Battle Lines
WHEN DR. DOLORES BERNADETTE Grier died on February 22, 2018, three communities mourned—the pro-life community, the Catholic community, and the African-American community. The founder of the Association of Black Catholics Against Abortion, Dr. Grier was inspired to oppose abortion in 1977 after hearing a speech by civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. After his speech, she went up to him and said, “Reverend Jackson, I’m going to join the pro-life movement. You said the pro-life movement needed youth and color, and I am the color.”
Dolores Grier deeply admired Reverend Jackson’s position as a black pro-life Democrat. In an interview published two months after the Roe v. Wade decision, Reverend Jackson told Jet magazine, “Abortion is genocide. . . . Anything growing is living.”1 Dolores Grier was heartbroken years later when Reverend Jackson sought the support of the hard-left wing of the Democratic Party for his presidential run—and reversed his stance on abortion.
Dr. Grier gave a speech in 1989 for the American Life League, saying:
Abortion is racism. It is a way of pruning, if you will, the black population. . . . In 1973, shortly after the civil rights struggles, when there were more benefits for black people, all of a sudden we were given this free, free thing from the society of America: abortion. Seventy-eight percent of your free abortion clinics were placed in black and urban areas, for the purpose of something free of charge from a racist society. To put it in the words of one pro-abortionist, “We don’t need so many Negroes anymore. There’s no more cotton to pick.”2
Dr. Grier joined an exodus of Democrats from a party they and their families had been committed to for generations.
Threatened and Besieged
By ending traditions and practices that went back to the founding of the nation, by reversing even longer-standing moral attitudes, and by doing so overnight, the Supreme Court had produced an earthquake in the political landscape. By establishing new moral codes based on questionable interpretations of the Constitution and inserting them into the very foundations of the nation; by imposing them simultaneously on every precinct, in every city and state in the Union, regardless of whether their inhabitants were sympathetic to the new codes or not, nine politically appointed justices had declared war on everyone who viewed the changes as assaults on their identities as Americans, or on their fundamental religious beliefs, or simply on their membership in communities that did not approve of those changes.
In a dissent from one of the Supreme Court’s post-Roe abortion decisions, Justice Scalia rightly observed: “[By] foreclosing all democratic outlets for the deep passions this issue arouses, by banishing the issue from the political forum that gives all participants, even the losers, the satisfaction of a fair hearing and an honest fight, by continuing the imposition of a rigid national rule instead of allowing for regional differences, the Court merely prolongs and intensifies the anguish.”3 Over the years, that anguish has hardened into resistance, and Americans have become divided not only over particular issues but over the fundamental laws of the nation itself, and—even more ominously—over what it means to be an American.
These Supreme Court decisions and the politics that inspired them were assaults on American pluralism, on the diversity of American communities, and on the fundamental American principles of equality and religious liberty. The Court itself, however, is only an instrument. The force behind the assaults was a radical movement whose members are convinced the society-transforming ends justify the undemocratic and extra-constitutional and even racist means. Their legal teams marched the issues through the courts and shaped the arguments—especially the invented “right to privacy”—to take advantage of an authority that could impose their minority agendas on an entire nation.
The Roe decision divided the nation along ideological, cultural, and even geographical fault lines. The pro-abortion camp was radical and cosmopolitan, concentrated on the two liberal coasts (especially New York and Hollywood); and it was represented in left-wing organizations and institutions like the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, the Democratic Party, academia, and the news media.
On the pro-life side were Americans who resided in a more rural and religious America, centered in the Bible Belt, but including Catholic urban areas. These communities felt directly assaulted by Roe and the radical forces behind it, and experienced this threat to their own communities as viscerally as they did the threat from the Communists in the ongoing cold war.
NO ROOM FOR COMPROMISE
The Roe decision provoked a seismic public reaction. The Second Vatican Council had already condemned abortion as “an unspeakable crime” in 1962. So it was no surprise that, within months of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the Catholic Church founded the “right-to-life” movement. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops declared that “a moral imperative” existed for a “well-planned and coordinated political organization by citizens at the national, state and local levels.”4 The goal of the movement was to add a right-to-life amendment to the Constitution.
The immediate result of the church’s demarche was to destroy the political coalition that had created the New Deal and powered the Democratic Party to electoral victories for three generations. In his book Left at the Altar, Democratic Party centrist Michael Winters explored the political schism caused by Roe v. Wade. “Abortion,” Winters wrote, “was the iceberg against which the New Deal coalition of Catholics and liberals sank.”5
It wasn’t merely the abortion issue that sank the coalition ship. The coalition was destroyed by the offensive and demeaning arguments put forth by the defenders of Roe, especially the radical feminists. They hailed Roe as a victory in the feminist battle to overthrow the existing order. The radicals’ demands were framed in such an aggressive and offensive way that a split became inevitable.
Michael Winters observed, “Catholics heard echoes of anti-Catholic bigotry and of eugenics in the arguments for liberalizing abortion laws, echoes that . . . were disturbing and unwelcome.”6 One particularly offensive attack was leveled by feminist icon Florynce Kennedy, who said, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”7 The word “sacrament” was a calculated attack on Catholics’ beliefs, in a sentence that accused them of misogyny.
More important was the series of nonnegotiable claims underlying all the feminist arguments: Abortion is just another form of contraception. A woman has a right to control her own body, regardless of the decisions that caused her pregnancy or the rights of the unborn child. To the feminists, abortion is the cornerstone of “gender equality” and women’s liberation. An unborn fetus is not a baby, not a person, but merely a blob of tissue, part of the woman’s body. These feminist arguments removed the unborn child from consideration entirely, a position that left no room for compromise or even dialogue.
Radical Aggression Against Religion
In 1968, the Democratic Party had adopted one of its equality-of-outcomes socialist rules, requiring that 50 percent of delegates to its national convention be women regardless of whether they merited the status of being a delegate. This gave the feminists the leverage to force the party to accept their extreme views as the party line. The religious fervor of the radical feminist position was expressed by Catholic feminist Mary Daly:
The repeal of anti-abortion laws should be seen within the wide context of the oppression of women in sexual hierarchical society. . . . The women’s movement is bringing into being a new consciousness, which is beginning to challenge the symbols and ethics of patriarchal religion. The transvaluation of values which is beginning to take place affects not only thinking on abortion, but the whole spectrum of moral questions.8 [Emphasis added]
In other words, according to Daly and her followers, feminism is here to replace traditional religion, which is reactionary and oppressive. The term “transvaluation” announces the revolutionary nature of their project. It intends to abolish traditional religion, which requires the subordination and oppression of women, and replace it with a feminist religion, to whom people will now look for the answers to moral questions. This is heady stuff, but hardly the kind of thinking that would allow dialogue between the parties. “We will eliminate you” is not a negotiating position.
Prior to Roe, there had been many debates about abortion across the country. Should abortion be permitted in cases of rape or incest? In cases of fetal abnormality? What should abortion law be for the people of New York and California? For the people of Kansas and Georgia? Should ending the life of an unborn child be left to the mother’s whim, or should there be specific circumstances and time frames in which abortion might be an acceptable course?
These and many other questions were the subject of dialogues before Roe—but Roe ended thoughtful discussion and compromise. Michael Winters, writing from the perspective of a concerned Democrat and Catholic, lamented how this avenue had been closed:
Democrats could have responded to Roe in a variety of ways. They could have worked to make adoption procedures less cumbersome or fought to extend healthcare benefits to help women whose economic circumstances might incline them to seek the relatively less expensive alternative of an abortion. . . . They could have supported a constitutional amendment turning the issue back to the states where it had been before Roe. Any of these approaches would have better reflected the public’s persistent ambivalence about abortion. Instead the party leadership largely bought the feminists’ interpretation of Roe.9
Of course, it wasn’t just an interpretation of Roe that the Democrats adopted. The party bought into the idea that women should be morally autonomous and freed of any responsibility toward their pregnancy. The feminist-invented constitutional “right to privacy” negated the unborn child’s right to life—and conferred a near-absolute right for a woman to have an abortion without consulting anyone, including the father of the unborn child.
Before Roe, the Democratic Party had been divided on abortion. But the Roe decision made it virtually impossible for any party official to hold a pro-life position. In a letter to a prominent Catholic two years earlier, Senator Ted Kennedy had written, “Once life has begun, no matter at what stage of growth, it is my belief that termination should not be decided merely by desire.”10 After the Roe decision was handed down, Kennedy was forced to become one of the defenders of a woman’s right to abort her baby, based solely on her desire to do so.
Like many other Catholic Democratic Party leaders, Kennedy sought to avoid the charge of hypocrisy by claiming that, in his private beliefs as a Catholic, he was still opposed to abortion.11 Once pro-choice policy was established as the official Democratic Party position, pro-life Catholics who were unwilling to surrender their principles (as Ted Kennedy had) migrated in droves to the Republican camp.
Energized by the Roe decision, the left stepped up its radical aggressions against the religious community. Each victory motivated the leftists to move on to the next item on their expansive agenda. The issue was never the issue. The issue was always the revolution. Each radical victory only inspired more radical aspirations and efforts.
How the Left Created the Religious Right
The next agenda item after Roe was the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution was introduced in 1971. It was approved by the Democratic-controlled House on October 12, 1971, and by the Democratic-controlled Senate on March 22, 1972, the year before the Roe decision. By 1977 the ERA had been endorsed by Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter and ratified by 35 of the 38 states required to pass it.
Written by feminists, the proposed amendment would have erased all legal distinctions between men and women. It was stopped just short of passage when Phyllis Schlafly mobilized a successful grassroots movement of conservative women. Schlafly pointed out that since the Constitution didn’t refer to women or men but to “we the people,” its equal rights protections already included women. On the other hand, the ERA’s denial of any differences between the sexes would strip women of rights they already had, including rights involving marriage and divorce. The ERA might even make women subject to the military draft.12
The left’s attempt to change the social order and marginalize religion provoked a national resistance movement. The radicals had successfully pushed their agenda through the Supreme Court and had nearly achieved their grand objective: amending the United States Constitution. But their impatience was their undoing. By attempting to achieve sweeping social change without persuading the country, precinct by precinct, through the democratic process, the left had created a resistance that was national in scope.
Driven by its desire to transform the social order, the left’s aggressions had frightened and offended Catholics and other religious conservatives. Among the unintended consequences was not only to drive Catholics into the Republican Party but to forge a pro-life alliance of Catholics and Protestants. This new spirit of Catholic-Protestant unity was reflected in a statement by a prominent, liberal Protestant theologian: “The Catholic Church is here defending the very frontier of what constitutes the mystery of our being. . . . Next to the issue of peace in the world, I feel the opposition to abortion and euthanasia constitutes the second major moral issue of our society (racial integration and the preservation of the family being third and fourth).”13
Prior to Roe, Baptists and evangelicals had not been politically active as a bloc. Jerry Falwell, head of the newly formed Moral Majority and one of the most important leaders of the religious right, said he had previously thought “the separation doctrine was to keep the church out of politics.”14 But once the communities of the Bible Belt came under siege from the left, conservative Christians changed their attitudes on political involvement. The Moral Majority, one of the most powerful new religious right organizations, defined its politics as “pro-life,” “pro-traditional family,” “pro-morality,” and “pro-American.” At its height, Falwell’s movement claimed 4 million members.15
The school prayer decision had already stimulated a dramatic growth of Christian schools, plus an increase in the number of parents choosing to homeschool their children. A 1978 attempt by the IRS to revoke tax-exempt status for Christian schools encountered overwhelming resistance and was quickly withdrawn. It was, as one observer wrote, “‘the precise trigger’ for the rise of the religious right.”16 Christians felt that their families, churches, and beliefs were under siege. The attacks on their religion by the government and the left galvanized them to seek the political means to defend themselves.
Within six years of the Roe decision, a new and powerful religious right had entered the political arena to defend the moral concerns of the Christian faith. These groups focused heavily on the family, the core institution they saw threatened by the newly radicalized moral order. Among its leading organizations were the American Family Association, formed in 1977, Focus on the Family (1979), Concerned Women of America (1979), and the Moral Majority (1979).
Their views, forged in battles with the left, were a natural fit with conservative politics, producing a shift to the right within the Republican Party. Under pressure from the religious right, the Republican Party withdrew its support for the Equal Rights Amendment and instead called for the restoration of prayer in public schools. The religious right was a major force in securing the nomination of Ronald Reagan, and registered millions of new voters to push Reagan over the top in the 1980 presidential election. Reagan adopted the Christian right’s opposition to abortion, and his traditional-values rhetoric resonated with the Christian right’s moral views.
Pressure from the religious right motivated state governments to pass laws limiting the right to abortion—laws requiring parental consent; spousal notification laws; requirements that abortions be performed in hospitals rather than clinics; laws barring state funding for abortions; and bans on “partial birth abortions” (a horrifying procedure, morally indistinguishable from infanticide, in which babies in late-term pregnancies undergo a partial delivery and are killed). Some (but not all) of these state restrictions were struck down by the Supreme Court.
The radical assaults on Christian values and morality did not let up; nor did their defeats cause radicals to rethink their maximalist demands. The passion that galvanized the left was not about changing particular laws and institutions or solving specific social problems. It was about changing the world.
Freedom from Responsibility
What Christians experienced as a war against their families, their communities, and their values was the result of the left’s “transformative” agendas. The motivating ideas of the leftist offensive brooked no compromise. If the right to abortion was part of a plan to replace traditional religion and its values in ways that would affect “not only thinking on abortion but the whole spectrum of moral questions,” what room was there for compromise with their religious opponents? It was a prescription for conflicts that were irreconcilable.
The radical position left opponents with no moral ground to occupy. Thus, the feminist claim that abortion rights must be viewed “within the wide context of the oppression of women in sexual hierarchical society” cast opponents of abortion as “oppressors.” This removed those who disagreed with the feminist view from the community of voices concerned about the welfare of women. It dismissed their arguments without considering them. They were “sexist” and “anti-woman.” If opponents of abortion are viewed as anti-woman, their concerns for the 60 million babies that have been aborted since Roe v. Wade are morally tainted.
Within the ranks of the left, discussions of the social impacts of the feminist position were rendered impossible. Consider the harm feminist positions caused in the African American community. According to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, in 2013 more African American babies were aborted (29,007) than were born (24,758) in the city.17 Why is a discussion of this off-limits among leftists? Because any suggestion that abortion causes social harm is an attack on women’s “reproductive freedom,” and thus on women, and thus morally reprehensible.
Feminists mobilize their supporters behind the “right to choose,” which they claim is necessary to establish the absolute autonomy of the liberated woman. “Pro-choice,” the banner under which they march, means the unconditional right to an abortion, a concept that implies a liberation from biology and its consequences, and from any moral obligations associated with the ability to bear children.
But there is a sleight of hand in the slogan itself. Before making the choice to have an abortion, a woman makes many other choices that radicals simply ignore: There is the choice to have sex and the choice of whom to have sex with. There is the choice to get pregnant and the choice that led to getting pregnant. Or to remaining pregnant until an abortion becomes the only way to terminate the pregnancy. Ever since the introduction of the “morning-after pill,” women have had a “plan B” available to prevent fertilization from taking place up to three days after intercourse.
Moreover, there has always been another choice available that radical feminists don’t like to talk about: The choice to give life to the child through adoption. This is a positive choice that the pro-abortion movement never speaks of. What feminists are actually demanding is not, in fact, the freedom to choose. They are demanding to be free from responsibility for their choices.
Breaking the Social Contract
When the Supreme Court circumvented the democratic process and imposed its will on America through Roe and similar decisions, it led to unintended consequences that went far beyond the abortion question. These decisions struck at the very core of America’s social contract. Prior to Roe, postwar America had been remarkably successful in maintaining a stable, cohesive society that was multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious, and free. By shattering a common understanding of our most basic social contract—the Constitution—the Court drove a stake through the heart of the foundation that has held Americans together.
In those years since World War II, America saw remarkable changes in social attitudes—some so dramatic that no one could have predicted them. For example, in the era of segregation, there was no more volatile racial issue than sexual encounters between blacks and whites. Anthropologists regard attitudes toward interracial marriage as a key index of a society’s assimilation of its minorities. In 1958, only 4 percent of white Americans approved of interracial marriages between blacks and whites. By 2013, the approval figure had jumped to 87 percent.18 Over the years, black-and-white couples have become ubiquitous in public life and popular culture, on television shows and even in commercials, whose producers take special care not to use images that might offend and alienate customers.
Interracial sexual relationships that once could have provoked lynchings are now accepted as normal. How did this happen? There was no Supreme Court decision that declared interracial marriage to be a constitutional right. This result was achieved through years of conversation and persuasion throughout our culture. Attitudes changed as all Americans came to accept that black Americans are included in America’s social contract, which requires that all citizens be treated with dignity as equals.
Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority, was once a committed segregationist, as were many members of the religious right in the Bible Belt. Many Christian leaders in the South had resisted the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to end segregation in the public schools. But in the 1960s, Falwell’s attitude changed. He had hired an Indonesian musician of dark complexion for his music ministry at the Thomas Road Baptist Church, which he had founded. When some parishioners objected, he stood firm and kept the new man on staff.
In 1968 Thomas Road Baptist Church accepted its first black members. In 1969 Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian Academy accepted its first black student. Falwell had experienced a conversion: “I realized that I was completely wrong, that what I had been taught was completely wrong,” he said. “For me it was a scriptural and personal realization that segregation was evil. I realized it was not taught in the Bible.”19
For over 225 years, democratic persuasion—a process made possible by the First Amendment, and by government through the consent of the governed—is what has made the American social contract work. Americans talked about their differences, listened to one another, and debated and compromised. It was all made possible by mutual respect for the right of others to dissent and disagree. This is the process to which radicals have laid siege.