detention facility because of her alleged tendencies “to be on the run” and “to lack motivation” to seek prenatal care.
Certainly society has a compelling interest in bringing healthy children into the world, both a moral and practical obligation to help women take care of themselves while they’re pregnant. But the punitive and vindictive treatment mothers were beginning to receive from legislators, police, prosecutors, and judges in the ’80s suggests that more than simple concern for children’s welfare was at work here. Police loaded their suspects into paddy wagons still bleeding from labor; prosecutors barged into maternity wards to conduct their interrogations. Judges threw pregnant women with drug problems into jail for months at a time, even though, as the federal General Accounting Office and other investigative agencies have found, the prenatal care offered pregnant women in American prisons is scandalously deficient or nonexistent (many prisons don’t even have gynecologists)—and has caused numerous incarcerated women to give birth to critically ill and damaged babies. Police were eager to throw the book at erring pregnant women. In the case of Pamela Rae Stewart of San Diego—the battered woman charged with having sex against her doctor’s orders—the officer who headed up the investigation wanted her tried for manslaughter. “In my mind, I didn’t see any difference between born and unborn,” Lieutenant Ray Narramore explains later. “The only question I had was why they didn’t go for a murder charge. I would have been satisfied with murder. That wouldn’t have been off-base. I mean, we have a lady here who was not following doctor’s orders.”
Lawmakers’ claims that they just wanted to improve conditions for future children rang especially false. At the same time that legislators were assailing low-income mothers for failing to take care of their fetuses, they were making devastating cuts in the very services that poor pregnant women needed to meet the lawmakers’ demands. How was an impoverished woman supposed to deliver a healthy fetus when she was denied prenatal care, nutrition supplements, welfare payments, and housing assistance? In the District of Columbia, Marion Barry declared infant health a top priority of his mayoral campaign—then cut health care funding, forcing prenatal clinics to scale back drastically and eliminate outright their evening hours needed by the many working women. Doctors increasingly berated low-income mothers, but they also increasingly refused to treat them. By the end of the decade, more than one-fourth of all counties nationwide lacked any clinic where poor women could get prenatal care, and a third of doctors wouldn’t treat pregnant women who were Medicaid patients. In New York State, a health department study found that seven of the state’s counties had no comprehensive prenatal care for poor women whatsoever; several of these counties, not so coincidentally, had infant mortality rates that were more than double the national average. In California in 1986, twelve counties didn’t have a single doctor willing to accept the state’s low-income Medi-Cal patients; in fact, the National Health Law Program concluded that the situation in California was so bad that poor pregnant women are “essentially cut off from access to care.”
• • •
OF ALL the clubs wielded over the heads of impoverished pregnant women in the decade, the positive drug test was the most popular. As the federal government and press became obsessed with the social problem of crack addiction in the ghettos, the national hysteria quickly homed in on pregnant drug-addicted women. Congress held alarmist hearings. Prosecutors applied tough felony laws to these women—laws that were designed for drug dealers, not drug users—and charged them not only with child abuse but assault with a deadly weapon and manslaughter. Judges proposed “life probation” on forced contraception, routine testing of pregnant drug users, and permanent restraining orders forbidding the women from ever seeing their children. Lawmakers advocated mandatory sterilization. Medical school professors recommended revoking public assistance benefits. Media commentators issued their own solutions. Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer suggested rounding up all drug-using pregnant women and confining them in a “secure location”—to halt the onset of a “bio-underclass.” And on the supposedly neutral news pages, reporters joined in with reams of didactic copy on crack-abusing mothers, almost all of it directed at black women. They claimed the women were the prime culprits behind the chaos in the inner cities and the national crisis in newborn deaths. “Crack Babies: The Worst Threat Is Mom Herself,” the Washington Post headline decreed. “Drug addiction among pregnant women,” Newsweek charged in 1989, in a widely voiced press sentiment, “is driving up the U.S. infant mortality rate.”
In fact, the rate of infant mortality wasn’t rising. Progress in lowering the nation’s disastrously high infant mortality rate—one of the worst in the industrialized world—did slow drastically. But that slowdown predated the crack epidemic of the mid to late ’80s; it was driven largely by severe rollbacks in health insurance and available medical care in the early ’80s. By 1983, the number of uninsured people had jumped more than 20 percent from the late ’70s. By mid-decade, nearly 40 percent of all poor women were uninsured. At the same time, the 1981 federal budget cuts in Medicaid and public assistance for poor female-headed households had stripped more than one million mothers and their children of their medical benefits. Consequently, the proportion of babies born to mothers with no or belated prenatal care rose 20 percent in the first seven years of the ’80s. Black women were hurt most by these trends; by 1985, one out of two black women had inadequate prenatal care.
It was these developments, far more than crack addiction, that slowed progress in lowering American infant mortality rates and caused low birth-weight rates to begin rising again in the early ’80s—after a decade of improvement. The leading causes of early infant deaths in the ’80s weren’t drug related; they were ailments like influenza, infections, and pneumonia, all easily prevented or treated by basic health care. Again, black mothers bore the heaviest burden; their infant mortality rates began deteriorating in 1984 (before the crack epidemic took hold) and by 1987, the black-white gap in infant mortality was wider than it had been since the government began collecting such information in 1940. (Black women were being unfairly singled out in the courts and in the press in the antiaddict crusade, anyway. An equal percentage of black and white women in the ’80s were using drugs and alcohol, a survey found; black women were just ten times more likely to be turned in to state authorities than their white counterparts.)
A 1989 University of California research team reviewed records of more than 146,000 births between 1982 and 1986 in California, and found that babies born to parents with no health insurance—a group whose numbers had grown 45 percent in those same years—were 30 percent more likely to die, be seriously ill at birth, and suffer low birth weight; uninsured black women were more than twice as likely as insured black women to have sickly newborns. A similar 1985 Florida report tracing the dire effects of lost prenatal care concluded, “In the end, it is safer for the baby to be born to a drug-abusing, anemic, or diabetic mother who visits the doctor throughout her pregnancy than to be born to a normal woman who does not.”
Proponents of the crackdown on pregnant drug users argued that women could avoid prosecution simply by seeking treatment for their drug habit. Yet treatment for pregnant addicts was largely unavailable. And clinical programs were essential for these women; sudden or un-monitored withdrawal from addictive drugs like heroin can be deadly to both mother and fetus. While government prosecution of drug-addicted women escalated, low-income pregnant women who did want to overcome their drug addiction would have an increasingly hard time finding help in the ’80s as the waiting list for drug rehabilitation programs stretched into the years and many closed their doors to pregnant women to avoid potential liability for drug-related birth defects. Less than 1 percent of federal antidrug funding was aimed at treatment for women—and even less for pregnant women. A survey of seventy-eight drug-treatment programs in New York City found that the vast majority of them refused treatment to poor pregnant women on drugs; 87 percent denied treatment to pregnant women on Medicaid who were addicted to crack. Across the country, two-thirds of hospitals reported that they had no place to refer drug-addicted pregnant women for treatment.
Nonetheless, law enforcement officials were eager to mobilize. The National District Attorneys Association even sponsored a two-day workshop to encourage prosecutors to wage legal war on pregnant women who took drugs. In 1988 in Butte County, California, a particularly crusading district attorney, Michael Ramsey, announced that he would prosecute any mother whose newborn tested positive for cocaine, methamphetamines or heroin, under a statute with a mandatory ninety-day jail term. What he envisioned, he says later, was “a system of choices.” He promised to exempt any woman who was in a drug treatment program. But Butte County had no such programs. What kind of choice was that? He explains, “I don’t see people making a choice unless you force them.”
The first woman snared in Ramsey’s dragnet was an impoverished twenty-seven-year-old heroin addict. For the prosecutor’s purposes, however, she proved to be less than the ideal first criminal. The young woman had, in fact, been traveling 130 miles round trip to the nearest methadone clinic, a $200-a-month private program in Sacramento. When her car broke down, she had hitchhiked. When her funds ran out, the program had discharged her, even knowing that she was pregnant. Two months from her due date, she appealed to several medical providers in the area—without success. None of these mitigating circumstances, however, deterred Ramsey and his pregnancy police squad. When her newborn tested positive for heroin, his team descended on her hospital room less than twenty-four hours after she had given birth, interrogated her, and took away her baby. Or rather, as Ramsey puts it, “We went down and presented her with the options.”
If the point of this prosecutorial policy was to frighten drug-addicted women into seeking help during their pregnancies, the strategy backfired. In Butte County, indigent women with drug problems just began steering clear of hospitals altogether—for fear they would be thrown in jail. At the Chemically Dependent Mothers’ Program in San Diego, after Pamela Rae Stewart’s arrest, the director observed that “women have constantly expressed concerns to me that I would turn them in.” (Stewart herself subsequently went into hiding.) In San Francisco, public-health professionals and social workers were soon reporting a rise in “toilet-bowl babies”—babies born at home, in bathrooms, or on kitchen floors. As deputy city attorney Lori Giorgi, who was seeing more such cases, reported, “They’re afraid their babies will be taken away.”
Doctors, who had first defined the fetus as an independent patient with a right to treatment, now began to define the pregnant woman as an ancillary party with no right to refuse treatment. First the doctors had issued a list of prohibitions, telling pregnant women what they couldn’t do with their own bodies. Then the doctors went on the offensive, telling pregnant women that physicians would now be free to operate on their bodies—with or without their consent. In a 1986 national survey of directors of maternal-fetal medicine fellowship programs, nearly half the doctors said they supported court orders that forced pregnant women to submit to obstetrical procedures—and favored involuntary detention of pregnant women whose failure to submit they believed might pose a risk to the fetus. Less than a quarter consistently supported a competent pregnant woman’s right to refuse her doctor’s orders. In the professional medical literature, physicians and medical school professors were proposing increasingly harsh and punishing methods of dealing with pregnant women who wouldn’t comply with doctors’ orders. Their recommendations included arresting women for “refusal to accept genetic counseling” or for choosing to deliver their baby by midwife against the recommendations of a physician.
The judges backed up the doctors. When the physicians asked for judicial muscle to enforce their will, the courts almost always delivered. The men on the bench, too, while crusading for fetal rights, often seemed to have trouble envisioning the women as full and live persons. A Washington, D.C., Superior Court judge ordered a cesarean section against the wishes of a nineteen-year-old pregnant woman, Ayesha Madyun, with this decree: “All that stood between the Madyun fetus and its independent existence, separate from its mother, was, put simply, a doctor’s scalpel.”
A review of medical institutions in eighteen states between 1981 and 1986 identified thirty-six cases where doctors had gone to court to force an unwilling woman to submit to obstetrical intervention—most times within a day after they first heard of the woman’s refusal. Judges granted all but three of the requested court orders—88 percent within six hours, 20 percent within an hour or less. At times, consent was conveniently granted over the phone. The women’s wishes were ignored in these cases even though in no instance had they been found to be mentally incompetent. And most of these situations weren’t even emergencies; in only two cases did doctors demand a cesarean section because they believed the fetus was in serious medical danger. And these doctors’ judgments were often wrong. Their predictions of harm proved false in six of the fifteen cases involving court-ordered cesareans. In a 1981 court order involving a Georgia woman, doctors testified that without the procedure, the chances of the fetus’s demise were 99 percent. After the court granted the order, the woman went into hiding—and delivered a healthy baby without the operation.
At a time when the rights of patients to refuse treatment in all other areas was gaining legal ground, pregnant women were increasingly losing battles to exercise their right of refusal in the obstetrical ward. The doctors, hospitals, and courts involved in these forced obstetrical surgeries often seemed contemptuous of pregnant women’s rights. In Chicago, a woman expecting triplets was tied down to her hospital bed with wrist and ankle cuffs after she refused to consent ahead of time to a cesarean. Instead of allowing her to seek care elsewhere, the hospital obtained custody of the unborn triplets and got a court order to force her to have the procedure. In at least two instances, the doctors didn’t even bother to get a court order before wheeling their protesting patients into the operating room. In a 1982 Michigan case, the judge didn’t just order a woman to undergo a cesarean against her will; he told her that if she didn’t comply, he would send the police to her house to drag her to the hospital. (She, too, fled and gave birth to a healthy baby.)
In ordering these operations, judges went far beyond the case law on parental duties to live children. The courts have long held that parents cannot be compelled to take actions to benefit their children’s health. In two key cases, the courts refused to force a father to donate a kidney to his dying child and declined even to make parents move to a new climate to aid their ailing child. “To compel the defendant to submit to an intrusion of his body would change every concept and principle upon which our society is founded,” the judge wrote in one such decision. “To do so, would defeat the sanctity of the individual.” It was apparently less of a legal leap to intrude upon the body of a pregnant woman.
The proponents of forced obstetrical surgery argued that protecting the fetus didn’t interfere with pregnant women’s rights in any serious way; even if the mother didn’t want a cesarean, the procedure was unlikely to hurt her. But when it came down to a choice between the health of the mother and the rights of the fetus, the fetus began to win out. This coercive ranking of maternal and fetal rights was nowhere more brutally spelled out than in the case of “A.C.”—the impersonal appellation the court would assign to Angela Carder in her final dehumanizing days.
• • •
ON A June day in 1987, Angela Carder lay in a hospital bed at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C. A twenty-eight-year-old secretary, twenty-six weeks pregnant, she was missing a leg, a casualty of her lifelong war with bone cancer. Doctors had told her before, twice, to be prepared for imminent death. Both times they had been wrong. She was, in fact, one of the first children to survive Ewing’s sarcoma, cancer of the connective tissue.
In 1984, Carder had married and decided she wanted to have a baby. She asked her doctor’s advice. Her cancer had been in remission for several years and her obstetrician told her to go ahead and get pregnant. But midway through her pregnancy, the disease returned with a vengeance. In her sixth month, an inoperable tumor engulfed her lung. She was hospitalized at George Washington and the doctors there issued a terminal prognosis. Her longtime oncologist, who had witnessed Carder pull through before and did not consider her to be a terminal case, recommended radiation and chemotherapy—treatment which Carder wanted, too. “She told the doctor in the beginning she wanted her health to come first,” her mother Nettie Stoner recalls. “Angie had been through too much in her life struggling to survive to give up her life.”
But the doctors at the hospital, who had just entered the case and were giving Carder only days to live, wouldn’t prescribe chemotherapy because they feared it would endanger the fetus. At twenty-six weeks, it was unlikely to survive, but if they could prolong Carder’s life for a couple of weeks—rather than attempting to save it—the fetus would have a better chance. So instead of treating her cancer, they jammed a tube down her throat and pumped her with sedatives, a strategy to delay the hour of death. Carder tried to fight this “treatment,” her mother says, remembering how her daughter thrashed and twisted on the bed, fending off the doctors. “She said, ‘No, no, no. Don’t do that to me.’” But Carder lost the battle and was, quite literally, silenced. With the tube in place, she couldn’t speak.
Word of the Carder case quickly traveled to the hospital’s executive and then legal suites. George Washington Hospital’s lawyers were not oblivious to the current climate on fetal rights. They had seen other hospitals dragged into court by antiabortion activists for failing to pursue heroic measures to save severely compromised fetuses. They began to worry: What if the fetus were “viable”? The hospital could be held liable for its death. The administration proposed that the doctors try to rescue the fetus with immediate intervention—a cesarean section.
In Carder’s fragile state, performing major surgery would likely kill her. Even the hospital’s doctors, who wanted to save the fetus, opposed it. As for the opinion of the patient herself, she was said to be “unconscious” from the sedatives and unavailable for consultation. Rather than waiting a few hours for the drug-induced haze to clear so they could ask Carder’s permission—and without ever seeking the advice of her family—the hospital administration called in a judge.
Superior Court judge Emmet Sullivan came by that very afternoon and set up court in a hospital conference room. On one side: the hospital’s legal team, two city attorneys, and the lawyer for the fetus. On the other: a lone court-appointed attorney representing Carder, appointed a half hour before the hearing.
Carder’s family was invited to the session, but no one apprised them beforehand that it was a hearing to decide their daughter’s fate. While visiting her daughter in the intensive care unit earlier that day, Nettie Stoner recalls a social worker drawing her aside and simply telling her she was needed for a “short meeting” down the hall. “No one told me what was wrong,” Stoner says, and the atmosphere in the conference room only confused her further. “I walked in and they were having lunch catered like a party. They were saying, ‘Have a sandwich! Have a soda!’”
The judge asked for a medical opinion. Each of the physicians in the hospital’s obstetrical department recommended against the operation. Then the fetus’s lawyer, Barbara Mishkin, spoke up. “Well, I suppose it will hasten her death,” she said, but Carder was probably going to die in a few hours anyway. Her rights should be put aside. To support her argument, Mishkin related a story she had heard secondhand. Carder, she told the court, had reportedly said the previous evening that she had “had enough of the pain.” Mishkin concluded from this hearsay evidence that Carder might not have wanted to live anyway, so the fetus’s interests should prevail.
The judge’s questions to Mishkin and the others focused almost exclusively on the fetus. He wanted to know how a cesarean section would affect the fetus’s health—but not how it would affect Carder’s. He championed the fetus’s right to live—but characterized Carder’s struggle to survive as an almost selfish concern for “her own comfort.” Not once did the judge explore or challenge the assumption that Carder was all but dead. Her longtime oncologist was not even invited to the hearing. When Carder’s attorney observed that performing a cesarean on Carder “would in effect be terminating her life,” he was cut off in midsentence by the judge, who said, “She’s going to die.” Hearing this, Carder’s anguished father cried out, “Who is to say she’s going to die?” His question was ignored.
Although Carder lay just down the hall, neither the judge nor the attorneys engaged in this life-and-death proceeding bothered to take the short walk to her room. Later, everyone would have their reasons. “If I wanted to go, then everybody would want to,” is the explanation that Mishkin offers. “I didn’t want to intrude.” She adds, “It was the end of an exhausting day. We couldn’t take any more.”
The judge took a brief recess, then reconvened the hearing. “There’s been some testimony that the performance of a cesarean section may very well hasten the death of Angela,” he told them. “There’s also been testimony that delay in performing the cesarean section greatly in creases the risk to the fetus. . . . Given the choices, the court is of the view the fetus should be given an opportunity to live.” Then he said, “I have ruled”—and told the doctors to operate immediately.
Dr. Louis Hamner from the obstetrical unit returned to Carder’s room to deliver the news. The sedatives were just begining to wear off and Carder was still foggy. He asked her if she wanted the surgery and she mouthed the word “yes.” A half hour later, he returned to her room. This time, she told him, “I don’t want it done, I don’t want it done”—unambiguously and repeatedly. It was, Hamner said, “quite clear to me.”
But when the doctor hastened to the conference room to tell the others still assembled there, they were dubious. The judge said, “The court is still not clear what her intent is.” And one of the city’s lawyers, Richard Love, allowed that Carder’s opinion didn’t matter anyway, because the court had originally made the decision on the assumption that it was to be an operation performed without her consent. The judge agreed and, once more, told the doctors to start the operation.
In a last-ditch effort, Carder’s court-appointed attorney Robert Sylvester called the American Civil Liberties Union Reproductive Freedom Project; the ACLU attorneys filed an emergency appeal for a stay. Within the hour, the case was heard via a conference phone call, with a hastily assembled three-man panel from the appellate court. The judges, told that the operation had to begin at once, agreed to hear all the evidence and make a decision in “sixteen minutes.”
Almost immediately doubts were raised about Carder’s ability to make a decision. Was her “mental frame of mind” impaired? the judges wanted to know. “Does this woman seem to be ambivalent?” Judge Frank Nebecker pressed. “Changed her mind at least twice, is that correct?” The fetus’s attorney Barbara Mishkin told the judges that the operation’s threat to Carder’s life was “insignificant” because she was a terminal cancer patient. It was “not a question of choosing between the life of the mother and the life of the fetus because the mother cannot be restored to normal life expectancy.” The “right of the fetus” to live in this case, she said, “overrides any interest in the mother’s continued very short life.”
Because the attorneys had all been appointed at the last minute, none were well informed of reproductive rights law. The only one attending this telephonic hearing who was familiar with the legal case history in this area was Elizabeth Symonds, the ACLU attorney. The law “is quite clear,” she told the judges. “The Supreme Court unequivocally ruled a woman’s life and health must always prevail over the fetus’s life and health, direct quote 439 U.S. 379, 400.” Judge Nebecker asked her one question, interrupted her midway through the first sentence of her answer, then said, “With the time constraints, we don’t have time to start reading.” Instead, with the sixteen minutes up, the judges ordered the hospital to perform the operation.
A short while later, the doctors delivered a girl. She was said to have “lived” two hours, although it’s unclear how: repeated efforts to inflate her lungs with a respirator were unsuccessful. It was “like trying to ventilate a rock,” Dr. Hamner told a Washington Post reporter later. Nettie Stoner was invited up to see the baby; she recalls the hospital staff handing her a tiny stiff corpse, dressed in a diaper, T-shirt, and cap. A nurse told her that the baby had lived briefly, but Stoner didn’t believe her. “They wanted a live product,” she says bitterly. “They wanted a live product so they could justify what they had done.”
Carder awoke a few hours later. When she was told the baby was dead, she cried. Her mother held her hand and told her it would be okay, that they all loved her and maybe one day she would have another baby. Soon after, Carder slipped into a coma. Two days later, she was dead. An autopsy report determined that the operation was a contributing cause of her death.
Five months later, the Court of Appeals finally issued its written opinion in support of its sixteen-minute decision. “We well know,” the unapologetic opinion said, “that we may have shortened A.C.’s life span.” Carder’s parents would later appeal the order, on the grounds that their daughter had not consented to the operation and that the surgery had violated her right to live. Three years later, the D.C. Court of Appeals finally agreed and ruled the judicial decision in error. But that was three years too late to matter to Angela Carder.
After Carder’s story hit the papers, it entered the popular culture’s feedback loop and soon became grist for an episode of “L.A. Law.” But in the TV version, the judge makes the “right” choice. Fetal rights are vindicated: the mother dies but the baby survives. For Carder’s mother, the show was the final indignity. First the hospital sought to invade her daughter’s body against her will. Then the courts knowingly hastened her daughter’s death. And now Hollywood was going to cover up these crimes. When NBC aired that script, Stoner says, “They took Angela’s story away from her.”
At least in the “fetal-neglect” cases that reached the courts in the ’80s, the doctors and judges were dealing with real fetuses. When corporate America started championing the fetal rights cause, the “unborn children” they proposed saving hadn’t even been conceived.
Starting in the late ’70s and accelerating in the ’80s, at least fifteen of the nation’s largest corporations, from Du Pont to Dow to General Motors, began drafting “fetal protection policies” that limited or barred women from traditionally “male” higher-paying jobs that involved exposure to chemicals or radiation—exposure that the companies said might cause birth defects. By mid-decade, hundreds of thousands of employment opportunities had been closed to women in this way. And a survey of chemical companies found unanimous support for the exclusion of women from these work settings.
On their face, these policies looked like enlightened corporate concern for employees. But they were motivated by liability fears, not compassion. And they were uniformly crafted by companies whose histories suggest that they would welcome an excuse to exclude women. Passed off as progressive efforts by health-conscious corporations, fetal protection policies actually had more in common with the backward “protective labor policies” that had proliferated at the turn of the century, policies that restricted the hours, pay, and type of work women could do—and cost women at least sixty thousand jobs. The proponents of these policies likewise professed benevolent interest in women’s prospective children, but many of these proponents were male union leaders and legislators patrolling all-male turf. As Cigarmakers International stated forthrightly in its 1879 annual report, “We cannot drive the females out of the trade, but we can restrict their daily quota of labor through factory laws.”
In the 1980s, neither corporate America nor the U.S. government made reproductive safety a real priority. In fact, the corporate desire to guard female fertility vanished mysteriously for women who worked outside the high-paid circle of the “male” workplace. Working women were exposed to proven reproductive risks and many of the same chemicals and radiation in garment sweatshops, hospitals, dental offices, dry cleaners, and beauty parlors, but no one was calling for their protection. (Pregnant beauticians suffer a higher rate of toxemia, miscarriage, and premature deliveries; pregnant nurses and hospital technicians are exposed to anesthetic gases, which have been shown to provoke spontaneous abortions.) These companies banned women from their production lines but not their clerical staffs—even though exposure to video display terminals (VDTs) was suspected at the time of causing higher miscarriage rates, birth defects, and other fertility problems. The Reagan administration demonstrated the same double standard over on-the-job reproductive threats. While encouraging fetal protection policies for the 1.4 million women who worked in traditional “men’s” industries, the White House thwarted investigations into the threat that VDT work might pose to 11 million women. When the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) tried to probe the causes behind the higher rates of reproductive problems among Southern Bell VDT operators, the Office of Management and Budget demanded that the agency drop all the survey questions on fertility and stress—claiming that such inquiries had “no practical utility.”
The companies that passed fetal protection policies in the ’80s virtually all belonged to male-dominated industries that had faced intensive federal pressure to hire women a decade earlier. AT&T, for example, which banned women from its computer chip production-line jobs in 1986, was one of the prime EEOC targets in the ’70s. Officials at Allied Chemical were still stewing about laws that “dictate we must use women” when they moved to lay off some female plant packagers—claiming that these women needed protection from the chemical fluorocarbon 22. After two of the women got sterilized so they could keep their jobs, Allied officials admitted that fluorocarbon wasn’t really a fetal hazard after all. And these companies were eager to bar women from more than simply the jobs that involved chemical exposure. Johnson Controls, the nation’s largest auto battery maker, even banned women from the career path leading to these higher-paying jobs. Any slot that might conceivably, through transfer or promotion, advance a worker one day to a lead-exposing job was out-of-bounds for Johnson Controls’ working women.
In making the case for fetal protection, the industries restated the antiabortion movement’s view: fetuses were independent people, women were mere holding units. In a federal survey of industry attitudes toward regulating reproductive hazards, corporate officials and industry lobbyists described the fetus as the “uninvited visitor” who needed protection—and the woman as the “room and board,” who needed to maintain a “safe and healthy environment” for her fetus. One industry group described “the unborn child” as “a member of the public involuntarily brought into controlled areas.”
The companies also repeated judicial priorities on women’s rights in the ’80s—fetuses first, mothers second. In the federal survey on fetal protection policies, company spokesmen consistently said they believed the rights of the prospective fetus should take precedence over the employment rights of women. To the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association, the exclusion of women was a minor inconvenience, “a small price for mothers, potential mothers, and society to pay.”
These same companies weren’t worried enough about unborn children, however, to ban their fathers from the factory floor—in spite of substantial evidence tying birth defects to men’s contact with industrial toxins. An OSHA study found that twenty-one of the twenty-six chemicals currently covered by fetal protection policies also caused male infertility or genetic damage. Johnson Controls barred women from its battery-making plants because of the danger of lead exposure, but it didn’t bother to bar men—even though lead is a well-known reproductive hazard to both sexes. A 1989 survey of 198 large chemical and electronics companies in Massachusetts found that 20 percent had fetal policies restricting women’s employment; none restricted men’s—even though all but one of the chemicals in question were known to pose reproductive hazards for men, too.
Nor was the sudden burst of interest in female reproductive health the result of newly available research. On the rare occasions where the companies bothered to produce data to support their fetal protection policies, they generally replied on a few, antiquated studies. Du Pont based its fetal protection policy on a single animal study, later disproven. More often, the “research” didn’t exist. Of the tens of thousands of occupational chemicals in use, only about 6 percent had been subject to scientific review for reproductive effects. And neither corporate nor federal fetal protectors were rushing to finance new studies. In fact, the Reagan administration severely cut federal funds to support research into occupational and reproductive hazards.
Working women filed suit against Johnson Controls over its extreme fetal-protection policy, which the company had first adopted in 1982. The case inched its way through the judicial system. A federal appeals court upheld the company’s policy. The Bush Administration allied itself with the company’s interests, arguing that such bans on women were perfectly acceptable as long as the employer demonstrated that they were necessary. Finally, in 1991, the Johnson Controls’ female workers triumphed in the Supreme Court; the justices found that the company’s fetal-protection plan violated the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act. The court could not, however, recompense these women for nine years of lost wages and missed employment opportunities. Nor were the corporations touting fetal-protection policies discouraged; they simply shifted to subtler and more sophisticated tactics, “counseling” women in new, required-training sessions about fetal threats on the job, or demanding that women get letters from their doctors permitting them to work, or requiring them to sign legal waivers.
In much the way that Victorian medical manuals had categorized women as “mental” or “uterine,” corporate fetal protection policies of the ’80s divided women into two opposing camps. As these companies would have it, women could choose to be procreators who stayed home—or workers who were sterilized. Take your pick, they told their female employees: Lose your job or lose your womb.
In the case of American Cyanamid, some women would lose both.
• • •
THE COMMERCIAL message of the ’80s backlash received a warm welcome, and additional boosterism, from the American Cyanamid’s beauty division. Marching under its return-to-femininity banner, the Fortune 500 company’s strategists sought a comeback for their ailing Breck Shampoo and hiked sales of their La Prairie skin-“treatment” line. They even hired trend specialist Faith Popcorn to help them to promote “retro” buying habits. But American Cyanamid did more than profit from the backlash; the company pitched in.
Behind the retouched face of the Breck Girl ranged the belching smokestacks of the many chemical and paint plants belonging to this diversified conglomerate. And, like virtually every company in the chemical industry in the early ’70s, American Cyanamid employed a factory work force that was solidly male. When the federal government began to push for integration on the factory floor, American Cyanamid was one of the first chemical companies to feel the pressure. Its Willow Island, West Virginia, plant, in particular, drew the federal investigators’ attention.
Since the 1940s, American Cyanamid had operated this sprawling chemical-based production factory in Pleasant County, in what had quickly become an unpleasing swath of polluted land along the Ohio River. The Willow Island plant was (and still is) the only show in town, its assembly line the only workplace for miles offering a living wage. Set in the heart of a state with the highest unemployment rate in the nation, the plant had at its disposal one of America’s most desperate labor pools. Few residents here, male or female, would have passed up the opportunity to work at American Cyanamid.
Yet when federal investigators visited Willow Island in 1973, they found the company had never hired a woman to work on its production lines. The federal government soon put American Cyanamid on notice to open its factory doors to women or face legal action. By 1974, Willow Island’s plant manager got the word from New Jersey headquarters to start seeking female prospects. Within days after the news reached Pleasant County, women were pouring into the plant’s personnel office. “After we interviewed a couple,” Glenn Mercer, director of industrial relations at the plant, recalled later, “we had no need to recruit. We had an ample supply of applications.”
At the time, Betty Riggs was a young mother and clerk at the Farm Fresh Market in nearby Belmont. One day early in 1974, some of the men from the plant stopped by the store for sandwiches. The company might start hiring women, she heard them complaining. When Riggs pressed for details, they told her the plant was “hard work” and “no place for a woman.”
In Riggs’s experience, men had always talked about a “woman’s place” but wives and mothers had always worked. When she was growing up, the women in her family had put food on the table for the eight children; and when they couldn’t afford groceries, they hunted. “We’d either eat wild meat or we didn’t eat,” Riggs recalls. By the time she was eleven years old, she was holding down a job. After her marriage at fifteen, an unhappy shotgun wedding, she “mostly did the providing.” Her husband drank steadily and worked sporadically. Riggs supported her son, husband, and both parents from her poverty wages at a series of “women’s” jobs: 75 cents an hour as a waitress at the Parkette Truck Stop, $1 an hour as a cashier at Hammet’s Dairy Bar, $2 at Farm Fresh.
When Riggs heard that American Cyanamid was hiring women, she wasted no time applying. When she got no response, she just kept showing up at the company’s personnel office. “I went down about every other day,” she remembers. But even under orders to hire women, the company’s officials proved reluctant equal opportunity employers. As a number of women who applied later reported, the personnel officers told them either they were too feminine for a man’s plant or not feminine enough. Some were told they were “too pretty” to work in a factory; others were advised they were “too fat.” Riggs recalls that the personnel manager told her he wouldn’t hire her because he thought she was overweight and he wasn’t “running a diet clinic.” Riggs shed the pounds, then reapplied. He still wouldn’t hire her.
After a year of nearly daily pilgrimages, Riggs finally got a job offer from American Cyanamid—but it was for a position as a cafeteria worker, paying the same salary as she was drawing at Farm Fresh. She turned it down and kept applying for factory work. Finally, in December 1975, American Cyanamid hired her as a janitor. A few months later, she managed to get a transfer to the lead pigments department—where the pay was six times higher than her Farm Fresh wages.
In the pigments department, Riggs worked as a “cake breaker” and a “blue bagger.” All day, she hoisted fifty-pound pans of solid baked paint from an industrial oven, slid the paint cakes into a grinder, and collected and bagged the blue dust at the other end. “I liked the work a lot,” she recalls. “It was real hard work, real exercise.” In the course of the year, several other women joined Riggs in the department.
Donna Lee Martin was unemployed and desperately searching for work when she heard American Cyanamid was hiring. She had been looking ever since she lost her $4-an-hour position at a fiber plant that had shut down. When she went over to Cyanamid for an interview, the personnel supervisor “asked me about my family and about having to work shift work and having responsible baby-sitters and how I would handle it if my kids were sick.” She told him she could manage it. In October 1974, she accepted a job at the plant as a “helper” in the catalyst department. Six weeks later, she transferred to the pigments department, because she heard the chances for advancement were better there.
Barbara Cantwell Christman was in her late twenties, recently divorced, supporting her two boys. She was taking whatever jobs she could find: hostess at the North Bend State Park dining room, clerk in a garment factory, receptionist in a doctor’s office. In April 1974, she, too, applied to work at Cyanamid. In her job interviews, the personnel officers warned her that she would have to “work midnights with a bunch of horny men.” One of them said she “would possibly have to shovel coal in a coal car” and wondered whether she could really manage it. “I told him yes,” she recalled later in a court deposition. “I had worked in a hayfield and I could do that. He told me I was awfully pretty to want a job like that and I told him I wanted the job. . . . I needed the job.”
All told, thirty-six women were hired for production work between 1974 and 1976. In the pigments department, in the first year that the women joined, both the quality and quantity of production increased dramatically—a fact begrudgingly noted at the plant’s annual banquet that year. Riggs wasn’t surprised that output had improved. She took the company-required quota of twelve completed “center feeds” a night seriously, much to the irritation of her male work partner, who had become used to a more leisurely pace of ten. “You screwed up a good thing,” he told her. She ignored him. “I was hired to do a job,” she says, “and I was going to do it.”
Riggs’s partner wasn’t the only man in the pigments department put out by the female invasion. “Women shouldn’t be in here working, taking jobs away from men,” was a popular refrain. “One guy,” Riggs recalls, “told Barb [Christman], ‘If you were my wife, you’d be home darning my socks and making my dinner.’” She had to laugh; his wife worked. The foreman was fixated on another “problem” posed by the women’s presence. He complained that they were a safety risk because they could “get [a] teat caught in the center feed” or “get their breasts caught in the pan.”
As the women’s numbers mounted, so did the reprisals. One day, the women arrived at work to find this greeting stenciled into a beam over the production floor: SHOOT A WOMAN, SAVE A JOB. Another day, the women found signs tacked on their lockers, calling them “whores.” Riggs found a violent pornographic centerfold stuffed into her locker; the note attached said, “This is what I want to do to you.” In two separate incidents, women fended off sexual assaults in the ladies’ locker room and shower stalls.
For Riggs, the most bitter opposition came from her first husband. He had never been reluctant to use his fists to keep her in line. One year, he had beaten her up so many times that her friends at Farm Fresh gave her an eye patch for Christmas. (It was tragically appropriate; the day she unwrapped the present, she recalls, she had two black eyes.) Before her job at American Cyanamid, Riggs says, she had endured the beatings because her husband owned the house and, when he was working, brought home the larger paycheck—money she badly needed to feed their son and take care of her parents. But now that she was making a decent wage, she had the means to leave him. “That’s why the job at Cyanamid meant so much to me,” she says. “Because I knew one day I had to be on my own.”
Initially, her husband relied on euphemism to deal with his wife’s new financial strength. “When I first started working at the plant, all of it was ‘his money,’” Riggs recalls. “Whenever payday came, he’d make me sign over the check and then he’d say, ‘This is how much you get for the week.’ He said, ‘Don’t tell anyone how much you make.’” He also fought the domestic shift in earning power by refusing to take care of their son while she worked. Even when he was unemployed, she had to hire help. And, Riggs recalls, “I had to keep getting new baby-sitters because he couldn’t keep his hands off of them.”
Eventually, he resorted to more direct and brutal strategies. He locked her in the house or beat her until she was too bruised to appear in public. One day, after he had smashed her head against the kitchen floor until she had passed out, she made her move. She left and filed for divorce. Her exodus only accelerated his violence. Soon after the separation, he sought out a job at the plant and continued the harassment there, in increasingly frightening ways. One night, she came out to the parking lot to find her car on fire. Another night on the graveyard shift, he slipped into the pigments department, sneaked up behind her, and flung her to the ground. He pummeled her face until her glasses broke. “There was another guy there,” Riggs recalls, “and he just stood and watched. The foreman . . . just ran out of the room. He didn’t want to be a witness.” She reported the attack to the company’s safety officer, who agreed only to give her husband a “verbal warning.”
• • •
The women at the Willow Island plant were determined to stay no matter what the men did. But, starting in the late 1970s, a bigger opponent than their blue-collar male colleagues loomed: the company’s top management. In 1976, the plant abruptly stopped hiring women. That same year back at headquarters, company executives decided to develop a fetal protection policy. American Cyanamid had never demonstrated a strong desire to protect factory workers in the past—employees at the explosion-prone Willow Island plant had worked for years in dirty and dangerous conditions. Suddenly, though, management was worried about reproductive hazards in the factory. American Cyanamid’s corporate medical director, Dr. Robert Clyne, quickly drafted a policy statement that would prohibit all women of childbearing age from working in production jobs that exposed them to any of twenty-nine chemicals.
The protection plan wasn’t a response to complaints from female employees; as Clyne himself conceded, there were none he was aware of, and he never had plant physicians survey workers about possible reproductive problems, anyway. Nor was the move inspired by scientific research. The company’s medical department neither reviewed the literature nor conducted any independent research on the reproductive risks of the chemicals that it had singled out. As Clyne explained later, the twenty-nine chemicals were “compiled as a result of a quick review of computer sheets.” In fact, only one of the selected toxins, lead, was actually known to cause reproductive damage. And while lead is a risk to both sexes, Clyne didn’t consider reproductive hazards for men. “We just did not have enough information to incorporate that facet of it at that time,” he said later in a court deposition. In a radio interview, he said that if it were determined that men’s reproductive abilities were being threatened by conditions at the plant, he wouldn’t call for men’s removal: “Other steps will be taken to protect the man; either possibly discontinuing the manufacture of the product or using personal protective garments, or respirators.” Nor did the company consider another solution—reducing the level of toxins in the workplace instead of banishing the women. The company later claimed that there was “no technology available” that was up to the task. A government inspection, however, had found that some changes in engineering controls could have lowered lead exposure to federally acceptable levels for both sexes. But the price tag—$700,000—apparently didn’t appeal to Cyanamid management.
In 1978, the company unveiled the first draft of its fetal protection policy. “We recognize that this may infringe on the scope of jobs available to the individual woman,” the company’s executive committee stated in an in-house memo, “but in our judgment this is certainly the lesser of the two evils.”
The policy wasn’t official yet, but Willow Island’s managers decided to enforce it at once. In a series of meetings in January and February of 1978, industrial relations director Glenn Mercer summoned women to the plant medical office to lay down the new ground rules. After May 1, he told them, no fertile woman under fifty would be allowed to work in eight of ten departments—a ruling that eliminated all but seven factory jobs for women—unless they were surgically sterilized. As Mercer put it to the women, the company was “getting the jump on OSHA,” which, he assured them, would be passing similar regulations any day now. Riggs recalls: “He told us it was going to be worldwide. He said there was going to be a time in the future when women wouldn’t work at any chemical plant unless they were sterile.”
The women began asking questions. Was he going to lay off the younger men to make way for displaced women with more seniority? No, he answered, just women. What if they took birth control pills? Not good enough, Mercer said, because they might “forget.” What if they agreed to take monthly pregnancy tests? Mercer shook his head again. What if their husbands already had a vasectomy? No, Mercer said. It was the women who had to have the operation.
The women asked for a list of the chemicals in question. Mercer said he didn’t have it handy but that there were “hundreds of them,” with more being added “almost on a daily basis.” Then a company nurse and doctor stepped forward to explain to the women that sterilization was simple and could be obtained locally. With that, the meeting was adjourned and the women filed out, most too shaken to speak.
• • •
Donna Martin listened to Mercer’s speech with mounting horror. She knew she didn’t have enough seniority to get one of the seven remaining jobs. How was she going to support her five children? Her husband was out of work, and they were already beset by financial problems. For weeks she agonized, and the more she turned it over in her mind, the more depressed she became: “Mentally, I couldn’t handle the pressure of having to choose between losing my job and never having more children.” She had some painkillers left over from an old neck injury; in February she took an overdose and wound up in the hospital for a month.
Within a week after her release from the hospital, she had decided to have the surgery “so I would quit worrying about losing my job.” She went to Dr. George Gevas, a local obstetrician, signed a consent form for the operation that same day and scheduled surgery the following week—because she wanted to be sure she met the company’s May Day deadline for sterilization. Afterward, frightened that she could lose her job if she stayed away too long, Martin allowed herself only three weeks of recuperation—“that was the shortest time he [Gevas] would agree to me being off,” she said.
When Martin returned to work, she discovered that the plant management had postponed the deadline for surgery in her absence; the corporation’s medical department was redrafting the fetal protection policy. Deadlines were set, then extended, throughout the summer. Finally, that September, the plant’s officials made a final announcement: The list of chemicals had been reduced from twenty-nine to one, lead, and only the women working in the lead pigments department would be affected. These women, he said, had until October 2 to choose between sterilization and termination.
Barbara Christman wanted to have more children, but she also desperately needed her job. Like Martin, the more she pondered the alternatives, the more she got “all messed up worrying about it.” Finally, she, too, went to Dr. Gevas. He scheduled surgery for the very next day. When Christman surfaced from the anesthesia, she found herself in an inappropriate locale. The hospital had considerately assigned her a bed in the maternity ward.
Betty Riggs and Lola Rymer also made appointments with Dr. Gevas. The doctor, Rymer recalled, gave each of them a lecture; he said it was “a poor way to hold on to a job” but “if you want it done, I’ll do it.” Both said yes, and he scheduled their operations for the same day. As Riggs says later, she just didn’t see any other option: “I did what I did because I was more or less the sole supporter for a lot of people who were depending on me. I couldn’t let them down. I was up against a brick wall and there was no place to go but forward.”
In the end, five of the seven women in the pigments department were sterilized. The company bumped the remaining two to the janitorial staff.
Back at corporate headquarters, the news of the sterilizations would eventually reach the company physician who had drafted the fetal protection policy. Dr. Clyne heard about it from a woman during an office meeting, but the news didn’t seem to trouble—or even much interest—him. Questioned about it later during a deposition, he responded this way:
Q: Did she tell you anything else?
CLYNE: No.
Q: Did you ask her any questions?
CLYNE: It was more or less of a brief aside. . . . It was just a piece of information that was delivered to me.
Riggs returned to work depressed—and frightened. “I wondered . . . if they didn’t get rid of us this way, what would be next?” Her first week back, she recalls, Mercer called her into his office and proposed that, even though she had been sterilized, maybe she would like to transfer out of the pigments department anyway. He warned her that if she stayed she would be “branded” by the men. She told him, “I’ve never done anything that I’m ashamed of.” Mercer had a similar talk with Christman. When she took two or three days to think about it, he complained. She told him that “it was a hard decision and I needed some time to think. And he said he needed to really know because he had a lot of scheduling and things to do and by my not deciding he didn’t know how to work his work schedule.”
Both women decided to stay in the pigments department. It wasn’t the easy route; as Mercer predicted, they were branded. Soon after Donna Martin returned from her operation, one of the guards handed her an insurance pamphlet on maternity coverage. The men in the department jeered that the women had been “spayed.” “You’re one of the boys now” and “The veterinarian’s having a special” were two favorite lines. The management’s attitude was little better: its own literature referred to the women as “neutered.”
In early 1979, OSHA conducted an inspection of the Willow Island plant. As news of the investigation spread, along with rumors that the company was considering layoffs or cutbacks in the pigments department, tensions rose even higher. “You women are going to get this place closed down,” men in the pigments department began shouting. “You’re the ones who got us into all this trouble.” That October, OSHA ruled that American Cyanamid had violated the Occupational Safety and Health Act and ordered the company to pay a $10,000 fine. The policy constituted a “hazard” of employment, OSHA found, because it had essentially coerced women into sterilization. In addition, OSHA noted that the lead exposure was equally dangerous to men, and should be cleaned up. American Cyanamid responded by shutting down the pigments department. The jobs the five women had sacrificed their wombs to keep were gone.
In 1980, American Cyanamid contested the government ruling and an OSHA review commission agreed to set aside the citation, concluding that the violation was not covered by the OSHA Act because the hazard it posed did not “operate directly upon employees.” The Labor Department began preparing an appeal to that decision, but just then the Reagan administration took over, and the appeal was dropped.
Meanwhile, the women were seeking legal relief themselves—first from the state civil rights commission, then the local office of the EEOC. After officials at both agencies made it clear that it would take years for a government ruling, the women turned to the union and legal services. The Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International agreed to pursue the legal appeal that the Labor Department had abandoned. And, in a separate action, thirteen women from the plant also filed suit against the company, charging violations of the federal Civil Rights Act.
The union’s case wound up before federal appellate Judge Robert Bork, and in 1984, he ruled in favor of the company. The fetal protection policy wasn’t hazardous, he wrote, because the women had “the option” of surgical sterilization: “The company was charged only because it offered the women a choice.” The women’s civil rights action would peter out after three and a half years of pretrial proceedings. The company outspent them by millions of dollars. In 1983, they accepted the company’s small settlement offer—$200,000 to be divided among the remaining eleven plaintiffs.
• • •
The women who participated in the suit would be among the first laid off in the ’80s. And when they went looking for work elsewhere, they found that their reputations as troublemakers had preceded them. Betty Riggs, the most outspoken, had the hardest time. She finally had to settle for a minimum-wage job at a state park—as a maid. It was back to women’s work.
One day in 1987, Betty Riggs was sitting with some friends in the gloomy Sunshine Club near the plant, watching Judge Bork’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings on television. Much to her surprise, one of the congressmen on the panel asked about the American Cyanamid decision. She listened carefully as Bork explained his thinking on the case: “I suppose the five women who chose to stay on the job and chose sterilization, I suppose they were glad to have the choice.” Stunned, Riggs jumped up from her seat and found herself addressing the room. “Did you hear that? That lying, lying man.” Desperate “to do something,” Riggs sent a telegram to the Senate Judiciary Committee:
I cannot believe that Judge Bork thinks we were glad to have the choice of getting sterilized or getting fired. Only a judge who knows nothing about women who need to work could say that. I was only twenty-six years old, but I had to work, so I had no choice. . . . This was the most awful thing that ever happened to me. I still believe that it was against the law, whatever Bork says.
The letter inspired only two responses. An aide to one of the senators called to say he found the letter too well written—he wanted to know whether an attorney had “put her up to it.” And at the hearings, Senator Alan Simpson said that he found Riggs’s telegram “offensive.”
By the end of the decade, Bork’s rhetoric had traveled the backlash circuit, from the court record to the press accounts and finally back to Pleasant County, West Virginia, where it would be invoked, time and again, to discount the women’s plight. On a spring morning in 1988, Steve Tice and a friend, both former Cyanamid plant workers recently laid off at the plant, are lounging against one of the many shuttered storefronts down the road from the factory. Asked about the case of the Willow Island women, Tice shrugs and says: “Everybody had a choice. They shouldn’t have went ahead and done it [gotten sterilized] and then raised hell about it. It just got too easy for the women to complain about every little thing.”
In nearby Parkersburg, on a tree-lined street in the older section of town, Dr. Gevas maintains a thriving private practice. He offers a similar analysis. “I feel these women had a choice,” he says. “If they had a rope around their neck or a gun to their head, then the women would have had a good case. But they had a choice.”
The company’s industrial relations manager, Glenn Mercer, lives on another well-groomed street; in the yard, rosebushes are in full and fecund bloom. Mercer plants his legs on the wide porch and folds his arms. “I don’t care to talk about it,” is the only answer he offers to each question put to him. Finally, asked if he has any regrets about his instructions to the women, he says: “None whatsoever. That’s all I’ll say. I have no regrets.” Then he retreats inside, slamming the door.
• • •
WITH ALL avenues for public redress closed, the women’s anguish turned inward. In the years since the operations, each of the five sterilized women of Cyanamid has come to think of herself as “unfeminine” and “incomplete.” Some say they have stopped sleeping with their husbands—they don’t feel “woman enough.” All have suffered crippling bouts of depression. And when they have sought help, from therapists or doctors, their despair has only been treated, or in some cases deepened, with prescriptions for mind-numbing drugs. They were medicated with tranquilizers, antidepressants, and lithium.
For a long time after the operation, Betty Riggs simply withdrew from the world around her. “I became cold and very unloving to a lot of the needs of other people,” she recalls. On the street, just seeing a woman with a child filled her with envy and shame. At home, “any TV show that had anything to do with family life just tore me apart.” It was as if, Riggs says, “I just couldn’t get my mind and my body and my heart together. . . . I was less than a person. I was lacking something. It’s like your sole individuality just went right down the drain. Like you gave up your only right.”
It was, moreover, the one “right” that the backlash era was supposed to be championing. The women at American Cyanamid, like women in every area, class, and occupation across the country in the ’80s, had been on the receiving end of a relentless cultural barrage. It told them motherhood was their highest calling. It told them they could restore their femininity by giving up their jobs. It told them they could only make economic and public progress by forsaking domestic and private happiness. While this program had little bearing on or practical relevance to the hard-pressed lives that Betty Riggs and her co-workers were leading, it could still make them feel “lacking” in the most deeply personal and agonizing ways.
The “choice” American Cyanamid gave these employees, like so many of the other options the backlash magnanimously granted women, was framed as a clear-cut and forward-looking development—it represented progress for women. Feminism had opened up choices for women, and now the corporations, the courts, and the rest of the society claimed they were doing the same. The American Cyanamid case shows, through the very extremity and horror of what happened to the women caught up in it, how much of a lie the backlash’s language of “choice” really was. There was never anything straightforward, helpful, or enlightened about the options presented the Cyanamid women. In fact, their alternatives were paradoxical, harmful, and regressive—and rigged against them from the start.
These were women who had no choice in the matter of their working: it was both a necessity—required by the economy they lived in and the unreliable men in their lives—and a basic source of self-sufficiency and self-respect. They had to work and they wanted to work; yet no one
the male workers they had to work beside nor the men whose beds they shared. If they kept working, they were humiliated at the office, assailed in the shower stalls, and beaten at home; if they tried to obey the social signals and go home, they would starve.
most glorious reason for living. The backlash told women they must choose between a womanly existence and an independent one, and it made the choice for them; it told women that if they gave up the unnatural struggle for self-determination, they could regain their natural femininity. But the women at Cyanamid weren’t even offered this preselected option. First the company’s fetal protection policy defined the women by their wombs, then it forced them to make the decision themselves to cut their wombs from their bodies. And having compelled the choice, the company ultimately revoked all options—the working women were sent home anyway, without their uteruses.
The distress these women felt was, in large measure, the result of the signals they picked up from their culture and the way these signals conflicted with the real circumstances of their lives. It was a predicament that, to one degree or another, women all over America faced during the ’80s. The particular tragedy for the women at American Cyanamid was that these signals conflicted and pushed them to make “choices” in irrevocable, starkly physical ways.
The backlash could never mold America into the backward-looking, dad-hailing, nuclear family fantasy it promoted. But it could implant that image in many women’s minds and set up a nagging, even tormenting dissonance. If women were miserable in the ’80s—and no doubt many were, more so as the backlash deepened—it was not for the reason most widely offered. In the end, feminism and the freedoms that came with it had little part in making women unhappy. It was rather that women’s desire for equality, an impulse that refused to disappear throughout the decade, kept clashing with the backlash’s agenda, spurring women to batter against the walls of self-doubt and recrimination that the backlash helped to build.
The backlash gave women a prescription for happiness that wouldn’t and couldn’t be effective. It split women’s lives into two half lives, work and home, and then billed the latter as a full, fulfilled existence. When women resisted the prescription, they were made miserable through psychological and material punishments; when they tried to follow it, they found that it was a faulty cure—half fantasy, half punishment—that had no place in their contemporary lives. In fact, it had never been effective; it was always a poor substitute. It could never meet the basic human needs and desires that women have brought forward time and again through the centuries—and that society has always sought to turn back.