Defenders of the Unborn DEFENDERS OF THE UNBORN The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade z DANIEL K. WILLIAMS 1 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America © Oxford University Press 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Williams, Daniel K. Defenders of the unborn : the pro-life movement before Roe v. Wade / Daniel K. Williams. pages cm ISBN 978–0–19–939164–6 (hardback) 1. Pro-life movement—United States—History. 2. Abortion—Moral and ethical aspects—United States—History. 3. Abortion—Government policy—United States—History. 4. Abortion—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title. HQ767.5.U5W556 2016 363.460973—dc23 2015017478 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Contents Acknowledgments  vii A Note on Terminology  xi Introduction  1 1. A Clash of Values  10 2. The Political Fight Begins  39 3. Initial Losses  58 4. National Right to Life  88 5. “Abortion on Demand”  103 6. A New Image  133 7. Progressive Politics  156 8. National Battle  179 9. After Roe  205 Epilogue  243 Notes  269 Index  339 Photos follow page 178 Acknowledgments This book would not have been possible without assistance and encour- agement from numerous people. I am especially grateful to Robby George and Brad Wilson, the direc- tors of the James Madison Program at Princeton University, for giving me the opportunity to spend a year at Princeton researching and writing this book. The intellectually stimulating conversations that I had with some of the other scholars I met through the James Madison Program—including Andy Lewis, Chris Tollefsen, Ben Kleinerman, Nathan Schlueter, Ken Miller, Kathleen Brady, Andy Bibby, Melissa Moschella, and Matt Franck, among others—gave me a new perspective on my research subject and helped me refine my ideas about natural law, Catholic theology, utilitari- anism, the meaning of human freedom, and the defense of human life. I am also grateful to Bob Wuthnow for encouraging me in my research and giving me the opportunity to attend the research presentations of some of his graduate students and postdoctoral fellows during my year at Princeton. My progress on this book would have been much slower—and its quality would not have been the same—if I had not had the oppor- tunity to spend a year in the James Madison Program. For that reason, I owe a special debt of gratitude to my late friend and fellow Brown Ph.D. Alan Petigny for inviting me to apply to the James Madison Program and recommending me to the program’s directors. I know that I would have enjoyed sharing this book with Alan, and I regret that he did not live long enough to see its completion. I am grateful to several colleagues who read this manuscript in whole or in part. These people include Mary Ziegler, Matt Sutton, Ray Haberski, Michael de Nie, and Laura Gifford. I benefited greatly from their thought- ful suggestions for revision, as well as from the suggestions of my man- uscript’s anonymous peer reviewers. I am also grateful to my graduate research assistant Thadis Coley for reading through a full draft of the viii Acknowledgments manuscript and offering helpful suggestions. The students in a graduate seminar that I taught in the spring of 2014 read an early version of my manuscript, and I am grateful to them for their comments. I would also like to thank Stacie Taranto for reading my introductory chapter and offer- ing encouraging feedback. I am sure that not all of these readers would endorse everything that I have written in this book or share my perspec- tive on the subject, but I very much appreciated their thoughtful critiques of my work, insightful suggestions, and supportive feedback. I am grateful to Don Critchlow, David Courtwright, Phil Goff, Axel Schäfer, and Darren Dochuk for giving me the opportunity to publish my research in journals or books that they were editing and for encourag- ing me in this project. Numerous other scholars have shared conference panels or discussed my research with me. It would be difficult to provide a comprehensive list of all of my fellow conference panelists and colleagues in the field who encouraged me in my research along the way, so I will not try to do so, but if you met with me for lunch or coffee to discuss my research, gave an insightful conference presentation that furthered my thinking on the history of the abortion debate, or simply asked a thought- ful question after one of my conference paper presentations, I want you to know that I am grateful for your help, insights, or encouragement. I am grateful to the University of West Georgia (UWG) for providing me with research funds—including a faculty research grant—that facili- tated some of my archival research trips, and for offering me a sabbatical to spend a year of research and writing at Princeton. I appreciate the sup- port that my colleagues in the UWG history department have given me in completing this research project and for offering me the opportunity to present some of my research in public forums at UWG. I would also like to thank Mark Tietjen, a colleague in the philosophy department, for his thought-provoking conversations and encouragement throughout this project. I am grateful to the numerous archivists and librarians who have assisted me. I am especially thankful to the directors of several dioce- san archives—including the archives of the archdioceses of Boston, Los Angeles, New York, and St. Paul-Minneapolis, as well as the diocese of Harrisburg—for locating collections that would have been impossible for me to find without their kind assistance. Msgr. Kujovsky, the director of the archives of the diocese of Harrisburg, gave me special permission to use the archives after closing hours and went out of his way to put me in touch with useful contacts and locate helpful material for me in addition Acknowledgments ix to arranging a place for me to stay while I was in Harrisburg. I am also grateful to the staff at First Things for giving me access to the unprocessed papers of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. I am grateful to the Sisters of Life in New York for giving me access to their collection of pro-life materials. And I am thankful to the staff at many other archives and libraries, including those at Brown University, Princeton University, Princeton Theological Seminary, UCLA, University of Kansas, Wichita State University, Catholic University of America, Saint Anselm College, Saint John’s University, Duke Divinity School, Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, Harvard Divinity School, the Library of Congress, the North Dakota State Historical Society, the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Bentley Historical Library, the John F. Kennedy Library, the Gerald R. Ford Library, the Jimmy Carter Library, and the Ronald Reagan Library, for helping me during my research visits. I have also benefited from the opportunity to do research at Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library and Countway Library of Medicine, and am grateful to the staff at those libraries for their professionalism in maintaining the high quality of their collections. The friendly staff at the library of my own university, UWG, was very help- ful in facilitating interlibrary loan requests. I am also grateful to several people in the pro-life movement—especially Juan Ryan and Mary Vanis, who agreed to telephone interviews—for supplementing my archival find- ings with their own personal recollections of pro-life activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I would like to thank the Right to Life League of Southern California, Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, Right to Life-LIFESPAN of Michigan, Birthright International, the Diocese of Pittsburgh Archives and Records Center, Saint John’s University archives, and The Tidings (the newspaper for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles) for their generosity in sharing photos with me from the pro-life movement’s early years. I would also like to thank the late Dr. Jack Willke and the family of Edward Golden for generously allowing me to publish photographs from their personal collections. The staff at Religion News Service was very helpful in helping me locate relevant photos from their files. I am deeply grateful to my editor at Oxford University Press, Theo Calderara, for his skilled editing work on my manuscript. This is the sec- ond time that Theo has edited a book for me, and I continue to be thank- ful for the many things that he has done to strengthen the quality of my writing and eliminate extraneous material.