(Image source: ACLU)

How many must suffer or die until reproductive healthcare is made available and legal to all? This question, powerfully present in the recent election, has been asked in various forms about contraception and abortion for well over a century in the United States. What’s more, making the harms caused by abortion bans and contraception bans visible has been a longstanding strategy in the ongoing campaign for reproductive freedoms. But this effort, today, as in the past, has taken place against the backdrop of pervasive hostility toward women and toward gender equality.

Earlier this year, the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2024 American Values Survey saw 44% of respondents agree or strongly agree that, “Society as a whole has become too soft and feminine.” Their findings were echoed by a CBS News/Yougov poll wherein 43% of men indicated that “efforts in the U.S to promote gender equality have gone too far.”

This misogyny informed the election and its outcome. Kamala Harris made restoring reproductive rights to American women a pillar of her presidential campaign. Her opponent gloated that he had overturned Roe v. Wade. Harris’ campaign spotlighted the physical and psychological harms inflicted upon women because of abortion restrictions. Her opponent simulated oral sex on a microphone during a rally but was silent on the public health crisis created by Dobbs v. Jackson.

The visibility given to abortion seekers and their suffering during this election season was unprecedented in the U.S. But the deliberate sharing of women’s stories in order to effect change has a long religious and feminist history. In 1967, for example, Christianity and Crisis published an article by the Reverend Howard Moody in which he railed against the country’s abortion restrictions. Moody gave powerful examples of how abortion laws punished sexual assault survivors and those with non-viable pregnancies.

(Rev. Howard Moody. Image source: Village Preservation)

To dramatize the barbarity of such laws, Moody envisioned a future in which abortion prohibitions no longer existed. A citizen of the 22nd century, he imagined, would come upon the “remains of American civilization” and be baffled and horrified by “archaic” abortion laws that “somehow seemed designed to protect human beings” but were in fact nothing more and nothing less than an “unforgivably cruel punishment” directed at women and “stemming from some inexplicable hostility on the part of men.”

An American Baptist, Moody was just one of many mainline Protestant and Jewish clergy who wrote and agitated against the “gross injustice of an inhuman” abortion law in the 1960s. These religious leaders were themselves participants in a wider conversation among journalists, lawyers, social workers, and politicians about how abortion laws created a sea of suffering and preventable deaths while making women into second-class citizens. And for decades prior, these same groups had called attention to the plight of women being denied contraception. Women’s emancipation, they knew, depended upon their reproductive freedom.

When Howard Moody called for the eradication of abortion laws in the pages of Christianity and Crisis, he was working within a religious tradition that taught people of faith to respond to injustice by bearing witness to and challenging the systems inflicting suffering. In the early 1960s, the suffering of both abortion seekers and those compelled to bear unwanted children was shrouded in silence and secrecy. Bringing these hidden harms to light, clergy believed, would provoke righteous indignation and social transformation. As one religious organization–the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion–put it, the aim was to “bring light and hope to the thousands of people who suffer — usually in quiet, and sometimes in death — the miseries and heartbreak of backstreet abortions.”

Such abortion rights efforts yielded victories, if uneven ones, first at the state level and then at the Supreme Court. After Roe, advocacy groups and scholars documented the not-so-hidden histories of how abortion restrictions violently impact women. The haunting images of women like Gerri Santoro—who died from a botched abortion in a motel room—have been ubiquitous for decades. Projects like Shout Your Abortion have painstakingly recorded women’s histories with abortion. And journalists have broadcast the perils of abortion seeking in a post-Dobbs world. The archive of suffering is vast and visible, and it is growing.

The process of bearing witness assumes that those who are forced to look at suffering will offer compassion. The abortion wars of the past half century have pivoted on the question of who should be given compassion, the mother or the fetus. Indeed, the anti-abortion movement has, through powerful visual rhetoric, literally foregrounded fetuses in hopes of erasing women from the picture.

But no amount of graphic fetal imagery has completely excised the grim and very-well-known truths about what happens to women when abortion is a crime. That the brutal consequences of abortion restrictions have been apparent and tolerable, if not desirable, to significant swaths of the American population brings us to a miserable and heartbreaking if obvious fact. Nested in the fetal images, which are meant to compel compassion toward the unborn, is a malignant hatred of women’s freedom.

The words of the Republican gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina made as much plain: “Abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers. It is about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.” And that misogyny, which was barely subtext before Dobbs, has erupted in the wake of the election. The phrase “Your body my choice”—a rebuttal of the reproductive rights mantra—has caught on in right wing circles in recent days.

More than half a century ago, it was revelatory when Howard Moody declared that abortion restrictions were “man’s vengeance on woman” even as he dreamed of a day when gender equality would prevail. With the election of a candidate whose abuse of women is well known, who campaigned on the fact that he engineered the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and who has returned to power promising his base that he would be their “warrior” and their agent of “retribution,” it is apparent that cruelty toward and the suffering of women is the point. A future in which misogyny and reproductive bondage are a thing of the past feels farther away than ever.

Gillian Frank is an Assistant Professor in the History of the Modern United States at Trinity College Dublin. His book, A Sacred Choice: Liberal Religion and the Struggle for Abortion Before Roe v Wade, is forthcoming with University of North Carolina Press.

The post This Future Must Not Be Forever appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Getty Images)

This past February, President Joe Biden offered a muddled statement on abortion. He disavowed “abortion on demand” because he’s a “practicing Catholic” but maintained that “Roe v Wade was right.” The President’s statement spurred a flurry of commentary that puzzled over his position on abortion and what he meant by the phrase “abortion on demand.”

While Biden’s tepid support of abortion rights has been apparent for years, the meaning of “abortion on demand” is less so. Some respondents, like the President of Planned Parenthood, condemned the phrase as “right-wing language.” More nuanced analyses note that the phrase “abortion on demand” originated with abortion rights activists and only later became a conservative phrase to repudiate abortion.

Yet, both perspectives misunderstand the more complicated political history of “abortion on demand” and its connections to religion in general and Catholicism in particular. Moreover, they miss out on the fact that the denigration of “abortion on demand” was and remains rooted in sexism that has spanned religious denominations, political affiliations, and both the anti-abortion and abortion rights movements.

A primer on the term’s complicated history is necessary, not just to understand President Biden’s utterances, but to better navigate the post-Dobbs landscape.

For over six decades, the struggle over the meaning of “abortion on demand” has reflected the fight over men’s ability to control women’s reproductive lives. In the early 1960s, state legislatures began to reconsider abortion restrictions amidst revelations of the high rates of criminal abortions and in the wake of thalidomide and rubella scares, which led to birth defects and infant deaths. Male medical experts, legal reformers, allied professionals, and religious leaders had an outsized voice in popularizing and shaping the meaning of “abortion on demand” – a phrase so foreign it needed to be put into quotations in expert and popular literature.

Media coverage in the early 1960s linked the foreignness of “abortion on demand” with actual foreign countries’ abortion policies. Japan, Hungary, and the Soviet Union were go-to examples because they permitted elective abortions. American commentators believed the United States was unlikely to adopt such alien practices. Such was the case in 1962, in discussions of the popular book The Abortionist by Lucy Freeman, which saw one of the earliest variations of this phrase in the American press. Amidst Cold War xenophobia, these foreign associations did little to help make the case for abortion on demand in the United States.

The landscape of reproductive rights, however, was rapidly shifting, and the foreign associations of abortion on demand would soon overlap with domestic debates within the growing American abortion rights movement. At first, the abortion rights movement was male-dominated and made up of “small, well-defined groups of elite professionals: public health officials, crusading attorneys, and prominent physicians.” By the mid-1960s, there were two major camps in the abortion rights movement: reformers and repealers. It was these two camps’ division over policy that would play a crucial role in shaping the political meaning of abortion on demand for decades to come.

The difference between supporters of reform and repeal was the degree of change they envisioned to abortion laws. Reformers called for a limited set of exceptions to these restrictions so that “deserving” women could access abortion. Rape, incest, fetal deformity, and the health and life of the mother, they believed, were among the grounds for terminating pregnancies. Repealers, meanwhile, wanted abortion to be elective—a private decision made by any woman for any reason. Abortion rights activists—reformers and repealers alike—used the phrase “abortion on demand” to signal the latter position.

At a moment when abortion laws, at their most permissive, allowed the procedure to save the life of the mother, reformers viewed themselves as political realists. While some reformers privately supported elective abortion, they believed the stigma surrounding the procedure meant that they could only ask for limited changes from state legislatures. Reform leaders like Dr. Alan Guttmacher maintained that the United States was “not ready” for the “abortion on demand” policies that existed in “iron curtain countries” because it would lead to an “ethical uproar.”

(Image source: Abortion On Demand)

What was often left unstated by reformers–because it was taken for granted–was that the ethical uproar had to do with distrusting women to control their reproduction. You can see the mistrust made explicit in a 1967 article by Dr. Eugene M. Diamond, a Catholic anti-abortion physician. Diamond declared that those “who propose abortion on demand” have “an inordinate confidence in the wisdom of the average woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy.” A number of reformers shared similar views about women’s capacity to make reproductive choices. Others strategically sought to appease chauvinistic politicians, physicians, and a wider public by proposing policies that mandated male medical and legal authorities deciding which women deserved abortion.

Abortion reformers presented this patronizing position as a reasonable compromise between absolute abortion prohibition and outright repeal. The tactic had broad appeal with politicians and with voters. As much was apparent in Washington State, which saw a successful referendum campaign for abortion reform take place in November 1970. There, the abortion rights campaign emphasized that their program was “not abortion on demand” and underscored that “the medical profession [would] deal responsibly with women in crisis.” At a moment when 92% of physicians in the country were male, reformers made abortion reform palatable by maintaining “responsible” male medical authority. The implication was that these physicians would ensure that women’s access to abortion would remain limited to the deserving few.

This emphasis by reformers on continued male medical authority over women’s reproductive lives was also attractive to the very Protestant denominations that would later join the anti-abortion religious coalition after Roe. In the early 1970s, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Southern Baptist Convention, and Seventh Day Adventists, among others, repudiated “abortion on demand” while accepting “therapeutic abortion based on approved medical indications.” So long as male medical authority over women’s reproduction was intact, these groups officially supported abortion reform. This paternalistic view of abortion would, within a few short years, also form the common ground between conservative Protestants and anti-choice Catholics.

If the paternalism of anti-abortion advocates and abortion reformers was axiomatic, the feminism of repealers was overt. Early proponents of repeal (a coterie of male doctors, lawyers, and mainline Protestant and Jewish religious leaders) insisted that abortion on demand was urgently necessary to “free women from a now needless form of slavery and let her become the master of her own body.” Some, like Episcopal Bishop James Pike, argued that “the right to decide must rest not with a doctor, or a judge, or any third party, but with the mother herself.” By 1967, with the flourishing of both liberal and radical feminism, the links between women’s emancipation and reproductive freedom became ever more apparent.

As women moved to the front lines of the abortion repeal movement, they made clear that abortion reform, in the words of Betty Friedan, was “something dreamed up by men” to keep women as “passive objects that must somehow be regulated.” These feminist ideas became highly visible, both in press coverage and in street protests. For example, in August 1970, over 30,000 women marched down 5^th Avenue in New York City to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of suffrage. This event, named the Women’s Strike for Equality, saw marchers carrying placards calling for “abortion on demand” alongside free daycare and equal opportunities in jobs and education.

Even as reformers and repealers debated how to transform abortion restrictions, opponents of abortion maintained that reform was a slippery slope to repeal. The Catholic Church dominated the early anti-abortion movement. Bishops and budding right-to-life groups in the United States with names like “Voice of the Unborn” linked abortion on demand with mass murder and a moral horror equivalent to the Holocaust. The phrase abortion on demand was still novel enough in the late 1960s that it sometimes warranted qualifying phrases like “so-called,” in the Catholic press. The denigration of “abortion on demand” by these opponents was helped along by the sexism of reformers and a history of press coverage that associated elective abortion with communist countries.

This Catholic-led attack on abortion rights grew louder and more organized from the early 1960s onward in response to the mounting successes of the abortion rights movement—both reform and repeal—in over a dozen states. Most states with reformed laws saw modest increases in abortion access. In contrast, the few states that repealed their abortion laws saw abortion access grow dramatically. In the eyes of Catholic anti-abortion crusaders, abortion access was no longer hypothetical nor confined to abstract policy debates. It was an expanding political and medical reality in the United States and abroad.

For politicians like Richard Nixon seeking to attract socially conservative Catholic voters away from the Democratic Party, the repudiation of abortion on demand would be instrumental in building a new right-wing interfaith coalition within the shell of a desiccated Republican Party.

Nixon’s 1972 campaign was novel, not just in the scope of its criminality, but because it hitched Republican politics to anti-abortion politics, profoundly changing the political landscape. President Nixon commenced his abbreviated second term on January 20, 1973, two days before the Supreme Court issued its ruling on Roe v Wade and Doe v Bolton. In these decisions, the court codified many of the policy demands of the repeal movement and bounded them within a trimester framework. The triumph of repeal and the demise of reform placed reproductive choice in the hands of women and made abortion far more accessible, affordable, and frequent.

Though he campaigned adamantly against abortion to garner Catholic votes, Nixon had a myriad of other issues to contend with once in office, not the least of which was his impeachment. The anti-abortion movement, however, did not lose its focus. Instead, it rapidly adjusted to its new role, shifting from defenders of a restrictive status quo to vociferous opponents of radically expanded abortion access.

It is difficult to overstate the extent to which anti-feminism and misogyny mobilized the post-Roe anti-abortion movement. Roe and Doe repudiated the abortion reform movement and fragmented the interfaith and politically diverse coalition it had built.

The victory of abortion repeal through Roe and Doe was a major catalyst in driving conservative Protestants into the heretofore Catholic-dominated anti-abortion movement. Religious constituencies that had previously accepted abortion (so long as it was controlled by men and rarely granted to women) became unmoored from the abortion rights coalition. Abortion, for them, came to take on the very meanings Catholic abortion opponents had long proclaimed: mass murder, moral chaos, and the upending of gender roles. It is no coincidence that a major site of interfaith contact and religious cross-pollination during the 1970s was the anti-Equal Rights Amendment movement. Led by the devout Catholic Phyllis Schlafly, her vast organization became an interfaith melting pot for anti-feminist and anti-choice politics.

In the ensuing decades, with the rise of an ecumenical religious right and their family values politics, these negative associations of abortion on demand with the destruction of divinely ordained gender hierarchies would become articles of faith. And they would fuel Republican policies and politics for over a half-century.

Meanwhile, by bandying phrases like “safe, legal, and rare,” some Democratic politicians would, in the spirit of the reform movement, attempt to triangulate a rhetorical space between reproductive freedom and outright abortion bans.

Which brings us back to Joe Biden and his invocation of “abortion on demand.” Today, the meanings of “abortion on demand” are again unsettled because the laws themselves are in dramatic flux. Abortion remains legal and accessible in some states. A number of states now have total bans, 6-week bans, or 15-week bans. Some of these restrictive states only allow abortion to save the mother’s life. Others have 1960s-reform-like laws that permit abortions to preserve maternal health or because of non-viable fetuses. A few restrictive states allow for abortions in cases of rape or incest. Even with these chary allowances, women reckoning with tragic personal or medical circumstances have found it difficult if not impossible to get abortions locally.

Dobbs might have been the end of Roe. But it has not been the end of the fight for abortion rights or for women’s social equality. As in the past, competing visions over who deserves reproductive rights are now in play among abortion rights advocates. When the President disavowed abortion on demand, he invoked a historical debate within the abortion rights movement over who deserves abortion access and whether women can be trusted to decide their reproductive futures. That these policy debates are still playing out against the backdrop of a religious movement that would ban abortion points to the fact that women’s reproductive freedom is once again caught between tepid friends and declared enemies.

Gillian Frank is a historian of religion and sexuality who co-hosts the podcast Sexing History. His book, A Sacred Choice: Liberal Religion and the Struggle for Abortion Before Roe v Wade, is forthcoming with University of North Carolina Press.

The post Abortion On Demand appeared first on The Revealer.

(Arkansas state capitol building. Image source: The Guardian)

What does it mean when a state plans to memorialize the unborn? For over half a century, anti-abortion activists have inserted their restrictive theology into the public square, social policy, and the intimate spaces of our reproductive lives. In so doing, these devout activists have attempted to control not just our bodies and our healthcare, but the stories we tell about them. Fetal imagery has been essential to this religious and political undertaking.

In the wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision, and especially in states with abortion bans, the public culture of the anti-abortion movement is taking on new state-sponsored forms. As much is apparent in Arkansas, where the legislature recently approved plans for a memorial to “unborn children” terminated “during the era of Roe v Wade.” In the past, anti-abortion legislators have used fetal burial laws to compel health care providers and pregnant people to cremate or bury fetal remains rather than treating this tissue as medical waste. Critics have argued, often in court, that such funerary laws are meant to impose a religious viewpoint about fetal life and mandate a mourning ritual for aborted or miscarried “babies.” So too with Arkansas’ state-sponsored monument to the unborn, the first of its kind to be commissioned after Dobbs. The cenotaph, however, does more than magnify and legitimize the anti-abortion movement’s demand that we view abortion as a loss of human life. It also proclaims that “the natural state” is a Christian dominion.

The anti-abortion movement has long created a rich material culture in service of its doctrine that the fetus is a child and abortion is murder. Opponents of abortion unceasingly and graphically convey this belief in prefabricated packets for Sanctity of Life Sundays, white crosses on church lawns, signs carried by street preachers outside abortion clinics, billboards on the side of major thoroughfares, and countless other forms of ephemera. Through these fetal fetishes, anti-abortion activists invite us to join them in grieving the loss of human life and stopping an “abortion holocaust.” The movement’s dream was to see Roe v Wade overturned. Until then, proselytization was the name of the game.

But in Arkansas, where an abortion ban went into effect within hours of the Dobb’s ruling, “pro-life” partisans are no longer an oppositional force and no longer need only to proselytize. Now, they are stewards and defenders of a restrictive abortion law. The planned monument–an expression of “pro-life” triumphalism–is nothing less than an attempt to legitimize this new and restrictive reproductive regime. Memorials, after all, are powerful public statements. They convey an “official” story about our bodies, our selves, and our pasts even as they (literally!) concretize a select set of values for future generations. In the plans for a state-sponsored abortion memorial, we see an aspiration for an enduring Christian dominion over reproduction.

(One of the proposals for the memorial to the “unborn.” Image source: Arkansas Advocate)

The content and placement of this abortion memorial signal Arkansas’ enshrinement of a white Christian nationalist worldview. The monument will be located at Arkansas’ state capitol and will likely sit near a controversial statue of the Ten Commandments, and a Confederate War Memorial. Despite several design proposals that featured images of unborn bodies, there will be no graphic fetal iconography at the memorial. The current plans for the monument include a living wall of greenery that is intended, in the words of its designer, to “honor God, the Creator & the unborn.” It will also feature a plaque with scripture (Psalm 145:8, NAB) and a quote derived from Amendment 68 of the Arkansas Constitution, stating that it is “the policy of Arkansas to protect every unborn child from the moment of conception until birth.” The absence of fetal bodies–heretofore the centerpiece of the anti-abortion movement–is supplemented with religious text, which states, in effect, that there is no daylight between the beliefs of the anti-abortion movement and state policy.

As evidenced by the memorial, anti-abortion adherents proclaim that fetuses terminated during the Roe era were murdered children, and that the era of legal and accessible abortion is a thing of the past. But that explanation is far too tame. The monument aims to make concrete what the new abortion restrictions assume: that abortion is an atrocity of a recently bygone era that must never return. Arkansas State Representative Cindy Crawford summarized the monument’s mission in the following way: “We have to remember abortion in Arkansas so it won’t come back.”

Predictably, this monument, which emphasizes the unborn and not the bodies that carry them, also erases women, their reproductive histories, their urgent social and medical needs, their dreams, and their diminishing ability to freely author their reproductive futures in Arkansas.

The monument also excludes the many citizens who hold other faiths and believe that reproductive choice is sacred. It is not hard to see how the monument’s very location, its placement at the capitol, and its incorporation of scripture, all trumpet a conservative Evangelical vision. As such, literary scholar Courtney R. Baker’s insight into Confederate monuments holds true for the planned abortion memorial: “The dominant message does just that: it dominates. It does not necessarily convince.” Like the Confederate memorial it will neighbor, the memorial to the unborn is ultimately meant to ossify a slanted story about the past and to limit the possibilities of reproductive freedom in the future.

But this attempt to foreclose reproductive freedoms and erase the voices of dissenters is just that, an attempt. Even as the state of Arkansas is demanding that its citizens grieve the fetuses that were legally terminated during the Roe era, a referendum drive is underway to enshrine reproductive rights into Arkansas’ constitution. If it passes, the ballot initiative will prevent the state from being able to “prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion services within 18 weeks of fertilization.” It will also allow abortions to protect the health and life of the mother or in cases of incest, rape, or fatal fetal anomalies. In the words of one of the referendum organizers, “we are one step closer to restoring the freedom that was taken from individuals when Roe v. Wade was overturned.”

What does it mean then, that Arkansas’ Republican-dominated legislature plans to memorialize the unborn? Tombs, scholar Benedict Anderson once observed, are integral to nation-building projects. “No more arresting emblems” exist, he asserts, than such edifices, which are, “saturated with ghostly national imaginings.” Such shrines, he notes, invite citizens to sentimentally identify with cultural projects far larger than themselves. In Arkansas, the planned memorial to the “unborn” is meant to entomb abortion rights and raise the flag of Christian nationalism. But that burial is premature. The future of reproductive freedom is still uncertain. It remains unclear what the mourning after Dobbs will look like and what may yet emerge from the rubble of Roe.

Gillian Frank is a historian of religion and sexuality who co-hosts the podcast Sexing History. His book, A Sacred Choice: Liberal Religion and the Struggle for Abortion Before Roe v Wade, is forthcoming with University of North Carolina Press.

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