Feminist Abortion Politics: Strategic Action and the Politics of the Body

• In Event: Feminist Affects and Attachments

Abstract

This essay takes a fine-grained look at grassroots abortion politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s in order to theorize two aspects of politics theory that often appear to be very distinct. The first is the meaning of strategic action. Departing from Michel de Certeau’s distinction between strategy and tactics, I argue that in the context of social movements, strategy is more usefully thought of as distinct from the politics of expediency rather than tactics. Because social movements are always situated between the extremes of institutional power and powerlessness, the opposition of strategy to tactics is not useful in understanding how opportunism in action can work for or against an overarching strategy of social transformation. Second, in the context of the politics of abortion, I argue that a strategy of locating women’s freedom in the body became central to a radical understanding of the importance and value of decriminalizing abortion. The debate over whether to pursue abortion reform or repeal, then, became a debate over the dedication to the strategy of liberating women’s bodies from reproductive determinism (repeal) or the expediency of abortion access as a “win” for the movement (reform). Through analyzing the action of one activist, Lucinda Cisler, in the larger context of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), I argue that the politics of expediency foreclosed the larger battle for a feminist strategy of abortion as a part of women’s freedom as grounded in the body.

Author

• Claire C. McKinney, William & Mary