A New Book Describes the Women’s Wing of the U.S. Anti-Abortion Movement

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anti-abortion movement, anti-abortion violence, Catholic Church, Catholic women, Crisis Pregnancy Centers, Evangelical men, terrorism

Marissa Haugeberg

I just wrote a review (for a librarians’ journal) of Women against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century by Karissa Haugeberg, an assistant professor of history at Tulane University. At first, I was put off by the subtitle, because the idea of dignifying anti-abortion zealotry with a term like “moral reform movement” is abhorrent to me. I myself would never use such a phrase for the same reason I never call opponents of abortion “pro-life” — like many feminists, I am sickened by the hypocrisy of that term.

As it turns out, however, one should not judge a book by its cover — or its subtitle. This is a nuanced, sophisticated, and balanced account of three decades of anti-abortion activism in the U.S. on the part of overwhelmingly white, largely working class Catholic and Evangelical women. By the end of the book Haugeberg has made it abundantly clear that there is nothing the least bit moral about the terrorist violence of the anti-abortion movement.

Haugeberg argues against the widespread notion that most acts of violence against women’s health clinic personnel have been committed by white Evangelical men. She demonstrates that women were coordinating violent “rescue” actions (vandalizing and bombing clinics and assaulting and terrorizing staff and clients) “long before Evangelical men joined the movement.” In large part, the Catholic women’s early turn to “rescue” violence was prompted by their frustration with most Catholic priests’ and nuns’ disinclination to actively oppose Roe v. Wade. Juli Loesch, for instance, cut off her relations with a group of Benedictine nuns because of their ambivalence about abortion.

Haugeberg repeatedly notes that most of the (Catholic) women who embraced anti-abortion activism initially went to some effort to portray themselves as seriously interested in women’s welfare. The crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) were set up by these women supposedly as a more female-centered alternative to the male-led and Evangelical-dominated anti-abortion groups, which were overtly anti-feminist, if not misogynist, and which put fetal personhood at the heart of their rhetoric.

But the CPCs quickly degenerated. Though still employing a discourse of concern for women’s health and wellbeing, the CPCs have unashamedly turned to “deception, coercion, and terror” in their attempts to prevent women from accessing abortion. CPC personnel routinely lie to women about how long they’ve been pregnant (thus moving them past the time limit for legal abortion in many states). CPC staff show fabricated abortion videos, make outrageously inaccurate claims about abortion hazards, intimidate and terrorize women seeking abortions, and publish confidential information about them and their families.

Haugeberg’s book is fascinating and well written. But it is not an easy read. She uses their own words as much as possible in chronicling violent anti-abortion fanatics such as Shelley Shannon (attempted murderer of Dr. George Tiller and intimate friend of the killers of Dr. Tiller, Dr. David Gunn, and others). Those words are smug and self-righteous, and it takes a strong stomach to read the sanctimonious justifications of their violent attacks.

Haugeberg criticizes the distinctions often made by scholars and the media between supposedly peaceful arms of the anti-abortion movement such as the CPCs and the terrorists who over three decades have killed eleven people, attempted to kill another 26, and committed close to 2000 acts of arson and vandalism. Violent anti-abortion activists move freely among the various factions of the movement, and their terrorism is virtually never condemned by the national organizations. The actions of female anti-abortion terrorists have met with tepid response by state and federal officials as well. All too often, their repeated violent acts do not lead to criminal charges and rarely result in jail time.

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Cautious Optimism after a U.S. Supreme Court Decision

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abortion, abortion access, abortion restrictions, anti-abortion movement, reproductive health, Texas, TRAP laws, U.S. Supreme Court, Uruguay

Over the past few days, the news media as well as social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have been abuzz with news of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-to-3 decision in the Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt case. The court struck down the Texas state legislature’s 2013 restrictions on abortion clinics; these restrictions had already caused half the abortion clinics in Texas to close, and threatened many more. A June 27 article in The New York Times called the decision “the court’s most sweeping statement on abortion since Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, which reaffirmed the constitutional right to abortion established in 1973 in Roe v. Wade.”

Justices Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Kagan. There was a gender gap in the 5-to-3 decision. The women justices voted 3-to-0 to throw out the Texas TRAP law; the men voted 3-to-2 in favor of the Texas restrictions.

People interested in women’s reproductive health have heralded the decision as signaling the likely end of most of the so-called TRAP laws (targeted restrictions on abortion providers) so beloved by right-wing state legislators all over the country. Indeed, anti-abortion forces view Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt as a shocking defeat. (The Washington Superior Court ruling against the Skagit County hospital district for failing to provide abortions that I was so pleased about last week seems like very small potatoes in comparison.)

I have to admit that when I first heard of the Court’s decision, I was as ecstatic as anyone else, and did not particularly cavil at the descriptions of Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt as being a death-blow to the U.S. anti-abortion movement. Upon reflection, however, my enthusiasm has become more measured. Such court decisions are welcome, of course. But history has shown us that one cannot rely upon the courts to ensure fair treatment. After all, the Miranda v. Arizona court decision of 1966 (which limited police powers and required that arrested persons be informed of their right to a court-appointed lawyer) has not notably resulted in equal justice for the poor. And anyone who knows anything about the recent history of abortion in the U.S. is well aware that neither Roe v. Wade nor Planned Parenthood v. Casey ensured access to abortion for women of scarce resources outside of certain major metropolitan centers.

Anti-abortion zealots are already regrouping, and strategizing about what their next moves will be. Their onslaught against the health rights of women over the past few decades has been unceasing, and there is no reason to assume that they will view Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt as anything other than a temporary setback. The TRAP laws have certainly been an effective tactic. But women are also denied access to abortion through intimidation of health care professionals and patients at the doors of clinics, cuts in funding to clinics that provide reproductive health services to the poor, and the failure of more than a handful of medical schools to require their students to learn procedures to terminate pregnancy.

It is, of course, far better for abortion to be legal than illegal. But that is not the end of the story. Sometimes a place where abortion is illegal can have better access than certain other places (such as many rural regions in the U.S.) where it is legal. Take, for example, the South American country Uruguay, which in 2012 became the second country in Latin America and the Caribbean (after Cuba) to legalize abortion under a broad range of circumstances. Interestingly, already for a decade or so before legalization, Uruguay had succeeded in drastically reducing maternal mortality from unsafe abortions by means of “before” and “after” appointments for poor women at the public hospital. Physicians would see women contemplating illegal abortions to instruct them in the correct administration of misoprostol/Cytotec, though they would not provide information on how to acquire the drug (which in any case was freely available over the internet). After the women self-aborted chemically, Uruguayan physicians would confirm completeness of the procedure and if necessary perform a uterine aspiration if there were any complications. This subtle skirting of Uruguay’s abortion prohibitions has come to be known as the “Uruguay Model,” and has been informally adopted by doctors in other countries with restrictive abortion laws, such as Uganda, Tanzania, and elsewhere. See the article by Patrick Adams in The New York Times.

More Junk Science from the NY Times

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anti-abortion movement, evolution, evolutionary psychology, junk science, sociobiology

For several decades, as women’s reproductive rights in the United States have come under frequent attack, the New York Times has been a staunch and consistent opponent of attempts to ban or drastically limit access to legal abortion. On 15 April 2014, the Times published an op-ed piece by Thomas B. Edsall titled “Abortion Endures as a Political Tripwire.” The essay expressed support for women’s right to abortion and asked why it is that abortion remains such a hot-button issue while certain other controversies that once seemed explosive — notably, gay marriage — have apparently lost political traction.

Unfortunately, in his efforts to find the answer to this question Edsall settles on an explanation that is peculiar, to say the least. He approvingly quotes two proponents of an evolutionary theory that suggests that vehement opposition to abortion is the inevitable result of (male) human nature. Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker and Nebraska political scientist John Hibbing opine that male attempts to limit access to abortion are understandable because, in Edsall’s words, “reproduction is both a core political issue and a core evolutionary one.” In evolutionary terms, males might want to restrict abortion as part of their attempt to, in Pinker’s words, “guarantee paternity, since a cuckolded man is in the worst imaginable evolutionary scenario…”

Edsall appears to have fallen for this bit of pseudoscientific nonsense hook, line, and sinker. Like so many explanations grounded in sociobiology (which proponents now call “evolutionary psychology” in an effort to escape the tarnished reputation of the earlier term), this one fails on historical and cross-cultural grounds.

For one thing, until the 19th century, in most cultures of the world abortion before “quickening” (the first movement of the fetus in the womb at approximately three months gestation) was considered permissible. Indeed, in many places and time periods a woman was not deemed to be pregnant until she announced herself to be so; anything she did before that point to make herself not pregnant (“restore menses” or “restore herself to health” was the way it was often phrased) was her business and hers alone. (I discuss this further in the “A Little Bit Pregnant” chapter of Sex and Herbs and Birth Control.) It is bizarre to categorize current opposition to first-trimester abortion as part of the “evolutionary core” of human actions if this supposed core did not manifest itself in any systematic way until the 19th century.

For another thing, the U.S. is virtually unique in the abortion issue being, as Edsall rightly terms it, a “political tripwire.” Certain parts of the world — such as China, Japan, and most of south and southeast Asia, which together hold about half of the world’s population — have liberal abortion laws and no significant anti-abortion movement. In some places that still have restrictive laws on abortion the laws have been greatly liberalized over the last couple of decades (this is true of Mexico and certain South American countries). In Latin America most opposition to abortion has come from the Catholic Church (which, by the way, did not categorically forbid abortion before quickening until 1869) and Protestant fundamentalist organizations based in the U.S.

It is illogical and unscientific to attribute the strength of the anti-abortion movement in the U.S. to humanity’s “evolutionary core.” Why would evolution apply only to Americans and not to Asians? For all their good intentions, Edsall and the New York Times are doing a disservice by disseminating junk science. (For another example of faulty science related to abortion in the New York Times see the post “Well-Intentioned Junk Science Is Still Junk Science”.) A logical explanation of anti-abortion fanaticism in the U.S. should be based not on biology, but rather on historical, political, and sociological analysis of the peculiarities of American society.

Postscript (added 9 June 2014): After contacting Steven Pinker, my husband Neal learned that his views had not been accurately represented by Mr. Edsall. In Prof. Pinker’s email correspondence with Edsall he had written, “I don’t think there can be an evolutionary explanation of opposition to abortion per se.”

Further postscript (added 4 October 2014): The following quotation from the 2010 book Misframing Men by Michael Kimmel (who is founder and editor of the journal Men and Masculinities) was brought to my attention by Tiffany Lamoreaux:

“Evolutionary psychology is not a natural science, but a social science, which is to say it is an oxymoron. It cannot conform to the canons of a science like physics, in which falsifiability is its chief goal, and replication its chief method. It does not account for variations in its universalizing pronouncements, nor does it offer the most parsimonious explanations. It is speculative theory, often provocative and interesting, but no more than that. It is like–gasp!–sociology. And, as in sociology, there are some practitioners who will do virtually anything to be taken seriously as ‘science,’ despite the fact that individual human beings happily confound all predictions based on aggregate models of behavior.” (page 71)