United States pro-choice movement

The pro-choice movement refers to support for women's reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, especially the right to elective abortion. Pro-choice advocates argue that the accessibility of safe, legal abortions saves the lives of many pregnant people who might otherwise suffer bodily harm and die from illegal abortions. Abortion-rights advocates also base their arguments on the wider context of individual liberty and reproductive freedom and rights. Leading abortion-rights organizations in the US pro-choice movement include Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, National Organization for Women, and the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as other major civil liberties organizations.

The 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade legalized elective abortion in the United States. However, the passage of Roe v. Wade united abortion opponents and emboldened the anti-abortion movement to form an agenda to overturn the decision and focus on changing state laws to restrict abortion rights. This resulted in the reversal of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022) and a wave of strict abortion regulations in many states. In response, the pro-choice movement sought to establish laws protecting abortion rights and access at both the state and federal levels.

Early History

After the US Constitution was adopted, abortion rights were considered purely a state matter. The first legal restrictions on abortion appeared in the 1820s, forbidding abortion after the fourth month of pregnancy. The American Medical Association worked to criminalize abortion as part of its drive to award doctors the exclusive rights to practice medicine, and by 1910, almost all states had criminalized abortion except when needed to save a pregnant person's life.

Criminalizing abortion did not stop people from seeking abortions. Estimates of the number of women seeking illegal abortions in the years before Roe v. Wade are as high as 1.2 million per year. Between the 1880s and 1973, thousands of women were seriously injured or died from either self-performed abortions or going to abortionists who used primitive methods or operated under unsanitary conditions.

During the first half of the twentieth century, some people, usually those of the middle and upper classes, could get relatively safe, albeit still illegal, abortions from private doctors. However, the rate of reported abortions began to decline because doctors who performed abortions faced increased scrutiny from their peers and hospital administrators challenging the legality of their operations. The rise of second-wave feminism in the mid-twentieth century gradually helped increase acceptance of abortion. Between 1967 and 1973, approximately one-third of the states liberalized or repealed their laws that made abortion a criminal act.

In 1973, the Supreme Court heard a case arising from a Texas law prohibiting legal abortion except to save the life of the pregnant individual. Twenty-one-year-old pregnant woman Jane Roe represented those who wanted legal, safe abortions, while Texas attorney general Henry Wade defended the law that made abortions illegal. After hearing the case, the Supreme Court ruled the right to privacy of an American citizen included, first, the right of a person to decide whether to have children, and, second, the right of people and their doctor to choose an abortion without state interference until the third trimester (at which point the state has a right to intervene in the interests of “potential life,” unless the women’s health was at risk). In the ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Supreme Court rejected the trimester paradigm in favor of a cutoff at the point of fetal viability.

Overview

Groups on both sides of the abortion issue reacted swiftly to Roe v. Wade. Supporters of legal abortion celebrated what they deemed their victory, while those opposed to legal abortion immediately began working to undercut the decision and prevent any federal or state funding for abortions.

Shortly after the Roe v. Wade decision, both proponents and opponents began to define their philosophies with a political framework designed to place the other in a negative light. The term “pro-life” seemed to imply that opponents are “anti-life” or favor death, while "pro-choice" seemed to imply that the opposition is “anti-choice” and favors coercion. Beverly Wildung Harrison stated in her book Our Right to Choose: Toward a New Ethic of Abortion (1983) that being pro-choice is more than being pro-abortion, however. She defined pro-choice as being pro-women’s lives, health, and rights. Sister Joan Chittister, a Catholic nun, made a similar argument when she criticized so-called pro-life activists who also opposed funding for public health services and assistance, saying, “I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. . . . That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.”

The abortion debate in the United States quickly became heavily politicized. In general, liberals and progressives tended to endorse the pro-choice position. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, prominent politicians in the Democratic Party often stated that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” and promoted programs that reduce the abortion rate, such as improving access to health care and contraceptives, providing comprehensive sex education in public schools, and ensuring paid parental leave. However, not all Democrats agreed with the pro-choice platform. A small pro-life faction existed within the party, just as a small pro-choice group existed within the Republican Party.

Through the years, the pro-choice and pro-life rhetoric grew more heated, and some anti-abortion activists turned to more direct measures of preventing abortions, with tactics that included demonstrating in front of abortion clinics, harassing people trying to enter, vandalizing clinic property, and blocking access to clinics. Clinic bombings, physical attacks, and murders of abortion providers created a hostile environment for people seeking abortions, and the pro-choice movement fought back in court and on the front lines.

While Roe v. Wade established a constitutional right to abortion, it did leave the window open to some restrictions on the procedure. Subsequent Supreme Court decisions tended to allow stricter and stricter abortion regulations, especially as the court grew more conservative in the twenty-first century. Fore example, Gonzales v. Carhart (2003) upheld the constitutionality of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. The anti-abortion movement worked steadily to pass state-level restrictions and also lay groundwork for potentially overturning Roe.

With the anti-abortion movement steadily gaining influence and attention, some in the pro-choice movement sought to evolve their messaging. For example, in a January 2012 article titled “New Goals for the Pro-Choice Movement in the United States? Accessible, Affordable, Destigmatized,” Peter Belden of the Hewlett Foundation summarized the new goals of the pro-choice movement as extending abortion rights beyond safe, legal, and rare. Activists touted the benefits that reproductive rights provide for women, such as improved health as well as educational and economic outcomes, but noted major inequities and systemic obstacles in abortion access. For instance, the Guttmacher Institute reported that in 2014, 90 percent of all counties in the United States lacked an abortion provider, and 39 percent of women of reproductive age lived in those counties. Stigma around abortion also remained a major obstacle, even in many relatively liberal areas. Pro-choice advocates argued both that abortion should be affordable and that forcing people experiencing poverty to continue unwanted pregnancies is cruel, discriminatory, and economically untenable. They contended that abortion should be a common health-insurance benefit in the private sector and people should not be restricted or denied federal funds to pay for abortions because they live on a reservation, serve in the military, or work for the federal government.

Abortion remained a highly controversial and often emotional topic of national debate into the 2020s. The pro-choice movement faced a major setback after Republican president Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and subsequently appointed three Supreme Court justices, giving the court a strong conservative majority that many expected could overturn Roe v. Wade. This prediction proved accurate with the 6–3 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), which ended the constitutional right to abortion and left regulation up to the states. Pro-choice advocates decried the decision as well as the subsequent wave of abortion restrictions enacted by many conservative-controlled states. Supporters of reproductive rights turned their attention to legislative efforts to protect abortion access, both at the state level and potentially in federal law. They also noted that polls consistently showed a majority of Americans disapproved of the Dobbs ruling. A resulting surge of pro-choice activism was seen as a major factor in the 2022 midterm elections, helping Democrats outperform expectations and maintain control of the US Senate. Several states also passed ballot initiatives supporting and even expanding abortion access, indicating widespread support for the basic pro-choice message even in some areas controlled by anti-abortion politicians. As the status of abortion rights remained unstable, however, and several states were including the issue on their ballots, pro-choice activists again campaigned heavily in the lead-up to the 2024 general election. At that point, fourteen states had total abortion bans in effect.

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