Was consciousness-raising politics or therapy?

The short answer

• A method that turned experience into evidence. Consciousness-raising gave women a way to compare housework, sexual coercion and other experiences that each might have taken as a personal problem. Repeated patterns invited a further question: what institutions and laws sustained them? The answer could turn private sorrow into a political grievance. Groups were inexpensive, needed no leaders and could be copied anywhere, allowing the method to spread faster than an organization could recruit. Discovering common experiences also gave women confidence to speak for others, a precondition for public protest.
• An injustice that fell hardest on the poor. Money affected both the choices available under the old law and the dangers women faced. A wealthier woman might travel abroad, pay a sympathetic doctor or persuade a hospital committee to approve a “therapeutic” abortion. Most poor women lacked those options. Wards treating septic abortion filled with poor women, and Black and Puerto Rican women bore a disproportionate share of maternal deaths. The inequality made repeal a question of fairness as well as abortion, drawing support beyond the women's movement.
• Doctors, lawyers and clergy changed sides. Some professionals who had encountered the consequences of criminal abortion became allies of reform. From the early 1960s the American Law Institute, an influential body of lawyers, proposed permitting abortion on limited medical grounds; many doctors supported reform after seeing the results of illegal procedures. In 1967 Protestant and Jewish clergy in New York began referring women to safe providers. These allies could draft legislation and testify with professional authority, giving reform a hearing among legislators unlikely to listen to radical feminists.
• Public confession as a weapon. Speak-outs, manifestos and courtroom protests made concealed acts visible and collective. When respected figures including Beauvoir and Catherine Deneuve admitted breaking the law, prosecutors faced the prospect of enforcing it against them or acknowledging its unenforceability. Gay liberation's contemporary call to “come out” used a related tactic; decades later, #MeToo testimonies appeared online. Public disclosure could weaken a law whose operation depended on people keeping quiet.

What it changed

A national right and a national opposition. The national right recognized in 1973 was accompanied by a national campaign to reverse it. Catholic organizations and, from the late 1970s, evangelical Protestants made abortion opposition central to a new conservative politics, alongside resistance to the Equal Rights Amendment. The issue remained among the most divisive in American politics for half a century.

Rights without access. The Court protected a woman's decision from state interference; it did not require the state to finance care. The Hyde Amendment of 1976 stopped Medicaid, public health insurance for people on low incomes, from paying for most abortions. Poor women retained the right but increasingly could not afford to use it. Feminists of color argued that a movement centered on “choice” had neglected the material conditions and abuses, including forced sterilization, that shaped their reproductive lives.

Europe follows a similar path. France's health minister Simone Veil carried the January 1975 law through parliament despite fierce hostility in her own majority; it legalized abortion in the first ten weeks. Italy followed in 1978 after a long campaign of civil disobedience. Confession, trial and reform thus shaped change in Western Europe, although Ireland and Northern Ireland held out for decades. Public confession could change law only where religious authority no longer dominated politics.