Roe v. Wade 35th Anniversary

Roe v. Wade turns 35 this month.  With this anniversary, we mark over three decades of reproductive freedom and progress towards women’s equality.  The ability to control whether and when to have children is critical to women’s ability to participate in the social, economic and political life of the country.  Access to contraception and abortion have allowed so many women to make important life decisions.  But we still have a long way to go in achieving freedom and fairness.

First, the good news.  America’s classrooms, boardrooms and legislatures have been transformed since Roe. Women currently make up 57 percent of college students - up from 42 percent in 1970 - and are obtaining advanced degrees in record numbers.  In the mid 1970s, women made up only 16 percent of medical school graduates; today they constitute nearly 50 percent.  Women holding science and engineering doctoral degrees have more than quadrupled since the late 1960s.  In 1973, there were 15 women in Congress and only three women had ever held the office of state governor.  Today, 92 women sit in Congress (including the first ever Madame Speaker) and 26 women have served as governors. And the ranks of women CEOs in Fortune 500 companies have grown from one in 1973 to 12 in 2007. 

Now for the sobering reality.  The most vulnerable women in American society have suffered disproportionately from assaults on reproductive freedom and correspondingly have not enjoyed equal opportunity with more privileged women.  Government policies throughout the United States create barriers to abortion for teenagers, poor women, women of color, and women living in rural areas.  They lack the access to health care and counseling that would accord them meaningful reproductive freedom (both the ability to end unintended pregnancies and obtain quality prenatal care).  Without control over childbearing, these women cannot share in equal educational and employment opportunities.

California has not been immune from attacks on vulnerable women’s reproductive rights.  The Legislature eliminated Medi-Cal funding for abortion 12 years in a row and passed a law requiring teenagers to obtain parental or court consent for abortion.  These draconian measures never took effect only because of court orders and ultimately, decisions from the California Supreme Court protecting the privacy rights of poor women and young women under our state Constitution.

But these fundamental rights are still not secure—even in California.  The proponents of Proposition 73 (on the 2005 ballot) and Proposition 85 (on the 2006 ballot) have twice attempted to amend the California Constitution to restrict teenagers’ access to abortion. They are now gathering signatures for a third initiative to endanger pregnant teenagers for the November 2008 ballot. 

Reproductive freedom and equal opportunity, denied to too many women in America, are now threatened for all women.  Those who oppose reproductive rights have not only restricted access to abortion but authored a revisionist history to support those restrictions—that abortion harms women.  In last year’s Supreme Court decision upholding the first ever federal criminal abortion law, the majority justified the ban in part as a protection for women against the emotional consequences of their own foolish decisions.  The majority acknowledged that it had no evidence that women suffered psychological harm from abortion (and in fact empirical evidence conclusively shows that coerced childbearing, not the ability to end unintended pregnancy, inflicts psychological damage).

The Court's only woman, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, argued in her passionate dissent that the government may not constitutionally prevent women from making fundamental childbearing decisions to "protect" them from making the wrong decisions.  Women are not harmed by having choices.  They are harmed by a government that refuses to respect their ability to make choices.  The right to decide whether to have children, Justice Ginsburg wrote, is central to a woman’s “autonomy to determine her life’s course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature.”

How should we celebrate Roe’s 35th birthday?  The anniversary should inspire us to make two commitments: we must constantly reaffirm the importance of reproductive freedom to women’s equality, and we must also remember that many women lack both reproductive freedom and  equal opportunity. They do not share in the promise that Roe holds out. And it’s our responsibility to make that promise real.

-Maya Harris
Executive Director of the ACLU of Northern California
January 24, 2008