In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (19 page)

Her activism made her a natural for the newly formed Center for Constitutional Rights, where Arthur Kinoy became her mentor. Most civil rights attorneys specialized in defense cases, but Kinoy went on the offensive by initiating federal lawsuits with massive numbers of plaintiffs. “Arthur’s babies,” as Stearns called his protégés, were always on the lookout for a fresh constitutional angle that could involve huge numbers of people. A class action suit with a vocal constituency was the Center’s favorite form of political action.

In 1969, Stearns knew, the legal front on abortion consisted of a handful of criminal defense cases. Among the most promising were
Belous
and
Vuitch
. Dr. Leon Belous, a prominent physician, had been arrested in California for making a referral. Dr. Milan Vuitch, respected
on the grapevine for his compassionate low prices, had been arrested in Washington, D.C. People in NARAL and Planned Parenthood believed there was a chance, slim but entirely possible, that one of the doctors’ cases could be decided favorably by the Supreme Court.

Stearns had begun to mull over another strategy. She had come across an article by Harriet Pilpel suggesting that abortion was a woman’s constitutional right under a penumbra of privacy and liberty protections in the Ninth and Fourteenth amendments. A woman’s right. Due process. Equal protection. Pilpel, a lawyer for Planned Parenthood, had left her revolutionary idea in the realm of theory. Stearns wanted to test it in court.

That August she found some likely confederates at a brainstorming session of Health/PAC. The inadequacies of medical care for poor people had activated a number of radicals around the country to make health and hospital issues their primary cause. Barbara Ehrenreich had founded Health/PAC from a socialist perspective, seeing the profit motive in medicine as the core problem, but her group was feeling the rumble of Women’s Liberation from within. A women’s collective in Health/PAC led by Rachel Fruchter and Dr. June Finer wanted to mount an assault on the sexism of doctors in obstetrics and gynecology. The question was, how?

Stearns proposed that they organize in a new way around abortion. Instead of waiting for rulings in
Belous
and
Vuitch
, they could go on the offensive in federal court. “Let’s bring an affirmative case in New York on behalf of the people who are really harmed,” she urged. “Not the doctors. The women.”

She laid out her plan. Hundreds of women could sign on as plaintiffs—women who could not get a legal abortion, women who had resorted to illegal means, women who’d been forced to endure unwanted pregnancies for the full nine months only to give their babies up for adoption. Health/PAC could hold meetings all over the city, all over the state. Rachel could talk about the politics of health care; June could discuss the medical aspects of abortion: Nancy could talk about the law. Together, they’d encourage the women to speak about their own encounters with OB-GYN at city hospitals and clinics. It was the Arthur Kinoy strategy of activating the masses through the
feminist process of consciousness-raising as applied to the Fourteenth Amendment theory of Harriet Pilpel. The women’s collective in Health/PAC loved it.

Stearns enlisted four more women attorneys, including Diane Schulder, an early member of New York Radical Women, and Flo Kennedy, always on hand to “kick ass” (as she liked to say) and carry the banner for women of color. The Women’s Health Collective trekked around the city holding meetings in people’s living rooms and signing up names.
Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz
was filed in federal district court in October 1969 with 350 plaintiffs, nearly all women. Doubting her own strategy at the last minute, Stearns added a couple of doctors and clergymen to the list. She needn’t have bothered. Three companion suits were filed simultaneously, one on behalf of prominent physicians saying the abortion ban inhibited good medical practice, one on behalf of abortion counselors, who were breaking the law, and one representing indigent families. The four suits were consolidated by the court.

The lawyers for the women’s suit won a huge concession in January 1970 when they got the green light to take personal testimony at the federal courthouse. Diane Schulder, who had heard me blurt out my story at New York Radical Women, asked me to come down and be deposed. Flo Kennedy conducted the questioning. She neglected to tell me that a reporter for the
Times
was present in the hearing room; it was an odd sensation to read about my abortions in the next day’s paper. Things were moving very rapidly, so rapidly, in fact, that in April the New York State Legislature passed a bill introduced by Constance Cook, a Republican assemblywoman from Ithaca and member of NOW, making abortion legal during the first two trimesters.

The lobbying in Albany had been heated and fractious, with accusations hurled and temperatures rising—on our side, that is. If our opponents also were split into hostile factions, we didn’t know it. Cindy Cisler’s New Yorkers for Abortion Law Repeal took an all-or-nothing position, urging legislators to vote No on the Cook bill because it fell short of total repeal. NOW and NARAL people converged on the state capitol by the busload to agitate for its passage. Connie Cook’s office
became a command post. Betty Friedan, arms churning, words tumbling in exhortation, was a tireless presence. The state’s entire liberal establishment—bar and medical associations, church groups, Democratic reform clubs, Mayor John Lindsay of New York and Governor Nelson Rockefeller, both Republicans—fell into line and endorsed the new legislation.

Redstockings, whose first-person speak-out had revolutionized the abortion discourse the year before, had retired from the field. Excessively concerned that Women’s Liberation was becoming a one-issue movement, the original consciousness-raisers had closed their doors to new members and were turning inward to reexamine their goals. Redstockings women were innovators and theorists, not conventional activists who wrote to and lobbied elected officials. As abortion rights in New York snowballed into a popular cause, they saw little need for further radical tactics. I believe that some of the movement’s most creative founders were already beginning to feel co-opted. The phenomenon of pushing a new issue forward and watching the vision play out pragmatically was a dilemma for them, and would remain one for many of the early leaders.

Some of the radical fervor was picked up by
People to Abolish Abortion Laws, an ad hoc coalition led by Ruthann Miller, a young Trotskyist organizer in the youth group of the Socialist Workers Party. People to Abolish was a precursor of WONAAC, the Women’s National Abortion Action Coalition, which the SWP “helped originate,” in its somewhat disingenuous phrase, at a tri-state conference at Hunter College the following year. Both groups attracted radical activists who disliked the intense personal revelations of consciousness-raising but felt at home carrying a placard and marching.

Unlike the tired old Communist Party and other sectarian groups of the left that were ignoring the new forces of Women’s Liberation, the SWP and its youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance, leaped headlong into our midst, seeing “masses in motion” who needed their guidance. The Trotskyists were like sheepdogs whenever they sensed “masses in motion.” Big public rallies where they could sell
The Militant
, the SWP paper, were their idea of revolution heaven. They were determined to get the “living-room feminists” into the streets.

The SWP’s passion for marches and rallies added another dimension to the abortion struggle. Worried that legalized abortion might be employed as a form of population control by “the state,” the activists carefully appended “No Forced Sterilization” to every WONAAC poster and flyer. At first WONAAC championed the provocative slogan “Free Abortion on Demand.” Later it excised the “free” part as ultra-left and unrealistic. WONAAC’s effectiveness was seriously undercut by its ties to the SWP. Whenever the hardworking, disciplined Trots moved into a group, they voted in blocs and tried to recruit for their party. They were accused of trying to take over the movement in a score of cities and college towns, and I don’t doubt that they wanted to and would have if they could, but Women’s Liberation was simply too amorphous, unstructured, and volatile for an SWP putsch.

A week before the Cook bill was brought to the floor in Albany, Ruthann Miller’s coalition drew two thousand New Yorkers to Union Square, the famous old site of May Day rallies. The air was thick with
FREE ABORTION ON DEMAND
/
NO FORCED STERILIZATION
posters. Most of the women who filled the square had never heard of the Socialist Workers Party, but the new spirit was such that they wanted to stand up and be counted.
The Militant
was the only newspaper to give the rally significant coverage.

All eyes were on Albany the following week. The roll call in the assembly stood locked at a tie until
George Michaels, an upstate legislator representing a heavily Catholic district, rose shakily to his feet: “Mr. Speaker, what’s the use of getting elected if you don’t stand for something? I realize that I am terminating my political career, but I cannot in good conscience sit here and allow my vote to be the one that defeats this bill. I ask that my vote be changed from No to Yes.”

From the visitors’ gallery there was an audible gasp followed by wild cheers.

Governor Rockefeller signed the bill into law on April 11, 1970, to take effect July 1. He credited Women’s Liberation, including the wives of the assemblymen and state senators who voted Yes. George Michaels’s gloomy prediction about the end of his political career proved accurate in the next election.

New York was actually the second state in the nation to legalize abortion. Hawaii had accomplished the feat one month earlier, although a ninety-day residency requirement limited its effect. Two weeks after New York, Alaska came through. New York, of course, garnered the national headlines, and an influx of abortion seekers from out of state. No residency requirement was attached to the New York law.

Pro-abortion sentiment triumphed in the Pacific Northwest during 1969 and 1970, when a radical women’s movement lit a fire under the medical reformers to change
Washington State’s law by popular referendum. Their victory was extraordinary. While activists in a few states were to try a voter referendum, Washington was the only state where it actually succeeded.

Seattle Radical Women and Women’s Liberation–Seattle had been spawned by antagonistic factions. Clara Fraser, an old-time Trotskyist, was the hurricane force behind Radical Women. Women’s Liberation–Seattle came out of University of Washington SDS. “The important thing to remember is that we all came into the abortion struggle as politically sophisticated women,” says Lee Mayfield, a mother of four, who had gone to Vancouver for two illegal abortions. The second time she had landed in the hospital, hemorrhaging badly.

“The splits make little sense in retrospect,” admits Jill Severn. “Whichever faction you belonged to, it was very radical to say ‘abortion’ out loud.” Severn, raped at sixteen by her brother’s close friend, had given up her baby for adoption.

Women’s Liberation–Seattle ultimately triumphed as the dominant feminist group in town, but both factions were instrumental in shifting the referendum’s focus from health care reform, as the medical professionals had tried to frame it, to “Abortion Is a Woman’s Right.”

Clara Fraser organized busloads of demonstrators for lobbying trips to Olympia, the state capital, to jog the bill out of committee. Lee Mayfield wrote the campaign pamphlet, “One Out of Four of Us Has Had or Will Have an Abortion,” for Women’s Liberation–Seattle. The group sold a total of ten thousand copies. It was the first time in May-field’s life as a radical that she had used a personal voice; the Redstockings
abortion speak-out in New York had given her the courage. Nina Harding, an African-American student at the University of Washington, is credited by Seattle feminists as the first person to draw a wire hanger on a
LEGALIZE ABORTION
poster to symbolize the danger from back-alley butchers. The wire hanger was adopted as a pro-choice symbol from coast to coast.

Referendum 20, as it appeared on the ballot in the November 3, 1970 election, had a hero in Dr. Frans Koome, a Dutch-born physician who ran an illegal abortion clinic in Renton, near the Sea-Tac airport. Reformers and radicals alike used the YWCA building on the University of Washington campus as their campaign headquarters. Dan Evans, the state’s Republican governor, endorsed the referendum. The women radicals did most of the leafleting, speaking, and ringing of doorbells. “We were all over the state, in Bellingham, in Ellensburg, at Rotary clubs, Democratic clubs,” Mayfield recalls. Even the Anna Louise Strong Brigade, a Maoist collective opposed to bourgeois electoral politics, found a way to pitch in with spray-painted slogans.

Opposition to the referendum was led by the Voice for the Unborn. The advocates for the fetus had not yet developed the sophisticated techniques they were to employ in the following decades. Their billboard slogan, “KILL Referendum 20, Not Him,” backfired, and their traveling “Life Van” with goat and pig embryos in jars was so tacky that people dubbed it “the pickled-fetus-mobile.” In their worst tactical error the Voice for the Unborn attempted a “Kill the Bill” march in downtown Seattle on Halloween, three days before the statewide vote. Five hundred Women’s Liberationists, many dressed as witches, outnumbered and outyelled the rosy-cheeked parochial schoolboys who were whooping it up with “Kill, Kill, Kill!”

Voters going to the polls the following Tuesday gave their overwhelming approval to Referendum 20.

Washington State’s new law had a residency requirement and a parental-consent clause for minors, and the abortions were not going to be free, as the women had hoped. “But we’d seen public opinion change by our efforts,” says Lee Mayfield. “Oh, we came out of that campaign feeling
so darned good.
”