Generational Politics in the Feminist Movement and the Erosion of Support for Abortion Rights
Here's a pretty old legacy post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 23 years ago, in 2001, on the World Wide Web.
Good articles on feminist topics on Salon are few and far between, but this one was a really excellent analysis of some of the dynamics of the erosion of support for abortion rights, and how both the Clinton administration’s feel-good liberalism, and generational politics within big repro rights groups like NOW and NARAL have helped shut young women (and boys) out of pro-choice organizing and fighting for the pro-choice message.
On the other hand, the Feminist Majority Foundation has done some very interesting work on the more specific dynamics of this change: support for legalized abortion (as opposed to taking up politicized labels like pro-choice
) has been making slow but steady progress over the past few decades, but support for anti-choice restrictions on abortions have also been growing in popularity. Not too surprising given the intense organizing that the anti-abortion Right has been putting into the chipping away
tactics to limit access to abortion as much as possible.