How the anti-abortion project conquered America(hurl alert)

It has become almost impossible for most Americans to avoid the anti-abortion arguments, the protest placards and the graphic pictures of foetuses. They might encounter them outside abortion clinics, but they are also in thousands of churches, schools, clinics and homes. Women who want an abortion, especially in Republican-controlled states, face a maze of regulations. And now, finally, the anti-abortion movement is in sight of its greatest victory. Americans have had the right to abortion since 1973 when, in the landmark Roe v Wade decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the right was guaranteed by the US constitution. No state could infringe that right. Last week an unprecedented leaked draft of the Supreme Court decision — Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation — suggested it is primed to overturn Roe v Wade. This is a political earthquake that would mean each state could regulate or ban abortion as it saw fit. At least half of the 50 states would ban the practice if that occurs. This result was not pre-ordained. It is the product of 50 years of activism from an energised and empowered conservative movement. Abortion law, like most law in the US, derived from English common law, and until the mid-19th century, in the English colonies and then the US abortion was legal until “quickening”— the time that a woman could feel a foetus move — between the fourth and sixth months of pregnancy. Importantly, quickening could be determined only by the woman herself. Many Americans believed the foetus became a potential life only then. They also knew that post-quickening abortions were much more dangerous because they necessitated instruments. The laws governing abortion began to change when a group of physicians, trained at emerging medical schools, sought to separate themselves from the healers and midwives who competed with them in the 19th century for patients. This organisation, the American Medical Association, lobbied state legislatures to pass anti-abortion laws. They said that they knew that life began at conception — that quickening was an artificial boundary. Their lobbying paid off. By 1900, every state had a law banning abortion at every stage of pregnancy. The only exception was when a woman’s life was at stake. Only a doctor could determine whether a pregnancy qualified for that loophole. After abortion became illegal, women continued to have them. They used a black market of providers — doctors, midwives and opportunists — and when that was not possible, they tried to manage their own, often with terrifying results. Police were deployed to stop the trade. The result was that more and more women and more doctors got caught in the gears of the legal system.

By the late 1950s and 1960s, a host of lawyers, doctors, clergy and social workers saw illegal abortion as a profound social problem. They began to lobby state legislatures to amend the law. In the late 1960s, the group was joined by second-wave feminists, who made much stronger claims. Feminists argued that women could not be full citizens if they could not control their reproduction. The modern anti-abortion movement was born. Groups of religious people, almost all of whom were white Catholics, tried to stop lawmakers from acceding to the reformers’ demands. Activists urged their congregations to get involved — to use church channels to spread information, enlist new activists and halt the effort to amend the law. While these activists were all religious, they did not say so in public. Americans in the 1960s were sceptical of religious movements imposing their minority view on the majority. Worried that anti-Catholicism would limit their appeal, they used non-religious arguments to make their case: first, in terms of biology, discussing fingers and toes, chromosomes and heartbeats. They spoke in the language of civil and human rights. They argued that legal abortion was akin to slavery and the Holocaust in that it devalued life. They warned that abortion was the first step on the slippery slope to socially sanctioned killings of all unwanted people. Between 1967 and 1973, 17 states reformed or repealed their abortion bans. The case that legalised abortion in America concerned Norma McCorvey, a Texas woman who had sought an abortion for her third pregnancy and been denied it. Her lawyers, Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, argued that this denial was unconstitutional because it violated McCorvey’s right to privacy. Their rationale stemmed from precedent: the court had ruled in 1965 that a right to privacy was implied in the US constitution. Coffee, Weddington and their client — known by the pseudonym Jane Roe to protect her anonymity — filed suit against the Dallas county district attorney Henry Wade. By January 1973, the case had reached the highest level of the judicial system. In Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court ruled that a woman in her first trimester of pregnancy had the right to terminate it. Once a foetus reached the second trimester, states could regulate abortion in ways that were reasonable for maternal health — which allowed only relatively minor regulations. In the third trimester, the court ruled, the foetus was viable and states could prohibit abortion, but even then they needed to make exceptions if it was necessary to save the woman’s life. This decision changed abortion law in 46 of the 50 states.

No uprising followed. The anti-abortion movement became a nationwide movement but remained relatively small. Activists finetuned their arguments and worked to build political power. Some of the most important tools in the redoubled anti-abortion effort were pictures of foetuses. Activists also developed foetus dolls, pins, buttons, stickers and balloons, and they created anti-abortion films. This imagery, this ephemera, was intended to shock. It was intended to provide visceral support for arguments about biology, rights and genocides. Activists brought their arguments and their images into the everyday spaces of people’s lives. They began in churches. Before the late 1960s, even Catholics would not have been regularly confronted with anti-abortion politics in their churches. After that, it would have been hard to escape. In Catholic churches and many others, activists integrated anti-abortion politics into the rituals of their faiths. It became hard for some to separate their Christianity from pro-life politics. Activists moved into secular places too: schools, doctor’s surgeries, hospitals, outside abortion clinics. Crisis pregnancy centres were opened: anti-abortion clinics that masqueraded as abortion clinics. Activists also tried to pressure religious people in office, especially prominent Catholic Democrats, such as Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden, to reverse their support for abortion rights. One radical anti-abortion activist argued such people “were no longer Catholics”. By the late 1970s, the movement had changed some important minds. White evangelicals had not initially been part of the anti-abortion movement. In fact, evangelical leaders had tentatively supported abortion reform and even Roe v Wade. Not for long, though. While anti-abortion activists worked, fundamentalists were pushing evangelicalism into more conservative territory. By the end of the decade, many evangelicals had joined the cause and brought their leaders with them. After 1980, evangelicals — a quarter of Americans — would be some of the most fervent disciples. Not all evangelicals or Catholics joined the new crusade. This was and remains a white movement. Many black evangelicals and Latino Catholics opposed legal abortion, but few voted on the issue and even fewer joined as activists. White social conservatives, some of whom had opposed racial integration in schools, borrowed the new social currency of civil rights and represented themselves as abolitionists, not segregationists. The movement was not immediately yoked to the Republican Party. Democrats had been the traditional party of Catholics, and early anti-abortion activists came from both parties. But they realised one would need to be a vehicle for their politics. It was not until 1976 that they chose the Republicans. As activist efforts to persuade national Democrats fizzled out, the Republican Party agreed to put an anti-abortion plank on its presidential platform for the first time. Quickly, the party discovered that anti-abortion voters could help it win. While those voters were rarely a majority, they were reliable. But too often, party leaders were tepid allies. Sometimes Republicans in state legislatures passed one of the many bills the movement proposed to restrict abortion access, but they often did not follow through. Because of Roe, activists had to content themselves with incremental change. For many, slowing abortions was the best they could do. In the late 1980s, more radical activists rejected this approach. If this is genocide, treat it like one, many argued. They advocated massive civil disobedience. The most famous of these radical groups was Operation Rescue, thousands of whose activists would descend on a city and blockade clinics. Every abortion clinic in the US experienced some kind of attack.

Near constant harassment meant that almost every abortion provider felt like they were under siege. There was also a surge in violence against providers, including murders. George Tiller, a provider from Wichita, Kansas, was shot in both arms. He went back to work the next day, serving women in terrible medical situations. In 2009, he was shot in the head in his church by an activist. This tidal wave of radical action only began to slow in the mid-1990s, when Congress passed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which imposed stiffer criminal and civil penalties on those blocking access to abortion clinics. If the rescue movement was largely a failure, other activists found success in the mid to late 1990s. Socially conservative leaders, such as James Dobson of Focus on the Family, began to make headway in the Republican Party. They said anti-abortion voters were tired of being good foot soldiers for a “big tent” party. They demanded elected officials stop merely saying the right things in an election year and start doing “the right thing”. The movement had cultivated a constituency for whom abortion was the only issue that mattered. Now the party had to do more to get these votes. In the 21st century, especially during landslide elections, the Republicans elected were therefore much more likely to be anti-abortion ideologues. Others who weren’t historically committed to anti-abortion politics, such as Donald Trump, knew what was expected of them once they were in office. The three-times married former casino owner was not known for his faith, but evangelicals were critically important to getting him to the White House. Once there, Trump, unlike anti-abortion presidents before him, delivered on his promises.

In four years he appointed about 200 federal judges sympathetic to their outlook, for lifelong terms. Most decisively he put three onto the Supreme Court. With six conservative justices outnumbering the three known to be pro-choice, the movement has the right audience for their arguments. And judging by the leaked opinion, a majority are ready to overturn Roe v Wade and send the laws on abortion back to the states. States with Republican legislatures will ban abortion altogether. They will also need to stop abortion-seekers from crossing state and international borders, while also stopping the inflow of abortion pills. The internet offers more information to abortion-seekers than in the 1960s, but the state also has tools to surveil and punish those who try to find those resources. There will be few national remedies for it. Congress could pass a law codifying abortion rights, but the Democrats’ slim majority in the Senate is not enough to get that done. The only real way abortion rights can be restored is if those who want to protect them mount the same kind of sustained and focused campaign that the anti-abortion side has done.

Jennifer L Holland is assistant professor of US history at Oklahoma University and the author of Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement

the baby killers are welcome to try to pass a constitutional amendment to enshrine their bloodlust. But I don’t think they will have much luck.

70 million, some of which could have been grandparents by now ... “conquered” ... yeah, sure.

Catholic here. Pro-life.

Youngins at work were talking about how horrible this possible the S.C. decision is.

I told them that Saddam Hussein threw people he didn’t want into shredders.

When baby can feel pain is unknown. It’s estimated anywhere between 16 weeks to 23 weeks. Explain to me how late term abortions is any different from Hussien did?

The look on their faces was priceless.

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