Larry Lader
Larry Lader became a supporter of the local VFP chapter when the Bush administration began responding to the attacks of 9-11 by declaring a global crusade against terror. He organized an antiwar contingent of his fellow Harvard graduates, contributed to the staging of Operation Dire Distress, and at least twice placed notices of veterans rallies in the New York Times. He also organized a contingent of veterans for the "March For Women's Lives" in Washinton, DC, April 24, 2004.
The New York Times
May 10, 2006 Wednesday Correction Appended
Lawrence Lader, Champion of Abortion Rights, Is Dead at 86
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Lawrence
Lader, a writer who so successfully marshaled his literary and
political efforts in support of abortion rights that Betty Friedan, the
feminist author, called him the father of the movement, died on Sunday
at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.
The cause was colon cancer, his wife, Joan Summers Lader, said.
Mr.
Lader was a major voice in the abortion debate for four decades,
becoming a lightning rod for its critics as well as a beacon for its
proponents. He wrote influential books and articles on the subject,
organized ministers to refer women wanting abortions to doctors as well
as referring 2,000 himself, helped found what was long known as the
National Abortion Rights Action League and helped win New York State's
repeal of abortion restrictions in
1970.
He unsuccessfully
sued the Internal Revenue Service to end the Roman Catholic Church's
tax exemptions on the ground that its opposition to abortion had veered
into the political arena. He successfully challenged some restrictions
on the drug RU-486, known as the morning-after pill, and arranged to
manufacture a version of it in the United States.
He organized
mothers with baby carriages to demonstrate in favor of abortion on
Mother's Day, strove to equate abortion rights with civil rights and
became famous (or notorious) for sharply worded arguments.
"Basically,
the opposition really hates women, which I think comes out of a woman's
sexuality," he said in an interview with The Body Politic magazine in
1991. "They fear women's independence -- women no longer chained to the
home waiting for the man with a rose in their teeth."
Mr.
Lader stumbled into the abortion issue while working on a biography of
Margaret Sanger, who around 1910 began her crusade for birth control
because of her horror of abortions, then dangerous and illegal. By the
1950's, he said, antibiotics and new technology had made the procedure
much safer, but it was still illegal and seldom discussed.
Mr.
Lader wrote one of the first carefully documented books on the subject,
"Abortion" (1966). It began, "Abortion is the dread secret of our
society."
The book promoted the argument that the Supreme Court's
1965
decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which enlarged individual rights
to privacy in matters of sexuality and family planning, could apply to
abortion. When the court in 1973 made abortion legal in Roe v. Wade, it
leaned heavily on the Connecticut case and cited Mr. Lader's book at
least seven times.
"It is not only an authoritative study of
the hypocrisy and absurdity of abortion practices," Ms. Friedan said of
the book, "it is a courageous blueprint of what women must do to
abolish the state's power to force them to bear a child against their
will."
Opponents of abortion differed. "By stigmatizing
criticism of Roe v. Wade as fanatical, Lader cheapens debate," James R.
Kelly, a Fordham University sociology and anthropology professor, said
in a letter to The New York Times in 1983.
Lawrence Powell Lader was born in Manhattan on Aug. 6,
1919,
and graduated from Harvard, where he helped found a radio station and
worked on The Crimson. He was an Army lieutenant during World War II,
and The New Yorker published war dispatches he submitted. He became a
widely published magazine writer in Look, Reader's Digest and The New
Republic, among others.
He was also active politically,
serving as district leader for Representative Vito Marcantonio, who
represented East Harlem and is still considered one of the country's
most radical congressmen. In 1948, Mr. Lader ran for the New York State
Assembly on Mr. Marcantonio's American Labor Party ticket and lost.
He made fun of his minor-party status in a pamphlet. "Pull the last little lever for Larry Lader," it said.
When
Mr. Lader decided to write his first book, he approached Ms. Sanger
about a biography. She had already written several autobiographies but
welcomed the proposal.
"Working with her completely convinced
me that a woman's freedom in education, jobs, marriage, her whole life,
could only be achieved when she gained control of her childbearing," he
said in an interview with The Times in
1991.
Mr. Lader's subjects besides abortion included the role of Boston's elite in the struggle to end slavery.
On
July 30, 1968, a small group of what Mr. Lader described as radicals
met in his apartment to plan a national organization. The result was a
meeting in Chicago in February 1969, where the first order of business
was deciding whether to try to change abortion laws, as was already
happening in many states, or to try to repeal them.
The answer
came in the name they chose: the National Association for the Repeal of
Abortion Laws. When the Supreme Court legalized abortion four years
later, the name was changed to the National Abortion Rights Action
League. After two more name changes, it is now called Naral Pro-Choice
America.
New York was the first battleground in the fight to
repeal state abortion restrictions. An unlikely set of circumstances --
including the fact that the Catholic Church's attention was focused on
a bill for parochial school aid, miscalculations by abortion opponents
and a last-minute vote change -- resulted in the repeal.
"The impossible victory," Mr. Lader called it in his book "Abortion II" (1973).
In
1976, he left the abortion rights league, in part because he believed
it was becoming too establishmentarian. He founded a new group,
Abortion Rights Mobilization, that aggressively fought his battles
against the Catholic Church and for RU-486.
Mr. Lader is
survived by his wife and a daughter, Wendy Summers Lader, both of
Manhattan. As the abortion debate became violent, Mr. Lader's wife said
she did not know how often he was threatened by people opposed to his
views. She said he hid his mail and smiled a lot, adding, "He was very
capable of denial."
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
CORRECTION-DATE:
May 11, 2006 CORRECTION: An obituary yesterday about Lawrence Lader, an
abortion rights advocate, referred incorrectly to the drug RU-486, or
mifepristone, which he supported. It is used to induce early abortions;
it is not known as the morning-after pill. (That pill, also called Plan
B, contains a different drug, a high dose of hormones used for
emergency contraception.)
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company