Stories from the “Safe, Legal, and Rare” Era

It's one of my first musical memories: the high, breathy voice, the worried pleading half-rhyme: "Papa don't preach/I'm in trouble deep." 1 It was instantly appealing; like any child, I knew what it was like to be in trouble. But the rest, the refrain of "I've made up my mind, I'm keeping my baby," was more mysterious. On the playground we would flick the tops off dandelions, say "Mama had a baby and its head popped off," and laugh uproariously; we didn't take babies seriously, much less want to keep them. So why did the girl want to keep one, and why did her father want to take it away from her? How could he do that, and why was he preaching? And what was the relation of this baby to the other babies we heard about in songs, to the True Blue baby Madonna also sang about and also loved?

 Even later, when I understood that "Papa Don't Preach" was about teen pregnancy, I didn't really understand it. Why would defying the father mean keeping your baby, even though having the baby would mean you were in trouble, losing sleep, in an awful mess? Wouldn't you want to get out of trouble if you could? It was only much later that I could see the song's prescriptions as products of backlash culture, postfeminism, and, in Madonna's case, a bit of light blasphemy that came around to the same old rules and fetishes in the end. The song was the perfect embodiment of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's metaphor for pop-culture consumption as false rebellion: it lets us imagine that we are escaping, they write, but our escape is illusory. We're like the mythical girl in the cartoon who imagines she is rebelling by climbing out her window to elope, but in the dark she can't see that her father is in fact holding the ladder.2 Colossally sexist but also apt: the papa in "Papa Don't Preach" is the ultimate dad holding the ladder.

If the song was on one level just a garden-variety internalization of patriarchal power, there was nonetheless something remarkable about its inclusion on an album of sugary pop songs about love and fun and vacation. This was Madonna, after all: the material girl, the unapologetic hedonist. Yet even she was not hedonistic enough, not callous enough, to get an abortion, even though her friends in the song kept telling her to get one in order to keep on partying with them. This was true only in art: in life, Madonna the person/star would focus on her career, would live it up, would not have a baby for another ten years. But the song's protagonist was content to "raise a little family" — she hadn't meant to become pregnant, but the right thing, the strong thing, and somehow also the rebellious thing, the fun thing, even the feminist thing, was to go through with it anyway.

This aversion to the exercise of abortion rights was encapsulated by the catchphrase "safe, legal, and rare," which was popularized by Bill Clinton in 1992. Antifeminist critic Caitlin Flanagan hailed this phrase in the Atlantic as late as 2019 as a brilliant compromise position, "a phrase that translated into language the inchoate sentiments of millions of Americans so exactly that they had to hear it only once for it to become their firmly held position on abortion."3 Clinton used the phrase more than once, of course; it became one of the examples of triangulation that many argue marked him as an exceptionally canny politician. But what did it mean, exactly, to say abortion should be safe, legal, and rare?

Those who believed in unlimited access to abortion might have reasonably imagined that the phrase promised a society with meaningful support for parents as well as more effective contraception, more empowered gestators, more sex education, and thus perhaps fewer uncomfortable medical experiences. But when he explained it further, Clinton made clear that striving for abortion's rarity would attach to it a permanent stigma unique among medical procedures. "We have to remind the American people once again that being pro-choice is very different from being pro-abortion," he explained during his 1992 campaign.4 As Tracy Weitz points out in her excellent investigation of the "safe, legal, and rare" stance, abortion is, in all times and places, common; "safe, legal, and rare" justified a raft of ways to make it rarer, which in practice made it less legal and less safe. These strategies included not training family physicians in abortion care and imposing waiting periods and other hurdles to accessing abortion.5 For Democrats it also meant year after year of backing the Hyde Amendment, which has barred federal funds from being used for abortion since 1976.6 Supporting Hyde allowed Clinton, Barack Obama and until very recently Joe Biden to deepen the distinction between "rights" and "support"—as with so many of their compromise stances, they only had to sacrifice the poor.

The "safe, legal, and rare" ethos permeated the culture of the 1990s and the first decade of the millennium. There was a general sense in the long 1990s, even in feminist quarters, that abortion was something you shouldn't do. You should be able to do it, but you shouldn't do it. This ambivalence is also embodied by the ubiquitous phrase "the right to choose," which constitutes a double dilution of the act of abortion. First, the phrasing implies that a right to this medical procedure is conferred by the state, which encroaches on and regulates your life in ways that do not apply when, for example, you need an appendectomy.7 And second, you don't even have the unconditional right to an abortion, but rather only the right to choose it, the right to make a decision that everyone else has the right to weigh in on and make you feel guilty about. This is really what Clinton was "reminding the American people" of, that if pregnant people had a right to choose, everyone had a right to an opinion about it. Clinton, and US popular culture more generally, accepted "the right to choose" but used various lines of argument to chide those who chose incorrectly.

Coinciding with Clinton's welfare reform, which wrenched support from single mothers and forced them instead to comply with onerous low-wage work requirements, 1996 and 1997 saw a couple of mopey anti-abortion musical hits by men. The Verve Pipe's "The Freshmen" spun a tale of a young woman having an abortion then killing herself, with its mumbly earworm of a chorus enacting the singer's disavowal of responsibility for the "sins" of abortion; the singer later explained that the song drew on his experience of a girlfriend who'd had an abortion, but, predictably, "poetic license took over and had her commit suicide."8 Ben Folds' hit single "Brick" perhaps went even further in its anti-abortion politics, and certainly further in its misogyny. "She's a brick and I'm drowning slowly" moaned Folds, narrating the story of a boyfriend-protagonist accompanying his high school girlfriend to an abortion appointment.9) The song oddly inverted the old ball n' chain story — what is she weighing him down with exactly? — and also repurposed the brick as a symbol: the album art imitated Pink Floyd's brick wall with graffiti, but now the oppressor was no longer institutional authorities but rather a teenage girl killing her boyfriend by making him sad.

Then in 1998 came Lauryn Hill's "To Zion," a magnificent restaging of "Papa Don't Preach" with an apostrophic address and a Christian plot (and choir) that revisited the annunciation: Hill was the Madonna, visited by an angel who predicted the birth of her "manchild." If Madonna had cannily staged "keeping my baby" while actually keeping her career, the once-in-a-generation talent Hill committed to the role, using the song to bid farewell to her career at 23, when it had barely begun. As in "Papa Don't Preach," the friends in "To Zion" who preach abortion and careerism are countered by the glorious new family. "I knew his life deserved a chance," Hill sings, over the sinuous thread of Carlos Santana's guitar, which contrasts beautifully with the military (and perhaps ultrasonic) drumbeat.10 The martial drum arrangement, along with the "marching marching" refrain that closes out the song, recalls the history of Black nationalism, the militancy of the choice to produce new Black life for the future nation. Black feminists wrestled with this reproductive imperative even at the height of the Black Power movement, and many concluded that having babies was not the best or only role for them to play in the revolution.11 In 1998, of course, there was no revolution in sight, but its reproductive-futurist echoes remained.

Hill was not the only brilliant artist who participated in the relentless move to fetal personification, a process Lauren Berlant describes as a "strategy of non-diegetic voicing."12 In 1989, teen-comedy auteur Amy Heckerling opted to make Look Who's Talking, which featured non-diegetic fetal voicing by America's "thoughtful everyman action hero," Bruce Willis.13 Willis' sardonic voicing of Mikey the talking fetus made the film a smash hit and a three-film franchise. And among other cinematic technologies, as Berlant observes, Willis' ability to speak in character from inside the womb enabled Heckerling to "link the logics of feminist consciousness to pro-life arguments about personhood."14

Achieving a similar effect through even more sentimental means, Anne Geddes' photo books and calendars, which were also smash hits in the 1990s, blurred the line between fetus and baby. Geddes posed newborns jauntily in flowerpots and peapods and teacups but also in gauzy settings that, she explains, were meant "to seem very 'womb' like." Describing her baby-subjects in just the terms Berlant identifies as newly dominant descriptors of fetal life, Geddes professes to love the babies because "nothing good or bad has happened to them; they're just pure."15 Her bestselling coffee-table book, also called Pure, features a recently born baby curled up under a woman's translucent white shirt, simulating fetality in order to imagine it, improbably, as not only innocent but also beautiful.16

These characters — the mopey men, magnanimous mothers, and adorable fetuses — combined to constitute an ideological field that was difficult to puncture. What did it mean to exercise one's "right to choose" at the turn of the twenty-first century, when everyone from Heckerling and Hill to Geddes and Clinton was lined up in favor of the superior purity and personhood of the fetus? Who were these cold, calculating women who used their heads and not their hearts, destroying the purest form of life imaginable and causing their boyfriends to drown slowly of mental anguish? Of course they had the right to choose to do these things, but how unfeeling and unpleasant one would have to be to make such a choice. Thus the culture surrounding fetuses and abortion in this period enacted exactly Bill Clinton's position: the dominant rhetoric was pro-choice, but it was also deeply anti-abortion. At most, in this period, there were flat assertions of abortion rights or depictions of pre-Roe back-alley abortions. Rarely was there any acknowledgement that abortion might be a responsible choice, or a liberating one.

The stigma against abortion that suffused the rhetoric of choice was countered effectively neither by alternative ways of talking about the right to abortion nor by the political actions of feminist groups. Even the abortion-rights group NARAL backed the "safe, legal, and rare" agenda by 1993 and removed "abortion" entirely from its name in 2003. Such shaming took its toll. As young teenagers, performatively in groups but also in quieter moments, my friends would say "I'm pro-choice, but I could never have one."17 Even the word "abortion" was difficult to say in those years. For the most part, we didn't know what we would choose if we experienced unplanned pregnancy. Many of us would go on to have abortions. But we were expressing a doubt and a virtue that felt obligatory, and these obligatory, public expressions of doubt in turn created a loop, enabling a political culture in which nobody stood up for abortion, and abortion became less and less accessible.

The anti-abortion side, of course, brooked no ambiguity. While Clinton was busy capturing the center with his compromise positions, lecturing women on responsibility while nominally protecting their right to choose, the Right was debating, in public, whether killing abortion doctors was morally justified.18 And of course they were actually killing abortion doctors, bombing, vandalizing, and blocking clinics. As Weitz points out, liberals' attempts to make abortion rare did not stem anti-abortion protests. In fact, as she traces, their efforts did the opposite, betraying how liberals did not in fact have the courage of their convictions. Anti-abortion pastor Rick Warren, chosen by Obama to give the invocation at his first inauguration, criticized the inconsistency of the "safe, legal, and rare" stance, asking "why would you believe it should be rare? . . . if a baby, a fetus is not a life, then why restrict it?"19

Of course, the anti-abortion movement dwelled in paradoxes of its own. Already out of step with general public sentiment, not even the movement's most zealous zealots wanted to treat abortion like murder under the law, although its most moderate moderates used language that drew that equation. And even now, the anti-abortion movement's quest to expand the number of embryos that grow into fetuses is decoupled from any vision of fetuses as full human beings with rights.  But in the 1990s and 2000s, opponents of abortion access understood that winning required doubling down on their contradictions rather than compromising. When they heard the cry for abortions to become "safe, legal, and rare" they smelled blood in the water.

The rhetoric of "safe, legal, and rare" and the imperatives that attended it — don't choose to have an abortion just because you can — intensified over the aughts. In a speech about abortion rights in 2005, Hillary Clinton said, "There is no reason why government cannot do more to educate and inform and provide assistance so that the choice guaranteed under our constitution either does not ever have to be exercised or only in very rare circumstances."20 This statement, as William Saletan observed at the time, effectively moved the pro-choice ideal from "safe, legal, and rare" to "safe, legal, and never."21 

The pro-choice /anti-abortion representations ramped up in Hollywood, too, notably in the form of Juno, the hippest comedy of 2007 and winner of an Oscar for original screenplay (the rare woman-authored winner). Though pregnant teenage protagonist Juno is a free thinker, evidenced by her sardonic-yet-whimsical demeanor and the film's quirky-yet-sweet look and soundtrack (then widely characterized as "twee"), she nonetheless chickens out in the clinic when she thinks of "the baby's" fingernails.22 She carries the pregnancy to term, gives up the baby for adoption in her irrepressible way, then finds romance with the friend who impregnated her. Juno's more reactionary twin was Knocked Up, Judd Apatow's gross-out family values comedy of the same year, in which a journalist with a promising career decides to continue an unplanned pregnancy and raise the baby with a slob of a guy from a one-night stand she barely remembers. The protagonist is then put in her place over and over as the slob teaches her valuable lessons, mainly about how she should abandon her ambitions, shut up, and raise his child. The two films together, both hit comedies, solidified the ideological boundaries constructed in the nineties. Across the aesthetic spectrum, from twee quasi-feminist indie to gross-out bro Hollywood, it was yes to childbirth and heterosexual romance, no to everything else. Plus you had to think it was funny.

The culture, of course, has opened up since then, or maybe exploded. By the 20-teens, the "choose my choice" fantasyland feminism of the Sex and the City years had begun to ring hollow; violence and coercion and scarcity could not be ignored forever. As abortion restrictions proliferated, pop culture representations began to imagine abortion as possible and even respectable. Jenny Slate's 2014 film Obvious Child proved that you can in fact structure a romantic comedy around not having the baby in the twenty-first century. Songs, for their part, can't really seem to overcome the elegiac or apostrophic, but we haven't seen an explicitly anti-abortion hit in quite a while.23 

More recently, as abortion rights wane across America, the abortion movie flourishes, mainly in the form of the abortion road trip film. In contrast with Juno and Knocked Up, where the protagonists' pregnancies provide the seemingly-necessary impetus for the romantic relationships that are at the center of the films (the supposedly edgy conceit of both is that pregnancy comes before, and leads to, romance), abortion road trip films are feminist-buddy quest stories.24 The protagonists, in pairs or groups of femme friends, must undertake treacherous journeys that sustain, test, or even forge their friendships. Abortion road-trip movies thus emblematize the desperate circumstances of abortion-seekers in the United States, as well as the generally desperate times in which maintaining stasis, rather than achieving a long-desired goal, becomes the near-impossible object of a quest.  Yet the films also offer in their resourceful, united outlaw girl questers an alternative to the consolidation of romance and family. They fulfill in their sometimes-madcap way Donna Haraway's imperative to "make kin not babies."25

It seems that, maybe too late, the pop culture that circulates globally from the US has moved on from the Roe years when abortion was legal, yet felt unimaginable. Diablo Cody, Juno's award-winning screenwriter, has only recently spoken openly of the film's abortion politics, explaining: "I was just creating; I never intended the movie as any kind of political statement at all. I can't imagine being that innocent again." Recalling getting a letter from her Catholic high school thanking her for the film's anti-abortion stance, she reflects further on the feedback loop that the culture of "safe, legal, and rare" seemed to create for so many:

Cody's account of how Juno's abortion could not take place is partially about the universal condition of being young and inexperienced. But it's also about the way ideological formations consolidate, circumscribing the limits of rebellion. The "safe, legal, and rare" structure of feeling is shattered now, catastrophically, but also in a way that might help us build something better.27 Recently an undergraduate student, surprisingly familiar with Juno and its unstoppable protagonist, said with certainty "Juno would've had the abortion." The unimaginable seems imaginable again.

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Molly Geidel is a senior lecturer in 20th-century US cultural history at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties (2015). She is working on two books, one on documentary film and development in the Americas, and the other on the figure of the counterinsurgent girl.

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