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This chapter examines Joan Andrews, a shy, conservative Catholic from Tennessee who engaged in some of the first violent campaigns against abortion providers in the early 1980s. Frustrated by conventional activists’ failure to overturn Roe, Andrews toured the nation firebombing clinics, chaining herself to obstetrical equipment, and teaching activists how to disrupt clinic operations. Andrews and other antiabortion “rescuers,” rarely served lengthy prison terms, even on those rare occasions when district attorneys pressed charges against them for trespassing, vandalism, or assault. This chapter clarifies that the federal government’s indifference to anti-abortion violence enabled extremists to organize operations intended to intimidate abortion providers and women.

Government subsidies and population control advocacy of contraception and sterilization continued through the end of the twentieth century. By the year 2000 female sterilization was the most common contraceptive, especially among women of color and lower economic means. The use of public funds for abortion, on the other hand, came under increasing attack. The battleground shifted from efforts to legalize abortion to organized and sometimes violent attempts to recriminalize or restrict access to it. The modern antichoice campaign resembles nineteenth-century efforts to undermine women's demands for equal rights by forcing them to revert to the traditional role of mother. While both campaigns portrayed aborting women as selfish and unnatural, few in the nineteenth century debated the legal status or personhood of the fetus. The post-Roe opposition, on the other hand, prioritized the legal and constitutional protection of the fetus over the mother. The vocal antiabortion camp led population controllers to emphasize instead sterilization and long-acting contraceptives, especially Depo Provera (DP) and Norplant, as the answer to perceived population problems. As abortion became too politically charged to promote as a cost-saving method for governments, state and federal funding dried up. Funds for sterilization and long-acting contraceptives, on the other hand, remained intact. These methods better suit the population control agenda as they are permanent, or semipermanent, and thus avoid any accidental pregnancies that indigent women could not afford to abort.

This chapter deals with the mechanism by which pregnancy is prevented as it relates to antiabortion politics. It examines the alliance between contraceptive researchers and reproductive-choice feminists around the debate on intrauterine device (IUD)’s mechanism of action. It describes how contesting views on the mechanism of the IUD were built in relationship to each other. This chapter shows that IUDs are not abortifacient by pointing to the unlikelihood of fertilization. It suggests that IUD developers appropriately claim themselves to be allies of feminists. It reveals that the scientific debate around the IUD’s mechanism of action is an important ingredient in the discursive transformation.

This chapter examines how and why infant abandonment has led to individual, regional, and national initiatives to save babies' lives. It considers several narratives of social responsibility that are embedded within infant abandonment prevention discourses and used by some activists in their campaign to urge women to safely relinquish unwanted newborns so that they could be placed in loving adoptive families, and why some activists gather together to honor dead abandoned infants and use the religious notion of saving their souls. It also discusses infant abandonment prevention in relation to antiabortion philosophies and aims, and the view that pregnant women who may unsafely abandon their babies represent a threat to individual infants as well as to the meaning of motherhood. Finally, it describes similarities in the language, strategies, and philosophies used by safe haven advocacy organizations and crisis pregnancy centers to reach individual pregnant women, including teenagers.

The chapter traces the career of Shelley Shannon, whose work in the far right wing of the prolife movement reached its apex when she shot Dr. George Tiller in 1993, outside his Wichita clinic. Like many women who joined grassroots antiabortion groups, Shannon was energized by the immediacy of direct action protest. But Shannon’s particular circumstances, including her troubled childhood, her proximity to white supremacists activists near Grants Pass, Oregon, and her membership in conservative evangelical Christian Church framed her choice of tactics. While the Reagan and Bush administrations had refused to authorize the FBI to investigate whether anti-abortion extremists were part of an organized effort to terrorize abortion providers, President Clinton authorized Attorney General Janet Reno to protect the nation’s abortion clinics. But Shannon’s plan to shoot Dr. Tiller, designed with the assistance of the cryptic prolife extremist group Army of God, had been carefully planned before Clinton took office.

The manuscript concludes by examining the contemporary state of abortion activism in the United States. It considers the close friendship Scott Roeder struck with Shelley Shannon after she was incarcerated. In 2009, Roeder shot and killed Dr. George Tiller in the foyer of his Wichita church. I also detail the surge in state and federal legislation intended to restrict women’s access to abortion and birth control, despite Americans’ stable attitude about abortion. Finally, the book considers how women were instrumental to the antiabortion movement’s efforts to diminish women’s ability to secure legal abortions in the post-Roe era.

This chapter analyzes nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates on the question whether doctors should be obliged to report illegal abortions to the authorities. While some American physicians and lawyers advocated such a duty in the context of wider anti-abortion campaigns, most doctors in the USA seem to have remained reluctant to damage the confidential physician-patient relationship by denouncing the women concerned. The existence of a statutory medical privilege in some American states served as an argument to keep abortions confidential. In Britain, the judiciary was divided over the issue, Justice Henry Hawkins calling it a “monstrous cruelty” to report a woman who had undergone an abortion to the police, whereas Justice Horace Avory criticized doctors who had maintained silence in such a situation. The medical professional bodies in Britain supported confidentiality in abortion cases. In Germany, a general reluctance of doctors to report cases of illegal abortion prevailed, until in the period of National Socialism notification of any miscarriage or abortion was made compulsory through the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, and the law on medical confidentiality was changed to permit disclosure for purposes that were held to be legitimate in the public’s opinion.

This chapter examines the debate over abortion rights. Abortion used to be almost always discussed in feminist terms—as a political issue affecting the condition of women. Since then, the right-to-life movement has succeeded in getting the public and the media to see abortion as an abstract moral issue having solely to do with the rights of fetuses. The “pro-life” position is based on a crucial fallacy: that the question of fetal rights can be isolated from the question of women’s rights. In their zeal to preserve fetal life at all costs, antiabortionists are ready to grant fetuses more legal protection than people. Despite its numerical insignificance, the antiabortion left epitomizes the hypocrisy of the right-to-life crusade. Its need to wrap misogyny in the rhetoric of social conscience and even feminism is actually a perverse tribute to the women’s movement; it is no longer acceptable to declare openly that women deserve to suffer for the sin of Eve.

This chapter discusses government properties, which First Amendment law calls “public forums,” that offer underfunded speakers opportunities to reach audiences. The Roberts Court has limited those opportunities by holding in two cases that the government may commandeer certain speech in public forums to express its own ideas or values and by holding in a third case that public universities may bar university-sponsored student groups from limiting their membership on moral grounds. A fourth Roberts Court public forum decision holds, in much more speech-protective fashion, that a state “buffer zone” that barred speech around abortion clinics restricted more speech than necessary to achieve the government’s permissible objectives. That decision, however, may limit its value for future speakers by emphasizing the distinctive character of the antiabortion “counsellors” who won the case.