Science > Abortion > NARAL, Anti-Catholicism and the Roots of the Pro-Abortion Campaign
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NARAL, Anti-Catholicism and the Roots of the Pro-Abortion Campaign |
http://www.catholicleague.org/research/naral.htm
By Robert P. Lockwood
The public debate over abortion was critical in a resurgent anti-Catholicism
in the mid-1960s. With the cooperation of media, abortion became an ongoing
battle waged in a war of words based on anti-Catholicism. The issue was
quickly defined as Catholicism and its role in public life, rather than
abortion itself. Pro-life representatives who happened to be Catholic would
be grilled on their religious faith, rather than on their position on
abortion. When the Catholic Church hierarchy took a strong stand on
abortion, it found itself the target, rather than the position espoused.
Quickly, the public issue of whether or not abortion should be fully legal
in the United States descended into a cauldron of unrelated issues of
separation of Church and State, the Catholic Church's tax exempt status, the
religious affiliation of abortion opponents, alleged "Catholic power," and
the imposition of sectarian belief on American law. As one New York state
legislator would thunder in the midst of abortion debate, "you have no right
to come to the floor of this body and ask us to enact into law church
doctrine."
Why did Catholicism become the issue in the abortion debate? It was through
a planned effort by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action
League. Called by the acronym NARAL, the organization began as a collective
of pro-abortion groups, nascent feminist organizations, illegal abortion
referral services, and various Zero Population Growth zealots in the late
1960s. Its fundamental goal was to legalize abortion and to repeal any
restrictions on the practice that were in place in every state at the time.
Far more than Planned Parenthood in the 1960s, whose initial forays into the
abortion issue were tepid at best (and whose founder, Margaret Sanger, was
generally anti-abortion), NARAL was at the cutting edge of the abortion
debate and would play a strong role in its legalization.
One of the primary motivations in NARAL's abortion campaign was the
anti-Catholicism of its founder and first executive director, Lawrence J.
Lader. Lader would effectively harness and use anti-Catholicism as a
fundamental aspect of NARAL in abortion politics, legislating, public debate
and media coverage. Under the influence of Lader and NARAL, Catholicism
would become the issue, as much as abortion itself. According to Dr. Bernard
Nathanson, one of NARAL's original members and a close confidant of Lader,
this anti-Catholicism "was probably the most effective strategy we had."1
In his book "Aborting America,"2 Dr. Bernard Nathanson described an early
conversation he had with Lader. Nathanson, who was still conducting
"therapeutic abortions" when he wrote "Aborting America" with Richard N.
Ostling in 1979, had operated the largest abortion clinic in the world. But
by 1974, he had begun to seriously reconsider his support for legalized
abortion. He would later become a leading figure in the pro-life movement.
According to Nathanson, he and Lader were discussing the overall strategy
for legalizing abortion in the United States in October, 1967, six years
before the Supreme Court would knock down all state laws that criminalized
abortion in its Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions and two years before
the formation of NARAL. After Lader described the need to activate feminist
leadership to see abortion as not one of many issues but a foundational part
of the feminist crusade, Lader - as recalled by Nathanson - "brought out his
favorite whipping boy":
"`.(A)nd the other thing we've got to do is bring the Catholic hierarchy out
where we can fight them. That's the real enemy. The biggest single obstacle
to peace and decency throughout all of history.'
"He held forth on that theme through most of the drive home. It was a
comprehensive and chilling indictment of the poisonous influence of
Catholicism in secular affairs from its inception until the day before
yesterday. I was far from an admirer of the church's role in the world
chronicle, but his insistent, uncompromising recitation brought to mind the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It passed through my mind that if one had
substituted 'Jewish' for 'Catholic,' it would have been the most vicious
anti-Semitic tirade imaginable.'"3 As Lader would amplify in a later
conversation, "every revolution has to have a villain.There's always been
one group of people in this country associated with reactionary politics,
behind-the-scenes manipulation, socially backward ideas.(I)ts got to be the
Catholic hierarchy. That's a small enough group to come down on, and
anonymous enough so that no names ever have to be mentioned, but everybody
will have a fairly good idea whom we are talking about."4
Nathanson, who would officially be with NARAL from its inception in 1969
until 1975, explained that the goal was to focus on "the Catholic hierarchy,
not the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church was the ordinary man on the
street Catholic.we didn't want to antagonize the man on the street Catholic.
So we focused on the hierarchy - the bishops, the priests, the cardinals,
the pope. That was a clear shot and not many people were going to object to
it." Nathanson said that he and Lader were convinced that this "average
Catholic" could be separated from the hierarchy on the issue.5 When this
initial strategy was planned, it was just before the negative public
response to Pope Paul VI's encyclical "Humanae Vitae" condemning artificial
contraception6 that enveloped the media. Catholic "dissent" was highlighted
in newspapers around the country. The media reaction to that encyclical
seemed prophetic by Lader and Nathanson. It was natural to believe that
average Catholics would be just as selective over the issue of abortion when
it came to a head. Nathanson stated that making the target the hierarchy
"was a piece of enormous political foresight." It was based on the
perception that "the man on the street Catholic or the women on the street
Catholic were selective Catholics." They "didn't want to antagonize them.We
left them alone because they would eventually come around to the NARAL point
of view. One organization formed during those years was Catholics for a Free
Choice, under Frances Kissling."7
Lawrence Lader had come to the abortion issue through his involvement with
various leftist causes in New York politics after World War II through the
American Labor Party. According to Nathanson, "(Lader) had a long history of
being ultra-radical and anti-Catholic. He was for a time a political aide to
Vito Marcantonio, who was the only card-carrying Communist ever elected to
Congress."8 Vito Marcantonio (1902-1954) was considered the most radical
congressman to ever serve consecutive terms and was charged with being a
Communist. Representing New York's East Harlem from 1935-1937, 1939-1950, he
espoused various radical causes (he was opposed to the Marshall Plan and
cast the lone vote against the Korean War) and claimed to be the unofficial
congressional representative of Puerto Rico. He defended America's Communist
Party, and ran for office when abandoned by Republicans and Democrats under
the American Labor Party, which was considered a Communist front group.9
Through this early involvement with Marcantonio and extreme leftist circles,
Lader was, according to Nathanson, "inoculated with the anti-Catholicism
virus"10 years before he was involved in the abortion movement.
Lader, the son of a wealthy family, became a wandering journalist developing
articles on different causes until he struck on Margaret Sanger's birth
control crusade in the 1950s. In 1955 he authored his first book, "Margaret
Sanger and the Fight for Birth Control," which nurtured his animus toward
Catholics, as Sanger certainly faced strong opposition from the Catholic
Church in her campaign to encourage widespread contraceptive use among the
poor and minorities. Lader was clearly influenced as well by the eugenics
crusades of the 1930s and 1940s that would evolve into the Zero Population
Growth movement. (In 1971, he would author "Breeding Ourselves to Death.")
But very early, Lader would focus his efforts on the issue of abortion:
"(Sanger's) doctrines shaped my future writing and campaigns on birth
control and abortion. Sanger opposed abortion - she was horrified after
watching large numbers of poor women line up on Saturday nights outside the
offices of quack abortionists during her nursing days in New York. But she
stirred my thinking by making me read the one medical text on the subject. I
agonized over abortion for years, increasingly convinced that contraception
alone could never handle the problem of unwanted pregnancies; that the
horrors of back-alley abortions must be stopped and the procedure safely
performed in hospitals and clinics. When I published my first book calling
for legalization of abortion in 1966, and became overnight a campaigner
rather than a writer, it was as though every step I made was with Margaret
Sanger's ghost at my side, directing my strategy."11
Lader's purple prose and his concern to move back-alley abortions to the
safety of hospitals and clinics belie his later campaign to make certain
that New York State's permissive abortion law allowed abortions to be
performed outside of hospitals in back-alley clinics that simply moved to
the front of the alley. But, as noted in Eleanor Smeal's introduction to
Lader's 1995 book on RU 486, his most important contribution to the abortion
debate was chronicling "the Catholic Church's continuing efforts to deny
women their reproductive rights. He documents the tremendous power the
Catholic Church wielded in state legislatures as activists worked to repeal
laws restricting access to abortions."12
In addition to Sanger, Lader was no doubt influenced to bring
anti-Catholicism to the forefront of the abortion debate by Paul
Blanshard,13 another veteran of the post-war New York leftist circles. Lader
's writings on the Church echoed Blanshard's anti-Catholic theories.
Blanshard had developed a staunch anti-Catholic animus when he worked in the
State Department during World War II. Like many affected by the eugenics
movement, Blanshard was exposed to Third World poverty in Latin America and
determined that over-breeding was the heart of the problem. He blamed this
over-breeding on the impact of the Catholic Church.
Blanshard was an important figure in the "secularization" of
anti-Catholicism in the United States. While anti-Catholicism had
traditionally been a part of American culture, it had generally been a
Protestant-based prejudice against the Catholic faith, with most of its
arguments rooted in Reformation theology. In his landmark best-selling 1949
book, "American Freedom and Catholic Power," Blanshard argued that there was
an ascendant Catholic Church in America, dominated by the hierarchy, that
was becoming a majority through the uncontrolled breeding of the laity. When
Catholics became a majority, they would amend the Constitution making
Catholicism the official religion, require the teaching of Catholic morality
in public schools, and impose on America Catholic beliefs on marriage,
divorce and birth control, Blanshard charged. As Lader would state in
developing NARAL, the enemy was not lay Catholics, but the hierarchy who
dominated them. If Catholics "controlled their own Church, the Catholic
problem would soon disappear because, in the atmosphere of American freedom,
(Catholics) would adjust their Church policies to American realities,"
Blanshard contended.
Blanshard's book was highly influential in resurrecting the concept of a
Catholic hierarchy engineering mindless laity. As nativists argued in the
19th century that the Catholic population would see the true Protestant
light if only freed from the domination of clergy, Blanshard argued that it
was a ruthless Catholic hierarchy hungry for power that would destroy
American freedoms unless the laity could be freed from their machinations.14
This was foundational to Lader's need to find an acceptable "villain" and
was re-stated in his 1987 book, "Politics, Power & the Church."15 Lader
regurgitated Blanshard's thesis in the beginning of the book: "The
development of Catholic power - the influence of its religious morality and
political aims on American society - has followed a careful design.By 1980,
with the election of President Ronald Reagan, the Catholic church achieved
what it had only grasped for before: national power that gave the bishops
more access to the White House than any other religion, and made them one of
the most awesome lobbying blocs on Capitol Hill."16 According to Lader, the
only threat to this hierarchical Catholic power, a monolith proceeding
virtually unabated through the 20th Century, was the rise of dissent within
the Church: "a radical wing increasingly alienated from the autocratic
structure of the Vatican and the hierarchy.(T)he radical wing represents the
best moral aspirations of the church and a bedrock defense of First
Amendment principles and constitutional doctrine."17 Like Blanshard, Lader
had an image of the Church that reflected the language of nativist
anti-Catholicism, "an autocratic structure through which the pope and the
bishops make all decisions, and their constituents follow them without
question."18 And that alleged structure was collapsing, as Blanshard had
hoped, as Catholics gained control of their Church through this radical
wing, and adjusted to "American realities." The clearest of those American
realities, according to Lader, was abortion rights.
These would be the ideas that permeated the abortion debate in the United
States. As many pro-life activists would discover early on, through Lader
and NARAL the debate would not focus on abortion itself. Pro-abortion
activists knew the subject to be distasteful and understood that their
cause, particularly in the early years, was a minority position. But to
raise the specter of "Catholic power" threatening civil liberties, and the
machinations of the "Catholic hierarchy" and their "unquestioning
constituents" marching in lockstep appealed to a visceral anti-Catholicism
in American culture. It was more appealing to argue against Catholicism than
for abortion. This strategy, Nathanson confirmed, "was strictly out of
NARAL."19
It was, however, a tricky argument. The presidency of John F. Kennedy, the
papacy of John XXIII and the Vatican Council had combined to create a
positive image of Catholics in America. Anti-Catholicism appeared to be old
baggage. Yet both Lader and Blanshard perceived that the Cultural Revolution
underway in the 1960s, particularly over issues of sexual morality, could
revitalize this essential tool. In his book, "On Vatican II" Blanshard in
196620 would accurately point to the Church's teaching on abortion as a
linchpin in regenerating secular anti-Catholic sentiment after its brief
hiatus. Lader would effectively argue on the eve of the Supreme Court's Roe
v. Wade decision that the country will have "a new birth of sex, not just
among youth, but married and single women of all ages - an explosion of
sexuality that threatens and terrifies the guardians of ancestral virtues
whether in the churches or the White House. It is this threat that makes the
Catholic Church.lash out at legalized abortion."21 "Legalized abortion,"
Lader concluded, "is the culmination of individualism versus
authoritarianism" represented by the Catholic Church.22 It was this
anti-Catholic understanding of the issue that would dominate media coverage
of abortion in the early years and be an essential strategy of NARAL under
Lader's direction.
As Nathanson explains it, the anti-Catholic strategy of NARAL "was not
normally discussed in executive committee meetings.But when Larry and I
would go down to the Caribbean every six months or so to plot out the
strategy for the next six months, of course we talked all about this. Lader
was fixated on anti-Catholicism, he was obsessed with it."23
The curious aspect of all of this, from a historical perspective, is that
abortion law in the United States was neither the creation nor the result of
Catholic influence. It would become central to the abortion debate that laws
on the books against abortion had been the result of religious beliefs and
Catholic pressure. Yet Nathanson acknowledges that initially, the Catholic
Church was not viewed as the most serious obstacle to getting abortion laws
repealed: "The Catholic Church had not been very active in the abortion
question at all. We were more concerned with the political reactionaries and
political hacks, particularly in the South and Southwest."24 Even in the
battle over legalization in the State of New York - which became the main
focus of NARAL's early campaign - Nathanson and Lader did not "single out
the Catholic Church," as they initially saw the Protestant population as
"historically against liberal abortion."25 But when the mainstream
Protestant churches became enthusiastic supporters of the pro-abortion
movement, the strategy of aiming the issue at the Catholic hierarchy, rather
than the Catholic population as a whole, fell into place. "We used the
Catholic Church and that in turn stirred them up.We went after the Catholic
hierarchy, the policy-making division of the Catholic Church. And after
enough drubbing with them publicly and in media, they finally woke up and
looked around and realized that there was a political and sexual revolution
going on."26
Abortion was never an accepted part of mainstream American life prior to the
1960s. The legal system, such as it was, and society, did not view abortion
favorably or in a neutral fashion. In the 18th century, the social pressures
from a small community would generally force a man to care for a child
conceived without marriage. A woman could also legally pursue the man who
had made her pregnant, and strong community and familial pressure were
applied. After 1800, with urbanization and an increase in a servant-class
made up primarily in the North of young women from rural New England, or
Irish, Canadian and British immigrants, forced abortions became more of a
recognized social problem. In addition to the rise in a young female servant
class of immigrants without family ties, a major factor in the increase in
abortion activity in the 19th Century was the massive growth in
prostitution, particularly in urban America. Abortions, such as they were,
were generally confined to the ranks of prostitutes who were most often
rural girls adrift within the expanding urban population, and immigrants.
Prostitution was a nasty, brutish and short life for young women with few
alternatives. Syphilis became a scourge and dangerous abortifacients were a
common form of injury or even death.
James Mohr argued in the influential "Abortion in America"27 that abortion
was commonplace among American women in the 19th Century. Marvin Olansky's
research tells a different story: "The prostitution-abortion link is
important to keep in mind because abortion historian James Mohr repeatedly
has generalized about the 'many American women' who sought abortions during
the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, for 'this practice was
neither morally nor legally wrong in the eyes of the vast majority of
Americans, provided it was accomplished before quickening.'28 He repeatedly
has suggested that everyone was doing it: 'Abortion entered the mainstream
of American life during the middle decades of the nineteenth century' and
was 'relatively common.' According to Mohr, at mid-century 'the chief
problems associated with abortion were medical rather than moral.' But the
evidence suggests that most abortions during that period were related to
prostitution, which was a muddy stream rather than a mainstream to American
life, and was definitely not viewed as an issue unrelated to morality." 29
"During the 1840s and the 1850s alone," Olasky writes, "at least thirteen
states passed laws forbidding abortion at any stage of pregnancy. Three
others passed laws making abortion illegal after quickening. By the end of
1868 thirty states had overcome all the legislative and cultural obstacles
of passing an anti-abortion law, and twenty-seven of them punished attempts
to induce abortion before quickening. Twenty of the states had bitten the
bullet and were punishing abortions at all stages equally, regardless of the
added evidence given by quickening; others had increased the range of
punishment."30 The legislative momentum against abortion continued in the
post-war period, creating the virtual universal ban on abortion in the
United States that would exist from 1880 until the 1960s.
The important point in this brief history of abortion and American law, is
that the driving forces behind these laws banning abortion were not churches
and certainly not specifically the Catholic Church, which had little or no
public impact in the 19th century in the United States. Even Lader would
recognize that the Church only began to have impact at all on American
public life, and then primarily in urban centers of the northeast, well into
the 20th century, long after anti-abortion legislation was in place.31 For
the most part, anti-abortion legislation came from a general reforming trend
within American society that saw abortion and abortionists along the same
lines as slavery and slaveholders - social evils to be addressed. It was a
liberal effort, and would receive strong support from the women's suffrage
movement.
In general, in the 1960s abortion statutes stated "that a person could be
imprisoned and stripped of his medical license, if he possessed one, for
performing or helping with an abortion."32 Of course, criminalization did
not eliminate abortion. An advocate for abortion legalization estimated in
the 1930s that 680,000 abortions took place per year throughout the United
States.33 A 1955 Planned Parenthood conference provided estimates ranging
from 200,000 to 1,200,000 illegal abortions per year.34 But with no real
statistical evidence, all of these numbers are guesswork.
Clearly, anti-abortion legislation and its enforcement had little to do with
the Catholic Church. The laws against abortion had not been "imposed" by the
Catholic Church, or any other church for that matter. The criminalization of
abortion - aimed nearly uniformly at the abortionists - had been legislated
by every state individually as reforming legislation under the guidance and
support of the legitimate medical establishment and community improvement
associations.
That being the case, why did the abortion debate so early become bogged down
in anti-Catholic rhetoric? Lader and NARAL's strategy to use
anti-Catholicism as a weapon did not spring from their collective genius
alone. Historically, of course, anti-Catholicism had arrived in America with
the Pilgrims so Lader did certainly not invent it. But anti-Catholicism had
existed so solidly in America not only because it was the parvenu of the
revitalized Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century, and Southern
prohibitionists who painted a stereotype of Northern, urban Catholic "wets,"
symbolized by 1928 Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith.
Anti-Catholicism was never simply the racist, nativist and theological
bigotry of a fundamentalist vein within America. It also persisted among
America's White Anglo Saxon Protestant leadership. Much as it is today,
anti-Catholicism has long been viewed as the product of an enlightened mind
within powerful segments of America's intellectual, academic and arts
leadership - the other "klan" that bred both Lawrence Lader and various
leftist movements that made up the American landscape in the 20th century.
Catholics had become a far more visible part of American life in the early
20th century, particularly in northeast urban political life. (Many of the
urban political reform movements found their impetus in the desire to regain
elitist hegemony over the lower-class Catholic rabble that dominated the
"political machines.") At the same time, Catholicism was identified with
positions deemed conservative, if not reactionary, within intellectual,
academic and radical political circles, as well as the burgeoning arts
community. The Church was portrayed as exercising censorship, particularly
in film through the Legion of Decency. The Church was seen as being on the
wrong side in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, supporters of Francisco
Franco at the expense of Republican forces. The Church's staunch
anti-communism (and the appearance of widespread Catholic support for
Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade in the 1950s) contributed
to a distinctly "secular" anti-Catholicism whose opposition to the Church
had less to do with theology than ideology. "Anti-Catholicism," Nathanson
explained, "had become the anti-Semitism of the intellectual. It has to be
done with a very careful, discreet touch, but it is done."35
This was the anti-Catholicism of Lawrence Lader and an infant NARAL. It
would use the old nativist anti-Catholic arguments that had visceral appeal
throughout American culture - the Church as authoritarian and undemocratic;
the Church as an alien presence within American democracy; the Church as the
enemy of separation of Church and State; the Church as attempting to impose
its morality on American culture; Catholic laity as political foot-soldiers
dominated by a hierarchy and incapable of individual thought - and strip
them of post-Reformation theological rhetoric. Rather than a religious and
racial prejudice, anti-Catholicism in the abortion debate would become a
secular assumption. The pro-life position was wrong because it was Catholic,
not because it necessarily lacked merit. As Nathanson explained, in liberal
circles anti-Catholicism would become a very effective tool. As leftists
viewed the Church, "given the political climate of the times with the
Vietnam War going on and the Catholic Church one of the few institutions
which supported the war, and given its general history of having been
politically extremely reactionary over the centuries and having committed
anti-Semitic acts, and having been relatively passive during the Holocaust,
we felt that an appeal to liberals particularly and others" would be an
effective strategy.36 This is the essential argument in Lader's "Politics,
Power and the Church." Published in 1987, Lader's essential thesis was that
Catholic pro-life activities were in opposition to true American
"pluralism": "The attack on the U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing
abortion.seems to threaten our whole pluralist tradition and could damage
our social cohesiveness.Catholic power, allied with Fundamentalism, has
threatened the American tenet of church-state separation and shaken the
fragile balance of our pluralistic society."37 Lader failed to discuss why
Jewish leaders expressing support for Israel, or Black ministerial
associations working for the Democratic party, did not threaten American
pluralism. The issue is only raised when it becomes framed as "Catholic" and
the "Catholic hierarchy" is involved.
The crusade for legalized abortion began in the birth control campaign,
eugenics crusades, and Zero Population Growth movement of the first 60 years
of the 20th century. While none of these movements shared widespread popular
support in mainstream America - and were generally viewed as on the radical
social fringes from the turn of the century until the early 1960s - they
would lay the foundation for legalized abortion. In the premier year of
Margaret Sanger's first magazine (1914), "The Woman Rebel," it was declared
that "abortion, performed by an able practitioner in the best hygienic
surroundings, will soon come to be regarded as useful, necessary, and
humane, even in a case in which a woman requests it for no other reason than
that she does not wish to have a child, that it is not her pleasure to
become a mother." Another article stated that "If a woman is to free herself
effectively, she must make herself absolute mistress of her own body. She
must recognize her absolute right..to suppress the germ of life."38 Such
views were far out of the mainstream of American life in 1914.
In these early years, the Church itself would not find it necessary to
address abortion directly. It was, however, a strong voice in opposition to
the widespread use of birth control methods in general, and particularly to
control the "breeding" of the so-called inferior races. The Church, of
course, also staunchly opposed the eugenics crusaders who aimed to sterilize
those same inferior races. The Church would also stand in opposition to the
later developing popularity of the Zero Population Growth movement as the
wrong answer for poverty both in the United States and the Third World. (The
Church has long stressed economic development rather than the semi-genocidal
and racist theories of imposed birth regulation on minority populations.) As
such, the Church did not gain many friends in these movements. When these
movements coalesced along with feminism in the 1960s around the issue of
abortion, the Church would be perceived as the essential enemy.
The Church, of course, was not merely perceived as the enemy to these
movements. It was the enemy and, to a certain extent, one of the few
consistent voices within American society addressing these issues contrary
to the developing "enlightened" agenda. As these issues moved from the
fringes of society, their supporters saw their primary enemy not in
ineffective mainline Protestant churches or Southern evangelicals who were
virtually invisible and impotent in American political life in the late
1960s and early 1970s. The chief spokesman for the opposition was, in fact,
the Catholic Church. Blanshard's obsession with "Catholic power" began with
the issue of birth control. Earlier rhetoric about the imposition of "one
religion's viewpoint" on American society was associated with the Catholic
Church, not Christian churches in general. This allowed the debate to
quickly descend into anti-Catholic rhetoric rather than analysis of the
issue itself.
Early movement to "reform" abortion law in the 20th century came from
elements within the medical community as well as the birth control and
eugenics groups. Over time, journalists would become more and more friendly
as well. A milestone publication was Dr. Frederick Taussig's Abortion,
published in 1936. In the book, Taussig argued for legalized abortion when
women have had too many children, are poor, or "irresponsible." He argued
that this was a medical issue that must be freed "from religious bias" and
that while the number of abortions will always be high, it should be
performed by doctors rather than illegal abortionists. Time magazine praised
the book, reflecting its pro-eugenic editorial stand at the time.39
As Olasky described it, "By 1942 doctors sympathetic to abortion were able
to hold a conference on the practice at the New York Academy of Medicine.
There, Dr. Sophia Kleegman charged that restrictions on abortion were
formulated largely by the 'theological dogma' of 'one particular church
'.Conference speakers overall enumerated themes that received great play
over the coming years: anti-abortion laws violated church-state separation,
attempted to save that which is not yet human, and did not stop abortion
anyway."40 Olasky also cites an ongoing change in media coverage of the
issue. Up to the 1950s, coverage of illegal abortion operations was
generally sensationalistic or euphemistic, referring to abortion gristmills
or "illegal operations" depending on the tabloid-level of the newspaper.
While that type of coverage continued to apply to unlicensed practitioners,
when those who were actually doctors were involved, the media treatment
became more sympathetic in the 1950s.
A critical event in advancing the abortion cause was the case of Sherri
Finkbine in the summer of 1962. The Finkbine case, briefly, involved a
popular children's television host in Arizona who had taken the drug
Thalidomide as a tranquilizer during the early weeks of pregnancy. She
discovered through her doctor that the European drug - banned in the United
States - had been blamed for profound deformities in infants whose mothers
had used it early in pregnancy. Finkbine was put on track for a legal
"therapeutic abortion." But after she related her story to the Arizona
Republic, allegedly to warn of the dangers of Thalidomide, the planned
abortion became public and hospital authorities withdrew their consent to
the surgery. It became a national story with hugely sympathetic coverage.
Finkbine and her husband eventually went to Sweden to have the abortion. A
Gallup poll reported that about half of Americans believed she should have
been allowed an abortion in the United States.41
Legally, the call for reform of abortion law began in 1959 when the American
Law Institute, an organization of attorneys and judges determined to
establish national legal norms for state laws, began to address the
question. The ALI proposed legalizing early abortions and, more important,
establishing a concept of legally justifiable abortion that was not
"therapeutic" - obtaining abortions would not depend on an urgent medical
need. While far from "abortion on demand," the ALI recommended statute
approved by the organization in 1962 would allow states to legalize early
abortions as a private matter between a physician and a woman.
In April, 1967 Colorado passed the first abortion reform law modeled on the
ALI recommendations. Though the Catholic Church in Colorado would mount
strong opposition, it was too late. The bill was signed by the governor and
became the first of the so-called "reform" abortion laws in the country.
North Carolina followed a month later. Supporters of such legislation in
both states kept the issue behind-the-scenes in states with small Catholic
populations. Governor Ronald Reagan of California signed an abortion reform
bill for California in June, 1967. Other states lined up to consider such
bills, based on the ALI reform model.42
To Lawrence Lader and others on the more radical end of the abortion-rights
movement, however, these ALI-modeled laws did not go nearly far enough. They
were aiming for the ultimate prize - complete legalization, not laws that
were essentially, to their minds, minimal reform legislation that kept the
state involved in the abortion decision and limited accessibility to
abortion at any time. They saw these reform laws as merely legalization of
the "therapeutic abortions" of old. Their goal was "an immovable position -
repeal or nothing."43
It was at this point that the abortion rights movement went decisively from
the hands of the birth control establishment to a burgeoning radical
feminist movement. "Lader's marriage to the feminists," Nathanson wrote,
"was a brilliant tactic" that, combined with the anti-Catholic strategy,
would prove successful.44
Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique had been released in 1963 and become a
hugely popular bestseller. The book, considered the first serious manifesto
of modern feminism in the United States, never actually mentioned abortion
while insisting that women see their lives as something beyond motherhood
and being wives. But by late 1967, when Freidan gathered with 300 others to
issue a "We Demand" manifesto the year after the founding of the National
Organization for Women (NOW), abortion rights was the last of their eight
fundamental demands. NOW rejected the "reform" movement and clearly sided
with Lader's repeal forces and demanded: "The right of women to control
their own reproductive lives by removing from the penal code laws limiting
access to contraceptive information and devices, and by repealing penal laws
governing abortion." As Gorney explains, the NOW statement was "announcing
with a vengeance the arrival of an indecorous new presence in the abortion
debates.that legal abortion be sought not as a public health measure or a
compassionate moral compromise, but instead as part of a massive change in
traditional assumptions about women in American society.adamant about the
linkage between legal abortion and women's equality."45 This zealotry would
be total and exists to this day. That is why, for example, even the issue of
partial-birth abortion is fought so tenaciously by NARAL and other
pro-abortion zealots. Any compromise would involve surrendering what had
become a fundamental principle of the more radical elements of the feminist
agenda. And that is also why the infamous Webster v. Reproductive Health
Services case - the July, 1989 Supreme Court decision that firmly reinforced
Roe v. Wade at a time when legal consensus believed that the Court would use
the case to reverse it - was viewed as a loss by NARAL and others as it
provided for some state regulation of abortion and abortion clinics.
The late 1960s radical feminists stepped up the abortion campaign by
consistently dredging up anti-Catholic canards. Lana Phelan and Patricia
Maginnis of California had a traveling abortion road show popular in
feminist circles. Maginnis (who would once famously complain that,
"Politicians insist they have to have their noses up our skirts") and Phelan
presented in their program methods of abortion and self-abortion. Phelan
would claim that "the first contraception and abortion laws were European
canon laws.the laws of the Catholic Church, which wanted women to produce as
many little worshippers as possible.Pat Maginnis.raised in a strict Catholic
family in Oklahoma.(abandoned) her religious upbringing with such fervent
distaste that when she talked about either Church or family, she tended to
use phrases like 'crippling Roman Catholic dogma,' and 'I wouldn't give a
person a dime for marriage.'"46 Phelan told the California Conference on
Abortion in February, 1968 that, "The compulsory breeding of women by church
and state is nothing more than the ecclesiastical and legislative pimpery in
which the bodies of all women are utilized for state profit and pleasure."47
It was a radical time and the issue of abortion rights would descend into
that level of vitriol and anti-Catholicism. And a new organization, with
firebrand Lawrence Lader at the helm, would step-up the anti-Catholic
strategy and bring it to the center of the abortion debate.
The National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) was
organized at the First National Conference on Abortion Laws held in Chicago,
February 14-16, 1969. It was a conglomeration of abortion referral services,
interested state legislators, women's organizations, new feminists and old
warriors from the birth control and eugenics crusades. The initial organizat
ion suffered from the usual ideological divisions encountered among true
believers, but it was Lader's flamboyance that quickly established the
public persona of the fledgling pro-abortion organization and helped to
create the anti-Catholic terms of the debate. "Days of Anger" were organized
for Mother's Day, 1969 in various cities in the east, with hot rhetoric and
stormy protests, complete with full and favorable media coverage.48
Under Ladar's leadership, NARAL would quickly move to make the abortion
debate appear to be a "Catholic" issue. The strategy was simple: convince
the media and the public that this was a case of the Catholic hierarchy
attempting to impose its will on America. Portray all opposition from
Catholics to legalized abortion as a power play by the Church with the laity
marching in lockstep to its clerical overlords. Accuse the Church of abusing
its tax exemption for a political power-grab. Secure the right to unlimited
access to abortion by painting the pro-life position as a peculiarly
Catholic notion with no rights in a pluralistic society. Pull out all the
old anti-Catholic canards and focus the debate as a church-state issue. "The
National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws had from its first months
of organization been describing regional right-to-life groups as clumsily
disguised arms of the Roman Catholic Church; in the 1970 annual NARAL
meeting minutes, typed underlining emphasized the strategy suggestions aimed
directly at the Church: 'Expose the tax-deductible lobbying efforts of
Catholics,' the NARAL recording secretary wrote. 'Point out the fact that
hospitals refusing to sterilize people or perform abortions are practicing
religion on public tax money!'"49 The strategy was to paint legislators who
were Catholics and pro-life as ignorant dupes of the bishops; those Catholic
legislators who were pro-abortion became "heroes" who "oppose abortion for
ourselves, but believe our church should not impose its will on our
non-Catholic neighbors."50
It was an effective NARAL strategy. One reason for its effectiveness was
that Catholics were certainly leading the Right-to-Life movement by this
time. The Catholic Church was the strongest religious institutional voice in
opposition to the abortion law repeal movement by 1970. Though certainly
there were non-Catholics involved in the pro-life movement, "Right-to-Life"
organizations were dominated by a Catholic presence in the early years.
Except for elements of the Lutheran Church, mainline Protestant churches
institutionally took at best a neutral position on abortion, and many became
pro abortion. "One of our major objectives of our campaign was to capture
the National Council of Churches, which is probably the biggest Protestant
organization there is," Nathanson said. "And they enthusiastically joined
our ranks."51 The Southern Baptist Convention refused to take a negative
stand on abortion until 1979. It would not be until nearly a decade after
Roe v. Wade that abortion became a serious issue for the evangelical
Protestant churches.52 And while there was some Jewish pro-life support (the
founder of Americans United for Life was Jewish), institutionally most
Jewish organizations were staunchly in favor of abortion repeal legislation.
Visibly, therefore, it was easy for NARAL to paint the Right to Life
movement as a conspiracy of the Catholic hierarchy. And this quickly became
the distracting issue.
Nathanson acknowledged that this had to be done delicately. "People were
pretty much accustomed to the idea of Catholics in public life.So we didn't
want to appear to be prejudiced or bigoted or in any way flagrantly or
offensively anti-Catholic. It was all done very subtly with a very light but
extraordinary effective touch. The anti-Catholicism was done with a very
subtle sophisticated touch and the appeal was not so much to the fact that
the bishops and the pope were reactionary bigots who were inaccessible to
reason. Rather, they happened to be historically against abortion and they
were supporting the Vietnam War. They were also anti-technological in many
ways, and stuck in the 15th Century. This was the kind of thing we were
saying."53
Of course, Catholics being in the forefront of the Right to Life movement
did not make abortion a Catholic issue. As Right-to-Life proponents saw it,
"the principle they were defending, the sanctity of human life, was not a
Catholic principle but an ethical principle, a moral bedrock solid under all
of us.guided to Right to Life by the plainest possible intersection of
medical science and common moral sense."54 The issue to Catholics had
nothing to do with church versus state or imposition of a Church's peculiar
teachings on society. This was not arguing for mandatory meatless Fridays.
It was arguing in defense of innocent life, a life existing so obviously
that religion or non-religion had nothing to with the question.
But the NARAL anti-Catholic strategy took hold. Catholics addressing the
issue publicly faced a virtually uniform inquisition. As one Catholic
pro-lifer in the early days described it to Gorney: "he learned to sense as
if by instinct when someone in the audience was going to raise a hand and
start in on the Church. Isn't it a fact - they were always grouped these
questions, and usually phrased in the manner of a withering attorney on
cross-examination - Isn't it a fact that Catholicism condemns abortion? Isn'
t it a fact that you yourself are Catholic? Isn't it a fact that Catholics
make up most of the membership of the groups that call themselves Right to
Life? Isn't this whole issue simply a case of one religious group imposing
its views on all the rest of us?" As the pro-lifer described it, his answer
in the early days was: Yes, Yes, Yes, No. Catholics addressing the issue
were portrayed as "'practicing religion' - dispatched by the pope, as it
were, to foist papal ideas on a secular democracy."55
From the late 1960s on, abortion was presented in the media as a peculiarly
Catholic issue. In newspaper reports, pro-life legislators or pro-life
spokesmen were consistently identified by their religion if they were
Catholic, though no one else would be so identified. This became standard
journalistic practice in abortion coverage. If Catholic, those presenting a
pro-life position in media were always identified by their faith. This
religious identification was defended by media as being simply part of the
story, reinforcing that abortion was predominantly a Catholic issue. To
newspapers and television reporters, abortion was a "religious" rather than
a social issue, and the pro-life movement simply the vanguard of a
repressive Catholic Church hierarchy. "The result was a long-running media
drama that pitted a hidebound institutional hierarchy against reformers from
within and without. This portrayal was reinforced by the language used to
describe the Church in media accounts. The descriptive terms most frequently
applied to the Church emphasized its conservative theology, authoritarian
forms of control, and anachronistic approach to contemporary society."56
Nathanson does believe that NARAL was instrumental - "it was insidiously
NARAL's idea"57 - in forming this media portrait of the hidebound Catholic
hierarchy as the sole opposition to abortion. "We had a woman who was very
savvy and very close to a lot of young people in media, particularly the
female radically feminized reporters who were reporting this whole scene. We
didn't have to convert them and we simply admitted them to the tent because
they were already converted. And you know we basically told them what to
print."58
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, media was clearly in the hands of NARAL.
NARAL sponsored a "Lysistrata Day" in Philadelphia in March, 1970. Getting
their idea from the ancient Greek play about women withholding sex to stop
war, members paraded in Philadelphia in togas and laurel leaf crowns and
pledged to "abstain from love and love's delights" to dramatize "the fact
that our bodies are not our own so long as the law can dictate that we must
bear unwanted children." Though the abstinence was for only one day and the
protest involved only six women it received prominent media coverage. As the
NARAL member reported back, "everyone had such a good time that the
reporters and the demonstrators subsequently repaired to her apartment for
wine and grass together."59 In Washington State, when a NARAL-proposed
abortion repeal bill was blocked in 1969, a columnist for the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer attacked "the seven Catholics who help run our state from
the comfort and power of the Senate Rules Committee in Olympia.two more who
are married to Catholics, and a handful of others who quiver every time they
get a call from the local representative of El Papa (the pope).Maybe someday
the disciples of El Papa - at least those who sit on the Senate Rules
Committee - maybe someday they'll realize that their God may not be the god
of the rest of us.that the voice of their celibate 70-year-old Papa sounds
like a curse to the rest of us." When a successful referendum campaign was
underway, a prominent feminist announced that "I deplore the arrogance and
presumption of the of the Catholic Church in this matter. You believe the
fetus is a human being. Some people still believe witches ride around on
broomsticks and a lot of other medieval, mystic hangovers."60 The co-opting
of the media, the identification of opposition with Catholicism, and
anti-Catholic invective as a prominent means of addressing the issue became
commonplace. According to Nathanson, this is a strategy NARAL maintains to
this day, though "they are more subtle about it now."61
This identification by NARAL of the "Catholic enemy" would have impact on
those who might have otherwise looked more objectively at the issue. Even
after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, many potential pro-life supporters were
unwilling to be identified with a Catholic issue, and there was "a thick
strain of anti-Catholicism at work in the early post-Roe years. The
evangelical magazine Christianity Today ran occasional editorials imploring
its readers not to dismiss the right-to-life cause simply because Catholics
had taken it up, and Richard Bott62 recalls how readily he and many other
evangelicals shrugged off the first decade of the abortion controversy as
the distant battle of an alien culture - which from the Protestant point of
view took an obsessive and irrational position on contraception, too. 'When
Roe v. Wade hit, and the Catholics were so opposed to it, you just
automatically assumed that it was something to do with their church, like
the Eucharist, the way they give communion or absolution,' Bott recalls. 'As
though - if the Catholics believe in it, why we kind of think they believe
strange things anyway. So it was very easy to assume that if they believed
in it, no one else did."63 Nathanson stated that this early avoidance of the
issue by conservative Protestants "never occurred to us"64 at NARAL, but was
one side benefit to the anti-Catholic strategy.
Before Roe v. Wade rendered the state-by-state battles over reform or repeal
academic, NARAL focused much of its attention on forcing through what would
become a draconian change in abortion law in New York State in 1970. A
milder abortion reform law had failed in New York in 1968, and a more
extreme bill defeated as well in 1969 which would have simply eliminated
abortion from the penal code entirely. The 1970 "Cook-Leichter" bill was
basically the same as the 1969 bill, though it required that physicians
conduct abortions. While NARAL opposed such restrictions (it wanted the
right to perform abortions extended to paramedicals, midwives, nurses,
technicians, etc. and would declare that as its ideal at its fall
convention), it opted to support the bill. It did so even when a further
amendment allowed abortion on demand up to the 24th week, and only to "save
the life of the mother" thereafter. "It was a compromise," Lader wrote,
"perhaps slight, but still a wrenching compromise for a movement founded on
the right of abortion without restriction."65
NARAL pulled out all the stops in the New York campaign, constantly focusing
on the Catholic nature of the issue and the Catholic make-up of its
opponents. Because of the extreme liberalization of the bill, many opposed
to abortion felt it had no serious chance of passing and it was only after
the New York Senate surprisingly voted in favor of it, that forces in
opposition mounted a counterattack. NARAL had organized "Catholic support"
for the bill that appealed to Catholic legislators. These Catholics
announced that they would not "foist my religious beliefs on others."66
NARAL complained that the Church harassed these pro-choice Catholics
legislators. In "Abortion II" Lader created the image of an all-powerful
Church threatening any Catholic legislator and "devout Catholics" forced to
chose between freedom of conscience and Catholic power, a line that NARAL
would hold throughout the campaign and Lader pushed hard in "Abortion II."
Lader described a Catholic and Bronx Democrat, who "withstood church
pressure": "Pastoral letters were read in all parishes. When he attended
church on Sunday, April 5, with his family, the priest cited him by name as
promoting 'murder.' His wife and children cried, and his twelve-year-old
kept asking him if he really committed murder."67 The coverage in the New
York Times focused on this "Catholic" story, painting a portrait of brave
Catholic legislators refusing to bow down to Church power: "It was very
tough pressure," concluded a Brooklyn Catholic legislator who was attacked
in his church while a young daughter sat at his side, "but I think the lay
Catholic is far ahead of the church on this issue."68
NARAL's tactical assumption was that Catholics somehow had no right to
organize on the issue, and to do so was an unconstitutional exercise of
religious oppression manipulated by the hierarchy. It made a point of using
this alleged threat of Catholic power on Protestant legislators. "Freedom of
choice, unfettered by religious dogma, eventually swung the votes of a
number of upstate Protestant Republicans like Senator Dalwin Niles who were
'big on freedom of the individual,' as a legislative aide put it. Niles
concluded that 'A large proportion of women were in favor of this bill even
though many of them were of the Roman Catholic faith.'"69 This alleged
Catholic women's support was an invention of the "New York State Catholic
Women for Abortion Repeal," a NARAL front-group that existed solely for the
purpose of one controlled telegram-mailing to senators.70
The Cook-Leichter bill passed by a one-vote margin and New York had the most
liberal abortion statute in the United States. The bill was signed into law
by Governor Nelson Rockefeller on April 11, 1970 and created "abortion on
demand" for pregnancies up to 24 weeks in New York State. NARAL had played
the anti-Catholic card effectively and it would become foundational to its
continued campaign, both before and after Roe v. Wade. A number of states
moved to follow New York's virtual repeal of abortion restrictions and the
NARAL campaign against the Catholic Church was the centerpiece of the
debate. Quickly, Alaska, Hawaii and Washington State had similar repeal
abortion legislation.
But a curiosity soon developed in the early 1970s. The irreversible tide of
repeal legislation began to encounter defeats. Iowa, Minnesota and Michigan
had rejected liberalizing abortion law and, by 1972, it appeared likely that
the New York law would be overturned as well. NARAL's Lader was shocked at
what he saw at a pro-life march in New York City in April, 1972: "We stood
and watched the bands, the Knights of Columbus, the Right to Life and
parochial school contingents pour down the avenue - 10,000 the newspaper
reported. It seemed macabre, all this money, organization, and fanaticism
unleashed against a law that simply gave women (about a third of them
Catholic women) the right to decide whether to bear a child...We were faced
with a religious crusade based on the assumption of the Catholic hierarchy
that its survival depended on forcing everyone else to accept its dogma. The
bands and marchers seemed surprisingly like the crusaders of eight hundred
years before -- the knights and ragged children who left Germany and France
to pour across Europe to the Holy Land to convert the infidels by force or
death." 71
The legislature in New York would be reconsidering abortion under the
Donovan-Crawford bill that would essentially repeal the New York abortion
law. Lader wrote for NARAL a half-page ad for the New York Times screaming:
"SAVE YOUR RIGHT TO ABORTION." The ad warned that the right to abortion was
"being destroyed this moment in Albany," and called the Catholic Church "the
most powerful tax-deductible lobby in history" which "wants to dictate your
beliefs.wants to force women to have children against their will."72 The New
York Times referred to a "medieval form of coercion" and NARAL - through
Lader - called the law "nothing but religious tyranny to impose one
religious dogma on all women" and asked, "Is this abortion struggle part of
a continuing battle in a religious war that is destined to divide or even
destroy our country?" When President Richard Nixon wrote to New York's
Cardinal Terence Cooke in support of the legislation, the New York Times
fumed about "a President openly working through a particular church to
influence the action of a state government." During floor debate in the
Senate, the NARAL position was echoed with one senator stating that "you
have no right to come to the floor of this body and ask us to enact into law
church doctrine." Both the Senate and the House, however, voted to overturn
the New York law. But there were not enough votes to override Governor
Nelson Rockefeller's veto on May 13, 1972. Within eight months, the Supreme
Court would wipe away the entire debate in the states by voiding every state
law against abortion. In the majority decision in Roe v. Wade, Justice
Blackmun would favorably cite Lawrence Lader's 1966 book "Abortion" eight
times.
At the end of "Abortion II" in 1973, the executive director of NARAL spelled
out the attitude toward the Catholic Church. Quoting Mary Daly of Boston
College, Lader saw the impact of legalized abortion as raising a challenge
to the "patriarchal authoritarianism" of the Catholic hierarchy. "In its
most vivid form, it symbolizes the struggle between the individual and the
institution which has regimented and controlled much of society's ethical
choices for two thousand years.The struggle between individual and
authoritarianism has already been accelerated 'into a situation in which
open war is declared between feminism in this country and official Roman
Catholicism,' Prof. Daley concludes. 'As this issue surfaces more and more
women are seeing the church as the enemy.
"Abortion has thus become the most volcanic ethical struggle of our time -
incorporating an alliance far beyond feminism - simply because it threatens
Catholicism more seriously than any other issue.. The authoritarian control
of the Church over family and procreation has been threatened on many
levels. The termination of the fetus - or murder, as the Church sees it - is
only a starting point. What the Church fears equally is the rejection of its
dogma by a large proportion of its communicants and the increasing use of
abortion by Catholics as a backup to contraception, Concomitantly, it fears
a sharp decline in the size of Catholic families.The whole structure of
authority is further threatened when the single Catholic woman need no
longer be forced into marriage against her will, or bear an illegitimate
child for a Catholic foundling home - children that often become priests and
nuns, who, when adopted, become the source of considerable financial
contributions to the Church from adopting parents."73
This, a reduction of the Church's position on the sanctity of life to a
crass need to keep Catholic orphanages open to provide future nuns and
priests, as well as hefty donations.
In 1975, Lader was forced out of his position as Executive Director at
NARAL.74 He would go on to organize Abortion Rights Mobilization (ARM) whose
primary function in the beginning was to attempt to have the Catholic Church
's tax exemption removed because of its activities in opposition to
abortion. The case was rejected for lack of standing by the Supreme Court in
1990. Lader then went on to campaign for the legalization and the
distribution of the abortion drug, RU 486. His anti-Catholic strategies
never left him, and he began to make a jumbled attack on a
"Catholic-Fundamentalist" alliance which he claimed to have elected Ronald
Reagan in 1980.75
NARAL, of course, has continued as the leading pro-abortion organization in
the United States. After Roe v. Wade it changed its name to the National
Abortion Rights Action League and now calls itself the National Abortion and
Reproductive Rights Action League, but has always maintained the same
acronym. It is currently strongly involved in a series of attacks on
Catholic hospitals for refusing "reproductive services" and has been
fighting conscience clauses that would exempt Catholic organizations from
being forced to provide abortion coverage in medical insurance.
----------
J Young
youngopinions@aol.com
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| User: "Ray Fischer" |
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| Title: Re: NARAL, Anti-Catholicism and the Roots of the Pro-Abortion Campaign |
30 Apr 2006 09:43:33 PM |
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<youngopinions@aol.com> wrote:
http://www.catholicleague.org
Pro-liar catholics whining that people won't let them rule the
world!?!
Boo hoo!
The public debate over abortion was critical in a resurgent anti-Catholicism
in the mid-1960s.
What "anti-Catholicism"?
With the cooperation of media, abortion became an ongoing
battle waged in a war of words based on anti-Catholicism.
Telling the truth isn't bias against Catholics. It's not
anti-Catholicism that caused the church to protect child molesters.
--
Ray Fischer
rfischer@sonic.net
.
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: NARAL, Anti-Catholicism and the Roots of the Pro-Abortion Campaign |
01 May 2006 12:58:24 AM |
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Goddi/Gotti LOVES abortion-----------proof:
HOSEA 14:1 --- R/Catholic (13:16 Prot.)
It's not hidden-----but p/c pro-choice cowards won't use it.
sector-four
"8 billion humanoids and going for 25 bill." Pope-Jonni Paul 2
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