At 88, Gloria Steinem has long been the nation’s most visible feminist and advocate for women’s rights. But at 22, she was a frightened American in London getting an illegal abortion of a pregnancy so unwanted, she actually tried to throw herself [...]
is succinct: “Obviously,” she wrote in an email message, “without the right of women and men to make decisions about our own bodies, there is no democracy.”
Reproductive freedom was not the only demand of second-wave feminism, as the women’s movement of the ’60s and ’70s is known, but it was surely one of the most galvanizing issues, along with workplace equality. “Abortion is so tied to the women’s movement in this country,” says Carole Joffe, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco medical school who studies and teaches the history of abortion. “Along with improved birth control, what legal abortion meant was that women who were heterosexually active could still take part in public life. It enabled the huge change we’ve seen in women’s status over the last 50 years.
“I think we are on a knife’s edge,” she says. “On the one hand, there’s been 50 years of a change in women’s condition in this society,” she adds, recalling that when she was growing up, women could only respond to employment ads in the “women’s section,” to list just one example. But when it comes to Roe v. Wade, she says, “I believe that the rights of the child in the mother’s womb are equally important. To quote Psalm 139, I believe that God ‘formed my inner parts’ and ‘knitted me together in my mother’s womb.’”
Cheryl Lambert falls squarely in the opposing camp. The former Wall Street executive, now 65, immediately thought back to the gains she made earlier in her banking career, becoming the first woman to be named an officer at the institution she worked for. She calls the court decision “a sucker punch.”
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