Roe v. Wade is perhaps the most famous case in the history of the US Supreme Court. It has been used as a litmus test for candidates for judicial office, and it has served as a lightning rod for modern constitutional law. Roe has been compared to both the reviled decision in Dred Scott, refusing citizenship status to African Americans, and the celebrated desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education—it has been denounced for denying fetal personhood and acclaimed for advancing women's equality. Roe has been the subject of much scholarly study, but almost all of it focuses on its role in the struggle for reproductive rights and reproductive justice. In Beyond Abortion, Mary Ziegler sidesteps many of these controversies, concentrating instead on Roe's reverberations within other social movements far removed from the issue of abortion: “Many social movements not involved in abortion politics have drawn from Roe's power, reasoned from Roe's idea of privacy, and projected deeply different meanings onto the Court's decision” (1). Deftly weaving together archival data drawn from strategy papers, meeting minutes, and correspondence from the disparate social movements that have utilized Roe, as well as original oral histories, Beyond Abortion is an incredibly ambitious project, which aims to tell “[t]he stories of the remarkable range of Americans who sought to apply Roe far beyond the abortion wars [and to] show how unfamiliar ideas about the right to privacy promised to change American life and law” (2).
Ziegler begins by briefly summarizing the history leading up to Roe v. Wade and the scholarly debate surrounding the decision. Moving chronologically through various periods of activism, Ziegler next provides a detailed description of the different social movements that have relied upon Roe to demand social change. She documents the rise and fall of the American Civil Liberties Union's Sexual Privacy Project, funded in part by donations from the Playboy Foundation, which attempted to transform privacy into an expansive right to sexual freedom that would shield the activities of diverse groups, ranging from sex workers to gays and lesbians: “Whether sex was for money or for free, whether it was with someone of the same sex or the opposite sex, activists insisted that sex was always an ‘issue of self-determination…the right to control our own bodies’” (43). She then turns to the role of privacy arguments in the medical context, including mental health activists who relied upon Roe to argue for a constitutional right to choose or refuse medical treatment and civil libertarians, free market conservatives, and alternative health care practitioners who advocated a broader consumer revolution in health care: “They argued that the Constitution gave individuals the right to pursue unproven treatments and to dictate what happened to sensitive medical information” (123). In the final chapters, Ziegler addresses activism by those who attempted to extend Roe to encompass a constitutional right to die, and by those who sought to oppose Roe with conscientious objection and calls to curtail overreaching by the judiciary.
Beyond Abortion uncovers the multiple meanings of Roe v. Wade and the right to privacy, vividly articulated in the manifold voices of activists from a wide swath of social movements not confined to those with a particular political valence. Ziegler reveals the ways in which Roe's powerful ideas about privacy, choice, and autonomy captured the popular imagination and spawned dramatically different readings of the right to privacy, including some roads not taken and missed opportunities. Many of the stories of activism Ziegler recounts may be unfamiliar and fascinating to those well versed in the traditional scholarship surrounding Roe, such as tales of the “cancer underground” (140), the “Laetrile wars” (122), and the “Insane Liberation Front” (93) Today, Roe is touted by conservatives as the ultimate emblem of judicial dereliction and abuse, so it is surprising to learn that the decision was once cited by conservatives like Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee in 1964. Roe has also faced criticism from feminists and progressives, many of whom allege that the right to privacy reinforces the status quo and exacerbates inequality, but Ziegler elucidates the arguments of feminists and progressives who tried to transform privacy to fulfill its untapped promise and potential to achieve human dignity and equality.
Taken together, these contradictory portraits of activism paint a multilayered and complex picture of the right to privacy, one that could be invoked both by those seeking to keep government out of the private sphere and by those calling upon the government to intervene to prevent discrimination and provide public assistance. By meticulously documenting this varied social history and eloquently elaborating upon its implications, Ziegler brilliantly demonstrates Roe's enduring significance as a symbol that stands for multiple, often inconsistent ideals, and reaffirms its continued relevance to current debates.
