Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880-1940

2. The Inadvertent Alliance of Anthony Comstockand Margaret Sanger: Choice, Rights, and Freedom in Modern America

2 / The Inadvertent Alliance of Anthony Comstock and Margaret Sanger: Choice, Rights, and Freedom in Modern America There’s more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underestimate it. —Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale This chapter seeks to trace a continuum between Anthony Comstock’s moralizing jeremiads against “obscene acts” and Margaret Sanger’s quest to legalize birth control, by demonstrating the ways in which both Comstock and Sanger used disciplining tactics that condemned abortion. Most important, this chapter demonstrates how Comstock and Sanger succeeded in criminalizing abortion, thus completing the task begun by the American Medical Association, which by the 1880s had managed to outlaw abortion in every American state.1 Comstock’s contribution to this juridical process worked by lumping abortion together with other “sexual crimes” and contributing to the misconception that abortion was primarily used by working-class and poor women. Sanger promoted birth control by separating it from the issue of abortion; she often portrayed birth control as a means to better the human race by emphasizing abortion’s pernicious effects, thus paralleling Comstock’s construction of abortion as degrading and destructive. While Sanger and Comstock initially appear to be working through different paradigms, the opposition between them is belied by the investment that both activists made in similar constructions of freedom and protection that subtend liberal and conservative ideologies.2 Comstock’s opposition to abortion mirrors Sanger’s position because both are invested in constructing laws that interpellate subjects into individualizing and moralizing persons that if properly trained should be capable of self-control. Comstock’s politics, traditionally seen as conservative, contain components of liberal ideology because they are invested in an individuated and self-controlled the inadvertent alliance / 39 (male) subject. It is through laws concerned with rights that the emphasis on the individuated life becomes foregrounded; indeed, it is precisely through the emergence of rights-based laws that the concept of an entitled subject capable of self-regulation emerged, as well as the inverse concept of a subject incapable of self-control and therefore legally stripped of “choice.” Using rights-based discourse, or what is sometimes called “the right to choose,” as a means to reenfranchise historically oppressed communities has a prominent but conflicted history in the United States. From Patricia Williams’s work that asserts that rights granted through constitutional law are crucial in the fight to grant African Americans equal status in the United States to Wendy Brown’s critiques of rights as embedded in a liberalism that establishes identity-based politics, the discussion of rights as a tool for remedying civil and social inequality has been heated. Much has also been written about the role of rights in granting women access to abortion and control over their bodies.3 For example, Mary Poovey has argued that giving women the right to have an abortion maintains an individualistic attitude toward a procedure that should be based in community decision and with a community’s support . In Roe v. Wade, while the Supreme Court decided that women had the freedom to make their own reproductive choices because the state granted individual privacy, the Court also granted women freedom from the potentially undue burden of pregnancy.4 The slipperiness between freedom from and freedom to points to a tension in the foundations of American liberalism. Freedom from assumes what Kimberlé Crenshaw points to as a victims-based protectionist ideology; the Supreme Court is “protecting” women who without laws protecting abortion rights would fall prey to the potentially difficult conditions of an unwanted pregnancy even as the same law mandates that the individual woman has a right to control her own body.5 Freedom to assumes an individuated private body that should not be subject to government interference. While Sanger and Comstock were both invested in outlawing abortion, the rhetoric they established for antiabortion arguments mirrors rights-based proabortion law and thus points to how proabortion policy in the United States has been so deftly undermined in the years following Roe v. Wade. Beyond Rights? In rehearsing rights rhetoric from the American civil rights movement , Kimberlé Crenshaw provides a nuanced picture of the critique of 40 / the inadvertent alliance rights that emerged from the movement, but also the necessity for those rights.6 Crenshaw recites the “Crits”7 argument, which...