The Right to Life Movement: Sources, Development, and Strategies

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 7, Issue 1, 1995, Pages 128-159

  Cassidy, Keith ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ANTI-ABORTION GROUPS--HISTORY; ARTICLE; CRITIQUE; DEVELOPED COUNTRY; ECONOMIC FACTORS; ECONOMICS; EVALUATION; INDUCED ABORTION; INTEREST GROUPS; LITERATURE REVIEW; NORTH AMERICA; NORTHERN AMERICA; ORGANIZATION AND ADMINISTRATION--HISTORY; ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT; POLICY; POLITICAL FACTORS; POLITICS; PUBLIC OPINION; SOCIAL CHANGE; SOCIAL EVOLUTION; UNITED STATES; WESTERN HEMISPHERE;

AMERICAS; ANTI-ABORTION GROUPS--HISTORY; CRITIQUE; DEVELOPED COUNTRIES; ECONOMIC FACTORS; INTEREST GROUPS; LITERATURE REVIEW; NORTH AMERICA; NORTHERN AMERICA; ORGANIZATION AND ADMINISTRATION--HISTORY; POLICY; POLITICAL FACTORS; SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT; SOCIAL POLICY; UNITED STATES;

ABORTION, INDUCED; AMERICAS; DEVELOPED COUNTRIES; ECONOMICS; EVALUATION STUDIES; NORTH AMERICA; ORGANIZATION AND ADMINISTRATION; POLITICS; PUBLIC OPINION; PUBLIC POLICY; SOCIAL CHANGE; UNITED STATES;

EID: 0029455884     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898030600004176     Document Type: Article

References (109)

1. For some of the literature on social movements, see Suzanne Staggenborg, The Pro-Choice Movement: Organization and Activism in the Abortion Conflict (New York, 1991), 3—8.
2. James Kelly's “Seeking a Sociologically Correct Name for Abortion Opponents, ” in Ted G. Jelen and Marthe A. Chandler, Abortion Politics in the United States and Canada (Westport, Conn., 1994), 14-40.
3. Andrew H. Merton Two older histories of the movement are Andrew H. Merton, Enemies of Choice: The Right to Life Movement and Its Threat to Abortion Boston 1981.
4. Connie Paige, The Right to Lifers: Who They Are, How They Operate, Where They Get Their Money (New York, 1983).
5. James Kelly “Beyond the Stereotypes: Interviews with Right-To-Life Pioneers, ” Commonweal, 20 November, 1981, 654-659.
6. “Toward Complexity: The Right to Life Movement, ” Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion 1 (1989): 83-107.
7. “Learning and Teaching Consistency: Catholics and the Right-To-Life Movement, ” in Timothy A. Byrnes and Mary C. Segers, eds., The Catholic Church and the Politics of Abortion: A View from the States (Boulder, Colo., 1992), 152-67.
8. “Seeking a Sociologically Correct Name for Abortion Opponents.” Robert J. Spitzer's The Right to Life Movement and Third-Party Politics (Westport, Conn., 1987) deals with New York but contains information relevant to an understanding of the larger movement.
9. While pro-lifers tend to be viewed negatively, abortion itself is given a more complex treatment. Celeste Condit Railsback notes: “Even in the strongest cases, therefore, the mass cultural medium of television admitted abortion only as an ambiguous and constrained practice” Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change (Urbana, 1990), 139. On television's treatment of abortion, she summarizes a number of shows in which pro-lifers appear and it is striking how frequently they appear as violent picketers or as arsonists and bombers. Pro-lifers have frequently lamented what they perceive as negatively biased treatment: see, for example, Dave Andrusko, “Zealots, Zanies, and Assorted Kooks: How the Major Media Interprets the Pro-Life Movement, ” in Dave Andrusko, ed., To Rescue the Future: The Pro-Life Movement in the 1980's (Toronto, 1983), 183-200. Support for the view that the media present a biased view of the movement can be found in a series of articles by David Shaw in the Los Angeles Times, 1-4 July, 1990
10. Marvin Olasky, The Press and Abortion, 1838-1988 (Hillsdale, N.J., 1988). There is a lengthy discussion of media bias in the treatment both of the abortion issue and of the pro-life movement
11. James Davison Hunter, Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America's Culture War (New York, 1994), 154-67. In this connection it is significant that
12. S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda S. Lichter report in The Media Elite: America's New Powerbrokers (Bethesda, Md., 1986) 29, that 90 percent of news officials interviewed took a pro-choice position.
13. In a review of public opinion polls dealing with abortion, the sociologist James Davison Hunter notes: “Outside the rank and file of the anti-abortion movement, the average American—even when numbered among the closest allies of the anti-abortion movement … —tends to view the anti-abortion movement the same negative way that the pro-choice coalitions do. The average American is much more likely to view the antiabortion movement as unconcerned about women and the poor, and marked by judgementalism, extremism and intolerance” “What Americans Really Think About Abortion, ” First Things 24 (June-July 1992): 20. A similar discussion by Carl Bowman, “The Anatomy of Ambivalence: What Americans Really Believe About Abortion, ” is found in Hunter's Before the Shooting Begins, 85-119.
14. This is a central theme in Paige's The Right to Lifers. Rosalind Pollack Petchesky stresses the connection of the New Right to the anti-abortion movement in Abortion and Women's Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom (New York, 1984). Nonetheless, she notes that “the organized antiabortion movement, however, in its political and ideological roots is distinct from the New Right and should not be confused with it” (254).
15. For an expression of this view, see Donald Granberg, “Pro-Life or Reflection of Conservative Ideology? An Analysis of Opposition to Legalized Abortion, ” Sociology and Social Research: An International Journal 62 (April 1978): 414-429.
16. Thus Susan Faludi in her book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York, 1991) declared that “the patriarch's eclipsed ability to make the family decisions figured as a bitter subtext, the unspoken but pressing agenda of the anti-abortion campaign” (403).
17. A similar theme can be found in Marian Faux, Crusaders: Voices from the Abortion Front (New York, 1990).
18. Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), 193, 194.
19. Faye Ginsburg, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 7.
20. Pamela Johnston Conover and Virginia Gray, Feminism and the New Right: Conflict Over the American Family (New York, 1983).
21. For discussions of the “symbolic crusade” thesis, see Stephen L. Markson, “The Roots of Contemporary Anti-Abortion Activism, ” in Paul Sachdev, ed., Perspectives on Abortion, (Metuchen, N.J., 1985), 33-43.
22. Peter J. Leahy, David A. Snow, and Steven K. Worden, “The Antiabortion Movement and Symbolic Crusades: Reappraisal of a Popular Theory, ‘Alternative Lifestyles 6 (Fall 1983): 27-47.
23. Amy Fried, “Abortion Politics as Symbolic Politics: An Investigation into Belief Sytems, ” Social Science Quarterly 69:1 (1988): 137-54.
24. Ginsburg in Contested Lives argues: “Viewed from an anthropological perspective, one can see in the abortion controversy the most recent manifestation of an ongoing process in which struggles over the material, political, and symbolic definitions of gender are intertwined, dramatized, coded and continualy transformed. As the abortion debate has come increasingly to stand for opposing views of gender, the possibility of mutual recognition seems to decrease as each side claims to speak a truth regarding contemporary as well as past and future generations of women” (220).
25. Mary Jo Neitz, “Family, State, and God: Ideologies of the Right-to-Life Movement, ” Sociological Analysis 42:3 (1981): 277.
26. Michael Cuneo, Catholics Against the Church: Anti-Abortion Protest in Toronto, 1969-1985 (Toronto, 1989).
27. Cuneo states: “As evidence by their different social backgrounds, value commitments, and aspirations, it is clear that not all activists inhabit the same cognitive and cultural world. … In addition to its Procrustean bent, Luker's thesis suffers from an implicit monocausality: the impugned status of housewives in the face of the exodus of women from homemaking into the public workplace is adduced as the primary if not exclusive impetus behind anti-abortionism. This explanation perhaps conceals an ideologi cal bias. In locating the roots of anti-abortionism in the sociocultural circumstances of activists it seems to imply that the question of abortion itself cannot or should not carry sufficient moral weight to arouse people to activism. Rather than taking seriously the claims of anti-abortionists regarding the inherent value of fetal life, these claims are dismissed tout court as a facade for what is essentially an alarmist reaction to the realignment of gender roles in contemporary society” Catholic, 82.
28. Kelly, “Toward Complexity, ” 83-107.
29. Elizabeth Adell Cook, Ted G. Jelen, and Clyde Wilcox, Between Two Absolutes: Public Opinion and the Politics of Abortion (Boulder, Colo., 1992).
30. Donald Granberg, “The Abortion Activists, ” Family Planning Perspectives 3 (July-August 1981): 162.
31. The belief that the ERA would result in the mandating of abortion funding was based in part on the experience of several states with state ERAs. See Lincoln C. Oliphant, “ERA and the Abortion Connection, ” Human Life Review 7 (Spring 1981): 42-60.
32. Henry J. Hyde, “The ERA-Abortion Connection, ” Human Life Review 9 (Summer 1983): 81-86.
33. John T. Noonan, “The ERA and Abortion, ” Human Life Review 10 (Spring 1984): 29-46. The NRLC took the position that the ERA was unacceptable unless it was rendered “abortion neutral” by the insertion of clarifying language. The same position was taken by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops; for the latter, see National Right to Life News, 3 May 1984, 1.
34. Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, Between, 123 (Table 4.7). The Beta for the correlation with euthanasia attitudes was —. 27; for sexual morality it was —. 20; 125. See also Barbara Finlay, “Right to Life vs. the Right to Die: Some Correlates of Euthanasia Attitudes, ” Sociology and Social Research 69 (July 1985): 548-60.
35. Cook Jelen, and Wilcox Between, 76. A finding consistent with this is reported in Hunter's Before the Shooting Begins, 103-6.
36. Donald Granberg in “Pro-Life or Reflection of Conservative Ideology?” disputes the notion that opposition to abortion “is part of a more generalized pro-life stance” (421). However, his test of such consistency is open to question because he believes that pro-lifers should be “disproportionately opposed to capital punishment, have less confidence in the military, and to favor increased spending to improve and protect the health of people while favoring a decrease in expenditures on the military and armaments” (421). Clearly this is one view of what a pro-life philosophy ought to entail, but it is hardly the only one possible. Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, Between (74), point out the problems with the sort of consistency test used by Granberg. Interestingly, Granberg's survey of abortion activists revealed that NARAL and NRLC members were similar in their opposition to capital punishment (60 percent and 56 percent, respectively) and far more likely to oppose it than the general public (28 percent); Donald Granberg and Donald Denney, “The Coathanger and the Rose, ” Society (May-June 1982): 40.
37. Cook Jelen, and Wilcox Between (74), point out the problems with the sort of consistency test used by Granberg. Interestingly, Granberg's survey of abortion activists revealed that NARAL and NRLC members were similar in their opposition to capital punishment (60 percent and 56 percent, respectively) and far more likely to oppose it than the general public (28 percent).
38. Donald Granberg and Donald Denney, “The Coathanger and the Rose, ” Society (May-June 1982): 40.
39. For an expression of their views, see Gail Grenier Sweet, ed., Pro-Life Feminism: Different Voices (Toronto and Lewiston, N.Y., 1985).
40. For a clear statement of this view, see “Why Is N.R.L.C. a Single-Issue Organization?” by Douglas Johnson, the NRLC legislative director. This statement has frequently been inserted in the program for the NRLC's annual meeting and clearly is an official statement. It says in part the NRLC “has defended the principle that every innocent human being has a right to life” and “socially sanctioned abortion, infanticide and euthanasia all violate that principle” (quoted from the 1990 program [108-109]).
41. Denyse Handler, “Mercy Killing: How, Why, and Where” (Lewiston, N.Y. 1977).
42. Cook Jelen, and Wilcox Between, 72. Donald Granberg and Beth Wellman Granberg reported an even weaker linkage: “We conclude that although abortion attitudes are not completely independent of political ideology, the two are not closely related” “Abortion Attitudes, 1965-1980: Trends and Determinants, ” Family Planning Perspectives 12 (September-October 1980): 250-261.
43. Cook Jelen, Between, 141.
44. Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, Between, 141.
45. Baker, Epstein, and Forth, “Matters of Life and Death”.
46. A. Lewis Rhodes, “Religion and Opposition to Abortion Reconsidered, ” Review of Religious Research 27 (December 1985): 158-68.
47. Jerome S. Legge, “The Determinants of Attitudes Toward Abortion in the American Electorate, ” Western Political Quarterly 36:3 (1983): 479-90.
48. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York, 1991), 118.
49. Hunter, Culture Wars, 44.
50. Hunter, “What Americans Really Think About Abortion, ” 18.
51. Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, Between, state that “an important part of the relationship between high levels of education and liberal attitudes toward legal abortion is clearly due to the socializing experience of education” (52).
52. Along these lines Randall A. Lake has argued that “pro-choice forces, I suggest, confront more than adamant beliefs about abortion; they also confront a powerful set of beliefs about the very nature of morality and the process of ethical judgement” “The Metaethical Framework of Anti-abortion Rhetoric, ” Signs 11:3 (1986). Lake further asserts that “anti-abortionists view humans as at best weak, selfish, and callous, and at worst maliciously immoral.” The warrant for this remark is dubious and attributes to members of the movement a homogeneity of view that simply does not exist.
53. Jerome S. Legge, “Determinants of Attitudes” (488): “It would appear that the overall structure of abortion attitudes among the American public is relatively weak with few consistent predictors”.
54. Kelly makes this point as well in “Toward Complexity”, 91-92.
55. Luker discusses the social-class differences between pro-choice and pro-life activists in Abortion, 194-97. The argument that abortion is a class issue was first advanced by Peter Skerry in “The Class Conflict over Abortion, ” The Public Interest 53 (Summer 1978): 69-84.
56. The argument that abortion is a class issue was first advanced by Peter Skerry in “The Class Conflict over Abortion, ” The Public Interest 53 (Summer 1978): 69-84.
57. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (New York, 1991), 491. In his view an upper class fully committed to the mystique of progress believes that the future is and ought to be controllable and it therefore supports abortion as a necessary means of achieving that goal. In his judgment, “The debate about abortion illustrates the difference between the enlightened ethic of competitive achievement and the petit-bourgeois or working class ethic of limits” (489). While he overstates the degree to which abortion is a class issue, he reinforces Hunter's point that what is involved is the collision of competing worldviews. Lasch bases his observations on his reading of Luker's work but gives it a distinctive turn: Luker recognizes class differences between abortion activists but does not assign to class the centrality ascribed by Lasch.
58. Laurence Tribe, Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes (New York, 1990), 238.
59. This point was made forcefully by Judith Blake in “Negativism, Equivocation, and Wobbly Assent: Public ‘Support’ for the Prochoice Platform on Abortion, ” Demography 18 (August 1981): 309-20. It is reinforced in Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, Between, who declare that “the majority of Americans hold positions that do not fall neatly in either camp—they support legal abortions in some but not all circumstances” (37).
60. It is reinforced in Cook Jelen, and Wilcox Between, who declare that “the majority of Americans hold positions that do not fall neatly in either camp-they support legal abortions in some but not all circumstances” (37).
61. This disjunction of morality and legality was discussed in Stanley K. Henshaw and Greg Martire, “Morality and Legality, ” Family Planning Perspectives 14 (March-April 1982): 53-62.
62. That the Supreme Court decision had run ahead of public opinion was also the opinion of Karen Mulhauser of NARAL, who said: “The country wasn’t with us at that point. Had we made more gains through the legislatures and referendum process, and taken a little longer at it, the public would have moved with us.” The quote is from Roger Williams, “The Power of Fetal Politics, ” Saturday Review, 9 June, 1979, 12.
63. This is discussed in Staggenborg, The Pro-Choice Movement, 139, in Tribe, Abortion, 174-75.
64. Kelly, “Toward Complexity, ” 87.
65. Interview with Edward Golden, Troy, New York, 1 June, 1989.
66. Interview with Mrs. Geline Williams, Houston, Texas. 2 July, 1994.
67. Raymond Tatalovich and Byron W. Daynes, The Politics of Abortion: A Study of Community Conflict in Public Policy Making (New York, 1981) 62-63.
68. For an early instance of tension between a group of conservative Catholics and Monsignor McHugh, see “A Catholic Abortion, ” which reprints the communications between them over a proposed national pro-life initiative, in the conservative Catholic magazine Triumph, April 1971, 7-12.
69. The addresses setting out the “seamless garment” philosophy are found in Thomas G. Fuechtmann, ed., Consistent Ethic of Life (Kansas City, Mo., 1988)
70. along with a number of essays discussing them. See also Patricia Beattie Jung and Thomas A. Shannon, eds., Abortion and Catholocism: The American Debate (New York, 1988).
71. For a criticism by a conservative Catholic, see James Hitchcock, “The Bishops Seek Peace on Abortion, ” Human Life Review 10 (Winter 1984): 27-35.
72. Interview with William Hunt, 1 July, 1989.
73. interview with Joe Lampe, July 1989. The ACCL approach is also apparent in Judith Fink and Marjory Mecklenburg, “Developing Alternatives to Abortion, ” in Facing the Future (Waco, Texas, 1976), 123-36.
74. Interview with David Mall, 9 July, 1983. Mall was AUL's second executive director, taking over in 1972 and overseeing the move to Chicago.
75. Burke Balch, 16 July, 1982.
76. For a discussion of the origins and work of HLI, see Fr. Paul Marx, Confessions of a Prolife Missionary: The Journeys of Fr. Paul Marx, OSB (Gaithersburg, Md., 1988).
77. For some discussion of these materials, Condit, Decoding Abortion Rhetoric. For more studies on the rhetoric of the abortion controversy, see David J. Mall, ed., When Life and Choice Collide: Essays on Rhetoric and Abortion, Vol. 1, To Set the Dawn Free (Libertyville, Ill., 1994). The Eclipse of Reason, in response to criticism of The Silent Scream, another film, was produced.
78. One of the first pro-life books, Charles Rice's The Vanishing Right to Live: An Appeal for a Renewed Reverence for Life (New York, 1969) manifests this clearly. Not a single biblical text was cited and the essential argument was “the compelling secular and constitutional reasons against abortion” (28). Again Jack and Barbara Willke's How to Teach the Pro-Life Story (Cincinnati, 1973) suggested that arguments were to be secular: “Perhaps it is best then to take the whole package of theologic judgement of this question, give it the honor it is due, and place it on the pedestal where it belongs” (18-19).
79. Quoted by Carolyn Gerster in National Right to Life News, 12 January, 1981 “What Is the Best HLA Wording?” 1.
80. Interview with Joseph Lampe, 1 July, 1989, Minneapolis.
81. This episode is discussed in Michele McKeegan, Abortion Politics: Mutiny in the Ranks of the Right (New York, 1992), 43-44.
82. Matthew C. Moen, The Christian Right and Congress (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1989), 103-106. The somewhat belated Protestant support for the Hatch Amendment was reported in National Right to Life News 9.8 (22 April, 1982): 1. Representatives of the National Association of Evangelicals, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Moral Majority, Pro-Life Ministries, and Lutherans for Life, along with James Robison, “came down firmly on the side of pro-life unity, and endorsed the Hatch amendment, apparently in response to president Reagan's calls for a united front by pro-lifers”.
83. See Judith Blake, “The Abortion Decisions: Judicial Review and Public Opinion, ” in Abortion: New Directions for Policy Studies Edward Manier, William Liu, and David Solomon, eds., (Notre Dame, Ind., 1977).
84. Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh and C. Allen Haney, “Shifts in Abortion Attitudes: 1972-1978, ” Journal of Marriage and the Family (August 1980): 491-99, see a sharp jump in approval of abortion after the 1973 decision and a subsequent stabilization or decline in levels of support. They attribute the decline in support in the 1975 figures to “the influence of the Pro-Life movement” (493).
85. An early expression of this view in the wake of the 1983 defeat was Lynn D. Wardle, “Restricting Abortion Through Legislation, ” in Andrusko, ed., To Rescue the Future, 101-17.
86. The conference, entitled “Reversing Roe v. Wade Through the Courts, ” was held in Chicago on 31 March, 1984. For a report on it, see National Right to Life News, 3 May 1994, 12. Its proceedings appeared as Abortion and the Constitution: Reversing Roe v. Wade Through the Courts, ed. Dennis J. Horan, Edward R. Grant, and Paige C. Cunningham (Washington, D.C., 1987).
87. New York Times, 26 June, 1970, 40.
88. William Safire, Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House (New York, 1975), 556-58.
89. Tatalovich and Daynes, Politics, 198.
90. For the argument that abortion was not a major factor, see Maris Vinovskis, “Abortion and the Presidential Electión of 1976: A Multivariate Analysis of Voting Behaviour, ” in Carl E. Schneider and Maris Vinovskis, eds., The Law and Politics of Abortion (Lexington, Mass., 1980), 184-205.
91. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities (Washington, D.C., 1975), 11-12.
92. Clyde Wilcox and Leopoldo Gomez, “The Christian Right and the Pro-Life Movement: An Analysis of the Sources of Political Support, ” Review of Religious Research 31 (June 1990): 380-389.
93. Moen, The Christian Right in Congress, 153-56.
94. For the poor image of the New Christian Right as early as 1980, see McKeegan, Abortion Politics, 27; for its later problems, see Moen, Christian Right, 151-53.
95. McKeegan, Abortion Politics, 25-26.
96. Paige, The Right to Lifers, 223.
97. The founder and director of the program is Felicia Goeken, who indentified the states with the best VIP organizations as Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Ohio; interview, 11 July, 1989.
98. Useful information about this subject can be found in Clyde Wilcox, “Political Action Committees and Abortion: A Longitudinal Analysis, ” Women & Politics 9:1 (1989): 1-19.
99. Joan Andrews with John Cavanaugh O’Keefe, I Will Never Forget You: The Rescue Movement in the Life of Joan Andrews (San Francisco, 1989), and Randall A. Terry, Operation Rescue (Springdale, Pa., 1988).
100. For an expression of this view, see Charles Rice, No Exceptions: A Pro-Life Imperative (Notre Dame, Ind., 1990).
101. The unnamed leader is quoted by Hadley Arkes in “The Strategy of ‘“The Modest First Step, ’ ” Crisis 12 (February 1994): 17.
102. Staggenborg, The Pro-Choice Movement, 138.
103. William McGurn, “Abortion and the GOP, ” National Review, 15 March, 1993. The 1992 exit poll conducted by Voter Research and Surveys, an association of leading news organizations, revealed that while 55 percent of Bush voters saw abortion as an important issue, only 37 percent of Clinton and 8 percent of Perot supporters did so as well. Newsweek, November/December 1992, 10.
104. Kelly, “Toward Complexity, ” 103-4.