For over six decades, the struggle over the meaning of “abortion on demand” has reflected the fight over men’s ability to control women’s reproductive lives. In the early 1960s, state legislatures began to reconsider abortion restrictions amidst revelations of the high rates of criminal abortions and in the wake of thalidomide and rubella scares, which led to birth defects and infant deaths. Male medical experts, legal reformers, allied professionals, and religious leaders had an outsized voice in popularizing and shaping the meaning of “abortion on demand” – a phrase so foreign it needed to be put into quotations in expert and popular literature.
Media coverage in the early 1960s linked the foreignness of “abortion on demand” with actual foreign countries’ abortion policies. Japan, Hungary, and the Soviet Union were go-to examples because they permitted elective abortions. American commentators believed the United States was unlikely to adopt such alien practices. Such was the case in 1962, in discussions of the popular book The Abortionist by Lucy Freeman, which saw one of the earliest variations of this phrase in the American press. Amidst Cold War xenophobia, these foreign associations did little to help make the case for abortion on demand in the United States.
The landscape of reproductive rights, however, was rapidly shifting, and the foreign associations of abortion on demand would soon overlap with domestic debates within the growing American abortion rights movement. At first, the abortion rights movement was male-dominated and made up of “small, well-defined groups of elite professionals: public health officials, crusading attorneys, and prominent physicians.” By the mid-1960s, there were two major camps in the abortion rights movement: reformers and repealers. It was these two camps’ division over policy that would play a crucial role in shaping the political meaning of abortion on demand for decades to come.
The difference between supporters of reform and repeal was the degree of change they envisioned to abortion laws. Reformers called for a limited set of exceptions to these restrictions so that “deserving” women could access abortion. Rape, incest, fetal deformity, and the health and life of the mother, they believed, were among the grounds for terminating pregnancies. Repealers, meanwhile, wanted abortion to be elective—a private decision made by any woman for any reason. Abortion rights activists—reformers and repealers alike—used the phrase “abortion on demand” to signal the latter position.