Defenders of the Unborn By Daniel Williams, OUP, £23
Daniel Williams’s Defenders of the Unborn is a fascinating, revealing and even-handed account of the early history of the pro-life movement in America.
The movement is usually presented as a reaction against the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v Wade, which led to the legalisation of abortion throughout the United States. But, as Williams shows, the debate on abortion began as early as the 1930s when a small number of doctors began to advocate a utilitarian philosophy in which the welfare of the pregnant mother was considered to take precedence over that of the unborn child. They were opposed by the National Federation of Catholic Physicians’ Guilds, founded in 1937 to combat new ethical challenges in medicine including contraception, sterilisation and abortion.
The battle over abortion began in earnest in 1959 when the American Law Institute’s (ALI) Model Penal Code included a model abortion law that allowed abortion in cases of rape, incest and disability, and to preserve the life and physical and mental health of the mother. Immediately, a number of American states sought to pass laws modelled on the ALI code, but perceptive observers, many of them Catholic doctors, immediately recognised that the code would lead to abortion on demand.
Williams shows that the Catholic Church was virtually alone in opposing abortion law liberalisation in the 1960s. Evangelical Protestants such as Billy Graham supported abortion in “hard cases”. The National Council of Churches, representing mainline Protestantism, strongly endorsed therapeutic abortion.
Yet the Catholic doctors and lawyers who were at the forefront in opposing abortion did not base their arguments on Catholic teaching but used rights-based arguments taken from constitutional law.
The early pro-lifers were positive that they could win the argument and for some time in the early 1970s it looked as though they were winning. In 1971 and 1972, numerous pro-abortion bills were defeated in state legislatures, pro-lifers won referendums in Michigan and North Dakota by large majorities and, most significantly, in 1972 the New York state legislature voted to overturn the most liberal abortion law in the nation, which it had passed two years earlier.
In the presidential election of 1972 the candidates of both major parties sought to appeal to the pro-life lobby. When Roe v Wade came before the Supreme Court the following year, pro-lifers were confident of victory. In a stunning reversal of fortune, however, the court ruled seven to two that the unborn child was not a person under the constitution and that women had an effectively unlimited right to abortion.
Since then the pro-life movement has never recovered its early successes, though it has made minor advances here and there. Nonetheless, there are reasons for hope. Williams notes that as of 2013, 48 per cent of Americans considered themselves pro-life while only 44 per cent considered themselves pro-choice. The 2013 March for Life, on the 40th anniversary of Roe v Wade, attracted as many as half a million people, twice as many as attended the civil rights movement’s March on Washington in 1963.
Students and young people, once the most pro-abortion group in American society, are now at the forefront of the pro-life movement. The rate of abortion has declined and the number of abortion clinics has been dramatically reduced. They are now greatly outnumbered by pro-life crisis pregnancy centres.
Using original documents and correspondence, Williams brilliantly chronicles a historic movement: how it organised, the types of people who joined it, and its strategies and political alliances.
The Catholic pro-lifer will feel vindicated when he or she reads of the unheeded prophets of the early pro-life movement: the Catholic physicians who predicted that the widespread acceptance of contraception would ultimately lead to the acceptance of abortion, and the many pro-life activists who could see that early attempts to legalise abortion for “hard cases” would ultimately lead to abortion on demand.
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