Will the venerable “pro-choice” label be retired?
Photo: Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP via Getty Images
In this new and perilous age in which federal courts no longer protect the right to a pre-viability abortion, all sorts of decisions affecting millions of Americans are newly exposed to the malice of federal and state lawmakers and the vagaries of election results. So the language used by advocates for and against reproductive rights matters more than ever, and there are signs of some significant shifts.
Most immediately, the preeminent organization defending reproductive autonomy, NARAL Pro-Choice America, has decided to change its name to Reproductive Freedom for All. NARAL stands for National Abortion Rights Action League, which was the group’s name from 1973 until 2003, when the Pro-Choice moniker was added, reflecting the dominant terminology for those fighting to defend and perhaps extend Roe. The organization’s current president, Mini Timmaraju, explained the decision to abandon the “choice” framework in an interview with Elle:
[W]e learned from our colleagues who represent Black and brown women and communities in this country — the most marginalized folks, the most affected by these bans — that they never had a choice. Even though Roe was the law of the land, because of targeted restrictions against abortion providers, if there’s one clinic and it’s 100 miles away, there’s a 72-hour waiting period, and you have a mandatory ultrasound, did you really have a choice to have an abortion? It’s important for us to acknowledge, putting political effectiveness aside, that terminology wasn’t representative of the challenges our most affected communities face.
In other words, many NARAL allies in the fight for abortion rights didn’t consider the legal regimen under Roe — which allowed the denial of public funding for abortion services and many restrictions on providers — adequate. The decision to retire the venerable NARAL label itself reflects an effort to broaden the organization’s agenda into other areas affecting reproductive rights, including access to health care and voting rights. And given the ongoing backlash against state laws restricting reproductive rights and even threatening criminalization of those obtaining, providing, or facilitating abortion services, it made a lot of sense to embrace the language of “reproductive freedom” with the egalitarian modifier “for All.”
However, the change could come with a political price. Polling before and after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade showed higher levels of support for maintaining and restoring Roe than for any particular formulation of abortion rights. Forty-nine years of living with Roe made it a familiar and comfortable line of defense for many women who relied on it, along with the “choice” terminology that seemed sufficient to those able to access abortion services. The more aggressive and comprehensive terminology of “Reproductive Freedom for All” will be seized upon by anti-abortion activists and their GOP allies who are already absorbed with distracting attention from their radical plans by accusing Democrats of moving the goalposts in order to facilitate relatively unpopular late-term abortions. Republican politicians are eagerly describing strict pre-viability bans with a few exceptions as “compromises.” At least the Roe formula was clear and very popular. But presumably, everyone will adjust to the new lines of battle before long.
A much older battle over abortion terminology is playing out in Ohio, site of the next major statewide ballot initiative on the topic this November (after a string of wins for abortion-rights defenders in 2022). A state constitutional amendment adding a right to pre-viability abortions modeled on Roe is expected to prevail after voters handily defeated a Republican effort to create a supermajority threshold for the enactment of citizen-sponsored ballot measures. But an appointed state ballot board has sneakily tried to make passage of the measure harder by writing a skewed “summary” of the amendment that will be the only thing voters see, as The Guardian reported:
This summary repeatedly substituted the term “unborn child” for “fetus” and says the amendment would “always allow an unborn child to be aborted at any stage of pregnancy, regardless of viability” if a doctor deems an abortion necessary to protect a “pregnant woman’s life or health.”
It’s unclear if word choice will matter in this particular case, but without question, the language of abortion politics may go through many mutations as the country sorts out its direction on this crucial set of issues.
