SEXUAL NORMS TRHROUGHOUT HISTORY: LEGALIZATION OF FAMILY PLANNING AND ABORTION. ANTI-ABORTION BACKLASH AND TERRORISM
Legalization of Family Planning
Legalization of family planning and reproductive rights for women took a great step forward in 1965, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut, struck down state laws prohibiting the use of contraceptives by married couples. The decision paved the way for the nearly unanimous acceptance of contraception that now exists in this country. Two years later, the United Nations Declaration on Population proclaimed family planning a basic human right and established the United Nations Fund for Population Activities.
Legalization of Abortion
The most dramatic advance in reproductive rights during the 1970s took place in the midst of a reawakened civil rights movement, the winding down of the war in Vietnam, and the drive for the Equal Rights Amendment. On January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade, which struck down restrictive abortion laws throughout the nation. It declared that the U.S. Constitution protects a woman’s right, in consultation with her physician, to choose to have an abortion.
The Anti-Abortion Backlash
Not surprisingly, the more the family planning movement was absorbed into the mainstream, the more vigorously reactionary, religious opposition marshaled its forces. The first anti-family planning organizations were launched in several U.S. communities in the 1960s, with strong support from the Catholic church. In 1973, the National Right to Life Committee was organized by the U.S. Catholic Conference’s Family Life Division. Its express purpose was to overturn Roe v. Wade and the new state statutes that had made abortion safe and legal.
Many supporters of these anti-choice organizations oppose contraception as well as abortion. They have proposed statutes and constitutional amendments that would outlaw the IUD and some forms of the Pill and severely restrict access to federally funded family planning services. Opposition to contraception within the anti-abortion movement continues to this day.
In the mid-1970s, the impact of anti-abortion organizing began to be felt in public policy. Congress passed the first version of the Hyde Amendment in 1976, barring any government support for abortions for poor women. Anti-abortion restrictions were added to numerous bills in subsequent years, continuously reducing the number of women eligible to receive federal assistance for abortions.
Anti-Abortion Terrorism
Many religious-political extremists turned to terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of their continuing failure to decisively overturn Roe v. Wade through the courts or by a constitutional amendment. Efforts to barricade clinics and the harassment of patients and reproductive health care workers have become commonplace. In the past two decades, there have been hundreds of bombings, acts of arson, and bombing or arson attempts launched against family planning and abortion clinics. Death threats and kidnapping have also become terrorizing weapons of the anti-choice arsenal.
In the early 1990s, clinic doctors and workers were shot and killed by anti-abortion protesters in Florida and Massachusetts. Five people were murdered at the women’s health centers where they worked.
Not since Margaret Sanger opened the Brownsville clinic have family planning activists had to fight such opposition and harassment from the anti-choice minority and from the government. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Americans continue to believe that individuals should be able to make their own reproductive decisions without government interference.
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