"Civil Rights and Wrongs" Planned Parenthood National Atlantic Region Spring Conference, Washington, D.C., May 20, 1989

The women’s movement was given new life in the late 1960s by women in the Southern movement for civil rights.

Their complaints that women in America’s progressive movement were relegated to “women’s work” and their opinions shunted aside was not embraced by an eager audience; the women’s movement was thus reborn.

But despite the origin of its renaissance, it could not find a solid constituency among working women and like the movement for civil rights, it allowed its opponents to seize the moral high ground.

They were for the family; the movement therefore was against it. They valued woman’s right to work in her own home; the movement seemed to say that housework had no worth.

Early on, pink and blue collar women and women of color were alienated at worst, and at best patronizingly assumed to be eager soldiers in the larger women’s army.

The movement paid for the divisions it had created in its own ranks with the defeat of the ERA.

Now a kinder, gentler movement, educated by its own mistakes and failures, is giving family a priority it did not enjoy before.

And the movement once perceived to be by, and for, white middle class women alone is reaching out and touching women who felt their concerns had been ignored.

The strains between the movement for Black freedom and for women’s rights are ancient.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, between the adoption of the 14th and 15th Amendments, an attempt at integrating these two progressive forces in American life was destroyed by racism.

The supporters of women’s suffrage opposed the 15th amendment because it gave votes to Black men, but not to white women.

Frederick Douglass vainly asked for their support.

“When women,” he said, “because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are snatched from their arms and their brains dashed upon the pavement; when they are the objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burned down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools, then they will have (the same) urgency to obtain the ballot.”

“Is that not true of Black women?” someone asked.

“Yes, but not because they are women, but because they are Black.”1

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had adopted the racist rhetoric of the unrepentant South. Blacks were “Sambo” to Miss Anthony; Miss Stanton vowed “to cut off this right arm of mine before I will work for or demand the ballot for a Negro and not for the woman.”2

The strained comparison they made between the newly freed slave population and voteless but skin-privileged women had no merit, and the insistence by many in the woman’s suffrage movement that the condition of each was now equal—requiring only the right to vote to guarantee each absolute equality—was foolish and naïve.

That disagreement ended hopes of cooperation between the two movements. Black women who fought for women’s suffrage into the 20th Century were rejected and rebuffed by the larger, white women’s movement, and the early movement for reproductive freedom echoed the racism of the fight for women’s right to vote.

That movement quickly began to promote birth control as a right for the privileged and a duty for the poor. Forced sterilization was promoted as a means of preventing white-race suicide.

By 1972, as many American women had been sterilized courtesy of the United States taxpayer as had been rendered sterile in Nazi Germany under Hitler’s Heredity Health Law.3As many as 40% of those sterilized here were Black.

The more than casual connection between reproductive rights and enforced sterility accounts for the largely white character of the movement for choice.

Operation Rescue, if nothing else, has had the beneficial effect of easing some of the long-lasting tension between supporters of abortion rights and opponents of forced population control. 

It ought be no surprise that these two seemingly complimentary strains in the progressive movement have not always marched arm in arm.

The overreaching identification of abortion with genocide, the easy familiarity between the early advocates of birth control and the racist eugenics movement, and the frequent reluctance of the larger movement for equal rights for women to identify forced or coerced sterilization as a central issue for minority women has contributed to the under-representation of women of color at the barricades and front lines of the movement for women’s equal rights.

Operation rescue has begun to change all that. Its cavalier co-option of the rhetoric and the memory of the Southern movement for civil rights has shocked and deeply offended those of us who were in that earlier movement.

I was active in the civil rights movement. I went to jail in the civil rights movement. Operation Rescue, you are no civil rights movement.

Their appropriation of the moral imperative of the civil rights movement is an affront to its participants, to the memory of its martyrs, and to its many beneficiaries today.

The civil rights movement waged some thirty years ago sought to extend constitutional rights to all Americans, and to have those rights enforced.

Today’s anti-abortionists want the Constitution rewritten. They want to deny American women their constitutionally guaranteed freedom of choice.

Throughout the United States, but especially in the South, thousands of Black women and men and their white supporters marched peacefully to win equality and social justice.

But Operation Rescue’s belligerent troops are much like the civil rights movement as Jerry Falwell is like Martin Luther King, as Phyllis Shlafly is like Rosa Parks.

And their ready support for terrorist actions against abortion clinics makes them seem more like the Klu Klux Klan than the peaceful protestors with whom they want to be compared.

Some of the supporters of forced pregnancy force another analogy—not with the civil rights protestors of three decades ago, but with the abolitionist movement of the 19th century.

Again the comparison does not stand.

Women in slavery used abortion and infanticide as a means of freeing them from producing future slaves, from dooming their children to a life like their own.

A white doctor in Georgia in the middle of the 19th century wrote of the “unnatural tendency of the African American female to destroy her offspring” without consideration of the unnaturalness of bearing children who would be slaves.

“When I ran away from slavery,” Frederick Douglass wrote, “it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of women, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act.”4

Douglass did fight for women’s right to vote; we must fight for women’s right to choose.

The abolitionists of the 19th century fought against the then-accepted proposition that slaves were private property, that the government had no public right to intrude between the owner and the owned.

Men cannot own other men, and men and women can control their own bodies and their lives; that is why the Civil War was fought as the civil rights movement waged. The natural counterparts of yesterday’s abolitionists are today’s pro-choice legions, the women and men who insist on human freedom and human choice, not those who would deny that right.

In Webster, Missouri’s Attorney General argued that the state had the right to condemn women to enforce pregnancy.

In an earlier case from Missouri—this one in 1857—a slave owner argued he had the right to impose slavery on Dred Scott.

Dred Scott was judged to be only 3/5ths of a man; today, white women earn 3/5ths the income white men earn for similar jobs; women of color earn even less.

Perhaps the opponents of women’s right to choose would stand on firmer ground if their concern for the unborn matched their concern for the living, but their interest begins at conception and ends at birth.

There are parallels, but they are drawn most exactly between Operation Rescue and their supporters and the movement against civil rights, not the movement for it.

The movement against civil rights was dominated by white men, frightened and fearful that the oppressed might gain equality. Today’s anti-abortion movement is similarly dominated by white men, who like their counterparts in the pro-apartheid movement in the American South, seek and receive the blessings of the clergy for their destructive works.

They may quote scripture and sing freedom songs, but there the likeness ends. They hate women, as the earlier movement hated Blacks, and t=like the earlier movement believe that the object of their hatred is escaping from its proper place.

That place is a world where women are subservient, child-producing machines, just as Blacks were once simple-minded free or inexpensive labor. 

They live in a world where AIDS is God-ordained, where high school sex education teaches incest, where abortion clinic bombers are heroes, where women’s rights are threats to family, and women’s inequality a natural condition.

Nowhere was this desire by men to dominate women shown so clearly as in a New York case late last year.

A woman lay in a coma, near death. Her doctors told her husband an abortion might improve her chance at life, and he petitioned the hospital to perform the operation. But from the darkness two other men appeared, arguing their arrogant right to intrude between spouses, their right to deny her her chance at life.

“Who were these strangers at my door?” the anguished husband asked. They were just that, circuit-riding messengers of death, self-appointed defenders of this woman’s body and her mind.

Operation Rescue supporters find their solace in a perverted Christianity, as their equals in the racist movement did a generation ago.

The Reagan Supreme Court may give them their reward, as it earlier this year rewarded the opponents of civil rights.

But the battle for women’s right to choose did not begin with court decisions and should not end no matter what the Justices say in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services.

This debate is as much about power and class as it is about abortion, just as is the unfinished debate in America about race.

For women of color, the issues are real and stark. Just as forced sterilization in a not too distant past focused almost exclusively on non-white women, today women who are Black and brown bear the brunt of the regressive social policies Ronald Reagan began and George Bush is carrying on.

Women of color faced death at the hands of back alley butchers more often than white women in the days before Roe v. Wade; today, they face an early death as life expectancy rates decline for minorities and infant mortality rates continue to climb.

Black women were labor units when slavery was law; today more Black than white women must seek work outside their homes, more Black than white women raise families alone, and more Black than white families face a future of bleak poverty, hopelessness, and despair.

Our problem then is to move the debate forward, away from the past, away from divisions of class and race in our own ranks.

The civil rights movement’s victories created a mood of relaxation among the proponents of human freedom, as the victory in Roe v. Wade induced a relaxed vigilance among the supporters of women’s rights. Younger Black men and women today with no memory of bus back seats or Jim Crow laws lack the aggressiveness of their elders in defending civil rights. Too many young women may think wire coat hangers are simply bothersome closet clutter; they do not know that these seemingly innocuous devices were once instruments of back-room butchery and may do butcher’s work once again.

We must use Webster to remind the complacent among us that hard won rights are never secure. If Roe is upheld, there remains a battle to be won, to extend abortion rights and health care to all Americans, not simply to a comfortable few.

If Roe is reversed or weakened, the battle must intensify, and we must not rest until the promise of America is made real to all her citizens, to everywoman, everyman.

There is a clear racial gap in American politics today. In the last five presidential elections, Black Americans have votes overwhelmingly for the candidate who offered hope; white Americans have chosen regression by lesser, but convincing majorities. The gender gap is not nearly so pronounced, but if we are to have women and men in Congress and State legislatures and on our courts who value human freedom, we must reach out to those confused and frightened by the rhetoric and threats of the louder voices of the moral minority.

They say they are pro-life; we must demonstrate they are hostile to human freedom and human development. The candidates they support favor guns, not butter. They support restriction, not expansion, or equal opportunity.

Every public opinion poll tells us that Americans are ambivalent about abortion; most oppose it, but an equal majority believe government has no business interfering between a woman, her physician, and this serious decision.

We must regain the moral high ground and energize what we know to be a fundamental tenet of American democracy—that government has no place in our private lives, in our bedrooms, or in our homes.

This is ultimately a battle for the hearts and minds of the American people. They are ours to win.