Brennan Center for Justice: Author Talk With Linda Greenhouse

Former New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse talks about Roe vs. Wade, partisan politics, and the future of abortion rights.

Interviewed by Nancy Northup

Read the interview on the Brennan Center for Justice website >,

Nancy Northup: What surprised you when you went back and looked at the documents that bring the debates before Roe vs. Wade to life?

Linda Greenhouse: I was surprised by how relatively late in the process of reform the women’s movement jumped in. I assumed the second-wave feminist movement initiated the cause of abortion reform. But that wasn’t the case. The initial impulse came from public health concerns and, to some degree from the elite of the legal profession. Feminists were on a parallel, but, different track. They focused on economic equality and empowerment. It wasn’t until Betty Friedan made the fabulous speech in Chicago in 1969—which we excerpt—that the feminists made an overt connection between economic empowerment and women’s need to control their reproductive lives. The meaning of “abortion” changed significantly over time, and, resonated differently within different communities. This is key to understanding what occurred both before, and after, Roe. It seems obvious once you say it, but, it sort of jumps out from the materials and I don’t think that’s been a point of much analytical focus before.

NN: Can you say more about the ways in which abortion has been understood in different communities?

LG: Yes. At first, abortion was presented as a public health issue. Back alley, illegal abortions were a significant cause of death and injury. Here was really a medical problem that needed to be fixed. But, as the sixties went on the abortion issue intersected with the growing power of the women’s movement, the Equal Rights Amendment, the Nixon presidency and Nixon’s re-election effort in 1972, and, the concept of abortion got mixed up with other elements of the social upheaval taking place. People came to understand, not incorrectly, that a right to abortion makes it possible for women to be in the world in a very different way. The debate over abortion became much more freighted, it came to involve far more than a debate over a particular surgical procedure, or, even a debate over ending a pregnancy as such. It came to stand for what one thought of the roles of women.

NN: The book aims to recreate the public conversation from which Roe emerged. How much has that conversation changed during the last forty years?

LG: Inevitably, we see the pre-Roe period through the lens of Roe. For example, we see the conflict within religious communities in terms of the Catholic Church and its opposition to abortion, the resources and ability it has to enter the public conversation in a very robust way, and get the idea the Catholic Church led opposition from other faith-based communities. This wasn’t the case, however, in the pre-Roe period. Something that surprised us—and I don’t claim Reva Siegal, my author, and I discovered it, but it was news to us— was the discovery that other religious communities, for instance the Evangelical communities, did not share the Catholic Community’s implacable opposition to abortion under all circumstances. They were open to the notion of ‘therapeutic abortion’ and recognized circumstances in which abortion, although problematic, would be morally acceptable, and, should be legal. This is one interesting example of how current assumptions aren’t historically correct.

NN: You also trace the issues in terms of partisan politics.

LG: Yes. A Gallup poll conducted in the summer of 1972 while the Supreme Court was getting ready for the second argument in Roe, asked ‘do you believe that abortion should be a matter solely between the woman and her doctor?’ The largest affirmative responses came from Republicans, and by a margin, I think of 68 percent. (Democrats also said yes, but by a smaller margin.) Party realignments occurred later.

NN: Are there notable similarities between the pre-Roe debate and today’s public debate about abortion?

LG: We reprint some very powerful anti-abortion arguments including a fascinating little book called Handbook on Abortion. It was written, by Dr. Jack Wilkie and his wife, in the form of questions and answers about abortion and Wilkie’s arguments are the same arguments the right-to-life community has been making ever since. They are very familiar—even though this little book predates the real hardening of the line. Dr. Wilkie self-published the book but it quickly circulated, has been translated into dozens of languages, has become the bible of the anti-abortion movement, and, is strikingly familiar today.

NN: Let’s talk about Roe itself. Did the decision cause the subsequent conflict, or, was the decision merely a symbol that emerged from public conflict about abortion?

LG: Reva Siegel, my co-author, and I don’t buy the notion that the Court started everything. On the other hand, I mentioned earlier the Gallup poll that indicated wide acceptance of the reform of the old abortion laws. We don’t know what the Courts made of that or what the Justices expected. We know they expected some controversy, but we don’t think they had any notion that there would be so much controversy, certainly not lasting to this very day, thirty-seven years later. So as I say, it is an ambiguous story. When I started covering the Court in ’78, there were already several post-Roe challenges to various obstacles to abortion access on the Court’s docket. The Roe mentality seemed solid on the Court. It seemed unlikely any of these challenges would be of more than marginal interest. Few people then would have imagined we would still be living with the aftermath of all this today.

NN: Commentators like Jeffery Rosen of The New Republic, argue abortion rights as a policy position, but think it would have been better if the Supreme Court had declined to recognize a Constitutional protection for abortion rights. What do you think? Might we have had less contentiousness about abortion if the Supreme Court had just stayed out of it?

LG: It’s a theoretically appealing, but historically inaccurate idea. Did the Court think that its decision reflected national consensus? Did the Court misread the public? We don’t really know the answers to those very intriguing questions. The historical record is clear that our electoral politics are not going to accomplish what Roe vs. Wade accomplished.

NN: Who is the audience for your book and how would you like it to be used?

LG: Ideally people on both sides of the debate will learn something about where we are. We specifically hoped that the college-age population will read it in their American Studies classes or Women’s Studies classes. We hope to reach both a general audience and specific academic audience.

NN: In the forward, you and Professor Siegel say your personal view is that a woman should be free to decide for herself, whether and when to bear children. It has been two years since you left your post at The New York Times. Have you been able to write and speak on your own position on the issue as opposed to the neutral journalistic position that you had for so many years?

LG: Yes. Now I’m free to say anything because I don’t have to write a regular opinion column for the Times website. It’s a different professional relationship to issues that I find fascinating.

NN: Was it very hard—during the thirty years you were covering the Court—to maintain the objectivity that you needed to have, particularly when you covered subjects like the Court’s treatment of abortion rights?

LG: Not really. I was a daily journalist for forty years. There are tools of the trade that reporters learn to deploy. I always had definite issues on the abortion issue, in the book, I wanted to come clean on this. The book is not a work of advocacy. So, no, I didn’t find it that difficult. Actually, I had much less of an idea of what was the right answer with respect to many of the issues that came before the Court. The Court deals with an awful lot of hard questions on which very smart people have disagreed, I was sometimes quite grateful that I didn’t have to reach my own decision, rather just report what other people were saying.

NN: Thirty-seven years after Roe vs. Wade the abortion battle rages on in the courts and the legislatures and in the media. Is there an end in sight?

LG: It’s hard to see an end in sight. Given the current efforts of the anti-abortion community, for instance, to require women seeking abortion to view ultrasound images of the fetus, and so on. I was just in Florida the other day and the legislature passed such a law and the question was, would the Governor veto it? There always seems to be something new to latch onto. And of course many of these efforts in the States are efforts not so much to change the hearts and minds of the State population, but to find a vehicle that the anti-abortion side might ride to the Supreme Court in the hopes the Court might take a different view of the matter. This is a long way of saying, no I don’t think the issue is going to go away.

NN: As a close Court observer, how far do you think the current Supreme Court might be willing to go in terms of restricting abortion rights?

LG: Three are four Justices who would uphold pretty much any restriction that comes across their screen. Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Alito, Justice Scalia, and Justice Thomas. So, that leaves us with a question mark about Justice Kennedy. Based on his opinion in Casey vs. Planned Parenthood in 1992, I think Justice Kennedy seems to be committed to the notion that there is a core right to abortion. I don’t see him changing his position on that. It is just a question of what he sees as an undue burden and whether or not that strikes other people as an undue or not. That is the unanswered question here.

Of course, we haven’t heard from Justice Sotomayor or from Solicitor General Kagan on this issue, but I’m assuming that their views will be much like the Justices that they are replacing. So, I’m counting them as the four on the other side, with Justice Kennedy in the middle.

NN: Very good. Thank you and Professor Siegel for putting together these materials. They bring to vivid life the public conversation that shaped debate before Roe vs. Wade. And as someone who works on this issue 24/7, I was surprised by much of what I read when I revisited these arguments and debates. The book is going to be an incredibly important contribution to the debate as both a social and constitutional matter.

Linda Greenhouse, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, covered the Supreme Court for the New York Times for many years and now teaches at Yale.

Nancy Northup is the President of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a global human rights organization that uses constitutional and international law to secure women’s reproductive freedom.

Read the interview on the Brennan Center for Justice website >,