Young women: Let’s talk about WHY we’re pro-choice

by Alexis Morin

Roe v. Wade was handed down thirty-six years ago.  We are all familiar with the landmark decision even if some second-wave feminists, notably Gail Collins, have criticized our generation of women for not fully appreciating its importance.  The Stupak Amendment has highlighted current attitudes towards reproductive rights and similarly, a Gallup poll from May 2009 showed that 51% of Americans identified as pro-life as opposed to 42% as pro-choice.  I don’t think the solution to ensuring Roe’s guarantee of legal abortion in the face of a growing pro-life movement is to admonish young feminists for being lazy.  Our generation has been able to take this right for granted.  Now that access to legal abortion is being threatened, we will need to learn how to persuasively articulate why we feel legal abortion should be a right, just as the feminists who came before us did.

For as long I can remember, I have believed that a woman’s control over her reproductive future is her right.  However, I have not always found arguing in favor of reproductive rights an easy task.  When presented with high-resolution, color posters of fetuses it can be hard to explain why you support a woman’s choice to terminate a pregnancy.  For me, looking at the legal argument Roe turned on and alternative arguments since proposed gave me new ways to articulate my conviction.

Sarah Weddington was the young female lawyer who litigated Roe and argued in front of the Supreme Court at the young age of twenty-six (by the way, can this woman get some respect?).  Weddington had an abortion herself in her early twenties when she felt unprepared to start a family.  The statement she submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 against the nomination of Justice Clarence Thomas explains her experience on the front lines of the pro-choice movement:

“[My generation] realized that women could not truly make the decisions that most affect their lives — about education, employment, family size, finances, and physical and emotional health — unless they were able to decide when and under what circumstances to bear a child.”

Weddington and her legal team located the right to abortion in the right to privacy, which had been affirmed by the Court in a string of decisions including Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 and Mapp v. Ohio in 1961.  At the time, lawyers were just waiting for criminal abortion statues to be challenged on the grounds of privacy; it was the argument with the most precedent behind it and the obvious choice for Weddington.

Since 1973, Roe has been maligned as an overzealous ruling written as policy.  Privacy doctrine has been criticized as substantive due process–in other words, as a right merely invented by activist justices.  But in response to these criticisms a compelling equal citizenship argument, grounded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, has been posed by many scholars including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Legal scholar and Yale Professor Reva Seigel does a beautiful job explaining the sex-equality basis for Roe in her chapter of What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said.  The equal citizenship argument connects the ideas Weddington expresses in the quote above with the practical aspects of citizenship. When the government coerces a woman to carry a pregnancy to term, the status of her family, education, employment, finances and health are all affected.  These are all the facets of American citizenship; they determine our ability to pursue happiness and fulfilling employment as well as participate in the political sphere.  For women to have access to the same spectrum of life options which men enjoy and thus have equal access to citizenship as men, we must be able to control our reproductive futures.

For legal scholars, it is crucial to hang these arguments on a constitutional hook like the Fourteenth Amendment; for me, the constitutional location of this right is less important.  This argument resonates deeply with me because of its focus on equality.  Supporting choice means supporting the equality of an entire gender, of over half of our nation’s population.  The equal citizenship argument is only one of many arguments for reproductive rights—it is particularly valuable for establishing that reproductive rights are in line with those rights we have enshrined in our Constitution—but I strongly encourage anyone who identifies as pro-choice to push themselves to define, explain, and argue their convictions.  As Collins points out, we could use the practice.