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  • Strange Bedfellows in the Political Discourse Surrounding Roe v. Wade
  • Simone M. Caron (bio)
Seth Dowland. Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 271 pp. Notes and index. $45.00.
Daniel K. Williams. Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. vii + 365 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95.
Mary Ziegler. After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. ix + 367 pp. Notes and index. $39.95.

Abortion has gained much attention from scholars over the last half century. The three books under review join other recent works dealing with abortion since the mid-twentieth century. Sara Dubow’s A History of the Fetus in Modern America (2011), for example, examines how U.S. perceptions of the fetus have changed in relation to the social and political context of the times, while Johanna Schoen’s Abortion after Roe (2015) explores how the antiabortion movement negatively impacted the development of pregnancy termination procedures. New additions by Daniel Williams and Mary Ziegler contribute complementary analyses of abortion prior to and after the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), whereas Seth Dowland places abortion in the larger context of the emergence of the Moral Majority and New Right.

In Defenders of the Unborn, Williams examines antiabortion activists prior to Roe. Catholics overwhelmingly dominated the movement; their opposition from the 1930s through the 1960s was based on New Deal liberal principles such as individual rights, legal protection for minority groups, and human dignity. Much of the early debate occurred in medical circles because doctors were the ones to face women who requested abortions. Basing their position on human rights arguments, Catholic medical organizations opposed all abortions. Jewish doctors often supported abortion liberalization. Protestant doctors, who constituted the majority of medical professionals, generally left the decision to individual physicians and later, following World War II, to hospital [End Page 621] committees. When the American Law Institute endorsed liberalization in 1959, Catholic lawyers joined the fray; they created a nonsectarian defense of fetal rights based in the language of constitutional law. They opposed abortion in the case of rape, for example, because it “executed” the unborn “child” for actions s/he had not committed (p. 46). They defended fetal rights as human rights and used much the same language as other rights movements in the 1950s and 1960s. By the late 1960s, antiabortion Catholics were losing the battle for two reasons: their views conflicted with majority opinion; and the Church hierarchy had lost much of its influence over its flock on the issue. In the wake of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), Catholic movement leaders separated contraception from abortion and focused on the latter as a violation of human rights. They encouraged doctors and lawyers rather than prelates to lead antiabortion organizations in order to appeal to allies outside the Church. When Protestant doctors joined the cause, they often quickly rose to prominent positions in order to convince the public that opposition to abortion was not just a Catholic movement. They gained some liberal Protestant and Jewish supporters with humanistic arguments: if society allowed fetal “murder,” then the “murder” of elderly and disabled could follow; also, legal abortion could lead to coercive abortion against the poor (p. 79).

The antiabortion movement changed tactics in the early 1970s. Leaders employed graphic images of live and aborted fetuses in slide shows for public lectures and in publications. They attracted some evangelicals by framing abortion as encouraging pre- and extra-marital sex. They incorporated more women into leadership to counter feminist claims that the antiabortion movement was an attempt by men to control women. New women leaders introduced the notion that abortion victimized women at the hands of both greedy doctors and men seeking to exploit women sexually and avoid the consequences. These changes helped activists defeat all liberalization bills pending in twenty-five states in the spring of 1971. Williams’ main argument is that while the antiabortion movement was overwhelmingly Catholic prior to 1971, by 1972 the media’s portrayal of it as such was incorrect.

The Court’s decision...

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