Opposition and Intimidation: The Abortion Wars and Strategies of Political Harassment

6. THE CHANGING FACE OF THE ABORTION DEBATE

Chapter 6 THE CHANGING FACE OF THE ABORTION DEBATE It is always and everywhere wrong to take innocent human life—even if a potential good is promised. There must be no unwanted humans. If “wantedness ” becomes the criteria for personhood and legal protection it is the poor, the elderly, and those without a voice who are the next in line. The ability for any person to survive without the need of help from others cannot become the criteria for “humanness” either; to do so will end civilization as we know it. We are made for one another and we are our brother’s keeper. —Rev. Keith A. Fournier, founder and president, Common Good 2002 The pro-life movement shares similar institutional structures and social-psychological dynamics that are present in other social movements. The anti-abortion movement’s origin and development have, in many ways, mirrored other social movements. Yet, unlike many movements, the pro-life movement has heavily relied on harassing, confrontational tactics despite the overall institutional progression of the movement and its resultant success operating through legitimate political channels. Anti-abortion groups have had access and opportunities within national, state, and local political institutions. Shortly following its inception, the rightto -life movement entered national politics and since then has expanded its role as a legitimate political player within multiple institutional venues. Over the years the movement has become more sophisticated and politically savvy. Prolife strategists have crafted multiple approaches designed to restrict the availability and limit the accessibility of abortion services. Chapter 4 documented several of the important national legislative and legal victories won by the movement in the past few decades. At the state level, the pro-life movement has easily outpaced the pro-choice movement in terms of helping to introduce and pass legislation around the country. 155 Given the impressive institutional progress of the movement, theory predicts that the pro-life movement would move away from using disruptive, “outsider” strategies and incorporate “insider” strategies. But for the pro-life movement, the shift away from outsider, confrontational tactics has not occurred. Quite the opposite pattern has emerged: the movement started out largely institutionalized and began incorporating confrontational strategies throughout the 1980s. By the 1990s the proportion of providers experiencing some form of anti-abortion activity hovered around 85 percent (Cozzarelli and Major 1998; Henshaw 1995a), and since 1995 the volume of anti-abortion picketing has exponentially increased (National Abortion Federation 2006). Political Harassment Confrontational pro-life tactics are used in the same political environment as mainstream, institutionalized tactics and more extreme, radical tactics. Political behavior exists along a continuum, where traditional participation is on one end of the spectrum and acts of violence fall on the other end. All along the continuum , groups are attempting to achieve political outcomes even though their strategies may differ. Protests, sit-ins, and boycotts are all forms of legal, unconventional political participation and have been used by social movements throughout history to achieve favorable outcomes for their causes. These activities are designed to gain the attention and responsiveness of governmental authorities to movements’ issues. Social movements may experience signi‹cant costs resulting from their use of unconventional tactics; costs typically come in the form of a government’s attempt to ignore, limit, or eliminate the challenges posed by movements. The confrontational tactics used by the pro-life movement radically depart from this expected pattern. Unlike most social movements, the anti-abortion movement is not trying to gain the government’s attention and responsiveness directly through these strategies. By working through traditional political institutions, the pro-life movement has already earned politicians’ attention and has also gained signi‹cant policy victories through this relationship. Confrontational anti-abortion tactics are aimed at nongovernmental actors and are an attempt to elicit an immediate response from them. I have argued throughout this book that these tactics are politically harassing because they are directed at nongovernmental actors in a political environment ensconced in an underlying 156 O P P O S I T I O N A N D I N T I M I D A T I O N fear, and the tactics are intended to change the behavior of others to achieve political goals. Along the continuum of political behavior, the dynamic between protesters and nongovernmental targets is signi‹cantly different than that between protesters and the government. Nongovernmental actors lack the resources to insulate themselves, whereas the government commands...