Lesbians, Feminisms, and Reproductive Rights Movements: How Lesbian Politics Tore CARASA (the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse) Apart

My paper chronicles the history of one of the most innovative, yet forgotten, reproductive rights organizations in modern U.S. history, the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA). CARASA was a left-of-center, New York-based group with a membership base that was largely Jewish and with a significant minority who identified as lesbian or bisexual. CARASA’s work was legal in two ways. First, CARASA members, who came together in the wake of the Hyde Amendment restricting federal abortion funding, critiqued the over-reliance of mainstream feminists on elite federal courts to secure reproductive rights. Second, they made law and policy foci of some of their campaigns, working intensively to secure state funding in New York to replace the federal Medicaid dollars the Hyde Amendment withdrew, and at the national level to change the regulations the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare issued to all of its grantees on the performance of sterilizations. The history of CARASA is a queer history in that internal conflicts centered around lesbian feminism led to the organization’s demise. Although many of the original members of CARASA were bisexual or lesbian, their politics were socialist feminist and not lesbian feminist. When the activists Sarah Schulman and Maxine Wolfe joined, they and CARASA staff member Stephanie Roth challenged the group’s rhetoric and agenda in light of the explicitly lesbian feminist politics that were increasingly important to them - and increasingly well defined as a distinctive strain of feminist thought and practice. This work provides an opportunity to explore the contours and impact of both socialist feminism and an historically specific, pre-AIDS, lesbian feminism to which U.S. historiography has not yet done justice.