Do Legal Victories Make Activists Complacent? [SPOILER: No.]

As far as “reasons why Debbie-Wasserman Schultz should resign” go, it’s pretty far down the list. But Amanda is right that Schultz’s assertions that young women are complacent about reproductive rights are completely wrong:

Insulting the people whose support you’re trying to get is generally frowned upon in politics, so why would Schultz say such a thing about young women? Part of the issue is that sneering at young women for complacency has been an unfortunate habit among feminists for roughly forever, ever since women who marched for suffrage were complaining that these young flappers don’t know how good they’ve got it. Every few years, or months sometimes, there’s a dust-up when some older feminists point a finger at the young ones for supposedly not caring enough, followed by an inevitable debunking where it’s pointed out that young women are, in fact, tying on their shoes and pulling out their protests signs and fighting for their right to control their own fertility. Schultz was probably just regurgitating a thing you hear around, not even thinking about how nasty it sounds to accuse the people who need abortion access the most of caring the least about it.

But is there any evidence that it’s true when it comes to this assumption that young people don’t care? Well, not really. Attitudes about abortion have remained relatively stable since Roe vs. Wade, with the majority of Americans agreeing that abortion should be legal in many or all circumstances. Young people, ages 18-34, are more likely to identify as “pro-choice” than their elders. Women, too, are more likely to identify as “pro-choice” than men.

[…]

Young women have been speaking out against these laws, as well as the attacks on Planned Parenthood. I personally spoke at a rally for Planned Parenthood a few years ago and the crowd that came out and stood in that miserably cold weather on a February afternoon veered young. I’ve been a pro-choice journalist covering the reproductive rights beat for nearly a decade now — including doing a weekly podcast for RH Reality Check for eight years — and I’ve met countless numbers of activists in that time, many of whom became trusted sources and friends. And I can assure you, young women care. College kids, twenty-somethings: Every day they are out there, often doing the thankless behind the scenes work, because they care. After all, it affects them. They are the primary target of these attacks on reproductive rights.

I think D W-S’s assertion is related to a broader assumption — which recently reared its head in CT comments threads — that Roe v. Wade was at least partially counterproductive because it made supporters of reproductive freedom quiescent. Much of the influence of Rosenberg’s The Hollow Hope, for example, has unfortunately been from one of its most weakly supported claims: that litigation and other forms of political activism are a zero-sum game, so even success in the courts might be counterproductive and failure in the courts is a disaster. But this argument really doesn’t hold up. Starting with McCann’s Rights At Work, it’s been debunked in the law & society literature. And in the case of abortion, the argument is frankly bizarre. We’ve been through this multiple times, but in fact supporters of reproductive freedom are among the best-organized and most influential of progressive constituencies. (I wish that advocates for labor or the poor had as much clout with the Clinton administration.) The decline of reproductive rights in some jurisdictions is not the result of complacency or tactical errors by supporters of reproductive rights. It is the result of 1)Anthony Kennedy believes states should have substantial latitude to regulate abortion, and 2)state governments in which no progressive constituencies have any clout will take advantage of this, and it’s delusional to think there’s some secret sauce that could stop this from happening without the intervention of the federal courts.

Another way of making this point would be to look at contemporary American conservatism. Conservatives have used litigation very effectively for decades. Has this made conservative activists more quiescent and less powerful? I wish.