Fmr. Pro-Life Leader Rev. Schenck on Abortion Ruling

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, overturning Roe v. Wade has been a decade’s long campaign by American activists. Many with unique perspectives like Reverend Rob Schenck. He was a high-profile organizer and spokesman for Operation Rescue in New York State. A particularly aggressive anti-abortion group. Then, a series of events forced them to evaluate the term pro-life and the power of words. Schenck joins Michel Martin to discuss his evolution.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Reverend Rob Schenck, thank you so much for talking with us once again.

REV. ROB SCHENCK, EVANGELICAL MINISTER AND THE DIETRICH BONHOEFFER INSTITUTE PRESIDENT: Thank you for inviting me.

MARTIN: You know, obviously we wanted to talk to you because you’ve had this prominent role in the movement to restrict abortion rights, people who follow the history of this remember that you came to, I think, national prominence and starting in the Buffalo campaign in 1992. I mean, Buffalo, New York, for a variety of reasons became the sort of scene of this enormous anti-abortion campaigns that were, you know, peaceful at first but became increasingly aggressive. You are known for these, you know, very kind of theatrical tactics. How did it become this other thing or take on this other character?

SCHENCK: Well, I refer to that phenomenon as the Rush Limbaugh isolation (ph) of our movement. When we shifted away from a moral argument based on human dignity and justice and became politicized and we were, we were co- opted by the Republican Party, for example, both nationally and locally. And when that happened, we shifted our attention away from women in crisis with unwelcomed pregnancies and their ultimately, of course, the children we hoped they would give birth to, and shifted to political power and influence. And when that happened, I think we lost our soul as a movement. We lost our moral force. We became just another influence group to begin with. But eventually, you know, political power is very seductive. And if you don’t guard your heart and your mind and your motives, it’s very easy to simply go to a game of domination and triumph. And we became a very triumphant (ph). By the time I ended my association with the movement in the mid-2000s, I thought very little about the actual individuals and their personal experience in all of this and more about the political landscape and whether we were going to be victorious or not. And of course, we were, both on the political and judicial levels. Meanwhile, of course, the movement did, in fact, turn violent. There was not just destruction of property and ultimately murder, but our language, our tone, our contempt for our opponents also turn to a form of rhetorical violence. And that demoralized the movement so that today, for me, it’s barely recognizable as the movement I joined 30 years ago.

MARTIN: You can’t help but notice that many of the people who’ve risen to prominence in this movement are for whom this issue is deemed or projected as primary are also people who have not, never been on the side of civil rights for all people, who have been actively hostile to the civil and human rights, particularly of African Americans. Some of the states that have the most restrictive abortion policies throughout this whole period are also some of the same places that have the most egregious, you know, maternal mortality rates. Well, particularly for people of color, particularly for black women. So, I guess a lot of people say, well, is it really about human dignity or is it really about control?

SCHENCK: What happened in that process of change for the worse overtime. The folks who did co-op at the movement for their own political ends have now gained dominance in the movement, complete. And so, yes, as you say, the way I see it now, the end of Roe is not a moral victory for the movement. It’s, in fact, the beginning of its greatest moral test, which I predict it will fail. And it will fail miserably and many more people will be hurt as a result of that, just as they are right now at this moment because the people who got us to this point, the politicians, the politicized movement leaders, and I include myself among them, it’s why I left the movement was to clear my head and conscience and kind of get a reset for myself. But what’s — what the reality that the movement has to face is that the victory that’s been achieved was achieved because the very people who got us here are the people who don’t simply dismiss the women and now the born children at the center of this crisis, but they actually have a contempt for them. They hold an attitude that says, you pick yourself up by your own boot straps, were not responsible for you, it’s not our burden to take care of you, you take care of yourself. So, they not only are uncaring, they are actually contemptuous of the people we said we’re at the focus of a movement. So, the result will be that states that now ban abortion will also not simply ignore the women and children placed at great risk as a result of this but will actually act in ways that further injure them. So, this is a complete inversion of the movement, of the movement’s original objectives and tenants and motivations. It’s even contrary to the Christian core of the movement’s motivations.

MARTIN: For people who aren’t as familiar with your story, what was the breaking point for you?

SCHENCK: Well, there were two. One was, I was jailed in Montgomery, Alabama, for my protest activity. And while there, I was placed, curiously, on the psychiatric wing of the jail, only because of overpopulation. They didn’t have any room anywhere else. And the reason that’s important is only because that wing of the jail was both sexes, men and women were in cells on the same block. And so, where was a woman about three cell doors away from mine who was obviously mentally ill. She was in great distress and she kept screaming, where are my babies? This is tough to even recall. It was so painful. But she said, where are my children? Who is taking care of them? I have three kids, where are they? Who’s taking care of them? And listening to that for hours broke a kind of spell that I was under. Because during my years in the movement, I imagined always a rosy cheeked white woman cradling a little baby that she had given birth to because she had heard our pleas not to kill her unborn child, and that there was an army of pro-lifers around her taking care of her, her child, a whole community assisting them. That was not the reality for this woman. She was utterly alone, nobody cared about her or her children. And suddenly I realized, the world is not the fantasy I imagined it to be. This woman’s reality is not where I have been living in this movement for 30 years. And that was the real — that helped — well, the only way I could describe it, it was like an intervention. It broke down all my imaginary defenses and helped me to see the people and their pain who were at the center of this terrible human experience. And later, I would be asked by a friend I trusted and had worked with extensively in the gun violence prevention space. She said, I had an abortion at age 22. Here were my circumstances. She said, had you been in exactly the same circumstances I was facing the same risks that I faced, what would you have done? And she said, I’m not asking for your slogan hearing, I’m not asking for your, you know, facile stage arguments, I’m asking you as a person, what would you have done in my circumstance? And I had to think long and hard. I brought back to memory that moment in Montgomery. And I answered her honestly. I said, I would have had the abortion. And facing myself helped me, again, to understand the true pain and crisis that is at the center of this question, and that’s why I now believe that neither the courts, nor the politicians, nor the state legislators, should be controlling this. This is a deeply personal and literally unique crisis for every woman who faces it. And she and only the people she seeks out to advise her and help her should be the ones to render this extremely difficult decision. And it’s why I left the movement. And now, I try to do all that I can to repair the damage I did over a 30- year period based on false information and assumptions and presumptions and imagination. This is reality. It’s not something we can create in our own minds.

MARTIN: You know, critics of abortion or opponents of abortion rights say it’s pro-abortion. But people who support abortion rights say it’s choice. I’m just curious if you can just explain that why that plays such a little role in the philosophy here, the idea of freewill, or the idea — or even, like I say, defending the life — saving the life of the mother?

SCHENCK: Yes. Well, again, the movement that I joined initially asked those sorts of deep questions over time and very quickly, we stopped asking those deeply searching and difficult questions. I think a new generation now of prolife-leaning young people are asking those questions. And part of my reassessment was the realization that pregnancy, unwelcome pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, all of it, is unique. And it must be treated uniquely. Even as a philosophical and even religious question, it’s unique. And I even argue at what we have now in Justice Alito’s majority opinion on Roe actually reflects a very narrow even theological and religious underpinning. It’s distinctly Catholic. It’s a form of Catholicism. It doesn’t reflect evangelical, theological process or opinion. This is something very different. And we have to face these realities. So, I think young evangelicals and young Catholics are ready to face in these very difficult questions about our own movement, about our own motivations, and we must seek those and we have to resolve them because this crisis is not going away. Abortion is not going to go away.

MARTIN: Do you think that your argument is having any headway among the people who share your core conviction that abortion is a tragedy and something that you would prefer not to happen? You know, do you feel that your point of view is making any headway?

SCHENCK: I think with younger evangelicals and younger Catholics, yes. And there are a surprising number of silent doubters in the movement. I hear from them routinely, people who write me and they send me, you know, e-mail correspondence saying, you know, I don’t dare say this out loud, but I have great doubts myself. You know, many of them grew up knowing nothing but this fierce conviction, you know, against abortion. But, again, my appeal is that this is unique. It’s not like other things. You can believe passionately that the best choice is for a woman to bring a pregnancy to term, give birth to that child, raise that child. But in order to get to that place, we have to ask, what are we doing to assist them in that? What’s policies? You know, during my time in the pro-life, anti-abortion movement, I raised tens of millions of dollars to end Roe v. Wade. Will those same donors give those same amounts of money, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, billions, actually, over the course of the national movement in all of its quarters, will they give that same amount of money to assist women with health care, with housing, with childcare, with job training? Will they use the same force in their voting privileges to vote for candidates who support public policy that provides those things for women in crisis pregnancy and their children all the way through their lifetime? Right now, the answer to that is, on the whole, no. They will not. I think that’s an indication already that there is a big problem with our argument on abortion. But I do believe you can be pro-life and you can support all those things. I think, right now, it requires that you be a Democrat and not a Republican, because the Republican Party stands against all those things. So, can you be a prolife Democrat? I think you can. And you have to support all those systems that allow a woman and assist a woman to make a different choice than abortion, but we are a long way from that, a very long way. There has to be a whole lot of work. And it’s going to take an uncoupling of the pro-life movement from the Republican Party. But right now, the pro- life movement is a wholly subsidiary of the Republican Party, and that is an enormous, and right now, irresolvable problem.

MARTIN: Reverend Rob Schenck, thank you so much for talking with us today.

SCHENCK: Thank you.