I was a pro-life crusader before the label “pro-life” was coined. For twelve years, I worked feverishly to stop abortion and reverse the Roe v Wade decision. Then, in 1984, I bucked my church, ignored every pro-life candidate, and did the unthinkable—I voted for Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro, two pro-choice Democrats. Four years later, sixteen years after I’d embraced overturning Roe as the cause of my life, I walked away from the pro-life movement entirely.
Cradle Catholic
I was a cradle Catholic raised in a strict Catholic home and educated in Catholic schools. On the day after Christmas in 1966, I married my college sweetheart in a traditional Roman Catholic ceremony. Several months later, when my always erratic menstrual cycle stopped entirely, I wondered if I could be pregnant.
I knew nothing about pregnancy other than a basic knowledge of how it happened, so I placed absolute trust in my doctor, a Catholic obstetrician practicing on the north side of Dallas, Texas. In March of 1967, my doctor confirmed my pregnancy and offered guidelines for the next seven months: smoking—okay, drinking—okay, weight gain—no more than twenty pounds. He patted me on the arm, assured me that I was healthy and sent me home to rest.
A month later, when I complained about unrelenting morning sickness, I was given a prescription to stop the nausea and sent home with the assurance that everything was perfectly normal. That night I awakened from a sound sleep, sweating. Under the glare of the bathroom light, I realized that my nightgown was soaked with blood. My husband pressed a towel between my legs, replaced my gown with a clean one, and wrapped me in a blanket. We raced to the hospital.
Save My Baby
The emergency-room staff tried to slow the bleeding. A young staff doctor poked, prodded and pushed before announcing, “You haven’t lost the baby.”
He proceeded to talk about things I’d never heard of before: dilatation and curettage, cervix and placenta, spontaneous miscarriages, and trimesters.
Today, young mothers pore over pregnancy guides and websites, but in 1967, few resources were available. One, Pregnancy and Birth by Alan Guttmacher, was not recommended to me. Dr. Guttmacher favored contraception—an absolute no-no for Catholic women—and his book would never be suggested by a Catholic doctor. I know this is hard to believe, but in the world of pregnancy and childbirth education, 1967 was still the dark ages.
While this young doctor tried to educate me, I was totally focused on “you . . . haven’t . . . lost . . . the . . . baby.” I rubbed my belly and willed my child to live.
My concentration broke when the doctor said, “While I’m struggling to save your baby, there are women paying doctors to kill theirs.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“These women don’t want to be pregnant, so their doctors end their pregnancies,” he explained. “It’s happening all over, maybe even in one of the ORs in this hospital tonight.”
“What happens to the babies?” I asked.
“They’re cut into pieces and thrown in the trash.”
“I could never do that,” I swore. “Never.”
I Don’t Want Other Babies
I was sent home with strict orders to stay in bed. On the third afternoon, I awakened from a nap with severe cramps. A few minutes later, I passed a mass of blood and tissue which I carefully gathered in a towel. Tears poured down my cheeks while I said the words of Catholic baptism—“I baptize you, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”—words reserved for a priest, except in an emergency. I carried the towel with the remains of my baby to the hospital.
After a D & C to scrape any remaining tissue from my uterus, I was pronounced young and healthy. “You’ll have other babies,” the doctor told me.
“I don’t want other babies,” I said.
Like so many women who’ve miscarried, I grieved alone. I held the memory of that tiny being in my heart, and I believed I had sent a new saint to Paradise. While I mourned the life I’d lost, I nursed my outrage toward those women who deliberately killed their babies.
In September of 1969, my first son was born, the most wonderful creature I’d ever seen and absolutely perfect. Before I left Dallas for Wisconsin, my obstetrician reminded me of the abortions occurring in hospitals all over the country. “All loyal Catholics must do their part to stop this,” he told me.
Taking Up the Cause
My church taught that human life begins at the instant the sperm and the egg unite and God infuses a soul into a new being. Destroying that innocent life is a most terrible sin, one punishable by an eternity in Hell. I knew all of that, but I had a brand new baby. I was too busy to take up the anti-abortion cause.
Then, in the fall of 1972, I met Dr. Charles E. Rice, professor of law at Notre Dame Law School and a friend of my parents. Over dinner, Rice delivered a passionate argument against abortion—punctuated with a vivid description of a vacuum machine ripping the developing baby out of the womb and turning it to mush. That evening I lost my appetite and my neutrality.
The next day, I called a group of my Catholic friends. Together we launched an anti-abortion committee aligned with Wisconsin Citizens Concerned for the Unborn, the organization that became the Wisconsin Right to Life Committee.
On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down the Roe v. Wade decision. The sweeping decision, supported by a 7–2 majority, removed all restriction on abortion in the first trimester. Restriction in later pregnancy had to allow abortion when the life or health of the mother was at risk.
The feminists celebrated, and I girded for war. It would take a national movement to overturn Roe, and I intended to be part of it. I was positive that the Court had made a terrible mistake, but I didn’t focus only on stopping abortion.
Bleeding Heart
I saw myself as a crusader for justice; justice for those not yet born and justice for those who were in need. Guaranteeing the basic necessities of life to those in need was an essential part of reducing the demand for abortion. I was positive that all pro-lifers, regardless of political party or ideology, would agree.
In the summer of 1976, my parents offered a clue that I might be wrong. “You can’t stop abortion with government programs,” Mother said.
“Government is never a solution,” Dad added. “Private charity is always the answer.”
I disagreed, pointing out that private charity alone never worked. Government was part of the solution, too.
Mother and Dad, the first two members in Chicago of the ultra-right wing John Birch Society, brought out the latest John Birch Society Bulletin, a special edition to honor America’s Bicentennial. In it, Birch founder Robert Welch surveyed the highlights of American history, focusing on those aspects that the right wingers favored—freedom and tiny government.
Of the early twentieth century, Welch wrote about what he called “a healthy kind of poverty” offset by freedom from all government interferences and programs.
“So,” I said to Mother, “you want women and their newborn babies to enjoy that same healthy kind of poverty, free from interference by the government?”
“There you go with those bleeding-heart liberal tendencies,” she answered me.
“Government never fixes anything,” Dad added. “It only destroys liberty.”
Pro-life Until Birth
It took me awhile, but I finally figured out that too many politicians agreed with Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. The push to “reform” welfare—the bailiwick of the Republican Party—worked so well that child poverty rates steadily increased from a low of around 14% in the Johnson administration to a Reagan administration high of 21%. Much of this was accomplished by politicians who were 100% pro-life.
For the most part, pro-life movement leaders weren’t one bit bothered when their 100% pro-life politicians embraced steep cuts and demanded even more. No consciences were pricked by cuts to federal nutrition programs that took food out of the mouths of women and their babies. No one seemed to care when cuts to medical programs left poor women without access to basic care.
I began to wonder about good “pro-life” folks who slapped a “Choose Life” bumper sticker on their cars, but cared less what happened once a baby was born.
Enter the Evangelicals
At the beginning of the 1980s, it was clear that the anti-abortion movement had undergone a major transformation. The collection of local groups like the one I headed had been amalgamated into a national structure with growing political savvy and political clout.
Early leaders of the National Right to Life Committee had realized that the movement had to move beyond its Roman Catholic roots. Help arrived when Francis Schaeffer, a well-respected evangelical Christian, took up the pro-life mantle and told American evangelicals that God wanted them to be involved in the political process. Schaeffer empowered other leaders who shaped, defined, and controlled the pro-life movement: James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson.
Together, these folks created the “religious right,” and helped forge the pro-life movement into a one-issue, one-party political operation with opposition to abortion as the litmus test.
A political candidate could be pro-death penalty, pro-nuclear weapons, pro-war, pro-guns, anti-aid to the poor, anti-healthcare, anti-food stamps, anti-civil rights and still be heralded as 100% pro-life. This contradiction bothered me as much as the fact that almost every candidate the pro-life movement endorsed was a Republican and a man.
Rape and Incest
For many years, I had led my local pro-life group, served on the board of the state organization, debated members of the National Organization for Women, appeared on local media and written scores of letters. But nothing mattered more to me than talking to high school students. Armed with slides of babies developing in the womb and plastic models of the fetus at different stages of pregnancy, I argued that abortion was the deliberate taking of a human life and should never be legal.
In every class, someone asked about abortion in cases of rape. I shared the findings of Dr. John Willke, the chairman of the National Right to Life Committee who held that the “psychic trauma of assault rape” made pregnancy unlikely. I quoted the section in Handbook on Abortion, where Willke claimed that 3,500 cases of rape in the Minneapolis-St Paul (Minnesota) area revealed “zero cases of pregnancy.” In later books, Willke calculated that fewer than 300 pregnancies per year resulted from rape.
It was a shock to me when I learned that these figures were wrong. According to the Guttmacher Institute and other experts, the actual number of pregnancies from rape was closer to 25,000 every year.
Questions about rape usually lead to the question of incest. The pro-life movement relied on the argument that the perpetrator should be punished but the unborn child had committed no crime, but that never satisfied me. I worried about the girl who was forced to carry her father or uncle’s child. What happened to her?
Desperate Women, Excruciating Choices
I argued that abortion of “defective” children would lead to the systematic elimination of defective or ‘inferior’ people as a matter of government policy. It was years before I read the heartbreaking testimony of mothers who face an excruciating choice when their unborn babies are diagnosed with fetal anomalies incompatible with life. Then, I learned about the dilemma of pregnant women battling cancer who had to abort and continue their chemotherapy, or leave their cancers untreated and hope they’d survive the pregnancy.
I began to wonder about the fate of desperate women if Roe v Wade were overturned. Would they be forced back into the illegal, underground abortion business that had flourished before 1972? Seeing no political will to offer real help to those in need, I knew the answer was yes.
I started re-thinking my pro-life involvement.
Pro-Life Reagan Hurts Poor Women and Children
Ronald Reagan—who had signed California’s 1967 law permitting therapeutic abortions—found his pro-life conviction in time to run for president in 1980. No matter how many pro-life leaders kissed Reagan’s ring or how often he declared himself to be pro-life, the actions of his administration proved otherwise. In the first term, his budget cuts for social programs exceeded $128 billion dollars.
It didn’t take a genius to realize that these programs served poor women and children; the cuts meant real pain for real people.
Once again, while pro-life politicians slashed programs that helped sustain poor women and children, the pro-life movement said nothing. My “pro-life” days were over; I knew I no longer fit in the movement I’d helped build.
Once You’re Born, You’re on Your Own
I’d love to tell you that my story is ancient history. I’d love to tell you that pro-life politicians have realized their misplaced priorities and taken up the cause of poor mothers and their born children. I’d love to tell you that the Republican Party has stopped its attacks on the constitutional rights of women and embraced policies that guarantee basic necessities to all citizens. But, I’d be lying.
The Republican Party and the Pro-Life Movement Have the Same Agenda
They intend to stop all abortions, even in cases of rape, incest, fetal anomalies and risk to the life of the mother. They limit access to contraception, mammograms, pap smears and STD treatment basic health under the guise of blocking government funding for abortion. They’re all in with slashing food stamps, Head Start, Medicaid, and any other government program they’ve designated as “welfare.” They’re leading the parade that wants a fertilized egg to have the same rights under the law as a woman.
Since I left the pro-life movement, it’s grown more aggressive in its tactics and more dogmatic in its legislative proposals. But this reality remains the same: pro-lifers love zygotes and fetuses. But, once you’re born, you and your mother are on your own.
First published on MOMocrats, August 2013
Revised 2016
When I asked a question at the Jacksonville library, you asked me to email you when I read the section of your book talking about the anti-choice period of your life.
These are my feelings. I was sad when I read that you used the emotion of your difficult pregnancy to make it harder on other less fortunate women.
I found the section explaining that the Catholic church *only recently* decided the soul entered the conglomeration of cells at conception interesting. . One quote from page 173: “St Thomas Aquinas … claimed that the male embryo became human at forty days”
I was very glad when your views changed and you saw the cruelty of the anti-choice movement. Quote from page 179: “Realizing that politicians were using the pro-life label to advance a right-wing agenda broke my heart …”
Nonsense… The Constitution lists the things that are important to every citizen in order of importance. LIFE, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of HAPPINESS. You do not sacrifice LIFE or LIBERTY in your pursuit of HAPPINESS .LIFE is listed ans number ONE. LIBERTY is number TWO. HAPPINESS is number three. People that say you have a right to kill an unborn healthy child because it is an inconvenience, embarrassment, economic burden or wrong sex have a arrogant hateful agenda. This is a way to demean women. Citizenship is a right and a responsibility. This country offers more opportunities than any other country in the world. You, as a individual, must decide if you will or won’t except those opportunities. But women have one thing, that men don’t have. They have the ability to create life. Yes, that is a burden and additional responsibility. You can not get away from that, it is the way you were made. Abortion is a blight on the American Character. It degrades and degrades women.
Reading your remonstrations, you have obviously not seen poverty or the plight of rape victims bearing the result of being victim of the rapist and then society. When and if people, especially government officials, start putting aside their overbearing hypocritical attitude toward women and accept all children who are born, regardless of race, color, heritage and economic status, then I will be pro-life, but as long as children go hungry in the land of plenty, go uneducated because of their “station in life”, women treated like sex slaves by husbands and other men, and breeders, without dignity, being allowed to die in order to give birth, kept on ventilators to satisfy craven male superiority, to have their preferably male child, leaving the mother absolutely no dignity, as long as these things continue to go on, I will be Pro Choice. I don’t believe in abortion for birth control, as a matter of fact, I believe when a girl or woman says no, it means no, doesn’t matter who the male is. Maybe, when women can be seen as equals, there won’t be a need for abortion, but as long as they are kept at the bottom of the pecking order socially, economically and regarded as chattel, it is their body, therefore their choice.
I do agree with much of what you’ve said. In my move from pro-life to choice I was pushed along by the refusal of politicians, mostly while male ones, to support any programs that helped women. I hope you’ll read my book and learn more about where I’m coming from. I think you’ll find that we are insync in many ways. Thanks for sharing.
First of all, I apologize for the length of this post as well as the lack of elegant grammar and/or consistent flow…lol! I didn’t have time to read through before posting. So without further ado…
I will absolutely be picking up your book because your story is especially important to the pro-choice (aka the true pro-life) movement. BTW, I was shocked to learn that the idiotic person, whom I at the time thought, accidentally made a funny gaffe for us to enjoy later, was actually saying what apparently some believe! That girls don’t usually get pregnant if raped! You mentioned that in your post, and we say jaw-floor-dropped! I never thought for even a second there was a human being on the planet that actually believed that crazy talk! I am clearly more naive than I thought. It just reaffirms that people are unapologetically misled in so many ways because of the deceptive tactics of these people. Another example being that just because one supports “choice” that necessarily means she would either a. Have an abortion herself (and willy nilly I might add) and/or b: That he/she wants anyone faced with the dilemma of an unplanned pregnancy to always choose abortion. It is a lie! They are so far removed from any reality that I think some of them actually believe their vitriolic nonsense! Which I also find ironic as their side holds no shame in telling 100% of those same women their only choices are parenthood or adoption! Apparently, those who support choice who come across women who find themselves in this predicament are chasing them into abortion clinics and strapping them down to, in serial killer fashion, harvest their fetus’ organs and leave them their to die while we get rich and then surround her while reciting our satanic chants in hopes they will someday return with the anti-christ which is of course the reason we force women into the clinics in hopes of discovering they are incubating demon spawn. If they dare not be the righteous mother of Lucifer then we rip out her baby and sacrifice to the devil-baby Gods in hopes for “better luck next time!”.
It has been reported that the year Roe v. Wade was passed, over 800,000 women had underground, illegal abortions. They think because the number of legal number abortions that are occurring, it is somehow the fault of that particular law which is infuriating! Yes, some decisions to have an abortion can most certainly be attributed to the fact that it is now safe and legal to obtain an abortion. But, that doesn’t mean that the large percentage of them would not have occurred anyway. We know this. They know this. Some of the supporters DO NOT know this because they are naive, vulnerable or just fed lie after lie after lie by people they are meant to trust without question…a very dangerous trust I might add! But, what do those numbers really tell us? Not that millions of fetuses have been aborted because of some mythical “Girls Gone Wild” fad took hold in 1972, or some evil plot carried out by the scary liberals or democrats. It is because women are taking charge of their lives which, believe it or not Rightwingers, Religious peeps, anti-choicers, horny men from all over the US, is much more beneficial to both men and women as well as Republicans and Democrats! They are planning their families more responsibly (no offense to those do not plan their pregnancies or those from another time that were often surprised by each pregnancy albeit wanted pregnancies they could be excited about. Perfectly reasonable btw) which leads to a more stable family life, a boost to our economy as more people are becoming educated and entering into career-oriented employment which progressing our nation as opposed to the alternative default if not given those opportunities, a reduction and shorter enrollment necessities in all of those pesky government assistance plans we all know you LOVE TO HATE, and of course, less children being abused, left in orphanages (which btw, have to be paid for!), brought into disaster home environments, and even worse, continue the vicious cycle of poverty for those who had no financial business or otherwise to bring a child into the world (and no, I am not referring to some nefarious eugenics plan or solely to minority groups). Unplanned pregnancies happen in all groups of people, and no matter their current situation, can and does reek havoc on their lives, and yours, as well as the “pursuit of happiness” by all involved that comes with that other pesky little detail, LIBERTY!!!!
People need to understand the implications of being staunch supporters of the anti-choice movement. I have never been able to get my head around the paradoxical views on abortion and wanting to reduce or eradicate government intervention to help support those who “choose” (some of which choice was never afforded) to forgo the abortion…um hello, who do you think the responsibility will fall to once you get your stubborn ways??? The Church? Not quite! The NPOs or NGOs? Try again! Citizens? Nuh uh, not voluntarily!! Will some from all of those groups seek to help? Yes, but not enough. We will watch our entire economic infrastructure collapse and our streets will become those of a third world country!! Too dramatic you say? Exaggerating you ask? Nope! Why then can I come to such a drastic evolution of the US? Because, while you are busy forcing births and denying people the resources in which to BARELY get by in the first place, you will have to begin demanding community outreach mandates through some weird fee charged to businesses and/or citizens, state-sponsored supplement programs that the taxpayers will have to incur (how else will you find the money), or coercive programs that would deny another some sort of privilege or right if not followed. They are living in a fantasy land if they think any of that is not true…oddly enough many will scream take of your tin foil cap or that I am indeed overstating which I find humorous given how many of them believe the gov is involved in all of these crazy plots against them and we must stand steadfast in the fight against tyranny (picture me saying that with great conviction, pounding my chest, and in a super scary low voice). No, the money they THINK they will save cutting these programs will NEVER be even close to enough to fix the impending next Great Depression! And, you will have a whole new movement on your hands demanding why when you promoted small government are you now making your citizens pay the price!
“Support the VERY RED RIGHT!! Poor and Pregnant 2016” should become the Right’s campaign slogan. How fitting that they are the RED group!! Very red because they may as well forget trying to wash the blood from your hands because they will be permanently stained as people will start dropping like flies from botched abortions, suicides, an increase in domestic violence due to financial hardships, health issues such as undetected cancers that proactive family planning has thwarted for so long, an increase in STDs, undetected diseases some of which are almost always caught BECAUSE a woman decided to have an abortion, and last but not least, the dead babies you fought so hard to protect that are now TRULY suffering as PERSONS some because of deaths that were knowingly going to take place shortly after birth because they didn’t develop properly In Utero and some at the hands of psychologically damage mothers, some at the hand of a brutal family member or parent (including biological, foster and/or adoptive), some by strangers going in and out of an unstable home life, and some later on from suicide based on all sorts of reasons including being forced to be born into a terrible existence!!! And just to show you I realize not all will end up in misery, I acknowledge some will have extremely favorable outcomes whether or not it was a forced situation, but that in no way justifies the means.
Even today, so many choices are made through coercion, guilt pushed onto them by anti-choicers/right/religious people, or being outright lied to about how abortions are performed and/or the “consequences” of having an abortion. They are just blatant lies, and the people telling them are proud of their hypocritical policies that ensure these women never get a fair shot at “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” as the man in the comment above so vehemently says is denied to the zygote/embryo/fetus that has taken residence in that woman’s womb, sometimes by no fault of her own. Why is it that he/they are so hellbent on ensuring the rights of those and not the rights of a person who no longer requires the womb of a woman? It makes no sense whatsoever!
Sorry for the rant, it just really infuriates me that lives are so carelessly tossed aside by anti-choice movement in order to fulfill some fantasy of what, I have no idea! People need to stay out of my girly business unless they are solicited or given approval to do so (pun intended)!
Thank you for sharing your story. I also grew up in a family that had Birch ideology (though I never heard the name till now). I also held similar pro-life view all through high school, albeit based on lies, like the one about rape. I started to question my convictions when I learned that until Roe v. Wade, abortion WAS illegal. I had never been taught about women who had died, or continue to die all over the world. I will be forever grateful for my high school teachers who exposed me to these facts. My family has become more and more extreme in their Birch-like views, and we barely speak. Reading your story helps me feel not so alone.
Once child is born you are on your own
Says it all