Abortion as a problem of women's rights also has deep historical roots, even if abortion itself was a latecomer to the bundle of issues that women's rights activists long pursued under the rubric of gender equality. The women's rights pioneers of the 19th century, without directly confronting pregnancy and birth, pushed for an expansion of women's social and political roles beyond the confines of the home, thus challenging the widespread assumption that motherhood was destiny and, therefore, that womanhood was incompatible with the rights, responsibilities, and opportunities associated with manhood and full citizenship. The call for "voluntary motherhood" during this time did not encompass a call for reproductive freedom in the modern sense. Instead, it was a response to the proliferation of illicit sexuality among men (expressed in prostitution and the spread of venereal diseases), which was perceived as a threat to the integrity of the family and women's place therein. In the early 20th century, the birth control movement more directly confronted women's efforts at controlling their own reproductive lives but did so without including abortion among the birth control practices they sought to make available to women. Nonetheless, the emphasis on planned parenthood placed reproductive control at the center of women's liberation as well as the well-being of the nation more generally. What the abortion rights movement added to these earlier movements was a reformulation of the foundation upon which women's reproductive agency rested: Whereas motherhood had been a powerful platform of earlier activists and a justification for expanded social and political influence, the abortion rights movement, precisely because it emphasized that motherhood was a choice rather than an inevitable conclusion of womanhood, helped sever the link between women's rights and women's roles as mothers.

When the movement gained political momentum during the 1960s, there was growing recognition that the prohibition against abortion not only was ineffective but also placed women at a distinct health disadvantage precisely because abortion was illegal and therefore often medically unsafe. While the medical solution to the problem of illegal abortion was a modest expansion of the grounds for legal abortion, advocates of women's rights offered a much more profound reinterpretation of abortion. Abortion, they argued, was not a medical problem to be solved by doctors once they were convinced that women really "needed" them, but instead a collective problem impacting all women. Abortion, in short, was part of a much larger problem of women's rights and, therefore, political at its very core. Hence, according to this movement, only if the abortion decision was placed in the hands of women could the problem ever be solved; that is, women needed full authority over the abortion decision irrespective of their reasons.

The tension around abortion as an unconstrained choice captures the fundamental disagreements over motherhood--and, by extension, gender roles--that have permeated the abortion conflict since the early 19th century. These disagreements, then as now, focus less on the extent to which women in fact have abortions than on the extent to which women's reasons for having abortions are justifiable or not.

Bibliography:

1) Burns, Gene. 2005. The Moral Veto: Framing Contraception, Abortion, and Cultural Pluralism in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press.

2) Ferree, Myra Marx, William Anthony Gamson, Jurgen Gerhards, and Dieter Rucht. 2002. Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press.

3) Ginsburg, Faye D. 1989. Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

4) Luker, Kristin. 1984. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

5) Mohr, James C. 1978. Abortion in America. New York: Oxford University Press.

6) Reagan, Leslie J. 1997. When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and the Law in the United States, 1867-1973. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

7) Staggenborg, Suzanne. 1991. The Pro-choice Movement: Organization and Activism in the Abortion Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press.

8) Tribe, Laurence H. 1990. Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes. New York: Norton.

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