This paper argues that current studies oversimplify the constraints and promise of Roe to feminists. Before the decision abortion rights pragmatists—many of whom had connections to the medical community or to the movement for population control—advanced arguments thought likely to succeed in court or in the political arena. Leading abortion-rights organizations primarily described abortion as a means to an end, including the reduction of domestic population growth.
In defending Roe, feminists were able to shift the balance of argumentative strategies used by their organizations, framing abortion as a right that belonged to women irrespective of its consequences. Roe also provided leverage for feminists seeking to reshape the racial politics of abortion. Whereas pragmatists had highlighted the ways in which abortion would curb rates of population growth, crime, welfare dependency, and illegitimacy, feminists within the movement seized on Roe, denouncing racially charged population-based arguments for abortion.
By the end of the 1970s, however, as abortion-rights groups professionalized their operations and deepened their involvement in electoral politics, the need to defend Roe did lead to a new kind of strategic conservatism within the mainstream movement, as activists downplayed claims for welfare rights or sex equality. In the late 1970s, this change in emphasis brought mainstream abortion-rights organizations into tension with the advocacy wing of the women’s health movement. Women’s health activists and abortion providers themselves became politically active, trying to make up for the mainstream movement’s perceived failure to explain what abortion involved or why women required access to it.
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