The Rewards of Scholarly Trigger Warnings

Last updated on: December 22, 2016 at 6:31 pm by D. G. Hart

The Rewards of Scholarly Trigger Warnings 2016-12-22T18:31:10-04:00 D. G. Hart

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As much as Daniel Williams bent over backwards to be sensitive to opponents shocked by pro-life terminology, his efforts paid dividends in the review Defenders of the Unborn received in the hallowed pages of elite journalism:

Among those of us who wish to protect access to abortion, it’s easy to feel that “right to life” language is a cover for an attack on feminism. It’s a feeling supported by a common story about history: The anti-abortion movement began after Roe v. Wade, because conservative evangelicals were threatened by women’s newfound power over their bodies. What else could explain the movement’s swift rise in the decade following the Supreme Court’s decision, if not a widespread reaction against equal rights?

But to tell the story this way, the historian Daniel K. Williams argues, is to ignore the long history of the movement to limit abortion, and to discount the motives expressed for nearly half a century by those in that movement. In “Defenders of the Unborn,” a deeply researched, evenhanded, accessible and surprising history of anti-abortion activism before Roe v. Wade, Williams gives us activists’ beliefs in their own words. He shares language from personal letters, diocesan newsletters, meeting transcripts, and Catholic and Protestant periodicals. And he tracks opinion polls across the 20th century to lend quantitative support to this book’s stunning central claim: For much of its history, the fight to restrict abortion was a progressive cause.

From the perspective of our historical moment, it’s hard to imagine a country where the most prominent voices against abortion were Catholic physicians, and evangelical Protestants were either in favor of lifting restrictions on abortion, or didn’t really care. A country where Democrats and the Black Panthers opposed abortion, and Ronald Reagan, like most conservatives, supported it. Where more men than women supported legalizing abortion, and Hugh Hefner was one of those men, leading one activist to call legalized abortion the “final victory of the Playboy philosophy.” Where opposition to abortion found common cause with opposition to the exploitation of women, to the abandonment of the poor, to big business and to the Vietnam War.

While the language of genocide seems disingenuous to progressives now, Williams’s characters remind us that in the years leading up to Roe v. Wade, the Nuremberg trials were fresh in the minds of Americans, as was the forced sterilization of poor women and women of color. Many liberals were understandably suspicious of any policy or law that seemed to promote population control funded by a government they suspected of systemic racism. As the Louisiana Right to Life Association put it in 1972: “Abortion is advocated as a way of reducing the number of illegitimate children and reducing the welfare rolls. Who do you think abortionists have in mind?” During the 1960s, the group that polled highest in the objection to abortion was African-Americans.

This progressive movement was winning before Roe v. Wade, Williams persuasively argues, because it shared language and values with the decade’s social justice causes. Even if you don’t buy that language now, it’s hard to read this history without believing that its adherents genuinely meant it. Legal in some form in 16 states, abortion had become much more visible in the late 1960s. An ecumenical, liberal coalition of anti-abortion allies began to share fetal photographs, abortion videos and the tales of horrified nurses with legislators, and even some who had supported liberalization changed their minds. In 1971, in every single one of 25 legislative battles, attempts to broaden abortion’s legality were thwarted by activists fighting for “life.”

Perhaps sensitivity to the sensitivity of others has its upside.

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