Honoree Profile: Nancy Stearns

Nancy Stearns graduated from law school in 1967, and in 1969 became a staff lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Before law school she had worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Atlanta; her Civil Rights Movement experience guided her legal career.

In the fall of 1969, working with the NYC Women's Health Collective, Stearns met with women throughout the city to discuss the medical, legal and political impacts of New York's law barring abortion. Those meetings resulted in the first challenge to abortion laws from the perspective of women rather than doctors.

With a team of women lawyers, Stearns represented hundreds of women challenging New York's restrictive abortion laws. They argued that without the right to abortion and the ability to control their reproductive lives, women would never be full and equal members of the society; that New York's law violated women's rights to liberty, privacy and equal protection; constituted an establishment of religion, and was cruel and unusual punishment.

While the case was pending, New York's legislature by a single vote legalized abortion up to the twenty-sixth week of pregnancy. After abortion became legal Stearns defended the new law against attacks by the anti-abortion movement seeking to block the performance of the procedure in NYC hospitals.

From 1970 to 1972, Stearns took the New York litigation model to New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and several other states, where hundreds of women plaintiffs successfully challenged their state laws.

With abortion legalized in New York, there were reports of poor women being pressured into agreeing to sterilization to obtain an abortion. Stearns joined a community task force to develop guidelines for the New York City Health and Hospital Corporation to prevent sterilization abuse; the guidelines became the model for similar New York State and federal guidelines.

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