Moving the Movement

Was Roe vs. Wade, once seen as a great victory for reproductive freedom, actually the beginning of the end for the women’s movement? In her review of Jeanne Flavin’s Our Bodies, Our Crimes, Gloria Feldt laments that the Griswold vs. Connecticut and Roe vs. Wade "victories carried within them the seeds of their own demise, for they were not grounded in women’s moral and legal agency for which the law should provide protection equal to men’s" ["Beyond Roe," Issue #11]. According to Feldt, because those cases turned on the right to privacy–which is not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution–instead of the right to equal protection–which is–women’s access to contraception and abortion has been eroded rather than cemented over the past few decades.

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This article was originally published in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.