Kitchen Table Politics. Stacie Taranto
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One estimate in the sixties claimed that there were roughly 8,000 legal abortions in the United States each year, versus 800,000 to 1,000,000 illegal ones. Faced with these numbers, sixteen states legalized abortion in some form between 1967 and 1970. Movements in New York began along these lines, with male reformers partnering with liberal Democrats in the state, such as assemblyman Al Blumenthal of Manhattan’s left-leaning Upper West Side.15
Blumenthal’s unsuccessful attempts to legalize abortion in 1966 and 1967 illustrated that he and fellow Democrats could not guide a bill through the state legislature. Democrats had little representation upstate and were a minority in both the State Assembly and Senate. Their base was downstate, and even there it was split: heavily Jewish and African American districts in the New York City area backed legal abortion; Catholic ones like where Margie Fitton grew up did not. A bill would have to be sponsored by moderate Republicans who controlled the state’s GOP and were in the majority in both houses (as opposed to the minority of conservative Republicans in New York’s GOP, most of whom were based upstate). Moderate Republicans, notably including Governor Rockefeller, embraced the feminist notion that women had a right to legal abortion, linking it to their party’s historical embrace of personal liberty and small government. Efforts to legalize abortion hastened in New York after Constance Cook—a moderate, strategically chosen because she was the only Republican woman in the Assembly—was invited to Betty Friedan’s apartment in 1967 to discuss legislative strategies.
Cook, who represented the Ithaca area upstate, was changed by that meeting; she joined NOW soon after and began to see abortion through a feminist lens.16 Cook was tired of sitting through male-dominated abortion debates in Albany. When, for example, the Assembly held hearings on one of Blumenthal’s unsuccessful reform bills that narrowly failed in 1968, Cook soured on being in a room full of men dictating “what women’s lives shall be.”17 As Cook looked into crafting her own bill, she was convinced by fellow NOW members to pursue a repeal measure (i.e., removing abortion from the legal code entirely) instead of reform. Both would legalize abortion, but repeal would decriminalize it in all circumstances, while a reform bill would, as Blumenthal had done, outline various circumstances in which abortion was legal. Feminists argued that reform would open the door for men in power to set those terms and police them as they saw fit. Ever the pragmatic legislator, Cook also felt that women were “never going to get … aroused politically” and lobby their state representatives about reform bills that could “require them to go to a committee of doctors, then to go to a committee of hospital administrators, and then to have consultations with psychiatrists or social workers or priests.”18
Cook was sustained by grassroots support from women outside the legislature—often from those who might have been opponents’ neighbors in the suburbs of New York City. In 1969, as Cook was trying to get a repeal bill out of committee, Blumenthal brought another reform measure to the floor of the Assembly for a vote. He failed yet again, this time after Martin Ginsberg, a Republican from Long Island, gave a last-minute speech about his fight with polio. Cook and other women were outraged. What should have been a debate about their reproductive rights turned into a well-televised sound bite of Assemblyman Ginsberg claiming that if he could thrive with a debilitating disease, so too should unhealthy fetuses be given a chance to do so rather than being aborted. At that point, nursing professor Sylvia Fields, who lived in Ginsberg’s district, organized 350 of his constituents into what she called the Nassau [County] Committee for Abortion Law Repeal. Dr. Ruth Cusack, a nutritionist who had fought for repeal since she was a doctoral student years before at the University of California at Berkeley, assembled 150 people in neighboring Suffolk County. Both groups included organized feminists and a range of other women, from sympathetic housewives and mothers to professionals like Fields who, as a nurse, had seen the sometimes deadly impact of illegal abortion. The two organizations gathered 2,500 signatures on Long Island to try to move legislators into the repeal camp.19
A new group, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), also formed in 1969 to push for repeal on a broader scale. Most of NARAL’s leadership came from New York, and they agreed to focus on Cook’s repeal bill, which, if passed, could be replicated in other states. NOW’s Betty Friedan, a New Yorker, spoke at NARAL’s inaugural meeting, remarking that it was “the first … decent conference” on abortion because “women’s voices [were] heard and heard strongly.”20
Radical feminists in New York injected new forms of activism into the debate. Members of radical women’s liberation groups tended to come from the student New Left that was active in the black freedom and anti-Vietnam war movements. In February 1969, radical feminists from two New York City-based organizations, Redstockings and New York Radical Women, interrupted legislative hearings on one of Blumenthal’s reform bills. The women burst into the chamber shouting slogans such as “every woman resents having our bodies controlled by men” and “no more male legislators!”21 A month later, Redstockings held its own abortion hearings at the Washington Square Methodist Church in Manhattan. Using the consciousness-raising technique that they relied on to politicize personal grievances and experiences, the only experts allowed to testify were women who spoke about their own, often illegal abortions before a diverse audience of 300 people.22 These tactics were reinforced by the efforts of liberal feminists. Redstockings and others made front-page news, which shaped public discourse and prompted reporters to ask lawmakers about their views on abortion. The answer that many politicians gave was often related to how much attention they had received from liberal feminist groups like NOW that deployed more traditional lobbying tactics such as visiting and writing to legislators.23
By the late sixties, Assemblywoman Cook and her allies—such as Ruth Cusack and Sylvia Fields, who marshaled support for legal abortion in the same counties on Long Island that later became strongholds for the opposition—were irate. Women, the true experts on pregnancy and motherhood, were being overlooked in the abortion debates. True equality for women had to encompass being able to decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy that would affect their lives (and bodies) well into the future. Controlling reproduction was paramount as feminist groups simultaneously tried to expand opportunities for women outside the home, such as employment gains that might lead to delaying or forsaking childbearing. This thinking was encapsulated in the “right to choose” and “pro-choice” language that proponents popularized nationwide in the early seventies.24
Opponents had little to worry about until 1970, when Cook won an important victory in the State Senate. Cook and her co-sponsor, Senator Franz Leichter, a liberal Democrat from Manhattan, decided to introduce a bill in the State Senate as opposed to the Assembly where she served; its passage seemed more certain there, which could provide momentum in the lower chamber. To secure votes in the Senate, Cook agreed to insert a requirement mandating that only physicians could perform abortions. Some radical feminist groups recanted their support for the bill and campaigned against it. Liberal feminist groups, intent upon passing legislation, held firm and formed a statewide umbrella group called the Committee for Cook-Leichter. The committee persuaded the New York Post to do a full story on the bill, sent telegrams to all nonsponsors, held press conferences, and circulated instructions on how and whom to lobby in Albany. Downstate in the New York City area, the Committee for Cook-Leichter was dominated by NOW and NARAL, along with the grassroots groups run by Ruth Cusack and Sylvia Fields on Long Island. Upstate, Cook relied on women’s civic and feminist organizations, the Unitarian Universalist Church, and individual members of Planned Parenthood who had run statewide campaigns before. In contrast to Planned Parenthood members, feminists, who were relatively new to politics, did not have the infrastructure or political acumen to sustain a statewide effort. Whenever possible, Cook tried to assist them by, for example, giving Betty Friedan a list of the leaders of every women’s group in the state. Bombarded by these efforts as opponents remained comparatively silent, the State Senate passed the amended Cook-Leichter bill on 18 March 1970. Thirteen Republicans and eighteen Democrats, led by Rockefeller moderates and downstate liberals, voted for the bill; twenty Republicans and six Democrats, most in Catholic districts, voted against it.25
During these Senate deliberations, Catholic leaders were relatively silent in Albany as they continued to lose their grasp over parishioners. That spring, the church was preoccupied with another bill