41 years ago, when all methods of controlling reproduction finally became legal throughout the US, most observers believed that the issue was finally settled.  For most people, the ability to plan and choose family size was a necessity of modern life.  Why then are Americans still fighting about this?  So many other progressive sex-and-gender reforms, such as gay rights and women’s freedom of dress, have support even among conservatives, but not this one—even though birth control is used by 98 percent of the US population.  A bit of history can throw some light on this conundrum, and in the process explain where the Tea Party and the ultra-Right wing Supreme Court are coming from.  Twice, once in the 1800s and once in the 1970s, a combination of opposition to women’s rights and economic motives fueled an anti-birth-control movement.

In the 1800s a strong women’s-rights movement developed in the US, growing out of the anti-slavery movement.  It called for women’s rights to education, to control their own earnings, to be able to divorce an abusive husband, and to custody of young children in the case of marital separation.  In the second half of that century, feminists added the right to vote to their program.  The US soon had the strongest women’s movement in the world, which of course produced a powerful backlash.  Anti-feminist conservatives feared above all that women might desert their domesticity, and suspected that women were raising fewer children and that this would free women to seek activities outside the home.

They were right.  The US birthrate had been falling since about 1800.  Couples were seeking to limit family size and the primary method was abortion.  Contraceptive methods were little known at the time.  Abortion was a universal practice throughout the world, and it was far safer than childbirth.    The most frequent users of abortion were married women who already had as many children as they could afford or care for.   The evidence suggests that in most cases decisions to abort, then and now, were made by couples who could not afford more children, not by women unilaterally.  But of course some unmarried pregnant women chose abortion rather than suffer the shame and ostracism that accompanied out-of-wedlock childbirth—a penalty that did not, of course, apply to the fathers of those children.

Abortion was typically performed by midwives (those who delivered babies) and experienced but nonprofessional women, who were usually quite skilled at these rather simple gynecological interventions.  As historian James Mohr showed, physicians were simultaneously struggling to establish a monopoly on healing and used a campaign against abortion to drive midwives out of business.

Spurred on by physicians, and by  both the women’s-rights movement and the birthrate decline, conservative state legislators began prohibiting not only abortion, but also all attempts to control fertility, in the 1840s, and by the 1890s all the US states forbade birth control.  In 1873 the federal government legislated against any form of reproduction control.  This did little to reduce abortions, but created an underground market—and probably, as with drug and liquor prohibitions, raised the price of an abortion.  The anti-birth control laws were a prime example of class legislation, since prosperous couples could pay for upscale doctors to perform discreet abortions.

What is most important about these prohibitions was the argument used.  The contemporary notion that the fetus has rights was rarely if ever mentioned.  Instead, anti-reproduction control advocates argued that the prohibition was necessary to keep women in their place; that birth control was allowing women to “escape” their God-given “destiny.”  The anti-birth control campaigners actively demeaned women, arguing that those who sought to abort were harlots–obscene, indecent, unwomanly, frivolous and selfish.

By 1900, however, public demand for fertility control was increasing.   The primary cause was not feminism, but the economy: children were becoming more expensive, were kept in school longer and less likely to help support their families, while more women were forced to work for wages.  Shortly before World War I, a widespread birth-control movement spread across the country.  (The various local organizations in this movement would ultimately unite as Planned Parenthood.)  By this time, modern methods of contraception, such as vaginal pessaries and diaphragms, were becoming available through a black market, and many women were furious that condoms for men, by contrast, were sold cheaply and legally in every drugstore.

In the 1920s leaders of the birth-control movement, eager to win their cause, constructed a compromise: legalize contraception but keep abortion illegal.   Despite this concession they still had to struggle for half a century until the last state legalized contraception in 1965.

Just as the last state legislature sanctioned contraception, demands for legal abortion were increasing.  Soon eighteen states had liberalized their abortion laws and observers assumed that this would soon be the case nationwide, just as today many assume today that gay marriage will soon be accepted nationally.   In that spirit, the US Supreme Court in 1973 recognized women’s right to abortions in its Roe v Wade decision.  In the ensuing discussion, contraception was rarely mentioned, because it was not only standard practice, but one that responsible sexual partners were expected to use.

The Catholic hierarchy objected, of course, even though Catholic laity used contraception and abortion regularly.  But no one predicted that opposition to reproductive rights would become a basis for a new conservative coalition.  This coalition was generated by two different factors.  First, by the end of the 1960s a revived women’s movement had grown out of the civil rights movement (in the US, all progressive movements have been spawned by anti-racist struggles), creating the largest social movement in the history of the US.  Its achievements were massive: for example, outlawing sex discrimination, requiring equal pay for equal work, transforming childbirth and the treatment of breast cancer, reworking the fashion industry to create comfortable clothes for women, and requiring schools to provide equal funds for female athletics.  But the backlash was also large, as conservatives ignited fears that women would no longer need men and would not remain full-time wives and mothers.

Second, observing this backlash, Republican Party leaders saw an opportunity.  By the end of the 1960s Republicans had despaired of ever being able to win the votes of poor and working-class people, given the Party’s pro-capital, anti-working class economic program.  They hatched a plan to elicit support by emphasizing sex and gender issues.  Reaching out to Protestant conservatives, they claimed to be retrieving a “moral” America from a culture that had fallen into immorality and betrayal of the word of God, because of the evil influence of feminism.  This became a base belief system of the Christian Right. (Consider the implications of their use of the word “moral:” they redefined morality to mean only sex and gender behaviors, while corruption, exploitation and the creation of ever greater poverty were removed from the category of morality.)  Like a magician’s sleight-of-hand maneuver, the sex-and-gender issues drew voters’ attention away from conservative economic policies.

The campaign first targeted abortion (along with gay rights and sex education—but those issues will have to wait for another essay).  At first only Catholics protested abortion rights, while even the most conservative Protestants defended them.  In 1968 Christianity Today, the main evangelical Protestant magazine, labeled abortion an acceptable means of maintaining family wellbeing.  In 1971 and again in 1974 the Southern Baptist Convention, the most conservative evangelical group, encouraged its members to support abortion rights in cases necessary to “the emotional, mental and physical health of the mother.”  W. A. Criswell, one of the Southern Baptists’ most famous fundamentalists, was pleased with the Roe v Wade decision: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”  It was secular Republican political strategists who persuaded these conservative Protestants to join with Catholics in an anti-abortion campaign.

But they faced a problem: how to make their argument.  In the 1980s it would have been political stupidity to argue for keeping women in the home or condemning women for venturing into the public sphere—the number of women in the permanent labor force was too large.  Instead, they chose to focus on the fetus.

The greatest single achievement of the anti-abortion movement, an achievement which the American movement then exported to other countries, was devising the slogan “right to life.”  That slogan did a lot of work for the anti-abortionists.  It sent many politicians, judges and lawyers into endless theological arguments about when life begins.  It suggested that women having abortions were callous, heartless and uncaring toward defenseless fetuses—despite the fact that most woman having abortions did so as a means of safeguarding the children they already had.  The slogan made women feel guilty for not feeling guilty about an abortion decision.  And it distorted and deformed many people’s natural tendency toward empathy, by placing fetuses ahead of the millions of children stunted by illness, malnutrition, violence, lack of education, and exploitive labor, and ahead of poor women struggling to feed and care for their children.

This campaign has so far failed to overturn Roe v Wade but it has succeeded in limiting abortion rights.  Its biggest victories were (1) prohibiting the use of public funds for abortion, which made abortion less accessible to those who need it most, and (2) drastically reducing the number of abortion providers.  This second victory was accomplished by a terrifying campaign of violence.  The American Coalition of Life Activists circulated “Wanted” posters—mimicking official police placards identifying suspected criminals—with the photographs and, often, home addresses of physicians who performed abortions, identifying them as “war criminals” and, recalling the Nuremberg laws, guilty of “crimes against humanity.” From 1977 through 2001, anti-abortionists murdered three doctors, two clinic employees, one clinic escort and one security guard; attempted 71 other murders; executed 41 bombings, 165 arson attacks, 82 attempted bombings and 372 clinic invasions; caused $8.5 million in damage.  This was enough to drive even staunch supporters of reproductive rights out of the practice and those who remained were heroes indeed.  Public revulsion has reduced this violence, happily, but not eliminated it. “Wanted” placards are now appearing again.

Obama’s election in 2008 showed that the majority of Americans were hopeful for progressive change.  The Right-wing, however, consumed with rage that a black man with an intellectual style was President, adopted a policy of blocking anything he attempted.  They managed to weaken the medical insurance law, but not to prevent its passage, so they have since turned to the courts.  And in doing so, they are now attacking contraception as well as abortion—in other words, returning to the logic of 150 years ago that any means of controlling reproduction is immoral, and thereby should be made as difficult to get as possible.

There is an upward spiral in this extremism: if a politician or a media celebrity is to win far-Right support, then every absurd accusation—from “Obama is a Muslim” to “women can’t get pregnant from rape”—must be topped by an even more outrageous claim.  That competitive mania can no longer be restrained by more rational Republicans; they created the Christian Right but they can no longer control it.  We have come full circle historically.  The very slurs directed at women in the 1800s spew out today with slightly different words—“sluts” and “bitches” are the favorite terms.  The hysterical, and sometimes hilarious, tirades against women display astounding levels of hostility to women.   (Several of our recent teenage school killers was motivated by that hatred.)  There is a new kind of male bonding achieved through womanhating.  The slut talk is a political strategy, and a dangerous one.  In its frenziedness it recalls the race hatred associated with fascism.

In my last piece for Telesur, I pointed out how religion was used in the courts to overrule scientific facts, as in the Hobby Lobby Company’s claim that the contraceptives covered by the Affordable Care Act were abortifacients, despite the medical science that showed this claim to be false.  The slut-talk, similarly, works by overruling social facts.  That talk assumes that birth control is something for women only.  It associates reproduction control with feminists, and feminism with the destruction of families and moral standards. This is of course nonsense.  Men and women alike depend on birth control.  Few men want every sexual encounter to lead to pregnancy, or to produce unlimited offspring that they must support.  Democrats and progressives claim that Republicans are fighting a “war on women.”  This is a catchy but misleading slogan: the anti-birth control fanatics threaten everyone’s wellbeing.  They are returning to the most sex-hating American tradition in their view that women should be having sex only in order to bear children.  In doing so, they put men in a strange position.  Because the anti-birth-control lobby clings to a double standard, they do not argue that men should have sex only when they want to conceive a child—and of course men who are sexually active are never called whores.  By this logic men should have sex most often with the women they consider indecent.

Of course most Americans do not follow this womanhating logic, and few follow it consistently.  Its proponents even maintain contradictory convictions: that birth control should not be made accessible to low-income people but that low-income people have too many children; that taxes are too high but all pregnancies should result in childbirth, which costs far more tax money than contraception or abortion; that parents should have as many children as God and nature bring but there should be no public programs to help support those children.

But if I had to identify the single largest source of this anti-birth control campaign, I would point to its long-term outcome:  It has turned many working and middle class people into conservative voters even when their votes undermine their own economic and social wellbeing.  It is one of the major factors in producing Right-wing state and federal governments.  Like race hatred and anger at immigrants, it offers false scapegoats that distract from identifying the real sources of today’s economic and political impasse.

Linda Gordon is Distinguished Professor of History and Humanities at New York University.  She is the author of the definitive history of birth control in the US, The Moral Property of Women.  She can be reached at [email protected]