By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — What a difference nearly a half-century makes.
The story in Arizona isn’t unusual. Pro-lifers around the United States could tell their own personal versions of it. But I was on the ground here, so this is what I saw.
All was quiet at the Arizona Capitol complex the night after the U.S. Supreme Court announced its earthshaking permissive-abortion opinions on January 22, 1973, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.
Members of the emerging pro-life movement were shocked that a seven-justice majority waved a magic wand and transformed a serious criminal offense against human life into a fundamental constitutional right overnight, without giving any significant justification for their action. It was just “raw judicial power,” as dissenting Justice Byron White said.
Although most abortions hadn’t been legal in Arizona, pro-lifers had begun to get together here and in other states because they’d seen the national push under way to bless lawless abortion.
Before long in downtown Phoenix, Robert Tamis, MD, went on to open an abortuary, showing his in-your-face defiance with his location on the city’s main north-south street, Central Avenue. I covered one of the early pro-life pickets of his business. Unmarried young women and girls who picketed Tamis are grandmothers now.
His one-story clinic right along the sidewalk, with its up-high windows, was a little south and on the opposite side of Central from the Westward Ho Hotel, one of Phoenix’s best hostelries and site of many civic gatherings back then.
Eighteen years later, an article posted on October 9, 1991, by the alternative weekly Phoenix New Times said Tamis “estimates he has performed more than 50,000 abortions.”
Pro-lifers went to work in 1973 to respond to the High Court’s legal usurpation. Because the court itself took this stand, who could they appeal to? It was too proud to admit any error.
So pro-lifers started meeting in living rooms here to react. They didn’t control the offices at government bureaucracies.
One year later, in January 1974, pro-lifers staged a powerful rally in front of the Arizona State Capitol. Around 10,000 people marched west along Washington Street. In 12 months — a little longer than a normal pregnancy — they had formed from out of nowhere to demonstrate in numbers rarely seen here for political expression.
They listened peacefully to speakers on the sunny afternoon then returned to their daily life and homes to begin a longer march to respond to the High Court. Would they have felt appalled if they knew it would take nearly 50 full years? The babies at that rally would have become 50 years old. The middle-aged then likely had died by 2022.
They had the numbers but the other side had the social clout, which it would use to portray small pro-abortion cadres as larger than the traditional majority pro-life sentiment which long had prevailed in U.S. culture, custom, and law.
Media members didn’t care much to publicize the pro-life cause. Female news and feature writers already mainly were pro-abortion feminists.
Ironically, pro-abortion Sandra Day O’Connor served as a state senator at this very same Arizona Capitol in some of the 1970s, less than a decade before recently elected President Ronald Reagan picked her from out of the blue in 1981 to become the first female Supreme Court justice.
Reagan thus betrayed pro-lifers significantly early in his presidential term, insisting he would stand by his nomination even though Arizona pro-lifers familiar with her record warned Reagan’s administration that he was breaking his word to them about the type of justice he would choose.
Forty-eight years after 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court announced on June 24, 2022, that it was overturning its baseless Roe and Doe opinions and the subsequent 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey opinion and was returning the issue to legislators and voters in the states. That’s where it traditionally had been before the 1973 Court jumped in to impose a national pro-abortion dictatorship.
Unlike 1974, the Arizona Capitol complex didn’t have to wait a year for a major demonstration reacting to the Court’s 2022 opinion, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
That very same evening a raucous, threatening pro-abortion crowd gathered at the Capitol, with some of them yelling, pounding, and kicking at the first-floor exterior glass doors and windows of the Senate wing, where senators were at work on expanding the state’s education savings account program as their 2022 regular session was coming to a close.
The senators weren’t voting on anything to do with abortion at the time. In March Republican Gov. Doug Ducey already had signed a bill into law against abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
In a statement, the Arizona Department of Public Safety said that with an estimated 7,000 to 8,000 people present, “What began as a peaceful protest evolved into anarchical and criminal actions by masses of splinter groups. As groups realized the state Legislature was in session, they attempted to breach the doors of the Arizona Senate and force their way into the building.”
The statement continued, “The violence of their efforts literally shook the building and terrified citizens and lawmakers who occupied the building. As the glass doors bowed from attempts of forced entry, the occupants of the building were instructed to move to secure locations.
“Due to the direct threat to the occupants of the Senate building and damage to the building itself, Arizona State Troopers took immediate action and utilized tactics including the deployment of field force teams and tear gas,” the DPS said, adding that there also was criminal damage to nearby state monuments and state buildings.
None of the monuments had anything to do with the Confederacy or slavery that had offended protesters thousands of miles east of here in 2020.
The following night some Arizona pro-abortion protesters pulled down some temporary fencing.
By the morning of June 27, local radio news announced that the state Capitol was surrounded by double fencing topped with razor wire.
Some conservative commentators observed that while national Democrats currently were denouncing the alleged Donald Trump “insurrection” of January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol, Democrats and their allies were engaged in their own insurrections, such as in Phoenix.
On June 27 Republican State Sen. Kelly Townsend told KFYI radio talk host James T. Harris (550 AM, Phoenix), “It’s something I will never, ever forget,” adding that she saw two children of one of the legislators “sobbing in fear.”
As for what the pro-abortionists wanted? They often were ashamed to say. They’d chant or yell for “health care” or “reproductive access” or “reproductive justice.” But abortion? Not so much.
The whole point of every abortion — cruelly disposing of the defenseless preborn baby — seemed just too irrelevant, or frightening, to them to mention at all.
Pro-abortionists had been coddled by the elite for so long, and told that they were so wonderful and special, even if their consciences were hurting, that they threw a huge tantrum, like any spoiled kid, when they were told in effect to grow up.
Even though their reaction was disgusting, many of them had been duped by the elite into thinking this way, and they knew no other response. They might consider taking up the way their personalities had been twisted by the elite who did it to them.
For more than a half-century, pro-abortionists have mindlessly repeated the obvious lie that the issue is only “my body” when in fact there’s a second body they want to victimize. That they still can’t tell the truth about so plain a fact serves to discount anything else they chant.
Although Dobbs said states are free to legislate as they desire on abortion, even if they want to favor it, a strong media theme was that permissive abortion had suffered a crippling blow. Was this because media pro-abortionists realized that if the issue is fully and accurately debated, it loses?
KKNT radio talk host Seth Leibsohn (960 AM, Phoenix) told his listeners on June 27 about a couple of young people who kept up with the news, but they thought Dobbs made abortion illegal.
In 1974, the Arizona pro-lifers’ accomplishment was notable in drawing around 10,000 people for a demonstration when dominant media already opposed them.
However, by 2022 that biased media had had a half-century to poison people’s minds with pro-abortion propaganda — as well as Democrats funneling tax funding to pro-abortion causes over the decades — so it wasn’t surprising that some thousands of pro-abortionists could show up at the Arizona Capitol quickly.
Of course, they did have weeks to prepare for a turnout after the scandalous early May leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s Dobbs draft.
While the leak of an entire draft of a Supreme Court opinion apparently was unprecedented, it wasn’t the first Court leak, not even about abortion. Very shortly before Roe and Doe were announced in 1973, Time magazine went to press with that news. As it happened, the leak had gone to Time writer Dave Beckwith.
In one of those strange coincidences in my life, I had met Beckwith the previous summer at the Beverly Hills, Calif., bureau of Time, when I filled in for a week for a vacationing writer, and Beckwith, who was regarded as an up-and-comer for Time, happened to be there.
A story posted by The Washington Post on May 2, 2022, after the Dobbs leak, recalled the earlier one in 1973, and why the chief justice at that time, Warren Burger, was so angry about it.
Burger didn’t favor the extent of Roe but, because of the opinion’s importance, he thought that he, as chief justice, should join the majority. However, Burger futilely hoped to scale it back by declaring it didn’t amount to “abortion on demand.”
The May 2 Washington Post story said, “Burger had reason to be especially angry about the leak. He had reluctantly supported the decision in Roe, but he went to pains to write that the decision was not going to result in ‘abortion on demand’ — which had been the headline of Beckwith’s story.”
As the decades passed, pro-lifers here and elsewhere around the nation had their victories and defeats, triumphs and betrayals. Even my own modest national contributions to the pro-life cause were defamed by historian James Hitchcock, Ph.D., who refused to admit his falsehoods in his book Abortion, Religious Freedom, and Catholic Politics, which was promoted unrepentantly by some Catholic media.
But the pro-life cause was too important for anyone to give up. That’s why we finally achieved Dobbs, despite a furious national pro-abortion establishment whose power is all too apparent as it gnashes its teeth in agony over Samuel Alito’s majority opinion.
From dawn to dusk and east to west, the overriding, arrogant tone in most media coverage is how to avoid, undo, override, and reverse Dobbs. The fact that Roe was the mere assertion of nonsense somehow usually goes unmentioned.
The Grand Canyon State’s largest daily, The Arizona Republic, is one of the gang. However, Republic columnist Phil Boas sounded a rare contrary note on June 25 about Justice Harry Blackmun’s Roe opinion, writing: “American liberals have lived rent-free for 50 years on the Blackmun decision. They didn’t have to frame arguments. They didn’t have to persuade 50 legislatures. The Blackmun court handed them the ball, the game and the whistle when it was only just beginning. . . .
“Roe was an enormous head start for the left,” Boas added. His article was headlined, “Roe is history. The left is furious. They ought to be contrite — Instead of fuming, maybe Democrats should be remorseful about the unearned advantage they got from Roe v. Wade.”
Although the media’s police didn’t like it, many explanations of why national Democrats and their pro-abortionist allies’ extremism had driven people away from them popped up on social media.
Look In The Mirror
A notable example was commentator and author Naomi Wolf, who favors abortion, at her column at Substack.com, “Outspoken with Dr. Naomi Wolf.” Posted June 26, it was headlined, “On Losing ‘Roe’ — How Could this Possibly have Happened? Easy. Pro-Choice Movement, Look in the Mirror.”
Wolf covered a number of considerations, including that women generally have more power in the law than they did 50 years ago so they don’t need abortion as an escape for the powerless, that it’s wrong to sneak minors into abortions that their parents don’t even know about when minors for good reasons generally can’t make important decisions on their own, and that the callous language of abortion advocacy drives people away.
It’s a powerful column worth your attention.
She wrote, “The organized feminist left were not content to use the language or policies that polls supported, of seeking a country in which abortion would be ‘safe, legal and rare.’ Rather, they pushed, in state after state, to enshrine that ‘right’ up until…the day of a baby’s birth. At what point does a ‘right’ become a murder?”
Shortly after Dobbs was announced, one conservative writer reflected the feelings of millions when he said that for the first time in his life, he awoke in the morning in a country where abortion wasn’t viewed in the law as a national constitutional right. And that was great.
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