Alyce Faye Wattleton

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Personal Information

Full name, Alyce Faye Wattleton; born July 8, 1943, in St. Louis, MO; daughter of George (a factory worker) and Ozie (a seamstress and minister) Wattleton; married Franklin Gordon (a social worker and musician; divorced); children: Felicia.
Education: Ohio State University, B.S., 1964; Columbia University, M.S., 1967.

Career

Miami Valley School of Nursing, Dayton, OH, instructor, 1964-66; Dayton Public Health Nursing Association, assistant director, 1967-70; Planned Parenthood Association of Miami Valley, Dayton, executive director, 1970-78; Planned Parenthood Federation of America Inc., president, 1978-92; Tribune Entertainment, Chicago, IL, television show hostess, 1992--. Member of advisory committee, The Nature Conservancy; member of board of trustees, California Wellness Foundation and Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Life's Work

For 14 years Faye Wattleton served as the president of one of the U.S.'s most visible public health organizations, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. As the leader of an organization that advocates women's reproductive freedom, Wattleton found herself at the forefront of a national debate on legalized abortion, especially during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush. She accepted the challenge without reservation and worked as an ambassador not just for reproductive rights but also for women's rights in general.

Always impeccably dressed and radiating a cool confidence, Wattleton articulated the pro-choice platform's tenets and goals without ever resorting to emotional outburst or dire threat. In the process, she became "the most visible and persuasive spokeswoman for abortion rights.... Under Wattleton, Planned Parenthood took off the white gloves and became one of the nation's most vocal and aggressive advocates of abortion rights," according to the New York Times Magazine.

As a nurse-midwife, Wattleton had watched as her patients suffered and died from back-alley abortions. As the leader of Planned Parenthood, she worked hard to protect future generations of American women from similar self-inflicted atrocities. At the same time, she always made it clear that her organization was not pro-abortion, but was simply pro-choice. "This is not a debate about abortion," she told Glamour magazine. "This is about a fundamental right to make choices about our sexuality--without the encroachment of a president, the Supreme Court, and certainly without the encroachment of politicians!"

Alyce Faye Wattleton was born in 1943 in St. Louis. She has described herself as an only child surrounded by adults who were deeply committed to the Christian faith. Her father was a factory worker, her mother a seamstress who also preached at the local fundamentalist Church of God. In Savvy Woman, Wattleton said: "I was raised by my parents to believe that it was my obligation to help those with less than I had. Although we were materially poor, the value of my family life was that there was a sense of achievement. We were taught to believe that it was possible to succeed, and that if you didn't, you didn't quit."

In their spare time, the Wattletons did missionary work and hosted other missionaries in their home. Young Faye admired these people and decided that she wanted to be a missionary nurse some day. She skipped kindergarten and first grade, emerging as an honors student. She graduated from high school at 16 and immediately enrolled in Ohio State University to study nursing. She earned a bachelor's degree there in 1964.

Certain experiences Wattleton had during her education and her early years as a nurse caused her to reconsider aspects of her fundamentalist faith. "I simply chose a profession that made it difficult for me to see life in such exacting terms," she confessed in Savvy Woman. "In a health-care situation, you see humanity at its most basic, and you realize there are no simple yes-or-no, right-or-wrong answers." However, Wattleton never relinquished the basic tenet of her Christian upbringing--the urge to make the world a better place.

From 1964 until 1966 Wattleton taught at the Miami Valley Hospital School of Nursing in Dayton, Ohio. In 1966 she won a full scholarship to Columbia University, and she completed a master's degree program in maternal and infant health care. It was during this training--in the days when abortions were illegal--that she saw the hardships borne by young women with unwanted pregnancies. One teenage patient in her care died of kidney failure following the injection of a combination of Lysol and bleach into her uterus. "A healthy, beautiful human being died because of the poison," Wattleton recalled in Seven Days. "That was the closest I had come to the desperation that women feel."

Having completed her master's degree, Wattleton returned to Dayton in 1967. There she served as a public health nurse and worked to expand local prenatal health-care services. She joined the local Planned Parenthood chapter the following year, convinced that responsible family planning could eliminate much suffering among both the parents of unwanted children and the children themselves. After 18 months in Planned Parenthood, she was asked to head its local board of directors. According to a reporter for the New York Times Magazine, Wattleton "turned the Dayton chapter into one of the outstanding affiliates in the country, making it an efficient fund-raiser and extending its outreach to poor women."

As she continued her work on behalf of Planned Parenthood during the early 1970s, Wattleton married and bore a child. In 1975 she was elected chairperson of a council representing the executive directors who ran Planned Parenthood affiliates around the country. This position raised her duties to a national level. Just three years later, at the tender age of 34, she was named president of Planned Parenthood. She was not only the first black person, but also the first woman to head the organization.

Wattleton quickly put her own particular stamp on Planned Parenthood. The organization was best known at the time for its 850 clinics in 46 states, serving some 3 million people per year with everything from infertility counseling and birth control to prenatal care. Wattleton felt that Planned Parenthood should also take on a strong advocacy role for women's rights and reproductive freedom. Almost immediately she established herself as that advocate, making herself available to print and electronic media whenever possible.

In many respects, Wattleton was the ideal choice for a Planned Parenthood spokesperson. She effectively bridged the gap between the organization's mostly-white, middle- and upper-class membership and the mostly poor women being served in the clinics. Her race helped her to challenge complaints that Planned Parenthood was helping to promote genocide by providing birth control to black women. Early in her tenure, Wattleton told Ebony: "The future and strength of the [black] race is for women to be able to have kids when they want them and to love and provide them with the tools they'll need to get through a hostile world. The image of the black woman bearing child upon child against her will is the real threat to the race."

As two Republican presidents and their followers sought ways to curb some women's access to legal abortions, Wattleton and Planned Parenthood fought the trend every step of the way. The organization did lose some corporate sponsors as it increased its political visibility, but that economic loss was more than offset by increased private donations. Under Wattleton, Planned Parenthood's budget tripled, from $104.3 million in 1977 to $303 million in 1988. Movie stars and Hollywood executives made public demonstrations of support, and the organization participated in numerous rallies in the nation's capital and elsewhere. On every such occasion, Wattleton stood in the forefront, elegant, poised, and passionately devoted to her cause.

As the abortion debate became more heated, the president of Planned Parenthood began to receive hate mail, including death threats. She responded by hiring bodyguards and keeping up her full schedule of appearances. Wattleton's classic good looks and her ability to state her views calmly brought her invitations to the popular television talk-shows, where she often debated leaders from the Right-To-Life, anti-abortionist movement. Still she watched in thinly-veiled fury as the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress, and state legislatures sought ways to decrease the number of abortions performed in the United States.

"Wattleton could be forgiven for succumbing to an occasional bout of the doldrums," Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in Vogue in 1992. "But she has refused to concede many points.... Showing a keen understanding of the underdog's advantage, Wattleton has used each loss to rally pro-choice sympathizers, organizing speaking tours and demonstrations and launching aggressive advertising campaigns. As a result ... she's managed to almost double the size of Planned Parenthood's contributor list. Wattleton may have lost many of the battles, but she makes it very clear that she plans to win the war."

Even her opponents were forced to concede that Wattleton was an effective campaigner. Time magazine contributor Richard Stengel called Wattleton "a stunning refutation of the cliche of the dowdy feminist," adding: "In an era when nonprofit organizations seek out celebrity spokespeople to get their message across, she is the public relations ideal, a spokeswoman who has become a celebrity." Named one of the ten most beautiful women over 40 by Harper's Bazaar magazine in 1991, she personified a woman bearing full responsibility for her life.

Wattleton spent 14 years at the head of Planned Parenthood, lobbying Congress against cuts in Medicaid spending on abortion, persuading state legislators not to create new laws against abortion in their states, creating nationwide coalitions for reproductive freedom, and speaking out against any politician's attempt to control what women choose to do with their own bodies.

Reflecting on her contribution to the pro-choice movement, Wattleton told Savvy Woman: "I've been able to position our argument in a way that is compelling to people, rather than attacking or offending those of the right-wing religious or political persuasion. My approach has been very valuable in positioning the organization and these issues in a straightforward, clear, no-nonsense manner. We're not saying abortion is right or wrong or preaching a moral cause, because that is a very personal decision. What we are saying is that government has no right telling women what to do with their lives."

As early as 1989 Wattleton began to hint that she might step down from Planned Parenthood's presidency. "We're going to have some very significant battles ahead, whether I'm going to lead them or someone else," she told Savvy Woman. "Whoever is providing leadership needs to be as fresh and thoughtful and reflective as possible to make the very best fight." In January of 1992, shortly after a pro-choice president entered the White House, Wattleton announced her retirement. Her decision was unexpected, but it was accepted without argument by Planned Parenthood's board of directors.

Since then Wattleton has been the host of a syndicated talk show originating in Chicago. Divorced since the mid-1970s, she shares her private life with a college-age daughter, Felicia. Wattleton, who told Jet she decided to devote her career to "improving the health, rights and well-being of women," will always be associated with the pro-choice movement and its goals.

"Reproductive freedom is critical to a whole range of issues," she told Ms. magazine. "If we can't take charge of this most personal aspect of our lives, we can't take care of anything. It should not be seen as a privilege or as a benefit, but a fundamental human right.... All women, rich and poor, brown, yellow, and white, must be free to take charge of their lives and make their own personal decisions. We have to fight for fundamental human rights so that no woman can be denied this dignity, regardless of her station in life."

Awards

Spirit of Achievement Award, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, 1991; Women of Achievement Award, Women's Projects & Productions, 1991; Margaret Sanger Award, 1992; Jefferson Public Service Award, 1992; Dean's Distinguished Service Award, Columbia School of Public Health, 1992. Recipient of numerous honorary doctorate degrees, including Bard College, Wesleyan University, Oberlin College, Long Island University, and University of Pennsylvania.

Works

Writings

• How To Talk with Your Child about Sexuality, 1986.

Further Reading

Sources

• Business Week, March 26, 1990, p. 69.
• Glamour, February 1990, pp. 194-95.
• Harper's Bazaar, August 1989, pp. 110-13; September 1991, p. 72.
• Jet, January 27, 1992, p. 36.
• Ms., October 1989, pp. 50-3.
• New York Times Magazine, August 6, 1989, pp. 16-19, 61-3.
• Savvy Woman, April 1989, p. 80.
• Seven Days, July 12, 1989, p. 15.
• Time, December 11, 1989, pp. 82-3.
• Vogue, January 1992, pp. 140-43.

— Anne Janette Johnson

From 1978 to 1992, Alyce Faye Wattleton held the stage as an articulate and telegenic defender of reproductive rights for U.S. women. As president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Wattleton was a national spokesperson for reproductive freedom and a lightning rod in the highly charged debate over abortion. Wattleton was the first woman and the first African American to head Planned Parenthood, the oldest voluntary family planning organization in the United States. During her fourteen-year tenure, she took an unequivocal stand on abortion rights and fought for improved reproductive health care for women with low incomes. Wattleton was known for her tremendous poise during confrontations with abortion foes and for her intelligent television interviews. As U.S. courts and lawmakers chipped away at abortion rights, Wattleton held fast to her conviction that women, not governments, had the right to control their reproductive destiny.

Born in St. Louis on July 8, 1943, Wattleton was the only child of George Wattleton, a factory employee, and Ozie Garret Wattleton, a seamstress and a Fundamentalist minister in the Church of God. Wattleton credits her parents for developing in her a strong social conscience and a will to succeed. She excelled in school and was only sixteen years old when she enrolled in Ohio State University. After graduating from Ohio State in 1964 with a nursing degree, Wattleton taught at Miami Valley Hospital School, in Dayton. She left that position in 1966 to begin work on a master's degree in maternal and infant health care, at New York's Columbia University.

While at Columbia on a full scholarship, Wattleton trained as a midwife in New York City's Harlem Hospital. In the 1960s, abortion was prohibited by law in most states. At Harlem Hospital, Wattleton saw firsthand the appalling medical consequences of illegal abortions. She witnessed the blood poisoning, torn uteruses, and painful deaths of desperate women who tried to induce abortions with chemicals or sharp instruments. These grim cases influenced Wattleton's decision to join Planned Parenthood and to support reproductive freedom. To Wattleton, the issue was one of self-determination and basic human rights for women.

After earning her master's degree in 1967, Wattleton became assistant director of the Montgomery County Combined Public Health District, in Dayton. As a public health nurse, she helped increase the prenatal health care services in the area. In 1970, Wattleton became executive director of a Planned Parenthood affiliate in Dayton. She married social worker and musician Franklin Gordon in 1971, and had a daughter, Felicia Gordon, in 1976. Wattleton and Gordon were divorced in 1981.

Wattleton's work ethic and her successful outreach and fund-raising efforts in Dayton led to her appointment in 1973 as president of the national Planned Parenthood organization. At age thirty-four, Wattleton became the youngest person ever to head the huge family planning enterprise. (By the time Wattleton resigned in the early 1990s, Planned Parenthood would have nine-hundred U.S. affiliates and an annual budget of $380 million.) Wattleton assumed leadership at a time when donating funds to Planned Parenthood was neither controversial nor a political act. Once Wattleton began to lobby for abortion rights, Planned Parenthood's reputation and perceived mission changed dramatically.

Although Planned Parenthood became synonymous with abortion, Wattleton pointed out that only a relatively small part of its operation was involved in terminating pregnancies. Only one-third of its U.S. clinics even performed abortions. Birth control, gynecologic exams, and prenatal care were the services most commonly provided. Whereas 130,000 abortions were performed at Planned Parenthood clinics in 1990 (when 1.5 million abortions were performed nationwide), 3 million women received pregnancy tests, contraceptives, and prenatal exams from Planned Parenthood during the same year.

Wattleton placed Planned Parenthood squarely in the pro-choice camp because she was concerned about the erosion of Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 93 S. Ct. 705, 35 L. Ed. 2d 147 (1973), a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case guaranteeing a woman's right to choose an abortion. When President Ronald Reagan took office in 1982, he aligned his administration with the antiabortion faction. During his two terms in office, federal funds for family planning clinics under title X of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C.A. §300-300a-41 [1970]) were cut significantly. Also, the Justice Department attempted to prevent federally funded clinics from even mentioning abortion as a medical option (42 C.F.R. 59.8). Its so-called gag rule was denounced by Wattleton as a violation of free speech and an unfair restriction on poor women. The controversial regulation was enjoined by federal courts and ultimately struck down by a U.S. district court in 1992 (National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Ass'n v. Sullivan, 979 F.2d 227 [1992]).

Perhaps the most discouraging blow to Wattleton and the pro-choice movement was the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 U.S. 490, 109 S. Ct. 3040, 106 L. Ed. 2d 410 (1989). In Webster the High Court ruled that individual state legislatures had the power to regulate abortion. As a result, an increase in state laws limiting access to abortion was likely.

Wattleton supported the introduction into the United States of RU486, an abortion-inducing drug not yet approved by the federal government. She also backed a reproductive rights amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Although Wattleton was a staunch abortion rights advocate, she was equally emphatic about the need to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place. She campaigned for the establishment of comprehensive health education programs in the schools and the community.

Because of her high profile and pro-choice position, Wattleton received several death threats while head of Planned Parenthood. During her term, several U.S. affiliates were bombed, picketed, and besieged by anti-choice groups.

In 1991 Wattleton resigned from Planned Parenthood to become host of a syndicated talk show in Chicago. She left behind a strengthened organization with a defined course of action, and a powerful example of living one's life according to principles.

Quotes:

"My satisfaction comes from my commitment to advancing a better world."