The cultural fission created by the controversy over birth control and abortion, as Juvenal's satiric comment above indicates, has a long and bitter history. The emergence of the modern state, however, transformed cultural differences into political acrimony as reproduction rights became public policy. In the United States, reproductive rights in the post-World War II period became a matter of political controversy when the federal government began to fund family planning programs domestically and abroad in the 1960s.

Beginning in the 1970s, historians and social scientists published a great deal on the birth-control movement in the United States, a subject that had been neglected. They were seeking perspective on the issues raised by profound changes in society that rendered problematic the gender system and family values of previous generations. It is no fluke that these scholars began to write the history of the effort to promote the separation of sex from procreation during the same decade that Congress removed contraception from the practices and information prohibited by the national obscenity laws (1971), and the Supreme Court ruled that married couples had a constitutionally protected right to practice contraception (1965), that the unmarried had a similar right of “privacy” (1972), and that pregnant women had the right to induced abortions performed by physicians during the first trimester of their pregnancies (1973). The Court's affirmation of a limited right to “abortion on demand” in Roe v. Wade followed a decade of intense political struggle and judicial action at the state level, and Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion, was self-consciously attempting to forge a consensus in areas of human behavior and public policy where conflicts were literally lethal and threatened the social order. In turn, much of the vitality of the scholarship on reproductive history that coincides with changes in the law sprang from the self-consciousness of women.

The Supreme Court changed abortion laws across the United States on 22 January 1973. Abortion had been illegal in many states, and in others a closely regulated medical procedure. In only four states did the law provide a broad right to terminate a pregnancy in the early months. Roe v. Wade declared that this right in the context of the doctor-patient relationship was protected by the Constitution's “right to privacy.” In practice, abortion became a matter of personal choice.

The U.S. government position on world population growth as it emerged in the early 1960s was a fundamental departure in both content and commitment. We embraced the idea that one of the goals of American foreign policy should be the simultaneous reduction of both mortality and fertility across the Third World. It was not simply rhetoric. As the years passed, we committed a growing portion of our foreign aid to that end. The decision to link U.S. foreign-policy objectives with the subsidy of family planning and population control was truly exceptional in that it explicitly aimed at altering the demographic structure of foreign countries through long-term intervention. No nation had ever set in motion a foreign-policy initiative of such magnitude. Its ultimate goal was no less than to alter the basic fertility behavior of the entire Third World! Whether one views this goal as idealistic and naive or as arrogant and self-serving, the project was truly of herculean proportions.

To operate within a strictly political frame of reference, the dispute over abortion—the centerpiece of the controversy over reproduction and population control in America—would seem to be over. With the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992, many observers declared as much. Charles Krauthammer, for one, argued that “one can reasonably declare a great national debate over when all three independently (s)elected branches of government come to the same position.” In 1992 the Supreme Court reaffirmed the central holding of Roe v. Wade in the Casey decision. Given this and an apparent majority of pro-choice votes in both houses of Congress, the new President-elect vowed to make good on his campaign pledge to pass the “Freedom of Choice Act” (FOCA), the legislative equivalent of Roe, as a safeguard against any future challenges. Certainly there seemed to be grounds for such a claim.

Social movements play a critical role in the development of public policy in modern America. An extensive literature provides us with valuable insights into their growth and evolution, but in the end it cannot substitute for the history of specific movements, which can be understood only in the particular circumstances of their birth and development. Over the last fifty years few movements have had the long-standing visibility, the mass involvement, and the public impact of the Right to Life movement. While there is still no adequate full-length account of the movement, an outline of some of the major aspects of its history, particularly as it is relevant to the public policy process in the United States, can be provided. Before embarking on that task, I will review and assess current interpretations of the movement, at both the popular and scholarly levels, and suggest a plausible explanation of its social sources and characteristics.

The battle over abortion in America is seemingly endless. The longstanding nature of the conflict is due in part to the ability of both the “pro-choice” or abortion rights movement and the “pro-life” or antiabortion countermovement to continue to organize support for many years. The pro-choice movement is particularly remarkable in that it has not only survived for more than twenty-five years, but it has grown stronger since achieving its greatest victory, legalization of abortion in 1973.