“Perhaps it is inevitable that even the most modest efforts by women to control their fertility spark a firestorm of opposition. All of women’s aspirations—whether for education, work, or any form of self-determination—ultimately rests on their ability to decide whether and when to bear children. For this reason, reproductive freedom has always been the most popular item in each of the successive feminist agendas—and the most heavily assaulted target of each backlash.” —Susan Faludi, Backlash, “Chapter 14 — Reproductive Rights Under the Backlash: The Invasion of Women’s Bodies”
Jeffrey Toobin (staff writer for The New Yorker and a legal analyst for CNN): Backlash was published in 1991, at a time when most people who followed the Supreme Court thought that Roe v. Wade would soon be overturned. In fact, the following year, in the Casey decision, the Court upheld, five to four, what it called the “core” of Roe. The Court adopted Justice O’Connor’s notion that there could be no “undue burden” on a woman’s right to abortion. But that turned out to be a very modest victory for the right to choose. As a result, the material about abortion in Chapter 14 read like it could have been written yesterday. The restrictions that Susan writes about—parental consent laws, fetal rights, etc.—remain battlegrounds today. Katha is the expert here, but my sense is that in many states at least, abortion rights are more restricted now than they were in 1991. Susan writes before the “partial birth abortion” controversy and, most notably, before the abortion debate spilled over to include contraception—as in the Hobby Lobby case.
The chapter reminded me of one of the enduring mysteries to me of the last two decades in politics: why abortion has remained deeply controversial at a time when gay rights (especially same-sex marriage) has made transformative progress. Theories?
The American Cyanamid story remains as shocking as ever. (Reminder: a group of women employees of a chemical company were given the “choice” of sterilization if they wanted to remain in positions that included access to toxic material. Several women did undergo surgical sterilizations in order to keep their jobs. Judge Robert Bork, before his nomination to the Supreme Court, wrote an opinion rejecting the claim that the company’s policy discriminated against women.)
I’m not aware of any changes in the underlying law, but I don’t believe that a company would propose, or the courts would allow, a policy like this anymore. Am I wrong? Is that overly optimistic? I guess it’s another version of the same question. Why has the backlash continued so intensely against abortion rights—but not against every other aspect of women’s rights?
Brittney Cooper (assistant professor of women’s and gender studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University): Jeffrey, I, too was shocked at how current the material in Chapter 14 felt, even though it is nearly a quarter-century old. The opening lines of the chapter, in which an Operation Rescue activist yells “Don’t kill me, Mommy” felt eerily similar to an ad campaign undertaken in 2012, in which a little black girl’s face was plastered on billboards with the lines “The most dangerous place for an African American is the womb.” While Faludi largely framed the reproductive struggle through the lens of working-class and evangelical white women, today one particularly conservative and virulent strain of the abortion rights debate is the closing of clinics in places like Texas and Mississippi that serve largely Latina and African American populaces, respectively. In New York City, black women have more abortions than any other demographic of women, and the number of abortions now exceeds the number of live births.
The rise in documented cases of legal abortion by black women is striking not only because black women are demographically quite socially conservative on the moral question of abortion, but also because this shift in black women’s reproductive practices must be attributed to the full-scale rollback of the social safety net that has also marked the last 25 years or so. Thus I struggle to reconcile the logics of an attack on reproductive rights that have given black women more control over reproduction and reduced the black birth rate and the fact that the right is no friend to black children, black mothers, or black families.
But Faludi’s larger point, that attacks on reproductive rights are always rooted in an attempt by men to control the sexual agency and romantic choices of women through the mechanism of controlling reproduction, resonates. Women’s sexuality in general, and black women’s sexuality in particular, are at the heart of continued national anxieties over both America’s moral sense of itself as a place with traditional family values and a nation that still has deep puritanical conflicts about sexuality. Rush Limbaugh’s verbal assault on then-Georgetown student Sandra Fluke, calling her a slut and a prostitute for advocating for birth control access, is the clearest example that birth control in the hands of women means that women’s sexuality is not in the hands of men.
And it is this core misogyny, Jeff, that is at least partly to explain for the difference in the gay rights struggle and the women’s rights struggle. Though in the contemporary moment, a good deal of the push for gay marriage is centered on the optics of gay families of color, the struggle was originally framed around white families, and in particular the rights of white men to enjoy all the privileges of white masculinity undisrupted by queer sexual practices. Some feminist scholars call this slotting of gay families into an otherwise normative nuclear frame “homonormativity,” and it is why more radical LGBTQ activists remain skeptical of the marriage equality movement, for instance.
The American Cyanamid story remains hard to take, but it also reminds me that the forced sterilization of women is a long-standing practice, particularly in the lives of black women. Next year, North Carolina will begin paying out reparations claims to over 7,600 victims or their families who underwent forced sterilization at the behest of the North Carolina Eugenics Board, roughly between 1924 and 1976. Most of the victims were black women, and the N.C. Eugenics Board allowed employers to petition to have their female employees sterilized.
Katha Pollitt (columnist for The Nation and author of the upcoming book Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights): This is one of my favorite chapters in Backlash, a book I love. It’s got terrific reporting: heartbreaking stories, pithy quotes, Faludi’s trademark sly anecdotes (Randall Terry ordering his wife around like a servant), lots of facts, and a powerful analysis of the effect of the backlash on reproductive rights. The way Faludi ties together the attack on abortion and birth control and lack of health care for poor women and denial of pregnant women’s right to give birth as they choose and the criminalization of pregnant women’s behavior and the obsessive community monitoring of quite ordinary everyday activities by pregnant women (put down that glass of wine, lady, before I call the cops) is sheer brilliance, and ahead of its time.
Earlier writers in this series have criticized Faludi for having a white middle-class perspective. As far as this chapter goes, I think that’s a bit unfair. True, Faludi doesn’t break out the racial aspect of the backlash as much as she might have—Brittney makes important points about the way the anti-choice movement targets black women specifically. But Faludi is very clear about the role class plays in reproductive control of women. Low-income women are the ones who suffer most from abortion restrictions and hurdles getting birth control. They’re also the ones who were, and still are, most often the targets of fetal-protection policies. Most of her subjects in this chapter are working-class girls and women, with complicated, difficult lives: poverty wages, controlling and/or unreliable men, inadequate health care. She tells their stories with tremendous insight, empathy — and indignation.
And yes, indeed: This chapter could have been written yesterday. With the possible exception of women being forced to choose between sterilization and their jobs, as in the American Cyanamid case back in the 1970s — the Supreme Court’s decision in Johnson Controls (1991) banned that — all the problems she identifies have gotten worse. (Forced sterilization persists, as the recent scandal of prison inmates sterilized in California demonstrates). Women are still being forced into C-sections, preventively detained during pregnancy for drug use or other acts, and, as is finally being widely reported, charged with murder or other grave crimes if they have a stillbirth or late miscarriage. (National Advocates for Pregnant Women are the go-to people for up-to-the-minute information on all this.)
As Faludi writes, most women are charged under laws intended for quite other purposes. Feticide laws, for example, which declare the fetus a separate victim in cases of criminal violence, were sold to the public as ways of punishing men who attacked pregnant women. Last spring, however, Tennessee became the first state to pass a law that specifically criminalizes illegal drug use during pregnancy (possible sentence: 15 years) despite protests from a long list of important medical organizations and groups involved with fighting addiction. The blithe indifference to scientific knowledge and professional expertise, combined with the lack of practical help offered to pregnant women in need, shows you that this not about achieving healthier babies. It’s about reducing women to fetal vessels.
Jeffrey points out that Backlash was written at a time when many pro-choicers feared Roe would be overturned. That hasn’t happened (yet). She was also writing in the heyday of Operation Rescue and other large-scale violent protests. Today’s anti-choice movement has evolved: Women are more visible both in the leadership and the rank-in-file, there’s less explicit misogyny, more “concern” for women’s well-being, more fake feminism. It’s been quite a successful makeover: Today’s ongoing wave of restrictions rides on the public’s willingness to believe that women are fragile and confused and need to be protected—from their own impulsiveness, from coercive boyfriends and parents, and above all from those nasty abortion providers. (But not, of course, from clinic harassers, who are all kindly grandmothers merely hoping to give a bit of “counsel.”)
Jeffrey, you wondered why the backlash has continued against abortion rights, when LGB (and even T and Q and *) rights have gained so much respectability. I think it’s because Americans have come to see same-sex marriage and the other demands as a conventional civil-rights issue: Here is an identity group demanding inclusion into the status quo. The movement has framed LGBT people as normal, everyday members of the community — middle-class and white, as Brittney points out. Then too, Uncle Brad and Cousin Brenda coming out of the closet has normalized gays and lesbians for millions of people (but the stigma of abortion is usually too great for Aunt Sheila to speak about hers freely). Also, LGBT rights is at least half about men’s rights. That always helps.
Abortion is a much more radical issue. It separates sex from reproduction, which disturbs the religious conservatives who wield so much influence in our unfortunate country. (In fact, our religiosity, especially our fundamentalist/evangelical Protestantism, is the single most important reason why we have a raging backlash against abortion and Western Europe does not.) Legal abortion also challenges the notion that women are basically meant to be mothers — never mind that since 1990 the majority of women choosing abortion already have children. Most deeply it challenges the balance of power between men and women, mostly in women’s favor.(Anti-choicers are always talking about men forcing women into abortions, but studies show this is quite rare.)
Finally, some people really do believe that a fertilized egg is a human life with human rights. Those are the anti-choicers who oppose stem cell research and fertility treatments that involve the destruction of embryos — a much smaller number than oppose abortion, which shows how much of the anti-choice movement is really about controlling women. You don’t see protesters yelling “Babykillers!” at couples on their way into the fertility clinic.
Considering all that, it is remarkable that a solid two-thirds-and-more majority of Americans support Roe, including many who describe themselves as pro-life. Since one in three women will have at least one abortion before menopause, and most have partners or friends or relatives who help them, we should not be surprised that most Americans want it to remain legal. But since the conventional wisdom holds that the country is evenly split, it bears repeating.
JT: Brittney and Katha, your comments about Chapter 14—and the proximity of the events in Ferguson—remind me of the persistence of class in American life. Somehow the country is always more comfortable talking about race and gender than about class. But class matters—always and a lot.
One of the great virtues of the book was the way Faludi pointed out the way the political backlash against the women’s movement fell so heavily against poor women. All those problems have gotten worse in subsequent years, I suspect. When it comes to abortion rights, wealthy women have always been able to get abortions, I know. But the class differences seem more pronounced than ever. Look at the post-2010 restrictions in the states, especially in the South, and most notoriously in Texas. A wealthy woman in Dallas or Houston who gets pregnant will have no trouble finding one in town or getting on a plane and going to New York. But for poor women, it’s become nearly impossible. I know the issue of class has come up a lot in the discussion of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In—that things are basically pretty good for upper-middle-class women and they’re getting better. The glass ceiling is breaking at the very top. As you may have heard, we may soon have a woman president. But what these victories mean for poor women is far from clear to me.
I think a similar dynamic is at work when it comes to race. It’s impossible to sort these issues out with precision, but I wonder how much of the problems in Ferguson are due to class as much as race. The late Mike Brown and his friends were poor, which to me was their main problem. Now it is true that poor black people are hassled (and worse) by the cops a great deal more than poor whites. That’s where my analysis breaks down, at least a little. But there is a substantial and growing black upper middle class whose problems are very different, and much smaller, than Mike Brown’s. I wonder what the election of a black president has meant for the issues at play in Ferguson. Not much, I suspect.
The class issue is also highly salient when it comes to gay rights. Hedge fund millionaires have gay children, but they don’t (by and large) have black children. And they certainly don’t have poor children. I am very glad that Senator Rob Portman of Ohio was educated by his gay son at Yale about the need for same-sex marriage. But his gay son at Yale apparently didn’t educate the senator about why poor people need health insurance. I think class explains, at least in part, the different trajectories of gay rights and abortion rights, especially for poor women. Gay marriage costs the taxpayers nothing and its benefits fall substantially to those who are already middle-class or above. Policies that benefit the poor, especially minorities and the poor, are never going to have that kind of support. It’s America! It’s a lot better to be rich than poor!
BC: It’s interesting that your sense, Jeffrey, is that the country is more interested in discussions of race and gender than class. My sense as a currently middle-class black woman from a working-class background is that our country is still deeply dishonest about all of these conversations, particularly race and class.
I write this sitting in the train station having just arrived from a 40-hour bus trip to Ferguson with black people from all over the country. And I am clear that class does not protect black folks from violent encounters with police. The first time an officer threatened to beat me with a billy club for parking in an unauthorized spot at a Wal-Mart, I was a 21-year-old recent college grad. That officer, a black man, and I had a conversation about why it took me articulating my rights to him to get him to back down from what was clearly a threat of excessive force. This is why I understand the policing issue to be not just about white police threatening black citizens. The ideology of policing sees black folks regardless of gender as a threat.
I won’t deny that class plays a pivotal role in this conversation. Mike Brown went to a failing high school. But this makes me think of two very important connections to Faludi. One is that the killing of black youth is a reproductive justice issue. The “protection of lives” rhetoric that frames anti-abortion policies at the state level is callously dismissed once poor children, who are disproportionately black, are birthed and need the resources to thrive.
But I am also reminded that Faludi’s book was written before the term “intersectionality” gained major cachet in the feminist movement.
I always think in intersectional terms, because I live in them, too. We cannot separate the interactions of race and gender and class together. These days the poor women most centrally impacted by lack of access to abortion are women of color.
And it is poor women of color who are central but often unspoken targets in the ongoing backlash against women’s rights to both sexual agency and to control their own reproduction. Control over the reproduction of poor black women is central to the American narrative of power, and we cannot tell the story of our modern backlash without concerted attention to the policing of the bodies of women of color through the systematic denial of reproductive justice.
KP: Yes, Jeffrey, I think you are too blithe both about race and gender. As Brittney points out, middle-class black people are not exempt from confrontational and even violent policing: Skip Gates was arrested in his own house! Even black people with college degrees are less likely to be hired than comparable whites, get worse medical care, worse financial services, and on and on. Racism is real. And so is sexism: you are just wrong, in my opinion, that middle-class and even upper-class women are now competing on an (almost) equal playing field with men. Wherever you look—law, medicine, politics, entertainment, academia, science, our own field of journalism — men are still in charge, and women are still paid less for doing the same work. In fact, the gap is bigger in elite professions like medicine than it is in working-class jobs. A few high-profile glass-ceiling-breakers don’t change the basic picture. When women are 50 percent of Congress and a majority on the Supreme Court we can discuss this again.
Getting back to abortion, when clinics close, the impact is most serious for poor and low-income women, but that doesn’t mean there is no impact on middle-class and upper-class women. Not everyone can waltz off to the airport just because they can afford a plane ticket (and a hotel room, and child care, and time off work — you see how it starts to add up). When getting an abortion requires lots of money, travel and time, a woman loses privacy: what happens if parents, family, partner oppose her decision? If her partner is abusive? If she has to tell their boss why she suddenly needs time off? If the expense and time means she has to go alone? Not every middle-class woman has her own money, besides. Even a college student from a well-off family might be on a tight budget, with her credit card and health insurance bills scrutinized by her parents. All these stumbling blocks raise the social, emotional, and financial costs of ending a pregnancy for every woman. They increase shame, stigma, and anxiety — and push abortions later in pregnancy, one of many ironies the anti-choice movement has bestowed on the nation.
I’m emphasizing the harm to non-poor women because just as there are people who privilege race and gender over class, there are plenty on the left-liberal end of politics who see class as the only issue (just look at the comment threads on any left-wing site). Abortion is just irredeemably about women, yes poor women, yes women of color, but in the end all women. Henry Hyde, author of the infamous amendment banning federal Medicaid funds for poor women’s abortions, famously said he would love to ban abortion for everyone, but poor women were the only ones he could get to. Here I would disagree a bit with Brittney: In my opinion, the anti-abortion movement has no special interest in black women. Those are just the ones it can most easily affect, because black women are disproportionately poor, are concentrated in black neighborhoods, and there is a ready-made black-nationalist vocabulary it can deploy. If their concern was the black community, or black women, or black children, or racism, they would be approaching the high rates of abortion among black women in a whole different way.
I also disagree a bit with Faludi, who wants to tie the anti-choice movement, especially clinic harassment and violence, to male working-class downward mobility. In fact, as Joan Walsh mentioned earlier in the Book Club, the anti-choice movement revved up the minute Roe was passed, while the economy was still okay. In my view, the movement is a protest against women’s independence and sexual freedom, and it is fueled by patriarchal religion—in its worldview, its funding, and its political muscle. Take away the institutional and organizational power of the Catholic Church and the fundamentalist/evangelical Protestant churches, and the whole thing would collapse.
It has been so interesting to talk to you both—and on such a rich, deep subject. That so many smart people have had so much to say in the Backlash Book Club shows what a powerful text it remains. That speaks so well of Susan Faludi, a brilliant writer and social critic — how many people produce journalism that people are still talking about over two decades later?
But what does it say about America that Backlash is still relevant?
Lots of ways to read along and join in: Post your own Backlash response on Medium/MSNBC.com, tweet at @readmatter with #BacklashBookClub, or comment on MSNBC.com. We’ll be featuring some of your posts and tweets as we go.
Read more of the Backlash Book Club, featuring Jamelle Bouie, Alex Pareene, and Michelle Goldberg, and others.
Illustrations by Hannah K. Lee
