A Historian Looks at the Pro-Life Movement
An Interview with Daniel K. Williams
This edition of The Pelican contains what I hope will be a periodic feature of this newsletter: an interview with someone who has special expertise, knowledge, insight, or experience related to the topics I cover here. I will look to interview people who can help readers sharpen their own knowledge or understanding, but (disclaimer) the standard I will use for selecting interviewees does not entail that I agree with any particular viewpoint expressed. The views expressed are not mine but those of the people I interview; for my views, you can tune in for any edition where I am not interviewing other people.
This inaugural interview is with Daniel K. Williams. He is Professor of History at the University of West Georgia. He received his PhD in History from Brown University, with a dissertation on “From the Pews to the Polls: The Formation of a Southern Christian Right.” He is the author of God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right and Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade. Defenders of the Unborn, which was published in 2016, was called a “deeply researched, evenhanded, accessible and surprising history of anti-abortion activism before Roe v. Wade” in a New York Times review, and the book was the subject of this longer piece in The Atlantic by Emma Green. This interview was conducted over email, and has been lightly edited.
PB: For readers who may not be familiar with Defenders of the Unborn, could you give a summary of its fundamental thesis?
DW: Defenders of the Unborn demonstrates that, contrary to what many people have assumed, there was a vibrant pro-life movement before Roe v. Wade that was winning legislative victories because it was rooted in a human rights ideology that resonated with people across the political spectrum. Perhaps most surprising to people today, the pre-Roe pro-life movement was a liberal movement whose leaders included many Catholic Democrats who believed in a strong social welfare state and who, in some cases, opposed the Vietnam War.
PB: Going back further in time, can you talk a little about the origin of anti-abortion laws in the 19th century—how and why they were passed—and then how and why those laws began to be challenged in the 20th century?
DW: Before the 19th century, there were no state laws governing abortion, although some abortions (particularly those that occurred after “quickening”—the moment at which a pregnant women perceives fetal movement, which usually occurs sometime in the second trimester of pregnancy) were prosecuted under the common law, which Americans borrowed from England. But starting in the early 19th century, a rapidly increasing urbanization led to the regulation of many activities that had not been directly regulated before—activities such as alcohol manufacture and sale, dueling, and medicine, to name just a few. At a time when state legislatures were taking a greater interest in regulating personal and commercial activities in order to protect the public, a number of doctors convinced legislators in their states that abortion needed to be regulated or largely prohibited.
The doctors argued that medical studies of fetal development indicated that “quickening” was not a significant moment in fetal development, and was certainly not the instant when human life began. Instead, fetal development occurred along a continuum, with signs of life occurring even in the earliest stages. Abortion therefore needed to be prohibited from the moment of conception, they argued. State legislatures were sympathetic to this argument, and by the end of the 19th century, nearly every state prohibited most abortions, with the exception of those that were necessary to save a woman’s life.
In the late 19th century, abortions to save a woman’s life were common, but after the development of antibiotics and the safe C-section in the early 1940s, childbirth and pregnancy became far safer, and the need to make painful decisions between saving a pregnant woman’s life or saving her baby became extremely rare. In this context, some doctors and lawyers argued that the 19th-century abortion laws needed to be updated, since the medical assumptions that had guided those laws no longer applied. The laws were also inconsistently enforced, because some hospitals applied a very literal interpretation to the idea of saving a woman’s life (which meant, in practice, that by the 1950s they performed very few abortions), while others applied such a broad interpretation to the clause that any woman who said that pregnancy was causing her suicidal thoughts could be given a pregnancy termination.
In 1959, the American Law Institute (ALI) recommended that states adopt an updated, uniform abortion law that would still prohibit elective abortions, but allow them in the cases of medical necessity, which included rape and incest, suspected fetal deformity, and dangers to a pregnant woman’s health, as well as, of course, her life. In 1967, Colorado, California, and North Carolina became the first states to adopt these ALI-style therapeutic abortion laws, and by the end of 1972, a total of 13 states had done so.
The therapeutic abortion laws of the late 1960s were based on a view that fetal life was worthy of at least limited legal protection (hence the prohibition on elective abortions for non-medical reasons), but this view was combined with a utilitarian approach to the issue that did not treat the right to life as absolute. If fetal life was a threat to a woman’s health or, in the case of fetal deformities, would be a terrible burden for a family and society, abortion might be permissible, the advocates of therapeutic abortion laws believed.
PB: One piece of history your book relays is there were a couple of successful attempts to push back against abortion liberalization immediately before Roe (such as in Michigan and North Dakota, and nearly in New York as well). Granted that alternative history is profoundly speculative, what do you think might have the trajectory of abortion politics in America if Roe hadn’t been passed? And what lessons can pro-lifers learn today from those pre-Roe successes?
DW: The pre-Roe pro-life movement was most successful when it was able to focus voters’ attention on late-term abortion. Public opinion polls showed that even as early as the mid-1960s, nearly 75 percent of Americans supported legalizing abortion in cases of rape or dangers to a woman’s health. As long as the abortion liberalization movement focused on these issues, it could win legislative victories, while the pro-life movement suffered political defeats. But in the early 1970s, when the issue was no longer merely the legalization of abortion for a few specific medical reasons but rather the legalization of all abortion through the second trimester, the pro-life movement was able to win victories by focusing voters’ attention on second-trimester fetuses, whose facial features were fully developed and who looked remarkably like prematurely born infants. In Michigan, early polling showed strong majority support for a 1972 abortion legalization referendum until pro-lifers launched an advertising campaign focused on photos of 19-week-old fetuses, which could have been subject to abortion under the terms of the referendum. Fetal photography was such a new technology at the time that many voters did not yet have a clear idea of what a 19-week-old fetus looked like. When they saw the photos, they decided that they could not vote for such a permissive abortion measure, and the referendum was defeated.
While this was one of the clearest and most dramatic victories for the pro-life movement, pro-lifers also won dozens of other victories in state legislatures. Between December 1970 and January 1973, only one state (Florida) liberalized its abortion law, and it did so only under court order; in dozens of other states, pro-lifers succeeded in defeating abortion liberalization or legalization measures.
When the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Roe v. Wade, political momentum seemed to be on the pro-life movement’s side. But a number of state and federal district courts had begun to side with abortion rights claims, and in several states (such as California and Florida), courts required a greater degree of abortion legalization than the state legislatures had initially wanted. The Supreme Court picked up on these arguments.
Many pro-lifers today wish that the Supreme Court had never ruled on abortion, but at the time, the pro-life movement wanted a Supreme Court ruling—a ruling, that is, that would declare that unborn human beings had a right to life. Both sides in the abortion debate were looking for a constitutional victory through the Supreme Court.
Given the makeup of the Supreme Court in 1973, it is difficult to imagine how the pro-life side could have won its legal argument, but one can easily imagine a set of circumstances in which the Court issued a much more limited ruling in Roe—perhaps, for instance, by ruling that the Texas law’s definition of “life” was too vague to restrict “Jane Roe” from terminating her pregnancy in her particular circumstances, and that the law needed to be updated and made more precise. This sort of ruling probably would not have set in motion the polarizing clashes over the Supreme Court and its abortion ruling that eventually resulted. Abortion probably would have continued to be debated at the state level, with different states adopting different policies on the issue, but perhaps the issue would not have polarized national partisan politics.
As it happened, though, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that directly refuted the rights claim made by the pro-life movement while largely (though not completely) affirming the rights claim made by the pro-choice movement. Because both sides of the debate grounded their claims in the uncompromising language of human rights, this did not settle the debate; the pro-life movement was not willing to accept the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the issue, and instead compared Roe to Dred Scott, the pro-slavery Supreme Court decision of 1857.
Perhaps neither side in the abortion debate would have envisioned the situation that we now face—a situation in which abortion is far more widely available in some states than in others. Pro-lifers, for understandable reasons, have for decades made overturning Roe their top priority, but even without a constitutional amendment or Supreme Court decision directly reversing Roe, we now live in a nation in which abortion availability and abortion policies vary more widely from state to state than at any other point since 1973. To the extent that contemporary pro-lifers has succeeded in reducing abortion availability in some states, they have often done so by using fetal photographs and capitalizing on voters’ discomfort with late-term, elective abortion, just as pro-lifers did before 1973.
PB: One of your claims in the book is that the pro-life cause has fared better in America than other causes associated with “social conservatism” because of the former’s affinities with rights-based liberalism. Can you flesh this out? And do you think this is still true?
DW: As I noted in my book, during the last four decades the Christian Right suffered rapid defeats on gay rights, same-sex marriage, anti-pornography initiatives, and other campaigns that are now largely forgotten, such as the campaign of the early 1980s to restore classroom prayer in public schools. On each of these issues, social conservatives lost their fight because their opponents made rights-based arguments (e.g. the right to equality under the law) that appealed to a rights-conscious society. But because the pro-life movement’s arguments are grounded in the same language of human rights that gave rise to the movements for social equality, they are much harder to dismiss, and they have had a much more lasting effect.
Today pro-lifers have almost completely severed their ties with the rights-conscious liberalism that originally gave rise to their movement, but because their fundamental claim—the claim that the unborn have a “right to life” from the moment of conception—is a claim about human rights, it continues to resonate with rights-conscious Americans in a way that social conservatism’s other causes have not.
PB: Does the rights-based framework for the pro-life cause eventually run up against limits in how successful it can be? Are there other frameworks that pro-lifers have historically used or could now use in talking about abortion? I am thinking, for example, of this piece (“Learning From Bodies” by Nora Calhoun in First Things, August 2014).
DW: The rights-based framework may be the most appropriate framework to use when making constitutional or legal arguments, but when discussing the issue of abortion in the realm of philosophy or values, other frameworks should probably be considered. Volunteers at crisis pregnancy centers, for instance, probably find that discussing a fetus’s right to life is rarely helpful when trying to give pregnant women the resources to make a life-affirming decision for their unborn child.
Not all pro-lifers are Christians, but those who are should probably note that the language of rights is not how the church has historically talked about abortion; it is instead how pro-lifers of the mid-20th century spoke when they fused Christian-based philosophical and theological frameworks with American constitutional claims in an attempt to translate their concerns into the language of secular politics. But when speaking among Christians, perhaps there are better starting points, such as the principle of “imago Dei” or human dignity, and the principle of social obligations.
Even many contemporary secular liberals would probably be more receptive to pro-life claims if they were phrased in the language of social obligations to both pregnant women and children (both before and after birth) rather than in a rights-based language that leads to prohibitions on abortion without accompanying resources to aid and protect pregnant women.
PB: How do you see the current state of abortion politics, both in light of pro-life and pro-choice activity on the state level (e.g. heartbeat bills) and on the national stage, including the current Presidential election? Is the debate stalemated or is one “side” “gaining ground”? What trends are you seeing and how do they echo or fail to echo other phases in the history of American abortion politics or the pro-life movement?
DW: If pro-lifers’ only goal is repealing Roe v. Wade or enacting legal restrictions on abortion, they are undoubtedly gaining ground. Thanks to a conservative shift in the judiciary and Republican control of the White House, the Senate, and numerous state governments, pro-lifers who have spent decades cultivating an alliance with the GOP are now reaping the political benefits of this alliance. But I suspect that such victories will not accomplish what pro-lifers expect, because even if the Supreme Court does overturn or largely eviscerate Roe, abortion will still be widely available in the states that currently perform the most abortions.
Because public opinion polls have not indicated much of a shift in public attitudes on abortion over the past few decades, any legal gains that pro-lifers make will likely result in an immediate attempt by abortion rights advocates to reverse these gains through state legislatures, Congress, executive orders, or the courts. I suspect that lasting gains will be possible only through a bipartisan approach that seeks to create a new national consensus on unborn human life—which means finding common ground and shared concerns with groups normally not considered sympathetic to the pro-life movement. Some members of the early pro-life movement attempted to do this, but in recent decades, the pro-life movement has largely had to abandon bipartisanship because of its narrow focus on overturning Roe v. Wade (rather than, say, protecting unborn human life by supporting measures that would improve prenatal and maternal health in at-risk populations).
PB: What do you see as the possible future or futures for both the pro-life movement and abortion politics in America? Will the pro-life movement take new forms or pursue new strategies than it currently does? Will the abortion issue persist as a live and contested political issue in American politics?
DW: Abortion has remained a hotly contested issue in American politics for more than half a century, and I do not see any signs that the controversy is likely to go away anytime soon. The political strategies that the pro-life movement is currently pursuing are not likely to resolve the issue, because they are not likely to produce a new national consensus on the question. But the work of crisis pregnancy centers, combined with the thoughtful conversations that pro-lifers are having with their pro-choice neighbors, may be more likely to produce a change in attitudes that will result in a higher respect for human life at every stage, whether born or unborn.