While Roe v. Wade was without a doubt one of the most phenomenal gains for women's rights in the history of US law, it's important to remember today that even it was a compromise. When first agitating for a closer look at abortion law in the late 1960s and early 1970s—when some activists were for "appeal" and not "reform"—one New York group took to handing out copies of their ideal abortion law: a blank piece of paper.
Even the now-common terms "choice" and "life" were compromises to the New Right, a concession to their conviction that abortion was about the life of an unborn child—when earlier activists strove to make sure that women were aware that abortion was in fact about the potential damage unplanned or unwanted pregnancy can have on a woman's body, emotional health, and economic stability in an environment already weighted against women's autonomy and survival.
Nowhere were these potential damages felt more strongly than by the plaintiff known as Jane Roe, a woman named Norma McCorvey. Apparently something of a brash and unpolished woman—later shunned by feminists when she revealed herself to be the real Roe and eventually so frustrated with the lack of support from feminism that she joined a pro-life group—McCorvey celebrated the passing of the historic case having already given birth to a child she hadn't wanted, never having told her partner or friends how she was involved in the case that had been in the papers for months.
In fact, she was six months into her pregnancy before her lawyers, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, finally fully explained that this trial wasn't actually about *her* right to an abortion. When they won the case, Henry Wade had immediately decided to appeal; McCorvey was anxious to get the process over with—her pregnancy was not helping her natural inclination toward depression and thoughts of suicide. Coffee explained to her that the rights to abortion they were fighting for in the case could only be performed within the first trimester, and that it was too late for McCorvey to have the procedure—even if they won.
"I suddenly realized," McCorvey wrote in her autobiography with Andy Meisler, "this lawsuit was not really for me. It was about me, and maybe all the women who'd come before me, but it was really for all the women who were coming after me."
The class and race biases that informed feminism and the early 1970s abortion rights movement may have been the only imaginable way to enlist nationwide support for change, but moving forward we need to eliminate these biases, both from our immediate surroundings and from our demands for policy reform.
"Am I a role model?" McCorvey asks in I AM ROE (http://www.amazon.com/I-Am-Roe-Freedom-Choice/dp/0060170107). And then she provide the sad truth of the matter: "No. For much of my life, it is true, I have lived at the bottom edge of American society . . . Even if those millions of women didn't know that I existed, I was fighting right alongside them."
Compromises in such undertakings probably seem small: To appeal to more women, the debate became not about control over one's body, but about the conditions under which that control would be gained. To maintain an aura of polite debate, the language was shifted to not be about demands or rights any longer, but about more pleasant-seeming options. And to hinge the case around real-life issues, the court needed a pregnant woman. One they seemingly felt no need to truly engage in the process of the struggle that bore her (admittedly fake) name.
In the future—over the next 34 years of struggle that will surely continue as we sort out the plethora of troublesome issues housed in women's bodies—I'd suggest we strive toward eliminating those compromises.
And work toward celebrating the contributions of those who *aren't* role models.
