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Grassroots Religion and Politics in the Building of a Broad-Based Right-To-Life Movement, 1960-1984

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Grassroots Religion and Politics in the Building of a Broad-Based Right-To-Life Movement, 1960-1984 Rallying the Right-to-Lifers: Grassroots Religion and Politics in the Building of a Broad-based Right-to-Life Movement, 1960-1984 Author: Allison Vander Broek Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:107943 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2018 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Rallying the Right-to-Lifers: Grassroots Religion and Politics in the Building of a Broad-based Right-to-Life Movement, 1960-1984 Allison Vander Broek A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Boston College Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences Graduate School March 2018 © Copyright 2018 Allison Vander Broek Rallying the Right-to-Lifers: Grassroots Religion and Politics in the Building of a Broad-based Right-to-Life Movement, 1960-1984 Allison Vander Broek Advisor: James O’Toole, Ph.D. This dissertation explores the formative years of the right-to-life movement in the decade prior to Roe v. Wade and explains how early right-to-lifers built a vast and powerful movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas most previous studies have focused on the connection between right-to-life organizing and the conservative ascendancy in religion and politics in the 1970s and 1980s, this dissertation studies the movement’s origins in state and local organizing in the years before Roe v. Wade and its growth into a national political crusade in the 1970s. During these years, grassroots activists fostered a vision for a broad-based right-to-life movement—a movement consisting of Americans from across the political and religious spectrums. This movement was made up of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, lay people as well as religious leaders—all of whom opposed legalized abortion for a range of reasons. Right-to-lifers believed their broad-based approach was the most effective way to fight abortion, and they embraced this diverse coalition, attacking abortion on a number of fronts with strategies ranging from legislative lobbying to alternatives to abortion to nonviolent direct action. Though their coalition eventually broke apart in the 1980s, this eclectic group of right-to-lifers built a dynamic and diverse movement and proved the powerful resonance of the abortion issue in American society. TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. v Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 1.0 A Movement Begins: From Individual Mobilization to Grassroots Organizing in the Right-to-Life Movement, 1960-1969 ................................................................................ 12 1.1 The Abortion Debate in the 1960s ....................................................................................... 16 1.2 The Catholic Church and the Abortion Issue ....................................................................... 20 1.3 California: Right-to-life Mobilization and the Therapeutic Abortion Bill of 1967 ............. 33 1.4 New York: The Catholic Church and a Right-to-Life Strategy for the States ..................... 44 1.5 Minnesota: The Power and Potential of State Right-to-Life Organizations ........................ 52 2.0 Battling it out in the States: The Movement Goes on the Offensive .......................... 64 2.1 State Politics: A Dynamic and Aggressive Approach .......................................................... 69 2.2 Building Interstate Right-to-life Networks .......................................................................... 84 2.3 Reaching Young People and Women .................................................................................. 92 2.4 Reframing the Issue: Abortion and Violence in a Declining Society ................................ 102 3.0 Black Monday: The Right-to-Life Movement and the Aftermath of Roe v. Wade .. 115 3.1 Developing a National Strategy Before Roe v. Wade ........................................................ 120 3.2 Black Monday: Roe v. Wade and its Immediate Aftermath ............................................... 130 3.3 Forming a National Movement .......................................................................................... 136 3.4 The NRLC in Disarray ....................................................................................................... 146 4.0 The Possibilities and Pitfalls of a Broad-based Movement ...................................... 164 4.1 The ACCL and NRLC Split ............................................................................................... 169 4.2 The 1976 Presidential Election .......................................................................................... 182 4.3 Attempting to Avoid Polarization ...................................................................................... 194 4.4 A New Strategy: Nonviolent Direct Action ....................................................................... 205 5.0 Right-to-Life Resistance to the New Right in the Age of Reagan ............................ 216 5.1 Conservative Politics in the Right-to-Life Movement ....................................................... 220 5.2 The Catholic Church and the Consistent Ethic of Life ...................................................... 233 5.3 Right-to-life Moderates and the Shrinking Middle Ground ............................................... 243 5.4 The Pro-life Left and a Renewed Vision for Right-to-Life Activism ................................ 255 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 267 Select Bibliography ......................................................................................................... 273 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project would not have been possible without grant support from the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation. A Research Travel Grant from the Foundation allowed me to mine the fantastic collections at the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. My thanks, also, to the many wonderful archivists who helped me navigate collections across the country. I also wish to thank my advisor, Jim O’Toole. His patience, encouragement, and advice made this process a joy. Finally, I could not have completed this project without the support of my family and my friends who are like family. A special thanks to my parents, Dale and Nancy, for their patience with their way-too-curious middle child and for showing me what it means to be a lifelong learner. v INTRODUCTION In 1967, six years before the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, Dr. John McKelvey, a local obstetrician, attended a hearing before the Minnesota Senate Judiciary subcommittee on reforming Minnesota’s abortion law. The hearing was one of several that had been held in the 1960s to try to update the state’s nineteenth-century abortion law. The committee heard several arguments for and against the proposed bill but McKelvey’s testimony stood out. When it was his turn to speak, the doctor surprised the committee by placing a preserved 11-week-old fetus on the table in front of the committee members, challenging them to answer on the spot “whether that is a human life or not and whether we are going to destroy it.”1 Shortly after, he and about twenty- five other Minnesotans met together to form the Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL) and to officially begin their fight against abortion. From these small beginnings, with just two dozen or so members, MCCL and the right-to-life movement in Minnesota would grow into a powerful lobby in state and national politics. Just seven years later, nearly five thousand Minnesotans gathered to circle the capitol building in St. Paul on January 22, 1974. They marched in solidarity with right-to-lifers across the country to mark the first anniversary of Roe v. Wade. In New York, several hundred protesters turned up at the capitol building in Albany with at least one scuffle breaking out when a pro-life protester “grabbed away and destroyed a 1 Pat Scharber, “Destruction of the human life held real issue in discussing abortion,” The Catholic Bulletin, March 31, 1967. Reel 1, Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life Newspaper Clippings Microfilm Collection, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN. 1 pro-abortion sign displayed by two young girls.”2 And in Washington, D.C., ten thousand people rallied in support of a constitutional amendment to reverse Roe v. Wade and make abortion illegal again. It was the first March for Life, which would become an annual tradition for the movement. Right-to-lifers gathered that day to show that despite the legalization of abortion they had not given up. In fact, in the preceding years, they had turned a disparate grassroots movement rooted in state and local action into a tough and determined national crusade. Fran Watson, president of the Celebrate Life Committee from Long Island and an attendee of the rally in Washington, D.C., praised what she saw as a strong and diverse movement built on the “concern by people from all walks of life…hope for
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