When the United States Supreme Court decided to end constitutional protections for abortion this summer in its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, women across the country were left in a state of shock. Faye Wattleton, who led Planned Parenthood as its first Black president from 1978 to 1992, was not among them. The St. Louis native long ago recognized that a decision like Dobbs was possible, and that fear drove her to devote her career to becoming a fierce advocate for reproductive rights. She recently spoke with St. Louis Magazine about the factors that she believes led the nation to this moment, and what might happen from here.
You spent decades fighting for women’s reproductive rights, including a woman’s right to choose. What has it been like for you since the Dobbs ruling was announced on June 24? I read the draft and saw how ugly the language was. But I have not been under any great emotional distress because I don’t know what anyone expected. This takedown did not just occur in June. Roe v. Wade was taken apart over the course of seven decisions. It started 40 years ago with the Harris v. McRae case, which denied poor women—mostly women of color—the right to pregnancy termination through Medicaid.
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So it’s fair to say you saw this coming? I guess I’m baffled that anyone’s baffled, frankly. It means you were not paying attention, nor taking responsibility for the policies that were aimed at getting women to the place we are today. We fought all these years and opposed a number of appointments to the federal circuits and the Supreme Court, including Robert Bork, to prevent this day. We fought back as much as we could, and they were defeated. They said, ‘We can’t do it outright for now, but we’ll go to the states and we will gradually change the Supreme Court.’ In time, given their dedication and the religious foundation much of this movement is built on, the outcome was highly predicable. So we have to look in the mirror and say we allowed this to happen.
Is there anything you wished you had done—or could have done—differently while you were president of Planned Parenthood to help steer the country away from this scenario? If anything, I perhaps wished I’d been more aggressive about fighting the opposition. I’ve been gone for more than 20 years, and there has not been the same level of dedication to the public fight that was needed. A great deal more attention was given to the service provider portion of the organization, which is the gold standard. There is no denying that. But what good will this do if women don’t have the right to exercise what we are offering? It’s a Faustian proposition. I felt that there had to be both. It went hand in hand. Because it’s not just about the organization, it’s also about what goes on in women’s lives.
You were a nurse before Roe v. Wade. Prior to that ruling, what was it like for women seeking abortions? Roe v. Wade did not invent abortion. It only made it possible for the service to be provided and integrated as a part of reproductive health services. It offered protection through the reasoning of personal privacy and due process. Before Roe, it was not uncommon to hear of women being injured, permanently sterilized, having horrendous experiences, or even dying as a result of unsafe procedures that were performed under unsterile conditions by inexperienced or incompetent hands. Consequently, there was a rise of referral agencies with whom we worked directly to ensure that a woman seeking a safe termination would not fall into disreputable hands. And those agencies were constantly surveying the care that they sent women to. This enabled women to have some assurances. Women with more resources had more options, like traveling to Puerto Rico, Mexico, and New York [after 1970]. But even if women chose to seek abortions elsewhere, that had its own problems, like disruption of daily life by traveling somewhere where there is no familiarity or personal connections, or all the possibilities of exploitation and disreputable care that could happen.
What do you think all of this means for Planned Parenthood and reproductive rights moving forward? It’s not what it means for Planned Parenthood, but what it means for every woman who has a uterus or has the potential to reproduce, and their healthcare needs. It means that women who don’t have the resources to exercise their decisions to receive comprehensive healthcare, including the availability of an unwanted pregnancy termination, will be unable to access safe reproductive healthcare. These women who can least afford to have this barrier placed before them will suffer the most. They are the most vulnerable to injury and exploitation, including disreputable care. Even before the overturn, 89 percent of counties in the country had no termination services. So, this is not a service that has been widely and flagrantly available as often characterized and is just adding further barriers to frustrate the woman making the decision to terminate a pregnancy.
We’ve always known it wasn’t just about pregnancy termination, but all aspects of reproductive control. Justice Clarence Thomas signaled this in his dissenting opinion. Contraceptives fall under the same logic of the court, that you have no further right to privacy in your decisions about your body because the United States Constitution does not explicitly say so. Pregnancy is treated as a casual condition for women. In reality, it’s a very consequential one. The idea that it deserves to be tossed around in a legislative, judicial process is somewhat highly perverse. Really, the value of women is on the line in this public debate.
Are we missing anything in our conversations about abortions? Why are we even talking about it? What business is it of mine to talk about your abortion? What’s missing is silence, and letting people live their lives as best they can in safety, while hoping for a better future without unwanted pregnancy and an undesired birth. Let people live their lives and get the services in the appropriateness of their lives—even for those people on the picket lines at Planned Parenthood clinics that bring their daughters in for services and then go back to the picket line. Even for the hypocrites. Don’t you think there is something perverse about focusing on people’s sexuality and their reproductive organs for women, and not men? We have no countervailing attacks on men’s testes. I mean, even having this conversation with you is a real perversion about what the national debate ought to be about.
How can women of your generation support younger women right now? We can, hopefully, tell the stories of what it was like and what it can be. Younger women are fortunate to have those of us who are still around to tell those stories and to forewarn what can happen, and what it will take to preserve what has been inherited. I still feel responsible to weave for future generations the freedoms I had the privilege and opportunity to fight for. And it’s not a gift. It’s an obligation. I think young women must take responsibility for themselves and for future generations. Sometimes experience is a bitter teacher. I think the journey back to restoring the constitutional protection will be a long and difficult one, but there is still a group of us who are already thinking strategically about what it takes to organize to pull together the language to move forward on a new movement to restore. This is not an act of God. It can be restored.
