Perspective | Restrictions on abortion and birth control restrict women’s citizenship


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the Supreme Court decision in dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe vs. Wade, The case that established women’s constitutional right to abortion in 1973 puts at risk not only women’s access to safe and legal abortion, but also the availability of contraceptives.

Previous Supreme Court cases that established the right to both abortion and contraception revolve around the right to privacy. In addition to relying on the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, Roe vs. Wade it also built on the precedent set in 1965, when the Supreme Court decision in Griswold vs. Connecticut declared contraceptive use by married couples a constitutionally protected right guaranteed by the right to privacy. In 1972, the Court extended this protection to unmarried couples in Eisenstadt vs. Baird. Therefore, a threat to a reproductive right is a threat to all. Justice Clarence Thomas made this clear in his concurring opinion in dobbswhat did you ask reviewing griswold.

But that is not all. As feminists have long understood, legal personhood depends on voluntary parenthood. And voluntary parenthood requires safe and effective birth control, including both contraception and abortion. A century ago, women activists worked diligently to make clear what they knew to be true: limitations on birth control jeopardize not only women’s bodily autonomy, but also their full citizenship.

Social work educator and social justice activist Sophonisba Breckinridge emerged as a vocal leader in shaping public understanding of why reproductive rights were central to women’s citizenship. Breckinridge, the first woman to earn her law degree from the University of Chicago, wrote an article for Woman’s Journal in 1929 on the evolution of women’s legal rights, provocatively titled, “How Women Came to Be ‘People’ . ”

In this article, Breckinridge reviewed the principle of the “feme covert” or “covered woman”, enshrined in English common law. The legal doctrine of “disguising” stated that women’s legal identities were suspended or “covered” during marriage. Because the new United States followed common law precedent, well into the 19th century, married women could not own property, retain their wages, or claim custody of their own children.

Statutory laws gradually eroded the common law tradition and gave women legal independence in some areas. Many states gave married women some property rights before the Civil War. New York, home to suffrage pioneers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and site of the first official women’s rights convention in the United States in 1848, went the furthest in giving married women the control of both the property they inherited and their wages. they won

However, even after the 19th Amendment gave (some) women the right to vote in 1920, the concept of the covered woman continued to govern women’s legal status. At the federal level, Breckinridge noted that only with the adoption of the Cable Act of 1922 did married women gain independent citizenship, rather than having their citizenship determined by the status of their husbands. (Previously, female citizens who married men ineligible for citizenship were subject to marital expatriation. In one famous example, Cady Stanton’s daughter, second-generation suffragette Harriot Stanton Blatch, lost her citizenship as a result of marrying a UK citizen.)

Another issue was birth control. Both federal and state laws severely limited women’s access to birth control information, as well as contraceptive devices such as diaphragms. The draconian Comstock Laws, adopted in 1873 and named for their zealous enforcer, anthony comstockliterally made public discussion of birth control a federal crime. Many states adopted the “Little Comstock Laws,” anti-obscenity laws that authorized criminal prosecution for discussing or providing contraceptives or abortions. Breckinridge insisted that legal restrictions on birth control infringed on women’s status as “persons” in the eyes of the law.

Breckinridge shared these beliefs with prominent birth control advocates Mary Ware Dennett and Margaret Sanger. Years earlier, Sanger had proclaimed in its anarchist bulletin that “forced motherhood is the most complete denial of a woman’s right to life and liberty.” Sanger’s short-lived posting subjected her to criminal prosecution under the Comstock Laws, as did her operation of a Brooklyn birth control clinic in defiance of the state’s anti-obscenity laws. The 1918 New York appeals court ruling against him in The people against Sanger showed that states denied women the right to control their own bodies even when they allowed doctors to prescribe contraceptives to patients.

While Sanger argued and prescribed contraceptives in defiance of the law, Breckinridge used her status as a legal expert to promote the legalization of birth control. As she explained to Dennett: “I have been trying to locate the birth control movement and the sex education movement in relation to the legal status of women in a slightly different way than has been urged before.” Breckinridge framed birth control as a fundamental right. By making this argument in the pages of Woman’s Journal, published by the respected League of Women Voters, she hoped to spread the gospel of reproductive rights beyond a relatively small group of birth control advocates to a broader cross-section of Americans. .

Dennett helped accomplish this goal in the 1930 Second Circuit case, United States vs. Dennett. Dennett defied the Comstock laws by printing and distributing a pamphlet on birth control, “The sexual side of life.” When the former secretary of the National Office of Civil Liberties faced criminal prosecution, the office’s successor organization, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), came to her defense. In this case, as in future cases, the ACLU became a powerful advocate for reproductive rights by filing Sexual expression as civil freedom..

These women recognized that, then as now, bans on birth control had a disparate impact on less privileged Americans. In 1922, Dennett, then head of the Voluntary Parenthood League, used the pages of the Birth Control Herald to urge another major women’s organization, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, to support birth control. Both state and federal laws “prohibit this knowledge for the poor, but wealthy women get it and use it,” she said.

Dennett backed up his statement by referring to penal reformer Y sex researcher Katharine Bement Davis’s recent birth control study among wealthy married white women, showing that nearly three-quarters of their respondents practiced contraception. Since the club’s members “are mostly from the affluent class that has already achieved paternity control,” Dennett stated, “it seems as if common humanity compels them to help make knowledge available to the millions of poor mothers who are still ignorant.”

Breckinridge, who shared Dennett’s concern for working-class women, advocated birth control during the Great Depression, paying particular attention to the plight of poverty-stricken parents. The Kentucky native planted editorials in the Lexington Herald, previously edited by her father, William CP Breckinridge, and brother, Desha Breckinridge, by convincing editor-in-chief Thomas Underwood to publish her ghostwritten articles on a variety of social issues, including reproductive rights.

He pushed readers to understand that the “right to parenthood” was a fundamental right. However, he explained that unfortunately not all fatherhood was freely chosen. Instead, responsible adults were denied, due to the Comstock laws, access to contraceptive information. The human cost of these legal restrictions on birth control, Breckinridge opined, was tremendous, measured both in the number of dangerous illegal abortions and the number of children affected by poverty. Breckinridge therefore advocated an immediate repeal of anti-birth control laws to “make truly voluntary parenthood possible.”

By the time Breckinridge wrote this editorial, some birth control advocates, most notably Sanger, had embraced eugenics, replacing rights-based arguments with race-based justifications. Sanger and others present birth control as a way to promote “better reproduction” and produce “better babies,” increasingly defined as white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and healthy.

But in the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of feminists, with the help of the ACLU, revived the notion of reproductive rights and used it to promote sexual self-determination for women, resulting in major advances that culminated in the milestone Roe vs. Wade decision. When more than 1 million Americans participated in the 2004 March for Women’s Lives, women of color were at the forefront of defending what black activist Loretta Ross called “reproductive justice”.

Today, as reactionary politicians strive to limit women’s ability to use contraceptives or seek abortions, Breckinridge’s ideas about the vital connections between reproductive rights and women’s citizenship remain painfully relevant. Feminist activists and their free speech allies can look to the past for effective tools to combat contemporary challenges to reproductive justice and reaffirm birth control as a civil right.



Reference-www.washingtonpost.com

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