Guttmacher was born in 1898. His father was a rabbi, his mother a social worker. In 1916, when a nurse named Margaret Sanger opened the nation’s first birth-control clinic, in Brooklyn, and was promptly arrested, Guttmacher was eighteen years old and a sophomore at Johns Hopkins. He formed his ideas about contraception and abortion in the nineteen-twenties. “I graduated from medical school firm in the belief that abortion was a simple, straightforward matter: bad guys did it; good guys did not,” Guttmacher explained, but “four years of hospital residency, and several experiences during my early years of practice, radically changed my attitude.” When he was a young doctor, Guttmacher’s patients included a mother of four (“the second person I ever saw die”) who, “screaming vainly for life,” died after what was probably a self-induced abortion: there was not a thing he, or anyone, could do to save her.
In 1933, Guttmacher wrote a guide for expectant parents called “Life in the Making.” A decade later, he was named chief of obstetrics at Baltimore’s Sinai Hospital. In 1952, Guttmacher moved to New York to become chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Mount Sinai and a clinical professor at Columbia. He also joined the National Medical Board of Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood grew out of Sanger’s work, but Sanger herself had become disenchanted with it. In 1956, forty years after she opened that clinic, Sanger reflected that what she had founded was “a fighting, forward, no fooling movement, battling for the freedom of the poorest parents and for women’s biological freedom and development.” Sanger believed that Planned Parenthood had “left all this behind.” In 1960, Guttmacher was quoted (falsely, he claimed) in an interview as referring to “the late Margaret Sanger,” after which Sanger, who was very much alive, wrote to him, “I think as a gentleman, if you have any sensitivity whatever, you will send in your resignation and demand that it sticks.” Instead, two years later, Guttmacher was named Planned Parenthood’s president. In his first annual report, he made a list of the organization’s goals, including this one: “End failure of most public health and welfare agencies to provide birth control services.”
During almost the whole of Margaret Sanger and Alan Guttmacher’s lives, both contraception and abortion were illegal in parts if not all of the United States. Only in 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, a case brought by Estelle Griswold, the executive director of the Planned Parenthood of Connecticut, did the Supreme Court declare laws banning contraception unconstitutional.
Sanger died in 1966. The next year, Guttmacher edited a book called “The Case for Legalized Abortion Now.” He believed that abortion was necessary “until contraception is so widely practiced that unwanted pregnancy … disappears.” He argued, therefore, that any future evaluation of abortion law would have to answer three questions: “First: Does the law promote reduction in abortion deaths and abortion-connected illness? Second: Does it largely eliminate ethnic and economic discrimination? Third: Does it curtail the number of illegal abortions?”
In Roe, decided in January of 1973, the Court deemed statutory restrictions on abortion in Texas unconstitutional. Following Griswold, the 7-2 opinion cited a constitutional right to privacy. In the essay that Reader’s Digest published that November, Guttmacher attempted to explain the ruling. He also tried to explain himself. He told the story of going to a hospital, in Boston, to give a lecture. He was met by protesters, one of whom “wore a white surgeon’s gown spattered with red paint, and carried a sign that cried ‘Murderer.’” Guttmacher wrote, “My reaction was one of sadness. For much of my life, I have been subjected to similar denunciation. Until recent years, its focus was my stand in favor of birth control. Now that contraception is applauded, and used by virtually all Americans, I am condemned for my liberal stand on abortion.”
Guttmacher died in 1974. What he would make of abortion politics four decades after Roe can be neither known nor guessed at, but, in that Reader’s Digest piece, he explained that he found the divisiveness of the issue puzzling: “The ironic fact is that those who oppose and those who favor legalization of abortion share a common goal—the elimination of all abortion.”
The conventional explanation for what has happened in the forty years since Roe is known as the backlash argument. It sees the Court as having overreached, by acting ahead of both state legislatures and public opinion, leading to grassroots protest, the birth of the pro-life movement, and, ultimately, a debased form of partisanship. In 2011, the legal scholars Reva Siegel and Linda Greenhouse published an essay in the Yale Law Journal called “Before (and After) Roe.” They argued that the backlash argument gets the story both backward and upside down. Opposition to the legalization of abortion, they claimed, wasn’t bottom-up but top-down, and it wasn’t backlash; it was frontlash. Siegel and Greenhouse demonstrated that turning abortion into a partisan issue had been part of a strategy, crafted by Nixon’s advisers, to reinvent the G.O.P. and get Nixon reëlected—before Roe. “No American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition,” Nixon said in 1969. Anticipating the opponents he would face in his run for reëlection, Nixon began to rethink his positions on contraception and abortion. “If the President should publicly take his stand against abortion, as offensive to his own moral principles,” Patrick Buchanan advised, in a memo dated March 24, 1971, “we can force Muskie to make the choice between his tens of millions of Catholic supporters and his liberal friends at the New York Times and the Washington Post.” A week later, Nixon issued a statement expressing his “personal belief in the sanctity of human life—including the life of the yet unborn.”
Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, pro-life activists began steering away from attempts to overturn Roe and toward efforts to weaken it, chiefly by lobbying for new laws, especially in state legislatures, restricting access to abortion. A new record was set in 2011, when ninety-two new abortion-restriction provisions were passed across the country, followed by forty-three in 2012. Meanwhile, contraception, although used almost universally by American women, remains politically controversial. Only last year it was the subject of heated controversy during the Presidential race, when some Republican Presidential hopefuls objected to provisions regarding contraception in the new federal health care law. Mitt Romney dodged. “Look, the idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman, husband and wife, I’m not going there,” he said. Lately, “there” seems not quite far enough from where it was in 1916, when Sanger was arrested for prescribing pessaries.
Looking back, it seems clear that the abortion-rights movement embraced the rhetoric of privacy at the cost of making an argument about equality. National political figures rarely use the word “poverty” any more, but the Guttmacher Institute this year reports that among poor women, the rate of unwanted pregnancy is five times higher than for wealthier women: four in ten women who have abortions are poor. The Institute, founded in 1968, took Guttmacher’s name in 1977. Its mission is to advance “sexual and reproductive health and rights.” But the political discussion of abortion involves more talk about rights than about health. That’s one problem. Another is that most of that talk has been coming from the right. The assertion of a constitutional right to privacy has been answered by the assertion of fetal rights, a claim that challenges not only Roe but also several forms of contraception and, possibly, Griswold itself. Guttmacher’s two key ideas—that contraception would replace abortion and that public health would trump politics—seem, in retrospect, regrettably naïve.
In 2011, when I was researching an article for the magazine about Planned Parenthood, one of the people with whom I talked was Reva Siegel, and one of the most remarkable things she said had to do with how effectively the backlash narrative has intimidated the left. “The right has raised a generation of people who understand that courts matter and who will vote on that basis and can be mobilized to vote on that basis and who are willing to pay political costs for votes,” Siegel said. “This is completely lacking on the other side.” Law students and young lawyers, Siegel believes, are convinced that Roe is the source of the polarization of Americans politics. In response, those on the left “have an inhibition about using litigation for social-change purposes,” while appeals to the courts are “the bread and butter of the right, whether it’s campaign finance or guns or affirmative action.”
If so, Roe’s legacy has hardly begun.
Original Article
Source: new yorker
Author: Jill Lepore
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