Abortion on Campus: Sexual Liberation and Reproductive Control at Southern Colleges and Universities before 1973

Abstract

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• Abortion on Campus: Sexual Liberation and Reproductive Control at Southern Colleges and Universities before 1973
• Lisa Lindquist Dorr (bio)

On October 6, 1971, Ron Sachs, editor of the University of Florida’s student newspaper, the Florida Alligator, was arrested for violating the state’s 1868 law prohibiting abortion. Sachs had not provided or been involved directly in any abortion himself. Instead, he was charged with violating the section of the law that prohibited the dissemination of any information that could lead to abortion.¹ Against the advice of the president and university attorneys, Sachs and his editorial team had published a list of abortion referral and counseling services in the October 6 edition of the Alligator. These services counseled women with unwanted pregnancies and provided information on competent abortion providers. Florida students, the editors believed, deserved information about abortion referral services regardless of the law, as debate on campus over the previous few years had made clear. The charges against Sachs ultimately were dismissed, with a ruling that Florida’s abortion law violated women’s privacy and that the prohibition on information was a violation of free speech rights. Two months later, in February 1972, the Florida Supreme Court concurred, throwing out [End Page 539] Florida’s 1868 law entirely.² As a result, college newspapers in Florida were free to publish information about where women could seek safe abortions. Student newspapers nationwide celebrated Sachs’s victory, as did several major newspapers in the state and around the country. The University of Florida even went a step further, providing its own on- campus referral service through the Student Government Association, recognizing Florida students’ interest in the procedure.

The story of Sachs’s victory for abortion rights has been resurrected recently in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022. But the efforts by students at southern colleges and universities to gain access to abortion before Roe v. Wade in 1973 made abortion legal went beyond the drama involving the Florida Alligator. College students across the South demanded access to reproductive services on college campuses. Their lively arguments, activities, and personal efforts illustrate the complicated debate over abortion in the South long before Roe. Although women’s liberation groups were part of this process, voicing their desire for the repeal of abortion laws, they were not alone. Indeed, the debate about abortion was less about the organized protest activities regularly associated with student movements of the 1960s. More broadly, students crafted new sexual values focused on responsible and equitable relationships between women and men.³ Embracing more permissive [End Page 540] views on premarital sex and responding to fellow students’ own stories about unwanted pregnancy and abortion, college students on predominantly white campuses across the South argued for reproductive choice and personal freedom, and evidence—from student newspapers to legislative records—indicates they acted on their beliefs. These efforts noted the real consequences of unintended pregnancies on “coeds” and the disparate impact those pregnancies, especially risky illegal abortions, had on women compared with men. Access to safe abortions, in that light, seemed only fair.

Unsurprisingly, students’ desire for autonomy and discretion in sexual values alarmed parents, administrators, and state authorities. Indications that college students needed birth control, experienced unintended pregnancies, and sought abortions confirmed to the older generation that college campuses, and their student-run newspapers, had lost their moral compass. Although the conflict over students’ sexual behavior exploded spectacularly in Florida, college trustees and state officials at predominantly white institutions in other southern states also sought ways to limit students’ access to information about birth control and abortion. While students did not necessarily take to the streets, they persistently asserted their right to determine their own values, with considerable success. By 1973, the fear and silence that had surrounded pregnancy and abortion on many southern campuses in the years before Roe v. Wade had been replaced by a new sexual landscape in which premarital sex and reproductive control were accepted aspects of student life, and avenues of access to safe abortion, even before Roe, replaced the risks of illegal abortion.⁴

Abortion was nothing...