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Urban.org argues that abortions should be permissible to all women across America. There are many reasons to do so. These include benefiting the woman's mental health, economic levels, and general wellbeing. Freedom also has to do with abortion. A woman should be able to dictate what she does with her body.

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The leaked draft US Supreme Court opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization would immediately restrict legal abortion access by overturning the court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which recognized the constitutional right to abortion.

Though abortion has been debated in US politics for decades, the evidence is clear: access to legal abortion improves women's lives (PDF).

In 2016 and 2018, the Urban Institute fielded the Survey of Family Planning and Women's Lives (PDF) and conducted follow-up interviews with survey participants to understand their experiences with unplanned pregnancy, birth, and abortion. Findings from this work provide insights about how substantial new restrictions on abortion access would affect women's lives.

(Note: In this post, we use the term "women" to align with the data sources referenced, but we acknowledge not all people who seek abortion identify as women.)

The vast majority of women think an unplanned birth would negatively affect a woman's life

More than 8 in 10 women surveyed in 2016 said an unplanned birth would negatively affect a woman's life, with more than half of women reporting a negative outcome for at least four of seven aspects of their lives. Most-close to 2 in 3-worried about negative effects on a woman's education, followed by concerns about her income, mental health, and job.

Numerous studies confirm these perceptions-access to legal abortion improves women's economic and social lives, and being denied an abortion creates economic hardship and financial insecurity for women and their children.

Women perceive access to abortion as more difficult in states with restrictive abortion policies

Since Roe, states have enacted more than 1,000 laws or regulations restricting access to abortion, including gestational limits, waiting periods, mandated preabortion counseling, and prohibitions on the use of state funds.

About 4 in 10 women surveyed in 2018 believed access to procedural abortion was easy, but 3 in 10 believed it was difficult, with medication abortion perceived as somewhat easier to access than procedural abortion. For both types, women in states with more restrictive abortion policies were more likely to perceive abortion access as difficult.

Though difficulty may reflect a range of factors-finding a provider, cost, time, travel, logistics, and emotional costs-these findings suggest abortion restrictions fuel women's perceptions that access is difficult.

Women believe "everyone should have their own choice"

In follow-up interviews, women emphasized the importance of having choices when deciding whether to continue or terminate an unplanned pregnancy and described their decisions as highly personal and dependent on many factors.

Nearly all interviewees in 2016 expected they would carry an unplanned pregnancy to term and raise the child, yet about one-third interviewed in 2018 reported they had an abortion when faced with an unplanned pregnancy. Women in both groups worried an unplanned pregnancy would have adverse impacts on their finances, income, education, and career, as well as on their physical health and emotional well-being.

Most 2018 interviewees, all of whom had experienced an unplanned pregnancy, were not immediately aware of their pregnancy, and some did not make the decision to continue or terminate their pregnancy until two or more months into their pregnancy. Women thought it was important to be able to make their own decisions with enough time to consider their options before deciding.

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Research Shows Access to Legal Abortion Improves Women's Lives

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The leaked draft US Supreme Court opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization would immediately restrict legal abortion access by overturning the court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which recognized the constitutional right to abortion. Though abortion has been debated in US politics for decades, the evidence is clear: access to legal abortion improves women's lives (PDF).

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Views from both sides involving abortion

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Views from both sides involving abortion

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In this article by abortion.procon.org, favors neither side of the argument, however, they list multiple pros and cons. This would be a great article to read if one's knowledge of abortion is relatively minimal. They are not leading into any side of the argument, they are just giving information on both sides of abortion.

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The debate over whether abortion should be a legal option has long divided people around the world. Split into two groups, pro-choice and pro-life, the two sides frequently clash in protests.

Proponents of legal abortion believe abortion is a safe medical procedure that protects lives, while abortion bans endanger pregnant people not seeking abortions, and deny bodily autonomy, creating wide-ranging repercussions.

Opponents of legal abortion believe abortion is murder because life begins at conception, that abortion creates a culture in which life is disposable, and that increased access to birth control, health insurance, and sexual education would make abortion unnecessary. Read more background...

Pro & Con Arguments

Pro 1

Abortion is a safe medical procedure that protects lives.

The death rate for legal abortions is 0.7 deaths for every 100,000 abortions. By contrast, there are one to two deaths per 100,000 plastic surgery procedures, three deaths for every 100,000 colonoscopies, and three to six deaths per 100,000 tonsillectomies. Childbirth has nine deaths per 100,000 deliveries.

Pregnancy-related maternal deaths could increase 20% in US states with abortion bans. Amanda Stevenson, Sociology Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, explained, "People with resources are more likely to make it out of state or find out about medication abortions. People who can't are more likely to have health issues, to live in poverty and have less access to resources." People of color are especially likely to be in the latter category and, thus, negatively impacted by abortion bans.

The predicted 20% maternal death rate does not include those who will die from "back alley" or illegal abortions because legal options were not available.

Globally 45% of abortions are unsafe, 97% of which take place in developing countries. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), "Evidence shows that restricting access to abortions does not reduce the number of abortions; however, it does affect whether the abortions that women and girls attain are safe and dignified. The proportion of unsafe abortions are significantly higher in countries with highly restrictive abortion laws than in countries with less restrictive laws."
Read More

Pro 2

Abortion bans endanger healthcare for those not seeking abortions.

Medical treatment for nonviable pregnancies is often exactly the same as an abortion.

Ectopic pregnancies occur when a fertilized egg implants somewhere other than the uterine cavity. About one in 50 pregnancies are ectopic, and they are nonviable. Bleeding from ectopic pregnancies caused 10% of all pregnancy-related deaths, and ectopic pregnancies were the leading cause of maternal death in the first trimester.

One out of every ten pregnancies ends in miscarriage. The drugs used for medication abortions are the only treatment recommended for early miscarriages. For later or complicated miscarriages, the same surgical procedure used for abortions is recommended.

While some abortion bans include specific exceptions for nonviable pregnancies and miscarriages, other bans are too vague to be practicable. Healthcare providers may refuse to perform a procedure that could be interpreted as an "on-demand" abortion for fear of liability or prosecution.

Further, bans are a slippery slope to contraceptive and other healthcare restrictions. For example, some already wrongly view Plan B (the morning after pill) as an abortifacient and are thinking of including it in abortion bans.
Read More

Pro 3

Abortion bans deny bodily autonomy, creating wide-ranging repercussions.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated, "eliminating the rights of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades.... In many cases, abortions are of teenage women, particularly low-income and often Black, who aren't in a position to be able to care for children, have unexpected pregnancies, and it deprives them of the ability often to continue their education to later participate in the workforce."

After being denied an abortion, household poverty increased and lasted four or more years, resulting in an inability to cover basic expenses including food, housing and transportation. A denied abortion was associated with a lowered credit score, increased debt, and an increase in negative public records including evictions and bankruptcies. The households were also more reliant on government assistance. Transgender and nonbinary people denied abortions may face even worse outcomes.

And the consequences can be much more dire. "If a woman of childbearing age dies, it has enormous economic consequences.... It's someone who society has invested in and who has many productive economic years ahead of them," according to David Slusky, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Kansas. Often, death also removes a wage-earner and caregiver from the household.

60% of women seeking abortions already had other children. Being denied an abortion worsened the well-being of their older children, including not meeting childhood development markers.

The Turnaway Study concluded, "Abortion does not harm women," and "Women who receive a wanted abortion are more financially stable, set more ambitious goals, raise children under more stable conditions, and are more likely to have a wanted child later."
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Con 1

Life begins at conception, making abortion murder.

Conception is the moment a sperm cell fertilizes an egg cell, which begins the process of cell division that creates a human.

Tara Sander Lee, Senior Fellow and Director of Life Sciences at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, stated, "life begins from the moment of conception when the sperm fertilizes the egg, because there is the creation of a new, totally distinct, integrated organism or a human being, which is going to be biologically distinct from all other life forms on this planet." The first cell is biologically distinct because it has its own DNA that is different from either biological parent and all other humans.

Ending a life is murder legally and ethically, even a life that is only a few growing cells at the time of death.

Pope Francis explained, "Abortion is murder. Those who carry out abortions kill.... At the third week after conception, often even before the mother is aware (of being pregnant), all the organs are already (starting to develop). It is a human life. Period. And this human life has to be respected. It is very clear.... Scientifically, it is a human life."

That people may face difficulties without abortion as an option does not excuse or justify murder. A reader of The Atlantic, who gave only the initial K., clarified the moral dilemma: "I wish that I could be pro-choice because the awful circumstances so many women face-that I can't even imagine facing-seem so much more real to me than the rights of a fetus who doesn't even always look human. But abortion is the intentional killing of a human being and we look back with horror at anyone in history who decided a group of people did not actually count as people. We cannot solve the problem of injustice against women with more injustice. We need solutions that support women without killing fetuses."
Read More

Con 2

Legal abortion promotes a culture in which life is disposable.

Echoing a 2014 remark by Pope Francis that connected abortion to " throwaway culture," Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, stated, "abortion represents a failure to recognize the sanctity of human life and promotes a culture in which human life in its most vulnerable moment is perceived as disposable. Such a proposal targets poor women as needing an expedient solution to a complex problem."

Tobin previously declared legal abortion a "brutalization of the American heart" on par with the "dehumanization of the undocumented" immigrants.

Alveda King, former Georgia state representative and niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., also connected abortion to other societal ills: "Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error. The error is thinking that when someone stands in the way of our wants, we can justify getting that person out of our lives. Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness. We create the deceptions that the other person is less important, less worthy, less human. We are all fully human. When we face this truth, there is no justification for treating those who look different than us as lesser beings. If we simply treat other people the way we'd like to be treated, racism, abortion, and other forms of inhumanity will be things of the past."

As King notes, some fetuses are treated as less than human. This ideology combined with legal abortion could create a slippery slope to designer babies, gender selection, termination of disabled but healthy fetuses, and other trait-selection-based abortions. The slippery slope can then extend to the mentally disabled and elderly in general.

"[A]bortion is an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation," according to US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. "Technological advances have only heightened the eugenic potential for abortion, as abortion can now be used to eliminate children with unwanted characteristics, such as a particular sex or disability."
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Con 3

Increased access to birth control, health insurance, and sexual education would make abortion unnecessary.

Experts largely contribute the decline in abortions in the United States and elsewhere to the improved safety and availability of LARC (long-acting reversible contraception) including IUDs and contraceptive implants that can last up to 10 years.

Access to health insurance to pay for contraceptives also contributed to a drop in abortions. With the passage of Obamacare (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act), more people were insured with access to free or low-cost contraceptives and reproductive care.

Linda Rosenstock, Public Health Professor of Health Policy and Management at UCLA, summarized the simplicity of the connection: "In the United States each year, about half of pregnancies are unintended and about 40% of those lead to abortion. Access to birth control leads to fewer abortions."

Further, teens are having sex later in life than their parents. 38.4% of American high schoolers reported they have had sex (down from 54% in 1991) and only 27.4% reported they were currently sexually active (37.5% in 1991).

Because teen birth control use has not increased significantly, experts attribute the decline in part to better sex education. A 2021 study found that students who received comprehensive sexual education initiated sex later than students who did not participate in sex ed. The later teens have sex, the less chance there is for them to become pregnant unintentionally, which leads to fewer abortions.
Read More

Did You Know?

1. Throughout much of Western history, abortion was not considered a criminal act as long as it was performed before "quickening" (the first detectable movement of the fetus, which can occur between 13-25 weeks of pregnancy).

2. In 1821, Connecticut became the first US state to criminalize abortion.

3. The death rate for legal abortions is 0.7 deaths for every 100,000 abortions. By contrast, there are one to two deaths per 100,000 plastic surgery procedures, three deaths for every 100,000 colonoscopies, and three to six deaths per 100,000 tonsillectomies. Childbirth has nine deaths per 100,000 deliveries.

4. Abortion rates in the United States have fallen at what the CDC called a "slow yet steady pace" since a peak in 1981. That year there were 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44. The rate fell to 11.4 abortions per 1,000 women in 2019.

5. 60% of women seeking abortions already had other children.

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Abortion - Top Arguments For and Against - ProCon.org

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The Pro Choice side says women should have control of their bodies. Pro Lifers say abortion is murder. Explore both sides of the debate.

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txvalues.org explains that "human life is a precious gift that we believe begins at conception and ends at natural death". The article lists many laws on and against abortion. One key statement against abortion is that hundreds of million of taxpayer dollars are spent on planned parenthood abortion organizations across the US.

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Pro-life | Texas ValuesTexas Values | Standing for faith, family, and freedom in Texas

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Overview Human life is a precious gift that we believe begins at conception and ends at natural death. Tragically, many in our culture view life as disposable. The 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade forced abortion on demand onto the American public. Since this disastrous decision, an estimated 50 millio…

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This image shows a poster illustrating a coat hanger with the phrase "never again" written on it. This is a reference to the extreme measures women desiring abortions have to go through. Coat hangers are used to get rid of embryos whenever safe abortions are not available to the public. There is a lot of danger in using coat hangers. The biggest concern, is the death of the women. This is why women should be granted access to abortions in order to provide them with non-threatening and sanitary procedures done by medical personnel. Overall, this was a very effective image that could illustrate the pro-choice community well.

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On July 8, President Joe Biden signed an executive order that directed the Department of Health and Human Services to take steps to protect and expand access to medical abortion and contraception while ensuring that patients are eligible to obtain emergency care. In addition, the order seeks to push back against threats posed by surveillance in states outlawing abortion by directing federal agencies to take additional actions to protect patient privacy. The order was in response to a two-week pressure campaign by leftists who were frustrated by the Democratic Party's tepid response to the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling protecting abortion rights. Many threatened that they would not fund or vote for the Democratic Party unless leaders took action.

The ways in which this pressure moved Biden from inaction to an executive order illustrates what activist scholars such as historian Howard Zinn long argued: One can't be neutral on a moving train, and change only occurs through sustained protest and agitation from the citizenry. Indeed, Lawrence O'Donnell explained that when he worked for the Democratic Party, they ignored the demands from the Left because many were never willing to actually withhold their votes on election day-ultimately succumbing to the fear tactics of the party's ongoing "vote blue no matter who" propaganda campaign. As Biden's recent executive order illustrates, those seeking to codify abortion rights need to agitate and annoy Democratic leadership to take aggressive action.

Case in point: Even though the decision was leaked a month ahead of time, Biden did not devise a plan to protect abortion rights following the decision. Meanwhile, Republicans made plans years in advance, passing so-called trigger laws that automatically outlawed abortion in states once Roe v. Wade was overturned. The Democratic Party response was limited to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reading a poem, Vice President Kamala Harris tweeting a picture of herself watching pro-choice protests, Democratic members of Congress singing "God Bless America" on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, a vast fundraising campaign, and chiding the electorate for not " voting harder " for Democrats-what allegedly allowed this all to happen.

Those protesting from the Left were showing that any fundraising campaigns or voter drives would be moot until they had faith in Biden as a change-maker.

Through podcasts, op-eds, street demonstrations, and more, progressives and leftists mobilized to pressure the Democratic Party to stop dithering on abortion rights and take substantive action, including removing the filibuster, packing the court, or adding abortion clinics to federal lands near states that outlawed abortion. They rebuked the Democratic Party in general, and Biden in particular, for serving as enablers of the Republican Party's anti-abortion agenda. Leftists were met by Democratic Party apologists who took to social media to deflect and blame Bernie Sanders supporters, Susan Sarandon, and other so-called far-left types for taking down Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, which they argued paved the way for Trump to appoint three Supreme Court Justices who were integral in overturning Roe v. Wade. However, these self-righteous social media users were outflanked by dozens of other Democratic Party apparatchiks, who echoed the critiques from the Left.

These included celebrities such as Debra Messing and "two dozen leading Democratic politicians and operatives, as well as several within the West Wing." They complained that they were being asked to do more fundraising and voting, while the Democratic Party-which controls the executive and legislative branches-dithered on abortion rights. Some even questioned if the president was capable of taking action and "mocked how the President stood in the foyer of the White House, squinting through his remarks from a teleprompter as demonstrators poured into the streets, making only vague promises of action because he and aides hadn't decided on more."

Those protesting from the Left were showing that any fundraising campaigns or voter drives would be moot until they had faith in Biden as a change-maker. This was certainly difficult to imagine from Biden, who promised wealthy donors in 2020 that if he was elected president, " Nothing would fundamentally change." However, these critiques seemed to put pressure on Democratic Party leaders. After the Dobbs decision was announced, Biden was reportedly making a deal to appoint an anti-abortion lawyer to a lifetime judicial appointment, but as the pressure from progressives mounted, his rhetoric became more aggressive as he expressed his willingness to remove the filibuster to codify abortion rights. Time will tell, but further inaction likely does not bode well for the president.

The Democratic leadership will also never give progressive activists credit for forcing the party to try to protect abortion rights.

Despite the notable shift, that rhetoric has done little to mask previous inaction. As a result, the protests continue, and his poll numbers continue to fall. Since Biden's election, Americans' confidence in the Office of the Presidency in general dropped 15 points, from 38% in 2021 to 23% in 2022-two points lower than the Supreme Court. Further, Biden's approval rating- 36% on July 6, 2022-was just two points above Trump's dismal 34% when leaving office. Translation: Currently, some 64% of Democrats do not want Biden to run for a second term.

Elites never admit failure. The Democratic Party will conceal, but never confront, that it failed to protect abortion rights from the far Right and the GOP. As a possible defeat may await Biden's party this fall in the midterms, its members will blame the other party or voters, never themselves, for promoting candidates and policies that will not keep them in office. This was already demonstrated in a July 10 interview on CBS in which Vice President Harris claimed that Democrats were not at fault for the reversal of Roe because they "rightly believed" that abortion rights were settled law. This is rich coming from someone who served in the U.S. Senate with colleagues who openly appointed anti-abortion judges and advocated for overturning Roe v. Wade.

The Democratic leadership will also never give progressive activists credit for forcing the party to try to protect abortion rights. Their disdain for progressives was illustrated by their efforts to undermine Bernie Sanders' presidential campaigns and remove all funding for Nevada's Democratic Party after a slate of Democratic Socialists were elected to lead the party. These efforts seem to communicate that risking a Republican Party victory is worth neutralizing progressive activists.

It is not surprising that the White House communications director Kate Bedingfield, who said Biden's response to Dobbs was "not to satisfy some activists who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party." In reality, activists may not be in line with the neoliberal corporate leaders in the DNC, but they are not out of step with the mainstream, considering that their goal to protect abortion rights is supported by 61% of the electorate, and 80% of those who are members of or lean toward the Democratic Party. Biden finally acted when he signed the July 8 executive order, which is hardly a substitute for codified abortion rights, but it illustrates that sustained protest directed at those in power is the only hope for making change. More protest and pressure will be needed to achieve a goal of passing legislation that codifies abortion rights.

The party can continue to berate pro-choice activists to deflect its failures, but the reality is that the activists are moving the party to action and should be embraced. There is still a long way to go, but this should be a lesson to those who support abortion rights or any other civil or human rights policy: To make change, one must protest and pester those in power, not just vote and hope. Rather than attack the Left, Democratic voters should hold those in power accountable to their base and a majority of Americans. As early 20th-century labor activist and songwriter Joe Hill once said in the face of defeat, "Don't mourn, organize." Then, agitate like hell for real change. Democracy is not a spectator sport. There is much to be done. Let's get busy.
Published with permission from Project Censored.
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The Political Power of Pro-Choice Protests

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On July 8, President Joe Biden signed an executive order that directed the Department of Health and Human Services to take steps to protect and expand access to medical abortion and contraception while ensuring that patients are eligible to obtain emergency care.

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This data pictorial illustrates public opinion on abortion from 1995 to 2022. As you can see in the article, 61% of people surveyed said abortion should be "legal in all/ most cases" while 37% of people surveyed said abortion should be "illegal in all/ most cases".

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About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions.

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As we can see in the image there is a recently born baby with the caption "fragile". This image provokes pathos in its viewers. It shows the baby's innocence as it sleeps. The phrase, "life begins at contraception" is a reference to one of the pro-life side's main argument points; a baby is alive from the moment an embryo is created.

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Photo by Fibonacci Blue (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anti-abortion_protest_at_Planned_Parenthood_(6905470802).jpg), used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Jennifer L. Holland

In March 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump argued that women who had abortions should be punished if abortion were made illegal. Trump quickly reversed himself, but the previously pro-choice candidate had stumbled into an argument that pro-life advocates have studiously avoided over the last forty years for fear of being labelled antiwoman. Some social observers looked at such statements and wondered if they signaled the declining importance of pro-life politics, and social conservatism more broadly, to the Republican party. Is the antiabortion movement no longer relevant in the United States? Those who would answer yes might suffer from myopia. In fact, the antiabortion movement, in its many iterations, has radically transformed Americans' ideas about women's bodies, reproduction, feminist politics, and of course, fetal life. In the two centuries the movement has existed, its constituencies, tactics, and tools have all changed. But what has remained is the effect this movement has had on women's lives. In the end, the pro-life movement transformed ideas as it also restricted the real ability of American women to access reproductive healthcare.

Before 1840 abortion was a widespread, largely stigma-free experience for American women. During that period, the American legal system used the quickening doctrine from British common law to decide the legality of abortion. Quickening occurred when the pregnant woman could feel the fetus move, typically between the fourth and sixth month of pregnancy. This was the only sure way to confirm pregnancy; before this time, any fetus was considered only a potential life. Women most often used herbal concoctions they had learned from other women, healers, or physicians to cure their "obstructed menses" before quickening. Post-quickening abortion was a crime, but only a misdemeanor. Some historians have suggested that laws against post-quickening abortions were primarily intended to protect the health of the pregnant woman-not fetal life-as it was much more common for women to die during abortions that used instruments rather than herbal abortifacients. Whatever the rationale, few abortions were prosecuted before the mid-nineteenth century because quickening was so difficult to prove. Only women themselves could testify to fetal movement.

This system of legal but quiet abortions fell apart in the mid-nineteenth century. The first "right-to-life" movement was not led by grassroots activists, but rather physicians, anxious about their professional status. Before then, physicians had been a largely unregulated bunch, without the institutional or cultural authority to corner the market on healing. In the early nineteenth century, a variety of other healers competed with physicians for business, especially the business of women's reproductive healthcare. While many physicians believed that scientific medicine would benefit their patients, some, in order to hurt lay healers' business, sought governmental licensing and regulation to weed out the competition. Physicians used anti-abortion laws, pushed in state legislatures, to increase their own stature and undermine their opponents.[1]

Of course, many would have narrated this story very differently. Some physicians claimed that this campaign was a product of superior medical knowledge. Many argued that women (and rag-tag group of healers who offered abortion) did not have adequate embryonic knowledge to determine when life began. But historians have noted that this medical insight was not a result of any advancements in embryonic knowledge. In fact, there were none during these campaigns.[2] Instead, the fetus was merely a stand-in for a broader cultural project. Here, the movement tapped into concerns over women's increasing education, autonomy, and the extension of rights, as it reasserted women's connection to and limitation by their own reproductive anatomy. Women's bodies, not their words or actions, confessed to doctors the "naturalness" of uninterrupted reproduction and the "truth" about fetal life.[3] Bodily processes could "speak for themselves," though they did need doctors to translate.

This effort largely succeeded. By 1900 every state had a law forbidding abortion at any stage, whether through the use of drugs or procedures. Almost all the laws passed during this time included a therapeutic exception, where licensed physicians could provide abortions at their own discretion as long as the abortion preserved the life of the mother. While this loophole allowed many women to obtain abortions, it also made doctors the ultimate arbiters of the morality and legality of abortions. These laws also created a large black market for women who could not access or obtain abortions through medical channels.

There was not much of an antiabortion movement between 1900 and 1965 because the state did its work. Police, courts, and lawmakers prosecuted abortionists and harassed women who procured the procedure. [4] But in the 1960s, some Americans began to demand change from their states. In 1959 the American Law Institute, a group of professionals that put together model legislation, advocated for the liberalization of abortion law. They suggested that the law should make exceptions for women who were raped, whose fetuses were deformed, and whose mental or physical health was at stake. The abortion reform movement was made possible by a larger cultural shift in Americans' ideas about reproduction and abortion. In the 1960s Americans witnessed the heartbreak of infant death and extreme fetal deformity. Thalidomide, a sleeping pill, caused thousands of birth defects in Europe and the United States. Later, an outbreak of German measles produced thousands of stillbirths and cases of babies born with major abnormalities. Images of white middle-class women and their deformed infants peppered American media, capturing the imaginations and parental fears of many Americans. [5] In the late 1960s a nascent feminist movement began to argue that women could not be full citizens unless they could control reproduction. Together these shifts helped push state legislatures to reform their abortion laws. Colorado was the first to amend its law in 1967, followed quickly by others, most famously California in 1967 and New York in 1970.

In the midst of states' efforts at abortion reform, the modern antiabortion political movement was born. Small groups of Catholic doctors, nurses, lawyers, and housewives joined together to oppose liberalization. In 1967 the National Council of Catholic Bishops aided their campaigns with support, money, and the formation of the National Right to Life Committee. Early Catholic activists were often joined by a handful of non-Catholics, usually Protestants, Mormons, or Orthodox Christians. Supporters of abortion reform argued that "right-to-life" forces were attempting to push Catholic values on a diverse American populace, and consequently many antiabortion groups worked to present themselves as ecumenical or non-denominational. Most of these early groups failed to stop changes in their state's abortion law but they did have some successes in the early 1970s, suggesting that not every state was ready for abortion reform.[6]

The 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, legalizing abortion in all fifty states, changed everything and nothing. In the 1970s the anti-abortion movement remained heavily Catholic, and they continued to pitch their issue as a rights issue rather than a religious one. But in other essential ways the movement changed. Before Roe, the anti-abortion movement was very small, geographically disperse, and focused on individual state legislatures. After 1973 activists and state legislators alike worried that Roe prescribed a one-size-fits-all abortion law that could only be addressed at the national level. Thus, in the 1970s, activists promoted the Hyde Amendment (which successfully prohibited federal funding of abortions through Medicaid) and pushed, unsuccessfully, a constitutional amendment banning abortion. After 1973 the direction of pro-life activism changed, even as its demographics and core political arguments remained the same.

While antiabortion activists retained their focus on individual fetal rights, they began to develop new ways to convey that message to the public that focused on the fetus and excised the woman. The tools that had the largest effect were graphic pictures of aborted fetuses, the most important drawn from John and Barbara Willke's Handbook on Abortion.[7] Some later called it the "Bible of the pro-life movement." The Willkes were a Catholic couple, a doctor and a nurse, who became convinced that pictures would help end legal abortion. The four pictures they put in their book, collected from sympathetic doctors and pathologists, were quickly reproduced and used in all parts of the movement. Their work built on a longer, medical history of viewing and personifying the fetus. Twentieth-century medical advances extended nineteenth-century doctors' interest in fetal life. After World War II, new medical technologies allowed doctors to view and treat fetuses in new ways, while others examined fetal development for the cures to persistent human problems, ultimately personifying and individualizing the fetus.[8] The Willkes and others simply extended this medical tradition into politics. They became sure that images helped people to understand a fetus, legally and culturally, as a baby. Thus the movement continued to develop new tools and technologies to this end: pictures of fetuses, in utero and aborted, fetal models, and fetuses in jars in the 1970s; fetal pins, dolls, jewelry, and clothes in addition to a proliferation of pro-life movies in the 1980s; and ultrasound visuals of fetuses in the 1990s and 2000s. Using these images, activists made a political pitch and moved fetal bodies squarely into American political culture.

As activists moved the fetus into the political spotlight, they tried to keep the pregnant woman behind the curtain. Increasingly in the 1970s, they attempted to link their campaign to civil rights and human rights work, which led to increasingly heated rhetoric. Some activists said legal abortion was worse than the Jewish Holocaust. Others argued that the Roe decision was akin to the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which ruled that black people-slave or free-were not U.S. citizens and thus not protected by the Constitution. Both decisions, they argued, made some groups "less than human" and degraded life. While not actually working on civil rights and human rights issues, pro-life activists used those causes to make the fetus a sympathetic victim and pro-life activists into modern day abolitionists. (These arguments also helped redeem the Republican party in the aftermath of "massive resistance" in the South.) But activists avoided discussing what would happen to American women if abortion became illegal. They tried to silence those in their midst who voiced the old argument that pregnancy punished women for promiscuity. Activists instead claimed that abortion providers and the feminists who condoned legal abortion were truly to blame.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, evangelical Christians joined the movement in great numbers, rejuvenating and eventually radicalizing the movement. Previously, in the late 1960s, evangelical scholars, pastors, and physicians could not agree on whether or not abortion was sinful. But by late 1970s and early 1980s, this sentiment had changed. Many evangelical laypeople and clergy opposed legal abortion and joined the fight to end it. Some simply joined existing pro-life groups; others formed new, more radical groups that rejected the politics of legislative reform. The most famous of the latter cohort was Operation Rescue, which sought to end abortion by "any means necessary." Operation Rescue pioneered the pro-life "rescue," in which thousands of activists created human blockades in front of clinics. In the 1980s and 1990s, Operation Rescue performed such rescues in cities across the nation, tying up the city's police departments, filling local jails, and making it incredibly difficult to get an abortion. Their national media spectacle sought to attract reporters and stun the American public. Extremists in the movement went even further. Between the early 1980s and the 2000s, there were 153 assaults, 383 death threats, 3 kidnappings, 18 attempted murders, and 9 murders related to abortion providers.[9]

As rescues captured the imaginations, enthusiasm, and anger of many anti-abortion activists, others continued to do the quiet work of incremental legal change. In the 1980s and 1990s, many pro-lifers, especially those who remained in more mainstream right to life groups, focused on making access to abortion more difficult on the state level. Due to their efforts, states across the country passed laws that required parental notification, "informed consent" (mandating women view materials about fetal development and the risks of abortion), and waiting periods between the initial consultation and the abortion. In 1992 the Supreme Court validated the legality of such laws in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, crafting a new rationale to determine the constitutionality of laws regulating abortion. Restrictions were legal as long as they did not place an "undue burden" on women seeking the procedure, validating the work of anti-abortion activists and making abortion increasingly difficult to access-especially for rural or poor women. The radical and moderate groups differed in terms of strategy, but together they succeeded at reorienting the conversation about abortion. Both types of groups worked to make pro-life politics central to social conservatism and by extension the Republican party. They made fetal life central to how many Christians viewed their religion and their politics. They asked conservative children to think of themselves as "survivors of the Abortion Holocaust." And they helped new "family values" constituents consider the fetus a member of the family and legal abortion the biggest challenge facing the modern family. In all these efforts, activists were successful, not for all Americans but for enough to build an expansive movement with the defense of fetal life as its core.

Perhaps most importantly, activists from the 1980s onward reinterpreted women's relationship to abortion. They brought back the old argument about the "truth" told by women's bodies and gave it a modern twist. Feminists, they argued, had persuaded women to deny the fundamental truth of fetal life. Abortion damaged women's bodies, but also their psyches. Women, they argued, were traumatized by abortion and like veterans, suffered from a form of post-traumatic stress. Only the pro-life movement could turn the tide against the psychological and physical damage of abortion and feminism. In the 1980s and 1990s pro-life activists recast themselves as both the protectors of women and the true women's rights movement. Increasingly, they claimed to be an individual rights movement, a civil rights movement, a family values movement, and a women's movement. So Trump's faux pas made two fundamental errors: it denied the fetus the political spotlight while also highlighting the movement's vexed relationship with American women. But his words also gave the misperception that this movement is increasingly unimportant. Women living in poverty, in rural areas, and in red states, trying to use their constitutionally guaranteed right to an abortion, would tell you a different story.

Author

JENNIFER L. HOLLAND is an assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. She specializes in the histories of the North American West, gender, sexuality, and race. She is currently writing a book about the modern anti-abortion movement in four western states.

Notes

[ 1] James C. Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolutions of National Policy, 1800-1900 (1978).

[ 2] Kristen Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

[ 3] Brian Stormer, Articulating Life's Memory: U.S. Medical Rhetoric about Abortion in the Nineteenth Century (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002).

[ 4] Leslie Reagan, When Abortion Was A Crime: Women, Medicine, and the Law, 1867-1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

[ 5] Leslie Reagan, Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

[ 6]Gillian Frank, "The Colour of the Unborn: Anti-Abortion and Anti-Bussing Politics in Michigan, United States, 1967-1973," Gender & History 26, no. 2 (August 2014): 351-78.

[ 7] Dr. and Mrs. J.C. Willke, Handbook on Abortion (Cincinnati, OH: Hiltz Publishing Co., 1972).

[ 8]Monica J. Casper, The Making of the Unborn Patient: A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Sara Dubow, Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[ 9] National Abortion Federation, "NAF Violence and Disruption Statistics: Incidents of Violence and Disruption Against Abortion Providers in U.S. & Canada," 2009, http://www.prochoice.org/pubs_research/publications/downloads/about_abortion/violence_stats.pdf

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Abolishing Abortion: The History of the Pro-Life Movement in America

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Photo by Fibonacci Blue (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anti-abortion_protest_at_Planned_Parenthood_(6905470802).jpg), used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license In March 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump argued that women who had abortions should be punished if abortion were made illegal.