Choosing the Right to Choose: Roe v. Wade and the Feminist Movement to Legalize Abortion in Martial-Law Taiwan

Decided in 1973, Roe v. Wade is one of the most renowned US Supreme Court decisions. In the United States, Roe has become an icon for women's right to abortion and is described as "an engine of controversy", giving rise to what Joan Williams has called "a gender war over the issue of whether women are or should be citizens of the republic of choice". Roe's impact has also extended beyond the United States. Although the international movement for abortion law reform began years before Roe and some countries, such as Japan, the Soviet Union, and Britain, have had legalized abortion since the 1950s, Roe both informed and was informed by a larger global movement to recognize women's reproductive freedom and equality. The High Court of Pretoria in South Africa referred to Roe in endorsing women's right to abortion. The Supreme Court of Canada used the rulings of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton as grounds to find the Criminal Code of Canada's restrictions on abortion unconstitutional.Roe recognized women's right to abortion in the name of privacy but also galvanized the anti-abortion movement in the United States. Similarly, the trajectory of Roe across national borders also fostered contradictory responses, which can be seen in court decisions against reproductive choice. The German Constitutional Court as well as the European Commission, for example, discussed and referred to Roe in their decisions restricting the right to abortion. US domestic and foreign policies that limit women's access to abortion — the Helms Amendment, the Global Gag Rule, and so on — have also undermined global recognition of women's reproductive rights. American law and policies have produced significant, if not hegemonic, influences in the world by both hindering and enhancing these rights.Indeed, Roe itself does not necessarily promote women's reproductive rights inside or outside the United States. The association of Roe and the privacy-right framing, as well as the concept of privacy associated with Roe, have long been under contestation. Recent studies have indicated that framing women's right to abortion as a right of privacy was not the only option available to the Court and feminists at that time. In fact these works have argued that the meanings of Roe have been constantly shaped and reshaped by the courts, activists, scholars, and the public. Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel have revealed the significant diversity attributable to voices on both sides of the abortion debate before Roe. In addition a group of constitutional scholars have demonstrated alternative possibilities to the Court's ruling. Mary Ziegler has gone further, to challenge the conventional narratives of Roe, arguing that the popular interpretation of Roe differed radically from the text of the original decision by shifting the focus from the rights of physicians to the rights of women. William Saletan has even argued that, since 1986, the pro-abortion rights movement has repackaged the right to abortion as a conservative idea that emphasizes state nonintervention and family privacy, turning abortion into a question of "who decides". This adoption of privacy rhetoric has given it broader appeal to conservatives while also enabling conservatives to adopt this rhetoric for their own agenda and exploit it.Because Roe has multiple meanings even within the United States, examining the significance of this court decision through a transnational perspective raises intriguing questions: In countries where Roe has served as a reference, how was the decision interpreted and applied? Why and how did some celebrate it to promote women's reproductive rights, whereas others used it to restrict women's access to abortion? What are the implications of the reception of Roe in the feminist politics of location? Kathy Davis's study of the transnational trajectory taken by the book Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS) suggests that concepts associated with OBOS — autonomy, freedom — "could easily be used (albeit flexibly and strategically) to empower women in the context of their own (often very different) modernization projects". Did Roe function as the legal version of OBOS and therefore exemplify the possibility of political solidarity among feminists across the globe, which allowed for distinct experiences of women in their own contexts? Or was Roe an illustration of the globalization of American legal feminism? If the latter, then American feminists' conceptions of "the right to choose" and "the right of privacy" become a universal legal framing of women's reproductive rights, thereby excluding alternative possibilities.A comprehensive study of Roe's transnational trajectory is beyond the scope of this study. Instead, using Taiwan as a case study, I investigate the relationship between Roe and the feminist movement to legalize abortion there from the 1970s to 1984, when abortion was legalized. I present a contextualized picture of local feminist struggles for women's reproductive freedom as well as the role of American law and feminism in an East Asian country. The next section offers a short introduction to the history of abortion law in Taiwan and a review of the official population-control programs assisted by American sponsors and their relationship with the legislative move to legalize abortion in 1970. This is followed by an investigation into the engagement of the Taiwanese women's movement in the legalization of abortion, as well as the adoption and influences of Roe in feminist advocacy. A concluding discussion reflects on the framing of the right to abortion as a right to choose in the context of Taiwan. This section underscores the need to develop new and contextualized abortion-rights framings so as to appropriately address and respond to localized forms of compulsory motherhood, the hegemonic belief that all women shall and want to be mothers.