Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-life Movement before Roe v. Wade by Daniel K. Williams (review)

Daniel Williams positions his political and intellectual history of the pro-life movement as a corrective to a dominant narrative that there was no organized opposition to elective abortion prior to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Williams's treatment does not evidence that he is deeply read in the history of gender and sexuality that usually serves as background for work on these issues. Nonetheless, he rightly and convincingly argues that historians of abortion and reproductive politics in the U.S. have not paid significant attention to the activists who resisted legalization. As a result, the book will be important to historians working to achieve a full understanding of the ongoing legislative controversies over elective abortion.

Williams locates the roots of the pro-life movement in Catholic New Deal liberalism of the 1930s and 1940s, but his work moves quickly to the 1960s and efforts to liberalize access to therapeutic abortions and eventually to legalize elective abortion. The reform effort of the early 1960s drew energy from the 1959 model legislation drafted by the American Law Institute, Romper Room host Sherri Chessen Finkbine's highly publicized pursuit of an abortion upon learning of a fetal deformity with her pregnancy, and activist Alan Guttmacher's rise to the leadership of Planned Parenthood in 1962 and his establishment of the Committee for Humane Abortion Law in 1964. Pro-life Catholics were caught somewhat off-guard by these events.

In pushing back against the initial state efforts at liberalization, rather than arguing from particular natural-law principles, the pro-life activists concentrated on the fetus's inalienable right to life, pointing to Declaration of Independence, and the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Williams argues that this rhetorical base sustained the movement in ways that purely religious justifications could not—a strategic move that Catholics used with other issues, such as opposing state sterilization statutes. Williams also offers an intriguing section on the powerful use of fetal imagery within the movement's print and media strategy.

In 1968, Father James McHugh of the National Council of Catholic Bishop's Family Life Bureau moved to form a separate national organization: the National Right to Life Committee. Given the separate status of NRLC, eventually the organization was able to draw in a coalition of liberals and progressives, some significant Lutherans and Methodists, who viewed anti-abortion work as part of their larger commitment to human rights, including anti-poverty work, opposition to the war in Vietnam, and to the death penalty. Williams wants to see a deeply ecumenical movement, but it is difficult to discern whether he has found the Protestant activists who are the exception to the rule or whether there was truly a broad-based Christian coalition.

The legal and cultural tide truly began to turn against the pro-life position in 1965 with the establishment of the Constitutional "right to privacy" in Griswald v. Connecticut birth control decision. The decision set up a pitched battle to balance the interest in fetal rights with women's rights. Second-wave feminists argued that reproductive rights were essential to respecting the women's human rights, and that argument worked against the privileging of fetal rights. These conflicts played out at the state level, with sixteen states successfully liberalizing their abortion laws in the late 1960s, and with the pro-life advocates successfully opposing twenty-five measures in 1971. The Roe decision established as settled law that a woman's right to privacy included the right to an abortion, pushing the state's interest in fetal rights out to the point of viability. The decision and the political realignment on abortion rights after Roe resulted in shift of the movement to allegiance with the Republican Party after 1980.