Anti-Abortion/Pro-Life

BOTH THE PRACTICE OF artificially terminating a pregnancy and the debate about its morality are as old as human civilization. Even the Hippocratic Oath, composed in ancient Greece, refers to abortifacents as one of the things doctors were not to administer. But the abortion question became a major political issue in the United States after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the state could not regulate first-trimester abortions, could only regulate for the woman's health in the second trimester, and could only regulate on behalf of both woman and fetus in the third, after the fetus reached viability. The Supreme Court based its reasoning upon the principle of the right of privacy, in particular, that a woman's body is her own business and that she alone should be the one to decide if she wishes to carry to term.

Almost immediately after that decision legalized abortion on demand, there was strong opposition from conservative religious groups. In particular, the Roman Catholic Church had a firmly stated position that life begins at conception and that artificially terminating a pregnancy is impermissible, even to save the life of the mother. Thus, it was not surprising that many of the earliest leaders in the opposition to abortion came from the Catholic clergy and laity.

Among these Catholic leaders were Joseph Scheidler and John O'Keefe. O'Keefe had been profoundly affected by his brother's death in combat in Vietnam. He came to oppose violence on the grounds of the harm that killing did to the killer, not the victim, and ultimately became a pacifist. While performing alternative service as a conscientious objector, he had a lengthy discussion with a woman who had had an abortion. Until that time, he had paid little attention to the question of abortion, beyond knowing that the Catholic Church opposed the procedure on moral grounds. Noticing how the woman seemed obsessed with the need to justify her decision to him, even a year after the event, he concluded that she was still haunted by her choice and was using her self-justification as a substitute for mourning her lost child.

This experience convinced O'Keefe that legalized abortion was a major social ill that needed to be dealt with. However, his experiences with existing anti-abortion organizations were unsatisfactory. He considered them little better than debating societies, reading and discussing existing arguments against abortion but never taking any greater action than writing letters to the editors of local newspapers. O'Keefe believed that a greater sacrifice was needed in response to a grave wrong, comparable to those of the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War. He organized nonviolent protests at abortion clinics in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and was one of the first to consider his activities not merely in a symbolic sense, but as actually rescuing the unborn from death. He argued that a woman who went home when confronted with a clinic protest might subsequently choose to keep her baby instead of going to another clinic, and that the life thus saved justified the disruption brought about by the demonstration.

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