The History of the Anti-Abortion Movement

WALTER ISAACSON, CORRESPONDENT: Thank you Christiane, and Karissa Haugeberg, welcome to the show.

KARISSA HAUGEBERG, AUTHOR, “WOMEN AGAINST ABORTION”: It’s great to be with you.

ISAACSON: You and I teach together in the history department of Tulane. One of the things you teach – and you’ve written a great book about it – is about abortion, women against abortion. Tell me about the anti-abortion movement of the 1960s and how it was led by women.

HAUGEBERG: Okay. So beginning in the 1960s, individual states began to decriminalize abortion in a handful of cases and in a few more cases to liberalize their abortion laws. So before the 1960s many states had very strict abortion laws. They only permitted abortion in the case where a woman’s life was at risk. And beginning in the 1960s, there was a movement afoot to grant physicians greater authority to determine when it might be medically necessary, maybe not to save the woman’s life, but to preserve her health. So about 17 states liberalized their laws, including – people might be surprised to hear this – many of the states along the Eastern seaboard, so including states like North and South Carolina. And it was in these states that were liberalizing their laws or decriminalizing their laws that the anti-abortion movement organized first. And not surprisingly, Catholics really led this movement. They were the only religion in the United States that had been very vehemently opposed to abortion throughout, throughout most of its history. So they had the infrastructure, you know, people could meet at, in church basements to begin organizing. And so a lot of the people who took up this work in these Catholic churches were women. And again, that shouldn’t totally surprise us either because so much of the voluntary work of religious work has been performed by women historically.

ISAACSON: What is the role of the clergy and how abortion became decriminalized?

HAUGEBERG: So this is very interesting. In 2022, we tend to think of abortion as being a religious issue only in terms of anti-abortion activism. But when we look back to the 1950s and 1960s, there actually was a very vibrant movement among clergy to assist women to get abortions. The largest of these groups was called the Clergy Consultation Service, and it was a coalition of Protestant clergy, but also rabbis and even a handful of covert priests working with them who helped women in states that had really strict abortion laws to get to those states where it was legal and safe. And one thing that’s very interesting about this group is they vetted abortion providers. So they would send in decoy women to ensure that the women who arrived at these offices were being treated humanely and weren’t being price gouged, which was a huge issue when abortion was criminalized. And it was this coalition of clergy – they practiced rather openly, so they didn’t hide the work that they were doing – and they characterized it as work that should not be shameful. And so some historians say that this is a very important turn of the tide to work so openly in support of abortion rights. And it was these clergy who, along with public health physicians who testified in front of state legislatures about the folly of criminal abortion laws. They talked about young, desperate women coming into their parishes desperate for information afraid to talk to their parents about what they were going through. And so it was their testimony that was incredibly compelling to state legislators.

ISAACSON: On the other side, in your book, what really interested me is that there were a lot of people on the anti-war progressive left, who were anti-abortion against abortion and in favor of laws restricting abortions in the sixties, coming out of that movement. Tell me about that.

HAUGEBERG: Absolutely. It’s this fascinating moment in the history of Catholicism, where in the 1960s, people may find this interesting, Republicans actually were slightly more inclined to favor abortion rights than Democrats. And one of the major reasons for that slight disparity was that Catholics were overwhelmingly Democrats. And so here you have a church that is historically anti-abortion, but in the 1960s in the wake of Vatican 2, have taken up a host of progressive issues. They’re concerned about regime changes throughout central America. There are aggressive anti-poverty campaigns. Catholics are front and center in the movement to oppose American engagement in Vietnam. And so a lot of people identified in so many ways as being progressive except for the issue of abortion. And so a lot of the women that I studied considered themselves to be Democrats, identified as feminists, and not in a cynical way, they truly believed in women’s equality, but for this issue of abortion. And there’s this interesting parallel that we could make to the way in which abortion politics got sorted out within both the Republican and democratic party. There was a long tradition of there being pro-choice Republicans and anti-abortion Democrats, and by the mid 1990s, that those became almost untenable positions.

ISAACSON: Huh? How did this sort of happen?

HAUGEBERG: So among the big changes in anti-abortion activism, it occurred in the, in the 1980s as evangelical Christians flooded into the movement espousing much more conservative ideas about proper gender roles but also the role of government in ordinary people’s lives. And in this debate between progressive Catholics and more conservative evangelicals, the evangelicals certainly won the day. They’re the ones whose worldview now shapes the Republican party.

ISAACSON: Let’s talk about some of the women who were against abortion, the women, anti-abortion activists in your book. Because I was surprised at how important women were leading the anti-abortion movement. Can we start with Marjory Mecklenburg?

HAUGEBERG: Marjory Mecklenburg, absolutely. She got her mark in establishing crisis pregnancy centers, which are now ubiquitous and just pretty much the centerpiece of the anti-abortion movement nationwide. So she helped to bring those in. They had initially started in Canada and she imported them into the United States. And then she got a key post in the department of health and human services in the Reagan administration, right about the time that abortion became a litmus test for getting these political appointments. And she helped to remake title 10 funding. She cut funding from groups that provided comprehensive sex education, and she started to steer federal money into these crisis pregnancy centers. So we really start to see the blending of federal money and the anti-abortion movement under her, in her tenure, in the health and human services. And part of the hallmark of women, women like Marjory Mecklenburg in the anti-abortion movement is they started to reframe the way the anti-abortion movement was approaching this issue. They tried to characterize their work as being in service to women. So rather than depicting women who got abortion as being fundamentally sinful or evil, they wanted to depict these women as being in need of help. So as victims of a cold system of unscrupulous physicians. And so these crisis pregnancy centers were intended to offer help to women in crisis, hence crisis pregnancy centers. And historians who look back at this period see this as a crucial turning point now.

ISAACSON: A lot of people think that they were kind of – that these type of centers were kind of ruses where they’d lure women in who wanted an abortion, and then try to talk ’em out of it. But these crisis pregnancy centers were really key to the anti-abortion movement.

HAUGEBERG: Right. So once they started to receive federal and then state money, they began to publish tracks that looked like legitimate scientific tracks. If you were to read some of these journal articles that purport that, for example, abortion can cause breast cancer or that abortion causes long term psychological harm. A lot of these tracks look like legitimate journal articles. They have footnotes and citations. And what most ordinary people who encounter this literature don’t understand is that these are not legitimate. These are physicians who are citing one another. It’s not, they’re not representing the consensus view of the American medical association or the American college of obstetricians and gynecologists. Rather it’s this cottage industry of physicians, many of whom are not even actually formally trained obstetricians and gynecologists. Many of them are just general practitioners. But nevertheless, it was in these centers that the distribution of these materials began. And what’s kind of diabolical about it is that the claims made in this literature actually made it into Supreme court decisions. When we look at major Supreme court decisions, including Gonzalez v. Carhart, they cite some of the material that came out of this cottage industry, saying things that, although there’s no evidence to support it, it’s reasonable to assume that women are traumatized by their abortion. That’s a line straight out of this cottage industry.

ISAACSON: Another interesting woman in your book is Dr. Mildred Jefferson, who I think was the first African American to graduate from Harvard medical school. Tell me about her impact on the anti-abortion movement.

HAUGEBERG: So, one thing that’s very interesting is, Dr. Mildred Jefferson, similar to Marjory Mecklenburg were both Methodists. And there – they came of age in the anti-abortion movement at this crucial stage when they were trying to enlarge themselves and to not just be regarded as a fringe Catholic movement and Mildred Jefferson did other things for the movement. It was easy to criticize the anti-abortion movement as largely being a white male dominated movement. And to have this professional black woman come forward was incredibly important to the movement. And it gave them some cache and some cover for these arguments that – these common criticisms of their movement. And one argument that she made was she really emphasized the way in which women of color have historically had a disproportionate number of abortions in the United States. And she tied this all the way back to the history of enslavement when black women didn’t have control over their reproduction. And it was her concern that welfare policies would incentivize black women being required to take birth control, something that actually has occurred. But she was also worried that abortion provision would be disproportionately centered in communities of color. And it is true to this day, women of color have more abortions per capita than white women. However, women of color are more likely to be pro-choice than white women. And women of color are less likely to have reliable access to birth control. So women of color and their access or their reliance on abortion is due to a whole host of issues unrelated to a targeting of abortion services in their communities.

ISAACSON: You spoke about how the progressive anti-war left movement of the 1960s. There was a strand of that that played into the anti-abortion movement. Tell me about people like Juli Loesch.

HAUGEBERG: So Juli Loesch is a fascinating character. She’s among that cohort of Catholics who was opposed to war and worked on a number of anti-poverty initiatives and then opposed abortion. And she was just this remarkable organizer. She had lists of activists who could be called upon to demonstrate. So for example, she led this really fascinating campaign at the Pentagon in opposition to both the Vietnam war and to abortion. And she and her allies showed up and poured fake blood on the steps of the Pentagon and this dual protest and she was also very opposed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. So she formed a group called pro-lifers for survival. That was meant to both tackle the issues of nuclear, proliferation and abortion. And again, whereas she was like great at the theatrics things that would actually become commonplace in the anti-abortion movement. She had a hard time really making this a mass movement, but very quickly, the leaders of operation rescue, which was getting going in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they recognized in her that she was really good at creating these really theatrical demonstrations that courted the press that would get people to show up and take pictures. So they hired her really early on understanding that she was a good organizer and it’s kind of a tragic story. They really took advantage of her. She helped to coordinate some very massive campaigns like some very, that turned out thousands of people to protest abortion, for example, to protest the 1984 DNC meeting that landed thousands of people in jail and was on the nightly news, but they very quickly cleaved her out of positions of power. They had little interest in her work to oppose nuclear proliferation and tackle poverty. So they extracted from her what they wanted, which was strategies for protesting, lists of potential volunteers, but then basically cut her out and they underpaid her. They started to deliberately exclude her from key meetings. And so her tenure in the movement kind of ends with her getting married and just going off and having children. But it’s, it’s kind of a deflated end to her career in that movement.

ISAACSON: The movement becomes much more activist, you know, much more assertive. Tell me about, you know, the rescue movement or Army of God.

HAUGEBERG: So beginning in the mid 1980s, the anti-abortion movement becomes much more aggressive and assertive and historians who look back at this moment, see a lot of people who are very frustrated, it appears that there’s little traction to overturn Roe V Wade efforts to enact a human life amendment into the constitution, completely stall out and committee again, keep because of the presence of pro-choice Republicans on those committees. And so there are a group who start to see there being that the only way out is through extra legal means, that they need to persuade ordinary Americans of the folly of abortion. And they need to just give up on some of the more traditional levers of enacting change through Congress or through the courts. So it’s these group of people who begin to stalk abortion providers to chain themselves to clinics, to intimidate patients who try to enter these clinics and even to go into the neighborhoods of providers and clinic staff by doing things like posting wanted posters in their neighborhoods to try to shame them out of this provision. And one element of activism that I think is overlooked, but it is quite terrifying is that they even went into the schools of clinic staff and provider’s children and did things like post pictures of their parents and said do you know that Billy’s mom kills babies and that sort of thing. So it was, it was very intimidating and very personal.

ISAACSON: You’ve written about how the anti-abortion movement does not end, you don’t think, with the overturning of Roe, what do you think happens next?

HAUGEBERG: I think that the anti-abortion movement is incredibly energized and hopeful about the future. One thing that they are prepared to do is to fight at both the state level to ensure that those states that do not have trigger laws, but are maybe purple states will pass legislation to make it more difficult to get an abortion or to ban it outright. But they also have their sights set on the federal level. And again, this is a moral imperative to them. It is their goal to have an abortion free nation, but I would also caution it is their goal to have an abortion free world. If we look at international policy in the George W. Bush administration, there was an effort to stamp out comprehensive sex education, and funding for abortion in international aid. So this isn’t something that stops in the United States.

ISAACSON: Karissa Haugeberg, thank you so much for joining us.

HAUGEBERG: Good to be with you, Walter.