Lawrence Lader papers

Lawrence Lader (1919-2006), A.B., 1941, Harvard University, was a journalist and abortion rights activist, co-founder of National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, which later became the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), and founder of Abortion Rights Mobilization (ARM). He wrote extensively on abortion and reproductive rights.

Lader was born in New York, New York in 1919. He served with Armed Forces Radio in the Pacific Theater during World War II, where his dispatches were published in The New Yorker. He went on to have articles published in Esquire, Look, Life, Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, and The New Republic. In 1948 he ran for New York state representative on the American Labor Party ticket. In 1955 he published a biography of Margaret Sanger, which began his interest in the abortion issue. Abortion was published in 1966, in which Lader argued that the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court decision, which extended privacy to sexuality and family planning, could also be applied to abortion. The book was cited multiple times in the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision.

Lader was among a group that co-founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws in 1969. After the Supreme Court decision, the group was renamed the National Abortion Rights Action League. Lader left NARAL in 1976 to found Abortion Rights Mobilization. The group actively sought the legalization in the United States of the abortion drug RU-486 (mifepristone). In 1992 he, with a pregnant social worker named Leona Benten, tried to enter the United States from Europe with a dozen RU-486 pills. They were met by customs agents who confiscated the pills. Benten appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, but was denied. Lader then set up a laboratory in Westchester County, New York, to manufacture RU-486, which he provided for clinical trials and gave free to women. Food and Drug Administration approval of RU-486 was achieved in 2000. Also through ARM, Lader sued the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to revoke the tax-exempt status of the Catholic Church, because of its political lobbying on abortion.

In addition to the Sanger biography and Abortion, Lader also authored The Bold Brahmins: New England's War Against Slavery (1961), Power on the Left: American Radical Movements since 1946 (1980), Politics, Power and the Church (1987), and A Private Matter, RU-486 and the Abortion Crisis (1995). Lader married Jean McInnis in 1942 and they divorced in 1946. He later married Joan Summers, whom he was with until his death. He had one daughter, Wendy. Lader died of colon cancer in 2006.