Mary Ziegler. After Roe

Law professor Mary Ziegler’s prodigiously researched After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate adds a useful layer to our understanding of the history of the American abortion rights controversy. In addition to a great deal of archival research, she summons up the voices of activists on both sides of the issue through a hundred personal interviews. Too often, students of legal doctrine and political activism forget what was at stake for people before and after Roe v. Wade (1973). Ziegler contends that in the first decade after the Court decided Roe, both sides’ views were fluid. Historians had wrongly concluded that the decision immediately revealed a “fault line in American gender politics” (xii). If Ziegler had not limited her study to after Roe, and paid more attention to the lead-up to the case, she would have found evidence undermining both parts of this argument. Roe is important precisely because of its place within a longer abortion rights story. Looking just at the late 1960s when some states began to adopt the Model Penal Code’s recommended reforms of abortion statutes and the second oral argument in Roe reveals that the opposing lines had already hardened. The discourse was far from fluid. The distance between the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church’s lawyers and the various voices of feminism was already great and the tone the two sides took was hardly conciliatory. They simply refused to talk to one another. The bitterness of this divide was evident in federal cases from Ohio (Steinberg v. Brown [1970]) and Louisiana (Rosen v. Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners [1970]). The intractability of the two sides in those cases (that were not argued before the Supreme Court) reappeared in the amicus briefs of Roe’s appeal. These divisions persisted, so that in the immediate period after Roe there was not nearly as much fluidity as Ziegler suggests. Perhaps private correspondence and interviews evidenced a fluidity in positions not found in public statements?

Abortion · Argument (complex analysis) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Statute · Summons · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies