Chapter 11

Mildred Jefferson arrived in impeccable dress at the WGBH-TV studio in Boston. Her fellow Harvard alum, Justice Blackmun, was due to deliver his Roe opinion any day. In anticipation of it, the doctor readied, in December 1972, to speak to the camera of the evils of abortion.

Mildred had first taken to the airwaves back in July 1970, decrying abortion in a debate aired on Boston’s Channel 2. She had only just awakened to the procedure, roused by the decision of the American Medical Association to suddenly accept what for so long it had not. She’d marshaled medicine and science in her arguments, speaking of fetal development and hysterotomy abortion—the removal of a fetus through an incision in the abdomen.

That same year of 1970, the pro-life community had also begun to turn toward science, after a Benedictine priest and professor in Minnesota named Paul Marx showed his Catholic students a medical film of an abortion. The students had recoiled, and the movement was thus transformed. “Instead of simply rehashing the philosophical and constitutional arguments against abortion legalization,” observed professor Daniel Williams, “the pro-life movement would use the power of fetal photography to convince the public that every abortion killed a human baby.” Indeed, by the close of 1972, such photographs (magnified and in color) would help to sell 1.5 million copies of “Handbook on Abortion,” a tidy grouping of questions and answers written by a pro-life Cincinnati obstetrician and his wife.

Barbara Rockett saw in Mildred the same potential to transform. Rockett had enlisted Mildred to the cause after hearing her decry abortion at a medical meeting. And after watching her on TV, she spoke of Mildred to a priest named Paul Harrington, who then wrote to the doctor. Identifying himself as a representative of “the Catholic Bishops of Massachusetts on the abortion issue,” the monsignor praised Mildred’s presentation and hoped she might thenceforth provide “helpful assistance.”

Mildred thanked the priest. She was open to collaborating. But she also wished to elucidate her position. She was, she wrote, “not so much ‘against abortion’ as . . . ‘for the sanctity of life.’ ” She added that what upset her even more than abortion was that doctors were performing them.

To stand for life was, suddenly, to stand against the medical establishment, that which Mildred still hoped to join. And, in the fall of 1970, she founded, with Dr. Rockett and others, the Value of Life Committee, an organization dedicated to saving the unborn from “their destruction.”

VOLCOM’s opposition to abortion was not absolute; it opposed those abortions “sought for economic, sociologic or eugenic reasons, or for reasons of convenience.” But Mildred had little sympathy for the woman carrying an unwanted fetus. Such a woman could have chosen (as she had) to abstain from sex or to practice birth control. (Mildred approved of diaphragms, condoms and “educated rhythm.”) And unlike others in the pro-life movement who presented women as victims of male doctors, Mildred did not. Hers was a philosophy of self-determination; pity was pitiful, abortion too. “The woman who arranges her life haphazardly, relying on abortion to remove complications,” wrote Mildred, “is unworthy of being called woman.” Of those “complications” come of rape or incest, she simply wrote, “Society’s efforts should be turned to ameliorating the circumstances that result in unwanted pregnancy.”

Mildred feared a change in the law; her eye was on Roe. In 1972, she was among the signatories of a brief filed to the Court that she later described as “scientific evidence of the humanity of the unborn.” Mildred sought to advance this idea not only with medical slides and arresting language but with her self-described “20-tooth smile.”

Mildred’s crusade left little time for her husband. If Shane wished to be at her side, he says, he had to accompany her to VOLCOM meetings. Abortion left Mildred little time for medicine, too.

MEDICINE HAD ONCE CONSUMED MILDRED. Back in 1951, she had been a new MD and aspiring surgeon when she told a reporter that what most defined her was “singleness of purpose.” That purpose had gone unfulfilled. Twenty years after medical school, her board certification had still not come.

But in 1971, she completed her stint as chief resident in surgery. And the following spring, at long last, the American Board of Surgery certified Dr. Mildred Fay Jefferson.

The moment was bittersweet. A lifelong goal had finally been realized. It had, however, been so long deferred that the dream had withered. More, it had given way to another career. Still, she who at age seven had snipped the frenum of her tongue-tied cousin and dreamed of becoming a surgeon now resolved at forty-five to find time for medicine, opening a medical practice on Harrison Avenue at the Boston University Medical Center.

The university quickly made Mildred an assistant clinical professor of surgery. But board certification did not change her lot. Mildred remained, as the director of surgical services at Boston City Hospital put it, “a black female . . . competing in a man’s world.” Though she needed desperately to build her practice, and more than once asked the chairman of surgery at her hospital to refer patients to her, he “refused to do so,” he acknowledged, even as he attested to knowing “nothing of a derogatory nature concerning her.”

Mildred would not speak publicly of her ordeal. She rebuffed the overtures of a Boston caucus devoted to black students and faculty. “I have found the whole emphasis on ethnicity and separatism self-defeating,” she wrote in reply. “There is no way to say ‘black is beautiful’ without provoking a response of ‘white is right.’ I prefer to let my life speak for itself.”

Of course, that life had been shaped by the realities of race and gender. And two decades after her graduation from Harvard had turned her into a celebrity—the first black woman to do this and that—Mildred had grown disillusioned. She was apt to speak in private not of the determinative power of her will but of an existential unfairness that her thwarted career had only confirmed. And she had thus chosen not to conceive a child with her white husband, never mind that childlessness was at odds with everything she publicly stood for: the power of self-determination, the insistence that every conception culminate in a birth, the assertion that propagation was the very purpose of woman—“the essence and reasons we exist as female human beings,” she later said. In perhaps the only public comment she would ever make on her childlessness, Jefferson alluded both to the inequity of life, and to her midlife conversion from nurture to nature. Said Jefferson: “I believe that biology is destiny.”

Mildred stood, in 1972, at a road forking between medicine and activism. She knew which direction she would travel. The same facts of her birth that were obstacles to overcome in medicine were, in the pro-life movement, assets, her race and gender and religion of great benefit to a community desperate to expand beyond white Catholic men. Indeed, the doctor—a black Methodist woman—embodied the movement’s aspirations.

There was something else about Mildred that foretold the future of the movement: she saw great opportunity in politics. As she would soon tell the Senate: “right-to-life organizations will become a permanent part of the political scene.”

IF EITHER POLITICAL PARTY could be seen, in the run-up to Roe, as putatively pro-life, it was the Democratic; Catholics had long tended to be Democrats, and flag-bearing politically liberal Catholics like Edward Kennedy denounced abortion without pause. But pro-life efforts to formally ally themselves with the left had gained little traction in the sixties, and family planning remained resolutely nonpartisan. Republican Dwight Eisenhower and Democrat Harry Truman—former presidents bound by a fear of overpopulation—came together in 1965 to co-chair a Planned Parenthood committee. And in 1967, twelve Democratic and nine Republican senators supported the Therapeutic Abortion Act in California, which made abortion legal through twenty weeks so as to protect the mental or physical health of the pregnant woman.

Two years later, prominent Republicans weighed in. “We need to make population and family planning household words,” Representative George H. W. Bush told Congress in February 1969. Added President Nixon in July: “No American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition.”

Nixon would soon sign a bill subsidizing contraception and abortion, too, the latter at military hospitals. But then he about-faced. For, as the professors Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel would observe four decades later, Republican strategists had come to identify Catholics and, more specifically, abortion, as rich in political opportunity. In March 1971, the president (prompted by a memo from advisor Pat Buchanan) revoked the permissive abortion policy he had only just instituted and disavowed a report on population growth that advocated the nullification of “unwanted fertility.” “Abortion on demand,” announced Nixon, “I cannot square with my personal belief in the sanctity of human life—including the life of the yet unborn.”

Nixon’s support buoyed the pro-life movement. Having watched in dismay as sixteen states legalized abortion in various circumstances from 1967 through 1970, the movement now helped to defeat all twenty-five legalization initiatives proposed in 1971. But in 1972, the pro-choice found in courts, both state and federal, the victories denied them by legislatures; judicial rulings legalized or liberalized abortion laws in seven states.

If the American legal battle over abortion was in its infancy, its political battle had only just been conceived. And in the months leading up to the Roe ruling, the fight for public opinion took to the air like the seeds of a dandelion. In October, one month before a referendum on abortion in Michigan, the Catholic church funded ads throughout the state which suggested to priests that they correlate the question of whether to have an abortion with the question of whether to shoot one’s neighbor. In November, upwards of 65 million people watched a two-part episode of Maude, a new TV sitcom on CBS, whose protagonist found herself pregnant at forty-seven. (She chose to have an abortion.) And in December, a woman named Jimmye Kimmey homed in on the word “choice” as the most effective rejoinder to “life.” “Right to life is short, catchy, composed of monosyllabic words—an important consideration in English,” wrote Kimmey, the director of an organization advocating the repeal of abortion law. “We need something comparable. Right to choose would seem to do the job.”

MILDRED JEFFERSON APPRECIATED the power of words. She could use them to bludgeon or inspire, and she rewrote her favorite sentences until they were just right. Between 1972 and 1973, for example, she changed her declaration that it was not yet time “to legislate that only the wanted, the perfect and the privileged have the right to be born” to “the perfect, the privileged and the planned”—an alliteration the movement would come to summon without cease.

Mildred’s name was carrying. And yet, few knew who she was. Her desire for privacy was becoming almost pathological, the doctor inviting no one to her home, letting slip, as Daniel Williams put it, “no snippets of autobiography.”

Mildred was guarded for good reason. Not only was her husband white and her father estranged and her title as surgeon misleading, but her hoarding had forced her husband from her home.

Shane still saw Mildred daily, if only to drive her about—to her ailing mother in Roxbury, to yet another pro-life function. The Roe ruling was imminent when, in December 1972, he drove her to the WGBH-TV studio in Boston.

The station was a member of PBS. It had invited Mildred and three others to debate abortion on a national TV show called The Advocates. Asked on air to define abortion, Mildred was mindful, as always, to humanize the fetus. An abortion, she said, was any method “to get rid of the boy or girl before it can be born.”

Mildred then described those methods, speaking in her clear contralto of suction and D & C and saline and hysterotomy, narrating a carousel of graphic slides with plain and unhurried language: “This makes a mush of the developing baby. . . . Arms, legs and ribs may not break down so easily. . . . This one had the outer layer of its skin scalded off.” The audience sat silent, agape. When a young lawyer from the ACLU named Brenda Fasteau asked Mildred if illegal abortion did not lead to horrors worse than those she had just described, Shane listened as Mildred parried the question. What mattered, she said, was what could be done to prevent those horrors. “The alternative to illegal abortion is not legal abortion,” she said. “It’s not being pregnant at the time when one should not be.”

Fasteau tried again. What of the mother of four who finds herself pregnant at thirty-nine and “feels she simply cannot raise another child?”

The doctor did not answer. To be a mother at thirty-nine, said Mildred, is to be thought attractive at thirty-nine. “Having a baby is one of the guarantees—absolute proof—that you are sexy.” The room burst into applause, the lawyer unable to respond before time ran out.

Lawrence Lader watched in dismay. PBS had broadcast the segment on stations around the country, and the airing of fetal slides, he felt, presented by the doctor, had been horribly effective. As he told the board at NARAL, the advocacy group he had helped to found: “Their impact was overwhelming.”

Philip Moran agreed. Moran was a local lawyer who’d met Mildred months before through the pro-life advocate Joseph Stanton. The three were among the organizers of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, a lay-led organization that would incorporate in one month and soon after join the National Right to Life Committee, a pro-life umbrella group that would become the most powerful in the nation. Seeing Mildred on television, he was in awe. “I remember watching that show and thinking, this woman is the greatest,” says Moran. He adds: “That’s what propelled her onto the national stage.”

All at once, Mildred was a pro-life celebrity.

Off in Sacramento, the governor of California had tuned in. Ronald Reagan had supported legal abortion, signing into law the 1967 Therapeutic Abortion Act. The bill had made abortion legal when pregnancy threatened the physical or mental health of a woman, and Reagan had expressed confidence that Californians would support its “humanitarian goals.” Still, Reagan had not thought the bill perfect; he lamented, for example, that it did not require the women getting abortions to live in-state or the facilities providing them to be of a certain size. He’d also insisted that the bill drop a provision allowing abortion in cases of fetal deformity. Now, more than five years later, a doctor on television had convinced Reagan to oppose all abortion except to save the life of a woman. The governor sat down to write her a letter.

“I had to tell you how truly great you were in your testimony on the ‘Advocates,’ ” Reagan wrote to Mildred on January 17, 1973. “I wish I could have heard your views before our legislation was passed. You made it irrefutably clear that an abortion is the taking of human life.”

Five days later, the Supreme Court would make clear that the law disagreed.