Choice and the Post-Roe Generation

By Jodie Morse

When pro-choice activists agonize over the teetering support for reproductive rights, they don't just mention the names George W. Bush and John Ashcroft. High on their worry list are people like Katie Schiller, 19, a government major at the University of Texas at Austin. Like many in her age group, she leans left on social issues such as the death penalty and gay rights. But she is deeply torn about abortion. Yes, she supports a woman's right to choose, but only in tightly prescribed instances, such as if a woman is raped or if a child might be born with a handicap. "Everyone wants this to be a black-and-white thing," she says, "but it's not."

In that view, she is also typical of her peers. While their parents may have reflexively worn the pro-choice or pro-life label, the children of the post-Roe generation have more nuanced views on the issue. As a group, they tend to be more conservative about it. In a poll published last fall by the Survey Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, 44% of 15-to 22-year-olds approved of placing some restrictions on abortion, while just 34% of those ages 27 to 59 did. Abortion-rights advocates are no more encouraged by their own data. A confidential report prepared by the Pro-Choice Public Education Project showed that from 1998 to 2001 there was a 7% decrease, to 57%, in women ages 16 to 25 who described themselves as pro-choice. "All [young people] hear is from the other side," says Kate Michelman, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. "We could show pictures of women dead or dying from illegal abortions, but we don't."

So how do you rally a generation that has known nothing other than legally sanctioned abortion? For starters, you hold rallies. While pro-life groups have marched on Washington on Jan. 22 for each of the past 29 years, it has been more than a decade since pro-choice groups descended on the Mall in Washington. "They just assumed the post-Roes would be on their side," says Derrick Jones, the outreach coordinator for National Teens for Life, which was formed in the mid-'80s and has been drafting young members ever since. The pro-life cause has also received a boost from technology. The morning-after pill and new forms of contraception like Depo-Provera have made surgical abortion that much rarer, and high-resolution sonogram images have made an embryo's first moments that much more real.

At the same time, the iconography of the abortion-rights movement is fading from memory. Indeed, pro-choice stalwarts pitched themselves to a younger audience more than four years ago with a multimillion-dollar campaign in which some of the ads featured coat hangers. To some of the movement's newest members, the message seemed almost laughably out of touch. "I've been in meetings where feminist activists make no attempt to really listen to young women," says Jennifer Baumgardner, an active Planned Parenthood member and the co-author of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). "The women making all the decisions are in menopause."

That is beginning to change. At one Planned Parenthood branch outside San Francisco, a Post-Roe Committee of twenty-and thirtysomethings was host to a happy hour called Planet Love: Sex, Choices and Microbrews. Among other activities, organizers gave away safe-sex kits, which included flavored condoms. To mark this week's anniversary, the Feminist Majority Foundation is playing host to a Never Go Back student-leadership conference in Washington. The movement's Old Guard will be on hand to offer advice--but only at the invitation of the younger recruits.

Some of the younger pro-choice prospects don't need an invitation to take up the cause. "I feel like choice is an issue where there is a challenge right now, and that's got me going," says Hannah Stein, a law student at the University of Minnesota. She started a pro-choice campus group after the G.O.P. swept last November's elections. "People don't realize it's endangered." --By Jodie Morse. With reporting by Julie Rawe/New York, Sarah Sturmon Dale/Minneapolis and Avery Holton/Austin

With reporting by Julie Rawe/New York, Sarah Sturmon Dale/Minneapolis and Avery Holton/Austin