road to abortion (II): How government got hooked, The

This was similar to a states' rights policy that President Nixon had recently ordered military hospitals to follow. "If the laws in a particular state restrict abortion," the President announced, "the rules at the military base hospitals are to correspond to that law." But on the other side of the coin, if the laws of a particular state were permissive toward abortion, then those laws were to be followed by military hospitals in the state. But because Nixon's order changed an earlier Defense Department policy that was more permissive toward abortion, abortion foes viewed his action as helpful. They apparently were distracted, too, by his rhetoric about abortion as "an unacceptable form of population control" and about "my personal belief in the sanctity of human life."22

President Nixon may have been inclined to oppose abortion in a general way, at least rhetorically, but he was unwilling to let that inclination overcome his states' rights position. Possibly he, or at least many of his subordinates, wanted to have it both ways. He received political credit among abortion foes for speaking against abortion, at the same time that he (or they) advanced population control by allowing abortion funding.

While funding battles went on behind the scenes, abortion supporters were waging a vigorous fight to legalize abortion nationwide. A population commission, appointed by President Nixon and congressional leaders, did its best to advance that cause by calling for abortion "on request."

Nixon selected John D. Rockefeller 3rd to chair the 24-member commission. An ardent advocate of population control and a Depression-era donor to the American Eugenics Society, Rockefeller was using family money and prestige to depress birth rates through his Population Council. He and other Rockefellers were also helping to fund the Association for the Study of Abortion, which promoted the legalization of abortion. And they were helping to finance the federal court case, Roe v. Wade, which would soon strike down state laws against abortion.

JDR 3rd had lobbied for establishment of the population commission and had conferred with Moynihan on its membership and assignments. Moynihan described a conversation in which Rockefeller "assured me that, while until recently most persons concerned with population growth had directed their attention to the problem of `unwanted children,' there is now wide agreement that in the United States, at all events, it is the wanted children who are going to cause the problem."

Another member of the population commission, sociologist Otis Dudley Duncan, was vice president of the American Eugenics Society. Other members included population-control hawks such as Sen. Robert Packwood (a Republican from Oregon) and Sen. Alan Cranston (a Democrat from California), and Population Council president Bernard Berelson. The commission's executive director, Charles Westoff, was a eugenicist; so were many professors who wrote papers for him. Anyone aware of these connections might have predicted that the commission would do what, in fact, it did: endorse legalized abortion and call for public funding of it; ask for more research on fertility control and more subsidy of contraception and sterilization; support sex education and "population education" in the schools; and recommend a national average of two children per couple.23