I recently had the pleasure of reading Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (Oxford, 2016), by the historian Daniel K. Williams. What follows is a largely visceral response to the book, written mostly during my daughters’ afternoon naptime, so I should state upfront that I am not really trying to recreate the finer shades of Williams’s arguments. I have known Dan for over a decade and was unsurprised by the all-around quality of his second book. It is a smart, patiently-executed study that chronicles the modern pro-life movement as it emerged in the postwar era and coalesced in the face of early abortion reform laws and, of course, the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The book is written from the perspective of the pro-life movement, but is not a brief for it.*

Defenders of the Unborn provides a rounder portrait of the pro-life movement than is typically available in either academic or popular forums. Williams argues convincingly against simplistically conflating the anti-abortion cause with the other forms of “family values” conservatism that took off in the Seventies. He cites many examples of left-of-center activists and politicians whose first instinct in response to mid-1960s calls for abortion liberalization was to defend the legal status of unborn life. That in and of itself is not a revelation to those who know something about Catholic and African American politics, but Williams pushes back against the tendency to downplay the fact that many early pro-lifers were not otherwise social conservatives. Not until the mid- and late 1970s did the familiar pro-family package (anti-abortion, anti-ERA, anti-gay rights, etc.) fully emerge. Here, it is quite apparent (to me, at least) that evangelicals sealed the deal. Defenders of the Unborn suggests that many evangelicals folded their anti-abortion positions into an existing conservatism that, while not always partisan in the pre-Reagan era, had long featured a deep skepticism about the liberal state (including the judiciary). A turn to the right was the price of evangelicals making the pro-life movement a bigger, less-Catholic tent. Williams’s book is a quiet rebuke of those historians who imply that the support for moderate abortion law reform proffered by some evangelicals in the 1960s and 1970s was akin to what we would now consider a pro-choice position. It was not. In the post-Roe era, most such evangelicals changed their minds pretty quickly.

Williams also tweaks the narrative of abortion liberalization in an important way. While momentum for reform surged in the mid- and late-1960s, it slowed and in some cases was reversed in the early 1970s (foreshadowing, it is worth noting, the trajectory of the ERA). In other words, Roe arrested a partially successful counterattack. Roe came as a surprise even to many supporters of abortion rights. It ultimately emboldened the conservative wing of the pro-life movement, shaping its successes and failures ever since.

For Williams, though, the pro-life cause has endured because it is not as wedded to politics as we are led to believe. He shows how pro-life standards, such as the use of Dred Scott as an analogy, pre-dated Roe and thus were not desperately snatched from the historical ether. He convincingly contends that the movement fundamentally has been about human rights, even if (as he concedes) the arc of its rhetoric has bent toward gender traditionalism.

Williams clearly laments the disappearance of pro-life progressivism as a political force. The simplest explanation for this development is that, by 1976, the Republican Party was much friendlier turf for abortion opponents. The opposite was the case in the Democratic Party. Williams references the growing influence of second-wave feminism in the national party. The implication is that Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, and countless others converted to the pro-choice cause largely because they wanted to remain electorally viable as Democrats. Perhaps—and one could say the same thing about Republicans George H. W. Bush, arguably Ronald Reagan, and certainly Donald Trump (whose track record suggests a longer-standing fealty to the Hugh Hefner wing of abortion rights). But the activists and voters who effected the party-based herding process surely were far less cynical than their chosen candidates. If many evangelicals became more pro-life once they started caring about the issue, then it is just as likely that many progressives (Catholic, secular, and otherwise) moved in the other direction once they thought things through. We can debate why people care about abortion, but less so that they actually care.

Defenders of the Unborn deserves a broad readership because it pulls off the tricky task of clarifying a messy subject. I was glad to see that it received a favorable review in The New York Times precisely for this reason. In the epilogue, Williams cites recent polling data on abortion as an indication of the durability of the pro-life movement, despite a half-century of disappointment. I see those numbers as instead showing the steady opposition of most Americans to strict bans on abortion, regardless of whether they embrace the pro-choice label. In my reading, a narrow interpretation of Roe (one that, say, allows for strict limits after the first trimester) better reflects the will of the people on abortion than does the leadership of the House of Representatives. But I don’t expect the pro-life movement to retreat, and nothing in this book gives me reason to think that it will.

* Williams is pretty clearly pro-life. To his credit, and at the risk of limiting his professional horizons going forward, he does not really try to conceal that fact. For the record, I am pro-choice, but have long believed that the Democratic Party should make a point of welcoming the many pro-life progressives in its midst—not because doing so is likely to win over anti-abortion hardliners, but because it is completely possible to be progressive and pro-life. Abortion is too complicated an issue to be reduced to a litmus test. It is also too important an issue to exclude anyone’s perspective. Everyone—female or male—considers abortion through an inexhaustibly variegated blend of moral criteria and personal experiences. In my case, the second-hand awareness that women I know have had abortions reinforced my support for keeping abortion safe and accessible. As Williams’s introduction suggests, becoming a parent solidified his pro-life position.

– Steven P. Miller