The Pro-Life Debate
Rachel Plouse
The case against the Pro-Choice movement has been active in the United States since 1840. Before then, abortion was a widespread, largely stigma-free experience for American women. “The History of the Pro-Life Movement” is a journal article published in The American Historian in 2016 and written by Jennifer L. Holland, a history professor from Oklahoma who specializes in gender, sexuality, and race. In the article she compiles research of the history of the pro-life movement in the United States.
Before 1840, the American legal system used the quickening doctrine from British common law to decide the legality of abortion. Quickening occurred when the pregnant woman could feel the fetus move, typically between the fourth and sixth month of pregnancy. This was the only sure way to confirm pregnancy; before this time, any fetus was considered only to be a potential life. Post-quickening abortion was a crime, but only a misdemeanor.
Physicians led the first “right-to-life” movement, anxious about their professional status. Before then, physicians had been a largely unregulated. In the early nineteenth century, a variety of other healers competed with physicians for business, especially the business of women’s reproductive healthcare. Physicians used anti-abortion laws, pushed in state legislatures, to increase their own stature and undermine their opponents. Abortion was officially outlawed in the U.S. by 1900.
There was not much of an anti-abortion movement between 1900 and 1965. In the late 1960s, a nascent feminist movement began to argue that women could not be full citizens unless they could control reproduction. Colorado was the first to amend its law in 1967, followed quickly by others, most famously California in 1967 and New York in 1970. In the midst of states’ efforts at abortion reform, the modern anti-abortion political movement was born. Small groups of Catholic doctors, nurses, lawyers, and housewives joined together to oppose liberalization. In 1967 the National Council of Catholic Bishops aided their campaigns with support, money, and the formation of the National Right to Life Committee. In the 1970s the anti-abortion movement remained heavily Catholic, and they continued to pitch their issue as a rights issue rather than a religious one.
The “Pro-life” movement has extreme roots in Catholicism along with the fight against all other forms of birth control. According to Catholic.com, contraception is wrong because it’s a deliberate violation of the design God built into the human race, often referred to as “natural law.” The natural law purpose of sex is procreation. The pleasure that sexual intercourse provides is an additional blessing from God, intended to offer the possibility of new life while strengthening the bond of intimacy, respect, and love between husband and wife. The loving environment this bond creates is the perfect setting for nurturing children. But sexual pleasure within marriage becomes unnatural, and even harmful to the spouses, when it is used in a way that deliberately excludes the basic purpose of sex, which is procreation. According to Catholic doctrine, God’s gift of the sex act, along with its pleasure and intimacy, must not be abused by deliberately frustrating its natural end — procreation.
In 2016, videos came to light allegedly showing Planned Parenthood selling fetal body parts. The videos became a major rallying point for Americans opposed to abortion. They fueled a threat to shut down the government as well as a push in several states to cut funding to Planned Parenthood. They also inspired a wave of investigations. After the videos’ release last summer, a number of states quickly decided to look into whether the tissue sale the videos purported to show was happening within their borders.
Despite all the worry, state investigations have yet to find any evidence that Planned Parenthood was selling or profiting off fetal tissue. Twelve states have completed investigations into Planned Parenthood following the videos’ release, according to the organization. The NPR article details the results of each investigation in multiple states.
Finally, in October, 2017, Vox posted an article talking about the Trump administration’s new regulation on medication. Legislators are trying to cut funding to clinics that provide it. The regulations stated that employers are now allowed to request a religious or moral exemption to the birth control coverage mandate established under President Barack Obama. This gives employers a greater influence over the reproductive health care their employees receive.
