Choosing the Right to Choose: Roe v. Wade and the Feminist Movement to Legalize Abortion in Martial-Law Taiwan

Introduction: The many Faces of Roe V. Wade

Decided in 1973, Roe v. Wade is one of the most renowned US Supreme Court decisions. In the United States Roe has become an icon for women’s right to abortion and is described as “an engine of controversy,” giving rise to what Joan Williams has called “a gender war over the issue of whether women are or should be citizens of the republic of choice.”¹ Roe’s impact has also extended beyond the United States. Although the international movement for abortion law reform began years before Roe, and some countries, such as Japan, the Soviet Union, and Britain, have had legalized abortion since the 1950s, Roe both informed and was informed by a larger global movement to recognize women’s reproductive freedom and equality. The High Court of Pretoria in South Africa referred to Roe in endorsing women’s right to abortion.² The Supreme Court of Canada used the rulings of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton as grounds to find the Criminal Code of Canada’s restrictions on abortion unconstitutional.³

Roe recognized women’s right to abortion in the name of privacy but also galvanized the anti-abortion movement in the United States. Similarly, the trajectory of Roe across national borders also fostered contradictory responses, which can be seen in court decisions against reproductive choice. The German Constitutional Court as well as the European Commission, for example, discussed and referred to Roe in their decisions restricting the right to abortion.⁴ US domestic and foreign policies that limit women’s access to abortion—the Helms Amendment, the Global Gag Rule, and so on—have also undermined global recognition of women’s reproductive rights. American law and policies have produced significant, if not hegemonic, influences in the world by both hindering and enhancing these rights.⁵

Indeed, Roe itself does not necessarily promote women’s reproductive rights inside or outside the United States. The association of Roe and the privacy-right framing, as well as the concept of privacy associated with Roe, have long been under contestation. Recent studies have indicated that framing women’s right to abortion as a right of privacy was not the only option available to the Court and feminists at that time. In fact these works have argued that the meanings of Roe have been constantly shaped and reshaped by the courts, activists, scholars, and the public. Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel have revealed the significant diversity attributable to voices on both sides of the abortion debate before Roe.⁶ In addition a group of constitutional scholars have demonstrated alternative possibilities to the Court’s ruling.⁷ Mary Ziegler has gone further, to challenge the conventional narratives of Roe, arguing that the popular interpretation of Roe differed radically from the text of the original decision by shifting the focus from the rights of physicians to the rights of women.⁸ William Saletan has even argued that, since 1986, the proabortion rights movement has repackaged the right to abortion as a conservative idea that emphasizes state nonintervention and family privacy, turning abortion into a question of “who decides.” This adoption of privacy rhetoric has given it broader appeal to conservatives while also enabling conservatives to adopt this rhetoric for their own agenda and exploit it.⁹

Because Roe has multiple meanings even within the United States, examining the significance of this court decision through a transnational perspective raises intriguing questions: In countries where Roe has served as a reference, how was the decision interpreted and applied? Why and how did some celebrate it to promote women’s reproductive rights, whereas others used it to restrict women’s access to abortion? What are the implications of the reception of Roe in the feminist politics of location? Kathy Davis’s study of the transnational trajectory taken by the book Our Bodies, Ourselves (obos) suggests that concepts associated with obos—autonomy, freedom—“could easily be used (albeit flexibly and strategically) to empower women in the context of their own (often...