When Everything Changed (32 page)

“He won’t use my name, will he?” Sherri asked.

On Monday morning, the paper arrived with the story in a black box on the front page. As promised, her name was not used. But there was enough about her husband’s occupation, the way that the drug had come into her possession, and other details to make it all pretty clear. “They did everything but give my address,” she said. That morning, while she was working at the TV studio, the hospital called and canceled the abortion. The Finkbines sued, and the case quickly became an international story. Sherri can still remember the TV reporter from her station “practically crying” when he came to her house to do the story. But she didn’t attempt to avoid being interviewed: “I was never the kind of person who said, ‘No comment.’ ”

When it became clear the lawsuit would never succeed, the Finkbines went to Los Angeles to prepare for a trip to Japan, where abortion was legal. But the Japanese, wary of the controversy, refused to give them visas. Meanwhile, the family was under siege at home. Death threats arrived in the mail, including one that promised to do to the four Finkbine children what their parents were planning to do to the fetus. Finally, with the kind of publicity that might normally be reserved for natural disasters or the opening of the Olympics, the Finkbines went to Sweden, where the abortion was performed.

Sherri never returned to
Romper Room.
“An executive from NBC in Phoenix called and said, ‘We think you’re unsuitable to handle children,’ ” she recalled. The station did give her a fifteen-minute talk show, which she kept until she became pregnant once again. Since pregnant women never appeared on television in that era, it was the end of her TV career. But she did hear from the NBC executive who fired her from
Romper Room:
“Darned if about a year later he didn’t call me because his daughter needed to abort a pregnancy.”

“A
ND YOU KNOW
, I
WOULD HAVE HELPED HER
.”

Early in America’s history, abortion was regarded as a form of birth control, and the general presumption was that a fetus became a human being at the “quickening”—the moment that a woman began to feel it moving around in her body. That had changed in the nineteenth century, and many Americans had been taught from childhood that abortion at any stage was the same as murder. Most people found the whole idea of abortion, at minimum, disturbing. But they often had more sympathetic attitudes when the pregnancy involved a fetus that was seriously deformed. (
Some polls showed
that half of the Americans questioned supported Sherri Finkbine’s decision to seek an abortion.)

Women had been having illegal abortions for far more pedestrian reasons—because they were unmarried or because they could not afford to raise another child—and many people knew someone who had had a pregnancy terminated. Anne Wallach remembered that when she was a student at Radcliffe in the late ’40s, she accompanied a friend who was given an abortion by a dentist. “It was terrible,” she said. “It was dirty, and the girl was in a lot of pain, there was a lot of bleeding. I spent the weekend with her in her dorm room. It was not a happy experience by any means.”

The memories of those traumatic abortions made the issue an emotional one for the young activists in the women’s movement. “
For my first abortion
in 1960 I took the Cuba option… ,” wrote Susan Brownmiller. “Here’s what I remember: Banging on a door during the midday siesta in a strange neighborhood in Havana. Wriggling my toes a few hours later, astonished to be alive. Boarding a small plane to Key West and hitchhiking back to New York, bleeding all the way.” But very few women discussed the issue publicly. Then, in March 1969, the feminist group Redstockings staged a public speak-out titled “Abortion: Tell It Like It Is” at a church in Greenwich Village.
New York Magazine
sent their young star writer, Gloria Steinem, to cover it. Listening as one woman after another got up to tell her experiences with an illegal abortion, Steinem felt she had reached a turning point. “
I had had an abortion
when I was newly out of college, and had told no one,” she wrote later. “If one in three or four adult women shares this experience, why should each of us be made to feel criminal and alone? How much power would we ever have if we had no power over the fate of our bodies?” It was the moment, Steinem said, when she stopped being a journalist standing on the sidelines and became a committed activist.

In 1970 Hawaii approved a law permitting abortion on demand, with a lengthy residence requirement, but the change had little impact on the mainland.
New York, however, was
a different matter. The state was considering a bill that would simply leave abortion in the first six months of a pregnancy up to doctors and their patients. It was sponsored by Constance Cook of Ithaca, a Republican who was one of four women in the 150-person lower house of the legislature. The debate began in the all-male senate, where the legislative secretaries—virtually the only women who worked in the capitol outside of the cafeteria staff—lined the walls of the chamber to listen. Clinton Dominick, who the
New York Times
called one of the senate’s “most respected members,” told his colleagues that he could best relate to the issue through his wife, the mother of five who told him that if she’d found she was pregnant again at 48, she would have sought an abortion.

“And you know, I would have helped her,” he said quietly.

Supporters of the bill from poor districts angrily pointed out that their constituents were the ones most likely to die from botched illegal abortions. But opponents retorted that it was unborn children who were in danger of dying. “This is murder,” said a Democrat from Brooklyn. A Republican who was the father of a child with Down syndrome described the pain he felt at hearing people say that abortion was justified if there was a danger the baby would be like his beloved boy. The bill finally passed the senate, 31 to 26, after five hours of emotionally fraught debate.

In the assembly, Cook thought she saw her bill going down to defeat when several former supporters voted no. A Bronx Democrat, Anthony Stella, said he originally thought his heavily Catholic district would feel it was “not my job to legislate morality.” But they had been telling him different in no uncertain terms, he said. Others reported that they had been denounced from the pulpit or in church newsletters. Cook made her usual pragmatic argument for putting the whole issue “into the hands of a doctor” rather than the politicians. But her male colleagues were hardly as calm. “I point the finger at every member who votes for this bill and say, ‘You, sir, killed these innocent children,’ ” said one. When the final vote came, it was a tie—the equivalent of defeat.

Suddenly, amid the hubbub, 60-year-old George Michaels, a ten-year veteran from a conservative upstate district, rose, his hands trembling. He had opposed the bill all along, he said, because his constituents opposed it. His voice breaking, he told the House, “My own son called me a whore for voting against this bill.” His other son, a theology student who had served as an assembly chaplain, had begged him not to let his vote kill the measure. “I realize 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,” he said. “I ask that my vote be changed from no to yes.” The legislative secretaries, the
Times
reported, broke into applause, and New York became the first mainland state to legalize abortion. Later in the year, the Democratic Party in Michaels’s district refused to endorse him for reelection. He lost the primary while he was hospitalized after a car accident, and he lost in November, when he ran as a third-party candidate. Senator Dominick, who had told the story about his wife, was defeated as well.

“I’
M GOING TO THE
LADIES’
LOUNGE AND READ A BOOK
.”

By the end of 1970, three states—Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington—had passed laws permitting abortion on demand for state residents. And New York’s law, which had no residency requirement, made legal abortion readily available to any woman who lived in the East and had access to a bus station. (
In the first year
the new law was in effect, about 55,000 New Yorkers ended their pregnancies, along with almost 84,000 nonresidents.) In California, the rules were loosened to the point that any woman who could pay for an abortion could usually qualify for one under the increasingly flexible “mental-health” criterion.

Meanwhile, a series of cases challenging state anti-abortion laws were making their way toward the Supreme Court. The one that would finally arrive there began in Texas, where a young lawyer named Sarah Weddington was put in touch with Norma McCorvey, an unmarried hard-luck woman who wanted to terminate her pregnancy. Weddington was only 25 and McCorvey was 21, “
a pregnant street person
,” as she later described herself, so uneducated she had walked away from a clinic where she had gone for a pregnancy test when the doctor requested a urine sample, because she had no idea what “urine” was. The happier parts of her childhood had been spent in reform school, the worst living as a 15-year-old boarder in the house of a man who raped her every night. She had married at 16, and her husband beat her when he found out she was pregnant. She sought shelter with her mother, who later took the baby to raise as her own. By then McCorvey had begun living with another woman, and her mother threatened to tell the police she was a lesbian unless she gave up her rights to her daughter.

It took, as McCorvey would later admit, an extraordinary degree of disorder for a woman who was living as a lesbian to have three unwanted pregnancies. She had never seen the second baby, which she gave away at birth. She discovered she was pregnant again when she was working as a carnival barker and was astonished when a friend told her about abortion—she had never heard the word and had to look it up in a dictionary. Her search for a way to get one led her to Weddington, who was looking for a pregnant woman who would be willing to challenge the Texas anti-abortion law. McCorvey believed the suit would lead to the desired abortion, and while she waited, “
I discovered that if
I smoked enough dope and drank enough wine, it was possible to not think about being pregnant.” When, inevitably, the case dragged on and McCorvey’s pregnancy was in the sixth month, she was finally told that it was too late to terminate. She unsuccessfully tried to kill herself, and gave the baby up for adoption when it was born.

Meanwhile, Weddington and her associate, Linda Coffee, argued what would become one of the best-known and most controversial Supreme Court cases in American history.
Their combined ages
were not equal to that of any one of the justices. Their client, McCorvey, was disguised as Jane Roe and never made an appearance in court. But they were stunningly successful. In January 1973, the Supreme Court ruled, 7 to 2, in
Roe v. Wade,
that any attempt to interfere with a woman’s right to abortion during the first three months of pregnancy was a violation of her constitutional right to privacy. Justice Harry Blackmun, a Nixon appointee who wrote the decision, said the state’s right to regulate abortions during the second trimester was limited to rules aimed at protecting the woman’s health and safety. Abortions could be prohibited during the third trimester, he said, except when they were required to protect the health or life of the mother.

While abortion rights had been an ongoing controversy in some states before the
Roe v. Wade
decision, in others it had barely scraped the surface of people’s consciousness. The sudden announcement that the Supreme Court was making abortion legal came as a shock, and the Americans who were most distressed turned against “activist judges” and everything else they connected with
Roe,
including the women’s movement.
By the end of the 1970s
, the National Right to Life Committee claimed more than eleven million members.

The abortion fight ran side by side with the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment. People who believed change hadn’t happened fast enough or gone far enough lined up against people who felt the nation had lost its moral bearings and needed to turn back. All this was happening at a time when the economy was betraying working-class families who had not gotten far enough up the ladder to protect themselves when the great postwar boom ended. The entire political texture of the nation was changing, and the Republican old guard, which had been conservative about economics but liberal on social issues, was sinking fast.
Mary Crisp, the cochair
of the Republican National Committee in 1980, said her party was “about to bury the rights of over a hundred million American women under a heap of platitudes” when the presidential nominating convention ended Republican support of the ERA and added a plank to its platform calling for a constitutional amendment against abortion. She wound up going home midconvention, her name erased from the program.

Anti-abortion feminists went through an equally painful losing battle. One of the NOW founders,
Betty Boyer of Ohio
, had resigned from the board in 1968 after what she called a “shouting match” over the issue. Some NOW chapters divided themselves into separate local and national organizations so members who opposed abortion could give their dues solely to local activities. “
Abortion was about
fifteenth on our list of priorities,” said Bev Mitchell of Cedar Rapids. NOW’s national leadership, she said, “got so domineering that according to them, there is just no room in the feminist movement for women who do not believe in abortion.”

The reaction against
Roe
in Washington began quickly. In 1976 Congress voted to cut off federal funding for abortions except in cases when a woman’s life was in danger.
The debate, Representative Barbara Jordan said
later, “was awful… the people who got up and sermonized. It was a super mess. We, the sixteen women in the House, were trying to orchestrate the whole thing, and we had these clowns on the floor talking.” One of them, she said, put a pillow under his jacket so he’d look pregnant. “He was ranting around… and I couldn’t take any more of it. I told one of my female colleagues, ‘I’m going to the ladies’ lounge and read a book, and if you need me in this debate that’s where I’ll be.’ And I just left.”