Abortion Politics in the United States
| Date | 01 December 1980 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1980.tb01265.x |
| Published date | 01 December 1980 |
| Author | Colin Francome |
| Subject Matter | Article |
ABORTION POLITICS
IN
THE UNITED
STATES
COLIN FRANCOME*
Middlesex
Po/v/ei~hnic
IN
an earlier article
I
discussed the continuance of the abortion issue in
Britain.’ However, in the United States the opposition
to
legal abortion has
been much more virulent and has increasingly led to violence. Many of the
clinics are picketed each week, others have been invaded and protesters have
chained themselves to the operating tables, and twenty-five clinics have been
subjected
to
arson. One in New York was burned down twice and the
proprietors decided not
to
reopen the premises. Damage at other clinics has
ranged up
to
$250,000
and
so
far only one person has been arrested for any
of
these offences.2 The issue has also been important in Congress and in 1977
there were twenty-six roll calls on the subject in the House of Senate. This
article considers the reasons for this situation.
LEGALIZATION OF ABORTION
When
I
analysed the social forces leading to the British 1967 Abortion Act
I
pointed out that there was a debate within the Abortion Law Reform
Association about whether to press for complete repeal of the restrictions on
the right to choose an abortion in the early months of pregnancy or whether to
press simply for an extension of the grounds. The article showed that the
reformers won over the repealers and that the British law does not guarantee
the right
of
a woman to an abortion. In the United States the same debate
occurred. At first the reform proposals dominated the discussion and the major
recommended change was the model Bill put forward by the American Law
Institute in 1959. This advocated that the grounds for abortion should be
extended and that doctors should be permitted to perform an operation
if
(1)
the continuation of the pregnancy ‘would gravely impair the physical or
mental health of the mother’;
(2)
if the doctor believed ‘that the child would be
born with grave physical
or
mental defects’, or
(3)
if
the pregnancy resulted
from rape or incest. This proposal received the endorsement of the American
Medical Association and for a time
it
seemed that the laws would be reformed
*
Research for this paper was supported with grants from the Lalor Foundation and the Social
Science Research Council.
I
am grateful
to
L.
J.
Sharpe,
J.
Stancer and M. Mascarenhas for their
helpful comments.
’
C.
Francome, ‘Abortion: Why the
Issue
Has
Not
Disappeared’.
Po/i/id
Qiturrer!,..
49
(1978),
217-22.
It
is difficult
to
document the total number
of
invasions but in the Washington area alone there
were nine up
to
1977.
Political
Studies,
Val.
XXVIII.
No.
4
(613
621)
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