Lawrence Lader papers

Lawrence Lader (1919-2006) was a birth control and abortion-rights activist and author. Among many other actions, he co-founded NARAL Pro-Choice America with Betty Friedan and others, and was active in the lawsuits that made RU-486 legal in the United States in 2000.

Lawrence Powell Lader was born in Manhattan in 1919; his father was a successful business man whose family owned a food additive company. In 1941 he graduated from Harvard University; while a student there, he co-founded the first student-run radio station as well as worked on the university's newspaper, The Crimson. Before joining the Army in 1942, Lader spent one year as the program director for the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System, an ABC affiliate. While in the Army (1942-1946), he rose from private to lieutenant and served mostly in the South Pacific and as chief, Troop Information, New York office, Armed Forces Radio. After WWII, Lader began writing for several of the nation's leading publications, publishing hundreds of articles over the next six decades. His work appeared in, among others, The Nation, New Yorker, Look, and the New York Times.

In 1955, Lader published the first of his twelve books, The Margaret Sanger Story. He would later say that he "admired her fiery commitment and said she undoubtedly was the greatest influence on my life"(LA Times, 5/14/06). Lader would devote most of the rest of his life to making birth control accessible and abortion safe and legal. In 1969, he and others, including long-time friend Betty Friedan, founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America. By 1976, Lader felt that NARAL was not acting aggressively enough and founded his own organization, Abortion Rights Mobilization (ARM) which was especially active in the 1980s, fighting the power of the Catholic Church and in the 1990s, working to make RU-486, the banned abortion pill, available in the US. That goal was achieved in 2000 when the US Food and Drug Administration finally approved the drug, marked under the name of Mifeprex.

The titles of Laders several books reflect his life work and include, in addition to the Sanger biography, Abortion (1966) and Abortion II: Making the Revolution (1973), Politics, Power, and the Church: the Catholic Crisis and the Challenge to American Pluralism (1987), and RU 486: The Pill That Could End the Abortion Wars and Why American Women Dont Have It (1991). Earlier in his career, he wrote about race in New Yorks Bloodiest Week: The Draft Riots of 1863 Turned a Great City into a Living Hell (1959) and The Bold Brahmins: New Englands War Against Slavery, 1831-1863 (1961). Politically, Lawrence Lader was very much on the extreme left--as a young man, he was district leader for Repreresentative Vito Marcantonio,"still considered one of the country's most radical congressmen."(NYT, 5/10/06) At the age of twenty-nine, Lader ran unsuccessfully for the New York State Assembly on Marcantonios American Labor Party ticket. His first marriage (1942-1946) was to Jean MacInnis who was just as progressive. While married to Lader, she kept her own name and a separate bank account.

In 1961, Lader married Joan Summers with whom he had a daughter, Wendy Summers Lader. Lader died of colon cancer at the age of 86. After he died in 2006, his wife of forty-five years told the Los Angeles Times that Lader "kept pressing the cause of abortion rights until his death...one of [his] last acts was to pay for an ad in a Sioux Falls newspaper" in protest over South Dakota's 2006 law banning abortions.