1. Twelve states reformed their abortion laws between 1967 and 1975, with four permitting abortion virtually on request. In response, a nascent right-to-life movement mobilized coalitions of political fundamentalists opposed to reform or repeal of abortion laws, and a bitter struggle was launched between contending interests. Blackmun seems to have been personally moved by the agonies of women who had late trimester saline abortions performed by unskilled or callous practitioners.

For the social history that informed the emergence of an aggressive women's rights movement for legal abortion, see Reagan, Leslie Jean, “When Abortion Was a Crime: The Legal and Medical Regulation of Abortion, Chicago, 1880–1973” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1991)Google Scholar. For the legal history that led to the “right to privacy” doctrine and the decisions affirming the rights of individuals to control their fertility, see Garrow, David J., Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (New York, 1994)Google Scholar. Skolnick, Arlene, Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty (New York, 1991)Google Scholar, provides an analysis of the changes in social structure and the family that proved profoundly unsettling to many Americans.

2. Gordon's, LindaWoman's Body, Woman's Right: Birth Control in America (New York, 1976Google Scholar; rev. ed., 1990) is an influential example of the new feminist history. For review essays on the emerging scholarship by feminist historians, see Ryan, Mary P., “The Explosion of Family History,” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 181–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Estelle B. Freedman, “Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America: Behavior, Ideology, and Politics,” ibid., 196–215; Elaine Tyler May, “Expanding the Past: Recent Scholarship on Women in Politics and Work,” ibid., 216–33; Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, “Comment on the Reviews of Woman's Body, Woman's Right,” Signs 4 (Summer 1979): 804–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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25. At this time only the most radical proponents of reproductive autonomy for women publicly defended induced abortion as a civil right. During the first half of the twentieth century, birth-control advocates often cited the high mortality and morbidity rates associated with illegal aboriton as justification for contraception. One of the most dramatic changes in the birth-control movement came in the 1960s, when tentative efforts to reform prohibitive abortion laws were suddenly replaced by strong demands that they be abolished, and the great majority of birth-control advocates aggressively defended abortion as a woman's right. Although the birth-control clinics of the 1930s sometimes provided aid to pregnant women who sought abortions, usually in the form of referral to sympathetic physicians, this assistance was offered at great risk of criminal prosecution. See Reed, Private Vice, 118–19.

26. The term “birth control” was coined by Otto Bobsein, a friend of Margaret Sanger, and printed for the first time in the fourth issue of Sanger's radical journal, The Woman Rebel (June 1914). See Chester, Ellen, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York, 1992), 97Google Scholar. Sanger has had numerous biographers, and both Reed and Gordon devote considerable attention to her in their histories of the birth-control movement, but Chesler's work is the most complete interpretation of Sanger's career.

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32. The Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau was opened with funds that Sanger solicited from Clinton Chance, a British manufacturer, and it was not legally affiliated with the American Birth Control League because, as a membership corporation, the league could not operate a medical dispensary, and, as usual, Sanger's plans seemed too bold to other leaders of the ABCL. Once Sanger demonstrated that a birth-control clinic could stay open, this form of service became one of the principal activities of the ABCL and its successors. Reed, Private Vice, 112–20.

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35. This opportunism, pragmatism, or plain dishonesty was characteristic of Sanger and accounts for the considerable confusion that exists concerning her positions on many issues, and especially her relationship to the eugenics movement, other feminists, and the medical establishment. See Jensen, Joan M., “The Evolution of Margaret Sanger's Family Limitation Pamphlet, 1914–1921,” Signs 6 (1981): 548–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reed, Private Vice, 129–39, and Chesler, Woman of Valor, passim.

36. Probably the most important single medical publication in the history of contraception was Hannah Stone's 1928 monograph demonstrating the effectiveness of the diaphragm-with-spermicidal-jelly regimen. It proved amazingly difficult to collect this data and to get it published. This accomplishment owed much to Hannah Stone and Robert L. Dickinson, but Sanger also deserved a great deal of credit, and this kind of achievement depended upon her opportunism in comparison to Dennett's hard-line civil liberties strategy. See Reed, Private Vice, 115–16, 167–80, and Hannah Stone, “Therapeutic Contraception,” Medical Journal and Record (21 May 1928): 8–17.

37. “Congressional Report: January 1 to May 1, 1926,” American Birth Control League papers, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass.; Reed, Private Vice, 100–104.

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