By DEXTER DUGGAN
Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade, by Daniel K. Williams, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, ISBN 978-0-19-939164-6, 365 pages hardback, $29.95, 2016.
The man seated next to me in the airport departure lounge in January asked what I was reading. He wanted to talk a bit after I told him Defenders of the Unborn was about the U.S. pro-life movement.
He soon disclosed that his wife had an abortion when they were young because they “weren’t ready,” but they later had children. That would have been more than 35 years ago, because he is 60 now.
He didn’t regret the abortion, he said conversationally, and believes there are too many people in the world. He asked what my religion is so I told him, although I didn’t ask his. He lives in the U.S. now but came here from a heavily populated other side of the world, so if he follows a religion, it might not be a Western one.
If a person’s wife had stolen $3 maybe 40 years ago, would he soon bring up the topic to a stranger in the airport today? I doubt it, but the abortion he was dismissing as a minor matter didn’t seem to be something he had let go of after these many years.
The wound of permissive abortion persists in causing harm to a culture that says there’s no damage. Like other wounds, it needs to be healed. Those who treat it lightly keep being surprised at the endurance of the infection.
In Oxford University Press’s Defenders of the Unborn, author Daniel K. Williams, a professor of history, notes that Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, author of the legally earth-shaking Roe v. Wade — which turned medicine, the law, and history on their heads on a January day in 1973 — “had little notion of the firestorm he had just ignited. . . . Blackmun was taken aback by the uproar.”
The shaken Blackmun tried to take refuge in fantasy despite the biting criticism against his illusionary judicial legislating. He declared those 43 years ago, “I suspect, however, that the furor will die down before too long. At least I hope so.”
Lee Gidding, a leader of the then-National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), was similarly clueless as she celebrated the Supreme Court’s big gift to her radicals. She said back then, “Before you know it, this will be past history, and abortion will be just another medical procedure. People will forget about this whole thing.”
A major theme that author Williams pursues is the nature of the young pro-life movement before the High Court threw down its challenge in 1973 that began to thoroughly reshape U.S. society, including the two major political parties.
Contrary to media myths that pro-lifers are reactionaries who sprouted to oppose women’s newly court-granted freedom, Williams writes, the early pro-lifers often were New Deal Democrats and liberals who regarded protection of the threatened unborn as a liberal, human-rights cause.
Shortly before the Supreme Court acted on that January 22, early pro-lifers were feeling optimistic that events were going their way, both with court decisions and legislative and public sentiment. Only two months earlier, in November 1972, the voters in the very different states of urban Michigan and rural North Dakota strongly had rejected proposals to loosen abortion laws.
On January 11, 1973, Williams notes, members of the North Dakota Right to Life Association gathered for their first annual convention. With the ballot-box victory just behind them, “they were optimistic . . . and were ready to move on to the second phase of pro-life activism — campaigning for social-welfare legislation that would give women facing crisis pregnancies the help they needed to carry their pregnancies to term.”
But with the court soon mandating its eccentric personal view upon the nation, the pro-life movement “suddenly had to focus all of its energy on one central task — overturning Roe.”
Pro-lifers continued to establish and maintain programs to assist pregnant mothers, but now they had to combat an aggressive national legal assault against innocent, threatened lives.
And, contrary to claims that pro-lifers were trying to impose their views on everyone else, readers of Defenders of the Unborn see scheming by elite, unrepresentative pro-abortion activists to overthrow the nation’s traditional protective laws.
Although Williams is more interested in recounting the development of the pro-life movement than detailing how it was misrepresented by pro-abortion media organs, he occasionally notes the weight exerted against pro-lifers by journalists.
In one endnote, Williams says that “numerous articles from The New York Times in the late 1960s and early 1970s treated opposition to abortion as primarily a Catholic cause,” with “one of the many examples of this phenomenon” being an article portraying “opposition to abortion legalization in Wisconsin as coming mainly from Catholics, and especially from Catholic clerics.”
For as long as it could, the Times repeatedly cast the issue as Catholic hierarchs versus women, the nation, or everyone else. Concern for preborn babies went down the drain as surely in newsrooms as at abortuaries. At the major Arizona daily paper I worked at in the early 1970s, if a female writer expressed a view about abortion in the hallways, it was pro-abortion.
If the Times kept ignoring pro-life liberals and characterizing “abortion foes” as benighted and backward, maybe liberals generally would get the idea they wanted no place among pro-lifers, while the pro-life movement was demonized in the paper’s pages as unworthy of any serious attention, much less respect. And the Times often is regarded as giving the clues to other media of how to conduct themselves.
Hmm, does that sound about like The New York Times’ world even today as it aborts the news to suit its own views?
As the decades passed, other dangerous anti-abortionists were to arise that the Times added to its list of cavemen, including “evangelicals” and finally even most of the Republican Party. Unwelcome elsewhere, millions of people who saw the basic logic of wrapping preborn babies in the same legal protection as other humans at least saw the GOP as a haven.
And indeed the two major political parties changed, with Democratic leaders getting the message it was OK to scorn and purge its traditional pro-life sympathizers, who in turn migrated to a Republican Party that finally awakened to the fact it was being gifted with an electoral advantage.
Although Americans today are more than familiar with the marvels of ultrasound imaging — flat-out science whose factual images drive pro-abortionists wild and judicial activists blind — it wasn’t so long ago that, for all that most people knew, “fetuses” really were just the “clumps of cells” that abortion defenders try to sell.
Williams notes that in 1965, one of the top secular magazines of that era — appropriately named Life — created a sensation when it published the first color photos taken of fetal development. Eight million copies of the magazine were sold within four days, and Life put together a reprint of just this article to fill customers’ continued orders.
As breathtaking as this evidence was, no one dreamed of the real-time sonograms just a few decades in the future. But such facts became an embarrassment, and weren’t to deter judges and certain social activists with a grim agenda.
When it seemed that pro-lifers simply asking judges and legislators to do the right thing wasn’t sufficient after Roe v. Wade and its companion Doe v. Bolton had broken all the rules, pro-lifers directly entered politics in short order.
In 1976, little-known Long Island pro-life Democrat homemaker Ellen McCormack jumped into that year’s presidential race, not expecting to win but to show some muscle. The savvy McCormack quickly did, receiving only eight fewer votes in Boston in the Massachusetts Democratic primary than powerful Sen. Birch Bayh, another presidential hopeful who soon dropped out of the race in embarrassment.
That instance could exemplify the pro-life movement, a broadly based coalition nevertheless rejected by elite powerbrokers. In 1973, Williams writes, Michigan Citizens for Life had more than 50,000 members, while the media-acclaimed pro-abortion National Organization for Women (NOW) had only 30,000 members in the entire nation.
Defenders of the Unborn will evoke fond memories among pro-lifers who can recall when they had dreams of working within both major political parties to protect the preborn and their mothers as well as other vulnerable people.
And the book might surprise younger readers learning such facts for the first time as that 74-year-old Jesse Jackson Sr. was a strongly pro-life young Democrat celebrity — until party insiders gave him the choice of rising in the party or remaining a pro-lifer. Like too many in that party, Jackson chose personal ambition and surrender.
In a telephone conversation, pro-life veteran David Mall, now 80 years of age and a resident of Davenport, Iowa, told The Wanderer on February 11 that author Williams is “a good scholar” who did a “masterful job synthesizing” pre-Roe scholars’ work.
Mall was one of the founders of Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL), one of the oldest state pro-life groups, rooted in a traditionally liberal setting.
However, Mall said, he thinks Williams didn’t adequately access direct sources, which is even more important when the early leaders are passing away. Mall gave as an example Williams’ statement that 25 people gathered in the Hartle family’s living room in 1968 to begin MCCL, even though Mall, who was present, recalls only 12 or 13 people being there, and says the room never could have held 25.
“If humans are available for discussion . . . they should be contacted,” Mall said, adding: “He’s a good scholar, but I have misgivings about drive-by scholarship. . . . I believe in participant observation” when they’re alive and available.
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