The earliest extant writing on techniques of reproductive contraception comes to us from an ancient Egyptian papyrus, dated to the 19th century BC, 40 centuries, 4,000 years, ago. The author of the papyrus discusses the use of pessiaries as contraceptive devices. From humankind's earliest writings, we have evidence that women and the men associated with them have always sought to control women's reproductive processes using man-made devices, amulets, prayers, potions, and pills.

      Both men and women understood that both men's lives and women's lives were constrained enormously by women's ability to bear children. For men who cared about and took responsibility for providing for their wives and children, an extra mouth to feed often met more work, not an easing of their burdens and responsibilities. Sometimes the strain of providing for their families led men to abandoned their families, leaving the woman as sole support of herself and her children.

      For women, another pregnancy met many things. For all women, another pregnancy met more work to care for another helpless infant. For some women, another pregnancy met another nines months of sickness ending with another dance with death because childbirth was a leading killer of women. For other women, unmarried women in particular, pregnancy met social ostracism and humiliation, often being driven into poverty and destitution, leading to prostitution. For some married women, a pregnancy met a breakdown of their marriage as their husbands struggled to provide for another mouth to feed.

      For all women, pregnancy had a profound effect on their abilities to have a career. Employers were afraid to go to the expense of hiring and training a woman, only to have her quit her job to bear and raise children.

      For men and women, anatomy was truly destiny.

      Under English common law, abortion was legal until quickening, that moment in pregnancy when a woman first feels the fetus move, usually at about 5 months of gestation. In the nineteenth century, first in England then in the United States, laws were passed restricting women's access to abortion. The earliest laws criminalized abortion in the later stages of pregnancy. By the end of the nineteenth century, almost all abortions had been outlawed - only those abortions needed to preserve the life of the pregnant woman or performed on rape victims were allowed. Likewise, contraception was outlawed through the Comstock Act, branding the dissemination of information about contraception to be an obscenity. The denial of contraception to women increased the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortion still thrived.

      Changing the law to prohibit contraception and abortion was one thing, getting the people to accept the immorality of abortion and to obey the law was another thing. Women remembered that contraception and abortion, at least in the first two trimesters of a pregnancy, had always been considered a woman's right. During World War I and the Roaring Twenties, more and more women began speaking out about the need for access to contraception while doctors continued to perform abortions on their patients. During the Great Depression of the 1930s and early 1940s, doctors performed abortions in part to accommodate men who were unable to provide for another child. During World War II, women were needed in the factories so male physicians once again obliged other men by providing abortions for women. Only in the post-World War II years, during the "return to normalcy", did the government seriously clamp down on illegal abortions. Contraception was still legally restricted in many states, and what contraception was available was only of some utility -- the diaphragm, messy, intrusive, and inconvenient, was the contraceptive of choice for many women since the birth control pill had not yet been invented. Coupled with the inability of women to contracept, government enforcement of the law against abortion had a devastating impact on women's lives: women's lives were truly constrained by their anatomy. People willing to perform an abortion became harder to find, abortion became more expensive and more dangerous for women.

      Yet, in the 1950s, the first inklings of change could be observed. Black men who had fought in World War II for freedom, democracy, and the United States challenged the legitimacy of a government and a society which deprived them of freedom and, through the use of poll taxes and literacy tests, that well-spring of democracy, the ballot. In the 1954 court case Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court overturned state laws which permitted or mandated racially segregated schools, and court cases followed outlawing segregation in many public places. With Black men gaining in their quest for equality, women of all colors began to think about rights and equality for them, both in regards to race and sex. At the same time, Katherine Dexter McCormick was financing the development of a new drug that would profoundly change world history beginning in the next decade - she was financing the development of the birth control pill. Radio, and the new-fangled invention, television, were making it easier to disseminate information to a large audience quickly and cheaply. Mimeographing machines made it easier to reproduce messages for widespread dissemination. Transportation, in the form of interstate highways, airplanes and the new jet plane, enabled people and materials to be much more quickly and easily moved from place to place. The easier means of communication and transportation made it much more difficult for a government to censor material. Information about abortion and contraception might not have been spoken about publicly, but informal dissemination of the information and private conversations about those topics were becoming increasingly difficult for government to control.

      With the support of McCormick, by 1960 the birth control pill was on the market. Flabbergasted corporate executives were amazed to find that a market existed for a drug that allowed women to engage in sexual activity without becoming pregnant. Although the drug was only approved as a menstrual regulator, the drug came into widespread use because so many women suddenly reported menstrual irregularities. The government would find that talk about and use of contraception could no longer be constrained. Women would talk to their friends, family, and physicians about contraception -- it was only a matter of time before more and more women spoke openly, publicly about contraception. Indeed, even the Vatican got in on the conversation -- one of the burning question at Vatican II was the Catholic church's position on contraception.

      In the 1965 court case, Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court voided the laws of 17 states that restricted access by married women to contraception. The Court ruled that the decision to bear a child was such a profound and personal issue that the right of a woman to make that decision strongly overrode any compelling interest the state might have in restricting a woman's right to reproductive choice.

      Seven years later in 1972 in Eisenstadt v. Baird, a Massachusetts statute restricting the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried persons was invalidated by the US Supreme Court as a violation of the rights of single persons under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

      In the intervening years, contraception and abortion had come out of the closet and women had been talking publicly about needing access to abortion. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, initially intended only to address civil rights for various categories (race, religion, country of origin) of men, was expanded by Southern legislators to include women in an attempt to make the bill so unpalatable that it would not pass. When the bill became law, men didn't worry; after all, no one expected the anti-discrimination provisions against women to actually be enforced. In 1966, a group of women founded the National Organization for Women, as an "NAACP for women." The Civil Rights movement for Black people and the anti-war movement which mainly benefited middle-class White men caused women to create the Women's Rights movement. The turbulent 1960 in which inherited traditions were questioned, perhaps only as profoundly as the during the time when Rationalists questioned Scholastics, set the stage for the transformations of the 1970s.

      In a fascinating story ( A Question of Choice by Sarah Weddington) of a woman with the right skills and right motivation being at the right place at the right time to profoundly influence the course of humanity, lawyer Sarah Weddington was asked by some acquaintances if they could be prosecuted as accessories to crime if they helped women to obtain illegal abortion. One thing led to another and eventually Sarah Weddington, building on the privacy rights established by the Court in the cases Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird, argued the case of Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court issued a wide ranging ruling that overturned the laws in 46 states, declaring that states could not restrict abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy, could only restrict abortion in the second trimester of pregnancy to protect the woman, and could restrict abortion in the third trimester to preserve the life of the fetus.

      No longer would anatomy be destiny for American women. In the period of one short decade, American women gained access to safe, effective, convenient contraception and safe, relatively inexpensive, readily available abortion. The effort to provide women with contraception and to legalize abortion would spread throughout the world.

      Whether or not you agree with the Court's finding in the case of Roe v. Wade, Weddington has profoundly influenced the lives of hundreds of millions of women and men over the past quarter century. And the case will continue to profoundly influence American women and men for the foreseeable future, motivating opponents to fight against access to abortion and motivating supporters to guard their access to abortion. Weddington has gone on to influential positions in government and private service, but for her historic victory in the landmark case of Roe v. Wade, Sarah Weddington is one of Sunny's picks for most influential women of the millennium.

References

      Bernard Asbell, The Pill: a Biography of the Drug that Changed the World , 1995

      Toni Carabillo, Judith Meuli, and June Bundy Csida, The Feminist Chronicles 1953 - 1993, Women's Graphics, 1993

      Carol Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton, Women of America: A History, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979

      John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, Harvard University Press, 1992

For More Information:

          Sarah Weddington's Home Page

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