Beggars and Choosers 1 CHOICE IS A MOVING TARGET Although we strongly believe in the private and responsible nature of our own choices to have children, we simply do not see the choices of women in poverty in the same way. --Thomas Ross, Just Stories 1       January 22, 1973, was a remarkable day in United States history. That afternoon Lyndon Baines Johnson died. At nearly the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court announced one of its most ambitious decisions ever, Roe v. Wade . On the evening news, the former president''s death eclipsed the announcement that abortion was now legal in all fifty states.

2 In the years since the Roe decision, however, the political struggle over the role of abortion in U.S. society has fiercely resisted eclipse. The meaning of the Roe decision, especially the meaning of the "choice" it promised women, has never stopped evolving. After the Court''s announcement, commentators called Roe v. Wade "one of the boldest, most sweeping decisions of the . era," "an astonishing decision," "extraordinary."3 Later, after the complexities of Roe had become more apparent, some observers still referred to it as "a total victory" and an "expansive decision.

"4 Sarah Weddington, the young Texas lawyer who argued the case before the Court, wrote in her memoirthat Roe was "a declaration of human liberty." She remembered that as she read the text of Justice Harry Blackmun''s opinion, she "rejoiced that the decision was seven-to-two [and] that it was strong and clear." She also remembered taking a phone call that day from a woman who had an urgent suggestion: "that January 22nd be declared a national holiday for women." Roe v. Wade generated so much hope and excitement partly because it seemed so clearly to be responding to the dilemma of all women. Many proponents of legal abortion believed Roe was a symbol and a vehicle of women''s liberation. A Vermont law student described the Roe decision as a response "to the rallying of women across the nation--a rejection of women as reproductive machines and an acceptance of women as individuals capable of choice."5 The Court had not distinguished among groups of women by age, race, income, or level of education.

Roe v. Wade was for everyone. This sense of triumph was not surprising. After all, abortion rights activists and many ordinary women had talked for years about the deeply degrading impact of anti-abortion statutes and the importance of achieving reproductive freedom. The founders of an early abortion rights organization, the Society for Humane Abortion, described state laws forbidding abortion as a form of sex discrimination.6 Many involved in the women''s rights movement defined abortion rights as having tremendous political and practical significance. One second wave feminist put it this way: When we talk about women''s rights, we can get all the rights in the world--the right to vote, the right to go to school--and none of them means a doggone thing if we don''t own the flesh we stand in . if the whole course of our lives can be changed by somebody else that can get us pregnant by accident, or by deceit, or by force.

So I consider the right to elective abortion . the cornerstone of the women''s movement . Without that right, we''d have about as many rights as a cow in the pasture that''s taken to the bull once a year . [I]f you can''t control your body you can''t control your future.7 During the late 1960s and early 1970s, advocates of legal abortion mostly used the term "rights," not "choice," to refer to what they wereafter. Still, the term "choice" did crop up. The National Abortion Rights Action League''s (NARAL) first national action in 1969--a Mother''s Day demonstration held in conjunction with press conferences in eleven cities--was called "Children by Choice."8 And Dr.

Alan Guttmacher, the prominent birth control advocate and important convert to the cause of legalized abortion, proclaimed January 22, 1973, "a great day for freedom of choice."9 But until Roe, most activists claimed that "the right to control whether you''re pregnant or not [was] indivisible from the right to self-determination."10 The rights language, however, did not last very long. Justice Blackmun referred to abortion as "this choice" a number of times in his Roe majority ruling. And the determination of abortion rights advocates to develop a respectable, nonconfrontational movement after Roe encouraged many proponents to adopt the term "choice." In a country weary of rights claims, choice became the way liberal and mainstream feminists could talk about abortion without mentioning the "A-word."11 Many people believed that "choice"--a term that evoked women shoppers selecting among options in the marketplace--would be an easier sell; it offered "rights lite," a package less threatening or disturbing than unadulterated rights. At first, people who used the term "choice" didn''t talk much about what it would take for a woman to exercise her new reproductive latitude.

The law had made choice legal for everyone, and that was that. A women''s health care provider observed in 1973, "What has been happening . is that if you can afford it, you get an abortion, and if you can''t, you have the child and go on welfare."12 Now, she indicated, the playing field would be much more level. A woman could choose whether or not to get an abortion and whether or not to become a mother, no matter how much money she had in her wallet. This early, optimistic sense of how Roe v. Wade would affect women''s reproductive lives reflected the utopian egalitarianism of many in the women''s movement at the time. In the struggle to win reproductive freedom, many activists didn''t think about the fact that pregnancy and childbearing have historically and dramatically separated women by race and class in this country.

For centuries, enslaved African-American women had endured coerced pregnancies and the human-selling practices of slave owners. White urban immigrant mothers had seen theirchildren targeted and taken away from them by "child rescue" charities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After World War II, white unmarried mothers were roughly pressed to relinquish their "illegitimate" babies, while in the same period Black unmarried mothers were stereotyped as excessively fertile welfare cheats.13 Which women, under which circumstances, were legitimately pregnant or legitimate mothers, and which were not, had always involved race and/or class distinctions in America. The pregnancies and childbearing of women of color and resourceless women had often deepened the vulnerability of these women, and deepened distinctions between them and middle-class white women who had resources and choices, long before Roe v. Wade. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this history--much of which was still buried or too fresh to look at historically--could have tempered optimism about "choice" as a powerful equalizer.     This book is about the complexities of "choice" in the United States after Roe v.

Wade. What happens when the special guarantee for all women--the promise that women can decide for themselves whether and when to be mothers--is expressed by the individualistic, marketplace term "choice"? How can users of such a term avoid distinguishing, in consumer-culture fashion, between a woman who can and a woman who can''t afford to make a choice? What aspects of "rights" were masked or lost when the language of choice replaced the language of rights at the heart of women''s special guarantee? I use the term "rights" to refer to the privileges or benefits of being a human and specifically a woman in the United States, privileges or benefits that one can exercise without access to any special resources, such as money. For example, women and minorities in the United States have struggled for and won "voting rights," that is, the right of all citizens over a certain age to vote, even if they have no money, no property, and no other resources. By contrast, choice, including the popular and problematic form "the right to choose," has come to be intimately connected to the possession of resources. Many Americans have developed faith in the idea that women who exercise choice are supposed to be legitimate consumers, women with money. This is true even when the choices they exercise, such as the choice to become a mother or the choice to end a pregnancy, might be considered a very fundamental issue of rights. Like the copywriter in the Kenneth Cole shoe ad that is the epigraph for this book, I find the slogan "the right to choose" fairly ridiculous. It impossibly mixes "right," a privilege to which one is justly entitled, and "choice," the privilege to exercise discrimination in the marketplace among several options, if one has the wherewithal to enter the marketplace to begin with.

Our Constitution does not, of course, guarantee anyone the right to enter the marketplace of reproductive (or any other) options. As I discuss later in this chapter, the Supreme Court''s decisions regarding the legitimacy of the Hyde Amendment (an act of Congress denying federal funding for the abortions of poor women) have proved that. Historical distinctions between women of color and white women, between poor and middle-class women, have been reproduced and institutionalized in the "era of choice," in part by defining some groups of women as good choice makers, some as bad. During a time when babies--and pregnancy itself--became ever more commodified, some women were.