Women Against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century by Karissa Haugeberg (review)

Karissa Haugeberg's slim but impactful book, Women Against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century, joins historical scholarship of the pro-life movement that began with Kristin Luker's remarkable Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood(Berkeley, 1984). Haugeberg makes a unique contribution to this growing body of literature by focusing on the role women played in antiabortion activism, something often overshadowed by the historiography's overemphasis on men's efforts to oppose abortion rights. Haugeberg uncovers her subjects through a masterful use of archival sources, antiabortion publications, legal documents, oral histories, and interviews. She argues that these "women who operated at the grass roots to change Americans' perceptions about life, death, and health paved the way for the erosion of women's right to abortion in the post- Roeera" (p. 35).

The women in Haugeberg's book are a surprising and often confounding lot, including radical feminists, longtime Democrats, and committed Catholics. Many of them had worked for racial justice or protested the Vietnam War. Nearly all of them had dedicated themselves to opposing abortion long before the Supreme Court legalized it with Roe v. Wade(1973).

Before the Roedecision, antiabortion work began with the emergence of crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) in the 1960s, which sought to steer women away from having an abortion by offering different medical services and counseling. Haugeberg points out that the women who opened CPCs thought differently about abortion politics than those in the traditional pro-life movement, who pursued legal and legislative strategies and focused on the rights of fetuses. The CPC activists "remade the abortion debate" by insisting that abortions harmed women emotionally and physically and represented society's failure to protect vulnerable women, arguments that became politically useful in chipping away at abortion rights in the following decades (p. 10).

The federal legalization of abortion, however, elicited more militant responses from many of these women who were frustrated by what they saw as the gradualist approach of the Catholic Church and larger pro-life organizations. Catholic feminists like Julianne Loesch launched small groups like Prolifers for Survival to carry out aggressive strikes against abortion by targeting clinics. Pretending to be women seeking an abortion, some activists infiltrated clinics and destroyed medical devices or planted bombs and started fires. Haugeberg shows that the federal government's refusal to classify these acts as terrorism meant that state and local authorities were left to deal with these issues. In states with strong antiabortion politics, judges often accepted these women's defense that their crimes were acts of civil disobedience.

Perhaps not surprising given such leniency, some of the women who had embraced violence escalated their efforts toward deadly means. For example, Shelley Shannon attempted to assassinate Dr. George Tiller in 1993. Though Tiller survived the five bullets from Shannon's gun, he was later murdered by Shannon's friend, Scott Roeder, in 2009. Haugeberg notes that historians have attributed such violence to evangelical pro-life men, but her book persuasively demonstrates that many of these aggressive tactics "were transmitted by Catholic women who understood antiabortion protest to be an extension of their long-standing commitment to social justice" (p. 57).

Scholars of abortion and feminism will value Haugeberg's meticulous and balanced portrait of these underexamined women. Her study complicates the persistent narrative of the pro-life movement and introduces instrumental historical actors who altered the course of abortion rights. While the book's close focus on the biographies of different women sometimes comes at the expense of accounting for larger historical forces, Women Against Abortionis a much-needed corrective that will surely inspire important additional work on women antiabortion activists.