Editor’s note: Due to the length of this article and the number of topics it covers, it will be published in three parts over three days.
Reading and watching post-election commentaries about the 2023 Election Day results, I found myself saying, “No, no, no.” Everyone seemed determined to talk about abortion in relation to Republican and Democratic Party advantages or disadvantages. Sure, political pundits can talk about election results in that way, and editors might think it sells papers or attracts viewers, but let me suggest that the issue of abortion, particularly when it came to a clear vote without a governmental position being contested—namely, the Ohio constitutional amendment guaranteeing access to abortion—the vote was outside of normal party politics. Sure, it will be a big issue in the voting on pro-abortion measures in many states in 2024. And it will certainly help Democrats, but I am more interested in what it said about women (and men) in the third decade of the 21st century and what it said about the current Supreme Court.
I haven’t been able to find a demographic breakdown of the Ohio vote to know the exact percentage of women who voted “Yes” compared to men. You would think that would be the single most interesting piece of information about the vote. What we do know is that the largest, most urbanized areas of Ohio voted strongly in favor of the amendment and that the most rural areas voted against it. That is not surprising. That still doesn’t answer the demographic question.
The best information I could find was from an exit poll of some 4,000 voters conducted by Edison Research on behalf of a consortium of mainstream TV news organizations. If we assume that the poll bears a close resemblance to the choices actual voters made, the most important number is that 60 percent of women and 53 percent of men supported the amendment securing the right to have an abortion if one so chose. And more women than men voted in the election. Once you know that most of both sexes voted in favor of the amendment, the rest of the poll’s results make complete sense. Most white, Blacks, and Latino people voted in favor of abortion rights, with the Black demographic voting overwhelmingly in favor. Young voters were heavily in favor of the amendment, with approval percentages declining with the increasing age of voters until you got to folks 65 and older, a majority of whom voted against it. Also, no real surprise. More college graduates were in favor of the amendment than those without college degrees, although a majority of both groups voted for the amendment. Unmarried men and women strongly supported the amendment, while married folks were less enthusiastic about it. Not surprisingly (but importantly), 76 percent of white evangelicals opposed the amendment.
Does any of this surprise you (aside from the vote itself)? I didn’t think so.
Coincidentally, last spring, I read Bonnie Garmus’ novel “Lessons in Chemistry” with great pleasure. I also, less enthusiastically, watched the Apple TV adaptation. Although I didn’t much care for the TV series, I loved Brie Larson, who played Elizabeth Zott, and Alice Halsey, who played Elizabeth’s “illegitimate” daughter.
For those who haven’t read the novel, it takes place in 1950s America. At this distance—some 70 years later—many of you may not remember or have lived at the time “Lessons in Chemistry” took place. At least retrospectively, this was a quietly unsettling time in America, a time of the beginning of monumental shifts in post-World War II America. Even for someone like me who grew up in the 1940s and ’50s, it seemed unreal to connect World War II to anything I was living through. In 1952, I was 12 years old, and the war seemed like something that belonged in America’s past and entirely unrelated to the world in which I lived. As I later in life realized, nothing could have been further from the truth. The ripples and eddies in our nation’s social fabric were affecting the most important parts of America’s social contract—the agreements by which Americans mostly agreed to live as a nation. The two most obvious examples were the burgeoning civil rights movements of both Black people and women. Putting aside the fight for the civil rights of Black Americans, let us deal with the civil rights of women.
The post-war years were a period when women increasingly didn’t want to return to their roles in pre-World War II America, where their career choices were largely limited to being a housewife, teacher, secretary, or some combination of two of the three. When men went off to war, their role in the economic life of America was substantially filled by women. Rosie the Riveter. When the war ended and men returned home and wanted to return to their old jobs (thereby pushing women out), increasing numbers of women found that they didn’t want to return to their old lives of being housewives or being confined to extremely limited employment choices. “Ozzie and Harriet” and all the other TV sitcom families might have been the ideal being promoted by advertisers and men, but more and more women were dissatisfied with that life. Like Elizabeth Zott, they wanted to be chemists, or doctors, lawyers, writers, mechanics, and factory workers. Who said they could only be secretaries, or teachers, or telephone operators?
Maybe my personal experience was unusual. When I was in high school in the mid-50s, almost every girl I knew wanted to be a writer, poet, doctor, scientist, lawyer, scholar, actor, or the like. No one I knew wanted to be a housewife. Not only that, but most of the women in my family worked, none in those traditional female roles. But then, I lived in New York City, and maybe the rest of the country was different. When I went to a large out-of-state college in 1957, I met a very bright, vivacious girl who planned to get an education degree, work for two years as a teacher, and then (after getting married) have a couple of kids and become a housewife. I had never met anyone like her. For me, she was the inexplicable exotic. But the world was changing, and the feminist revolution was just getting started.
The fictional Elizabeth Zott faced almost all the problems that other women of that era faced. She fell in love but didn’t want to marry. But she and her boyfriend lived together, and she became pregnant. The love of her life died, and she faced all the opprobrium that was laid on unmarried mothers. Some of the men around her considered her to be of low moral character because of her unmarried relationship and motherhood. Her male employers refused to take her seriously as a scientist and wouldn’t believe that she had anything important to contribute. She was prevented from attaining a PhD because she was, well, a woman, and women were incapable of being scientists. She was sexually assaulted and was supposed to accept it as a normal event and make no complaint about it.
Lest you think that I exaggerate about the difficulties that women who aspired to be scientists faced, here is a story: In the mid-2000s, I had the opportunity to work with one of the brightest young scientists in America, someone who was both as smart as anyone I have ever known and was also an extraordinary woman. Yes, she had all the degrees and academic credentials one could ask for from the world’s most prestigious institutions and was working at a leading American university, teaching and conducting research into some of the most abstract, complex, and mysterious areas of physics. At the time, she told me that it was almost impossible for her published work to be fairly reviewed by her peers in certain parts of the world (including her own university) unless she had a male co-author. After I read “Lessons in Chemistry,” I asked if that had changed. She told me that things had improved somewhat (particularly in the U.S.), but not entirely. She also said that in applying for grants (and almost all research scientists survive by attaining grants), she was far more likely to get one if there was a male name attached to the application.
Abortion in the 1950s was, of course, illegal. But it was hardly unknown, any more than it has ever been unknown. As long as women have been having babies, there have been abortions. Although it was illegal when I was in high school and college, I knew more than one woman who had had abortions. If I had no idea at the time how one might find a willing abortionist, many women did or at least had a better idea of how to find one or whom to talk to about it. It was a subject that women rarely discussed with men, but they certainly discussed among themselves.
In colonial America, there was nothing illegal about it, although the Dobbs decision written by Justice Samuel Alito noted that it was illegal in England’s common law. That doesn’t mean that it was illegal in written law, and fidelity to written law was of great importance in early America. Alito is not the world’s most reliable historian. He tends to cherry-pick his historical examples and prefers historical analysis written by people with whom he is in political agreement. I don’t know if any history professor would give him a passing grade when reading his historical analysis of abortion’s past. If reading the Dobbs decision is too much for you, read his July 2022 speech to the Religious Liberty Summit in Rome. In it, he also delivers a history-based argument, which, again, cherry-picks his facts to make what is, in my opinion, a dubious case.
In post-revolution America, it wasn’t until the mid-19th century (almost 100 years later) that the first laws banning abortion began to be enacted by states, and by 1880, it was illegal in most of them. Nor, by the way, was there anything particularly unusual about pre-marital sex. In historian David Hackett Fischer’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” he notes that in the very Puritan, very Calvinist city of Boston, approximately one-third of women were pregnant when they got married.
Abortion was never a particularly important political issue before or after World War II. Sure, the Roman Catholic Church was opposed to it, but there was nothing new about that. However, the big shift in attitude was led by the evangelical community’s institutions, which had been much more interested in defending racial segregation. However, in the post-Civil and Voting Rights Acts era, not to mention Supreme Court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education, which overthrew the once favored “separate-but-equal” decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, policies favoring segregation and Jim Crow laws were rapidly losing both political appeal and legal cases. In 1976, Bob Jones University lost its tax exemption because it discriminated against Black students, and evangelicals began searching for a political issue around which they could rally their community and, hopefully, the country at large. Then, in 1978, Jerry Falwell of Liberty University preached his first anti-abortion sermon, and the pro-life movement became a mainstay of evangelical pastors. They had found a “religious” issue that they would claim was simply a “moral” and non-sectarian issue that could rally the greater evangelical community and provide a path to greater temporal power and influence.
Not surprisingly, Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal in 1973, was always controversial. In 1976, during his failed attempt to become the Republican presidential nominee, Ronald Regan opposed abortion, and by the time he was elected president in 1980, the Republican Party platform adopted the anti-abortion/pro-life position, and it remained a feature of Republican politics ever after.
During his presidency, Donald Trump made the overturning of Roe possible by appointing three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, resulting in a six-to-three conservative majority. All six of those justices proclaimed themselves to be devout religionists during their confirmation hearings. Five of the six were Roman Catholics. The author of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision that overturned Roe was Samuel Alito, who had long made his opposition to Roe known.
Note: In Part Two of this series, we will concentrate on Samuel Alito and his decision in general.
