Gloria Steinem Quotes
There is nothing more fundamental than the idea that the government does not have a right to decide when and whether we have children.
Steinem, Gloria. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983.
He was referring to Eisenstadt v. Baird in which the court had just ruled on the quoted passage. Some opponents of the Court’s Roe v. Wade decision claim that the opinion came out of left field and had no logical chain from past jurisprudence, but as this quotation pointed out, Roe was the inevitable logical conclusion of an entire line of Supreme Court thinking. Opponents mostly sought reversal on fundamentally moral grounds, not legal.
A Woman’s Concern like many other anti-abortion groups are also morally opposed to birth control of all kinds except celibacy or the “rhythm method” which is not particularly effective. He was appointed by the George W. Bush administration after vigorous lobbying by some of the extreme right wing religious groups who wanted birth control such as pills, IUDs or condoms to be made illegal. These proposals did not get much public support as the vast majority of Americans including a majority of Catholics use birth control methods that this man would have criminalized. His claims about the negative effects of birth control had no scientific bases whatsoever. As a physician, he had been warned by the Medical Association for the improper practice of medicine. He had to resign his government position.
Both the United States and Canada had laws regulating the sexual behavior of citizens in the privacy of their own homes. It was not just homosexuality that the state attempted to control. Even the specific positions and methods of heterosexual intercourse were controlled by some states. Oral sex, certain positions of intercourse and other “details” could put a person in jail. Canada, a parliamentary nation, changed this by legislation. In the United States, it was the Supreme Court decisions protecting privacy that invalidated these old sexual role restrictions and prescriptions. For example, just 4 years before this quotation was made, 1963, the state of Connecticut was ordered (Griswald v. Connecticut) to release a pharmacist for the “crime” of filling a doctor’s prescription for condoms for a married couple where the wife would likely die if she became pregnant and carried the baby to term.
Gloria Marie Steinem is an American feminist journalist and social political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader and a spokeswoman for the American feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
