Marjorie Jones Dannenfelser was older than Roe, but not by much. Her mother was barely pregnant with her in 1965, when Life magazine published the first photographs of a human developing in utero—a glowing eighteen-week fetus, floating in an amniotic sac against what looked like a starlit sky. An astonishing eight million copies sold in days. The images of the fetus were both a revelation and a fairy tale. They showed it developing over time, but not the woman growing the fetus with her body and blood. America met the fetus on its own, a pioneering cosmonaut exploring the womb, without the literal ties of motherhood.
But the bond between mother and child shaped Dannenfelser from the start. Not long after she was born, her parents moved back to her mother’s hometown of Greenville, North Carolina, to live near her mother’s mother. Dannenfelser would listen to her and two great-aunts tell stories of their lives growing up on the Perquimans River, where their father ran a hardware store and two of them got married on the same day. She learned from their strength and loss. Their fourth sister, the baby of the family, had died suddenly at age thirty back in 1939. The death certificate said she had an infection following a surgery that removed a dead fetus, and died of cardiac failure. She left behind her husband and two small children.
The Episcopal Church tied together generations of Dannenfelser’s family. The church was becoming more progressive, and it supported Roe. Before the ruling, Americans across party lines backed some form of abortion rights, including 68 percent of Republicans—more than the 59 percent of Democrats who agreed that “the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician,” in a poll released by Gallup in August 1972. Abortion opponents, often Catholic, were largely a nascent collection of regional groups and had no significant national organization.
Like many Republicans of their day, Dannenfelser’s parents were conservative on matters of economics and foreign policy, but liberal on social issues. They believed abortion was a “necessary evil,” Dannenfelser later wrote, so she did too. When she followed her mother’s footsteps to Duke University, she was eager to study medicine, like her father had. They were close, and when she worried she might be pregnant the week of her freshman orientation, her father helped her see a doctor to get a pregnancy test.
Dannenfelser knew she would get an abortion if it came back positive. She holed up in her room, anxious, and did not want to talk about it. It was 1984, about a decade after Roe. That year, more than 1.3 million American women had abortions. The Duke paper carried a regular ad, tucked between classifieds for a $6-per-hour housecleaning position and a typist job that paid $1.25 per page: “Abortion to 20 weeks. Private and confidential GYN facility with Saturday and weekday appointments available. Free pregnancy test.” Dannenfelser had her family, and she would have their love and support no matter what. She vowed she would not withdraw from college on the first day, that she would not be both a freshman and a mother. But it was a decision she never had to act on. The test was negative. She did not recount the story for years, until she was one of the most prominent antiabortion activists in the country.
The incident, and how it shaped the rest of Dannenfelser’s life—as Davis’s loss of Tate Elise affected hers—was another illustration of how the intimacy of abortion made the issue unlike nearly any other in American life. Pregnancies—intended and unintended, joyful and tragic and routine—shaped the lives of the women and men on all sides of the political fight over the procedure. And it is the inescapable closeness of the issue that has made it as formative for the nation as it has been for its major political players.
With the pregnancy scare behind her, Dannenfelser jumped into college life, and for her, that meant the College Republicans club. Its campaign to reelect President Ronald Reagan was in full steam, and she was fascinated with politics. Decades before Donald Trump made it his motto, Reagan had promised to “Make America Great Again,” and like most voters, Dannenfelser didn’t take his antiabortion views seriously. Two-thirds of Americans opposed the constitutional amendment he supported that would outlaw all abortions. Plus, it was hard to believe he would really do what he said, because before Roe, when he was the Republican governor of California, he signed a law that legalized abortion in cases of rape, incest, or the life or health of the mother.
But unlike in the world Dannenfelser knew back home in Greenville, where it was not uncommon to be a Republican and support abortion rights, the Republicans she met at Duke were so divided on the issue that the club had two different factions, one that was “pro-choice,” one that was “pro-life,” the political shorthand for supporters of abortion rights and their opponents. The split mirrored the division growing in the Republican Party across the country in the 1980s. A new movement, the “religious right,” as it was called, was gaining power and had been making abortion a significant, politically divisive issue.
Paul Weyrich, one of the fathers of the religious right, and his allies saw abortion as a way to mobilize Christian voters against Democrats like President Jimmy Carter, whom they blamed for forcing evangelicals to desegregate their Christian schools to keep their tax-exempt status. They organized Christian conservatives into a significant political coalition for Reagan—and he won, twice. Though Catholics often led antiabortion groups, evangelicals quickly became a more consistently reliable antiabortion cohort. And Reagan became the most high-profile champion of their cause.
After Reagan won reelection, Dannenfelser refused to go to an event at Duke where antiabortion activists screened a film that the president himself had shown at the White House. The Silent Scream was a twenty-eight-minute film depicting a suction abortion at twelve weeks of pregnancy in graphic detail, made to look as if the fetus were crying out during the procedure. Medical experts disputed that a fetus could feel pain at that stage, but Reagan declared that fetuses felt “long and agonizing pain” during the procedure. The footage was edited, with the speed altered for dramatic impact. It gave the impression that a twelve-week fetus, in reality less than two inches long, was like a full-term baby thrashing about in alarm before an abortion. The White House showing was a high-profile win for the new antiabortion movement, which aimed to get the film in front of as many elected officials and Supreme Court justices as possible. The effort made Dannenfelser angry. She remembered how she felt when she thought she might be pregnant.
“When you become a woman, come back and talk to me,” she told men who questioned her views.
But the shifting Republican politics were a powerful force as she came of age. Her interest in medicine was rapidly being replaced by a growing ardor for politics. She wrote to the Heritage Foundation, Weyrich’s conservative think tank in Washington. The group was part of an effort to build a new generation of conservative leaders in public policy, working alongside other new groups like the Federalist Society, which aimed to shape the future of conservative law. In the summer of 1986, Dannenfelser got a spot in a group house for ten young Republicans on O Street in Georgetown, called the Right House, part of an experimental project to network top young Republicans from around the country.
Warm summer evenings at the Right House became a time for Dannenfelser and her new friends to sort out their place in the shifting Republican order, with boozy ramblings about philosophy. Members of the Right House fell generally in two camps, the libertarians, who, like Dannenfelser, supported abortion rights, and the social conservatives, who were often Catholic and opposed Roe as “a tragic betrayal of our nation’s founding principles,” she later recalled. Most of the house focused simply on politics, but she grew smitten as one recent Catholic philosophy graduate, Chris Currie, made impassioned political arguments from a place of moral conviction. They would argue over Catholic dogma, and she pressed the case for why the church should allow birth control and divorce. He was “the best apologist” for Christian faith she had ever met, she said.
As the summer went on, they dated, and she started doubting her past beliefs on abortion and on faith. His Catholic worldview seemed so big, with philosophy and history stretching all the way back to the first century, and her Episcopal faith started to feel inadequate. She encountered the book that catechized antiabortion activists, John C. Willke’s 1971 Handbook on Abortion, filled with images of mangled fetuses and arguments to defend their cause. She admired the way the Catholics lived their lives. When one of the Catholic guys in the house found a pornographic video in the VCR, he destroyed it. The house manager, a libertarian, demanded he pay for lost property damages, citing principles about freedom of speech. But the Catholics, including Currie, replied that they ultimately answered to a moral call higher than law: pornography, the church taught, violated human dignity and harmed the community. The libertarians kicked them out of the house, and Dannenfelser chose to leave with them.
The death of a childhood friend that summer also pushed her toward faith. “How to handle loss for the Christian is all tied up in the whole story of salvation and humanity,” she reflected later.
Religion and politics were blending in a new way for Dannenfelser. Back at Duke, she decided to major in philosophy, with a second in political science. And when Pope John Paul II came to the United States in September of her senior year, she and Currie traveled to see him in Detroit, the final stop of the pope’s whirlwind ten-day trip. Before leaving to return to Rome, the pope urged action against abortion.
America’s majestic mountains and fertile plains were indeed beautiful, John Paul II told a crowd gathered at the airport to send him off. But America’s greatest beauty and richest blessing was instead found in the human person.
“Every human person—no matter how vulnerable or helpless, no matter how young or how old, no matter how healthy, handicapped or sick, no matter how useful or productive for society—is a being of inestimable worth created in the image and likeness of God,” he said. “If you want equal justice for all, and true freedom and lasting peace, then, America, defend life!”
Dannenfelser soon felt a tug she could not ignore. As she got to know the Catholic Church through her boyfriend and the pope’s teaching, she fell in love with the faith. And like falling in love, religious conversions are often hard for those on the outside to truly understand. Her mother absolutely disagreed with Catholic opposition to birth control, abortion, and divorce. The conversion to Catholicism meant saying goodbye to her old self, her whole identity, and in many ways to the women who had shaped her for generations. Yet spiritually, Dannenfelser felt drawn to what Pope John Paul II often called the “feminine genius” of Mary, the mother of Jesus. History had long excluded women and limited their economic, political, and social participation because it penalized motherhood instead of rewarding it, he argued. Mary was a model for full human dignity and female service to society, grounded in being a mother.
It was this vision of womanhood that Dannenfelser grew to love, even as her religious conversion to Catholicism and her political conversion to the antiabortion cause blended into one. Her personal transformation mirrored the shift of conservatives of her time. Over the fourteen years from Roe to the time of the pope’s visit, the Republican Party had gone from mostly supporting abortion to being defined by opposing it. The story of her conversion was also the story of a new Republican Party, driven by a conservative Christian flank.
Not long before Dannenfelser graduated, after she saw the pope in Detroit, she went to see Reagan when he came to speak at Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium. The editorial board of The Duke Chronicle, the student newspaper, criticized the president, “this most moral of leaders,” for forcing his morals on the public by opposing abortion rights. A fight broke out in its pages as students fired off opinion letters to the editor about abortion—for weeks.
Men can never understand “the desperation, the anguish, the physical and emotional suffering” of a pregnant woman considering abortion, a junior named Stacy Pollina wrote. What about the forty-year-old mother of five who jeopardizes her own life with another pregnancy? Or of a thirteen-year-old raped by her father, a child carrying a child? Biologically, women have no choice—no freedom.
“To make abortion illegal is only to rape women of what freedom they do have—the freedom to choose to have an abortion or not, in accordance with their own moral values,” Pollina wrote. “To make it illegal is to impose certain moral values upon every woman in the form of control over her body through legislation.”
Reading Pollina’s letter, Dannenfelser decided it was time. Unlike when she was a freshman, she was now with Reagan all the way.
Dannenfelser replied with a five-paragraph letter of her own, her first real public declaration of her new opposition to abortion. LIFE DESERVES A CHANCE, the headline announced.
She used to agree with Pollina, she wrote, and she understood “the desperation, the anguish, the physical and emotional suffering” that Pollina described, alluding to her own pregnancy scare. “I can testify to the fact that concern for oneself—one’s body and reputation—is natural and understandable,” she wrote. “But the difficult and crucial challenge in life is to come to the point where one can reach beyond the self and feel concern for the life of another.”
The right to life is the most fundamental of all rights, she went on. No one knows for sure at what point we can be called human, “given the elusive physical and spiritual nature of the human being,” she reasoned. “This means we must not assume that an unborn life is not human; even the smallest chance that it is, that is, is enough. Life is too precious a gift to gamble with.”
Dannenfelser settled in Washington a converted woman in the late 1980s, eager to follow the political principle of her first boss on Capitol Hill, an antiabortion Democrat, Representative Alan Mollohan, cochair of the House Pro-Life Caucus: “If you shoot a bear, you have to kill it.” It felt strange to her, working for a Democrat, but helping him advance the antiabortion cause came first. She married a cradle Catholic, a colleague and mentor working on antiabortion issues, Martin “Marty” Dannenfelser, and temporarily retired to start a family.
But she remained devoted to the antiabortion cause, determined to bring her own conversion to America. It was not long before she helped to start a new group, the Susan B. Anthony List, to shoot down the bear of Roe. And now, after four years of losing in Obama’s America, she refused to let her own party prevent her from killing it.