Roe v. Wade and its Immediate Impact

This image is from the original Roe v. Wade debate in 1970, this debate was primarily discussing if women had the right to decide to terminate their pregnancy. 

Before 1973, abortion in America had been a punishable crime for nearly an entire century. This time period saw the deaths of thousands of women from botched abortions, high infant mortality rates, and illegal underground abortion clinics. Criminalizing abortion did not decrease the need for abortion and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the pressure for abortion rights only increased. In 1970, New York took steps toward legalizing abortion and repealed state laws to allow physicians to conduct abortion within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy.[1] By 1972, 223,000 legal abortions were recorded in New York and 61.8% were done on women from other states.[2] This demonstrated that the need for abortion was ever-present and 13 other states followed suit by enacting similar reforms. In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that women had a constitutional right to reproductive privacy, without government intervention, up until the period of “viability” or the end of the first trimester.[3] This effectively legalized abortion in the first trimester.

            Within the immediate aftermath of Roe v. Wade, conditions for women improved; the world of illegal abortion was replaced by safe, legal, physician-conducted abortions. Public health improved drastically as maternal and infant mortality fell, sepsis clinics closed, and women were safe from the injuries of illegal abortion.[4] Numerous abortion clinics emerged in low-income areas, making it more accessible to low-income and minority women.[5] This research seeks to question how the legalization of abortion through Roe v. Wade impacted the lives of women in its immediate aftermath. Using Ms. Magazine and Off Our Backs, it is evident that Roe was simply one small step in a much larger journey towards women’s health and reproductive justice.

Ms. is a feminist magazine founded in 1972 by Gloria Steinem, it covered feminist news on grassroots activism and reported on injustices against women.[6] Off Our Backs was a national and radical feminist periodical that was founded in 1970 and published up until 2008.[7] Both sources were considered controversial in mainstream media and often found themselves paradoxically subjected to public backlash and female appraisal. These sources also exist within the second feminist wave and often are the voices of white women. There is an absence of minority voices within these publications, likely because women of colour were often fighting entirely different issues than their white counterparts.