Lawrence Lader was a writer whose intellectual and political energies found their outlet in this country’s impassioned abortion debate. He advanced the idea of abortion as a civil right, and in the process became, according to his obituary in the New York Times, “a lightning rod for its critics as well as a beacon for its proponents.” New York, where Lader was born and where he succumbed 86 years later to colon cancer, was the battlefield of a movement for which he was in large part responsible.

From his days as a student at Harvard College, Lader combined journalism with outspoken political stances. As a Crimson editor, he played a role in the paper’s opposition to U.S. involvement in the “European War,” according to a class note he submitted to Harvard Magazine in 2003. Graduating in the same year that saw the attack on Pearl Harbor, Lader soon enlisted and became a lieutenant in the Army. His freelance war correspondence was published by The New Yorker, and after the war he continued to write for magazines such as Look and The New Republic. Lader also threw himself into New York City politics, working closely with Representative Vito Marcantonio of East Harlem (an inspiration, according to this website, for Al Pacino’s portrayal of the fiery, big-hearted mayor in the 1996 movie “City Hall.”)

A turning point came when Lader decided to write a biography of birth control activist Margaret Sanger. "Working with her,” he told the New York Times in 1991, “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." Lader's 1966 book Abortion advanced the link between abortion and individual rights to privacy, and was cited at least seven times in the majority opinion of Roe v. Wade. In 1969, Lader and a small group of self-described radicals formed the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, which achieved its first victory in New York State. That organization is today called Naral Pro-Choice America.

Lader remained vigilant on the abortion issue his whole life, locking horns with the Catholic Church and rallying against efforts to prohibit certain procedures, such as the “abortion pill” RU-486. His life was not all impassioned public debate, however. In a note published in Harvard Magazine in 2000, he wrote, "I have plunged into strange waters: Poetry! The Sewanee Review has accepted two of my poems as well as a piece of never-published war writing." He and several classmates also organized a veterans’ march on the White House in the fall of 2002, in opposition to the impending war in Iraq. "I've marched in every parade you can think of," he said in an interview the following summer. "And I'm still marching."