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Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement
Tiny You tells the story of one of the most successful political movements of the twentieth century: the grassroots campaign against legalized abortion. While Americans have rapidly changed their minds about sex education, pornography, arts funding, gay teachers, and ultimately gay marriage, opposition to legalized abortion has only grown. As other socially conservative movements have lost young activists, the pro-life movement has successfully recruited more young people to its cause. Jennifer L. Holland explores why abortion dominates conservative politics like no other cultural issue. Looking at anti-abortion movements in four western states since the 1960s—turning to the fetal pins passed around church services, the graphic images exchanged between friends, and the fetus dolls given to children in school—she argues that activists made fetal life feel personal to many Americans. Pro-life activists persuaded people to see themselves in the pins, images, and dolls they held in their hands and made the fight against abortion the primary bread-and-butter issue for social conservatives. Holland ultimately demonstrates that the success of the pro-life movement lies in the borrowed logic and emotional power of leftist activism.
324 pages, Hardcover
First published April 7, 2020
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515 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 28, 2022
Incredible book about how abortion became the sustaining issue of the right-wing coalition and has mobilized white voters for decades, bringing us to where we are now on the brink of Roe. v Wade being overturned. Particularly interesting as someone living in Colorado, which is now a blue state with some of the most liberal abortion laws in the country (but also a place with deep red roots and huge swaths of abortion access deserts). Doesn't equivocate on its feminist convictions at all and does a much better job of detailing how abortion and racial issues intersect than most current commentators. This only came out in 2020 but I hope it becomes essential reading.
February 20, 2024
This monograph is laden with presuppositions and personal ideological biases, which is obviously her prerogative to do so as the author. Likewise, it is my prerogative in this response essay to dispute what I considered to be weak and flawed arguments that she clearly crafts for an audience she assumes shares her views on the politically explosive issue of abortion (e.g. other academics of the liberal persuasion).
Right from the get-go she lays out her central argument— “anti-abortion activists made the political personal to many white Americans” (2). Pro-life activists achieved this, she argues, by bringing “fetal imagery and its attendant politics into crisis pregnancy centers, onto public thoroughfares, and to schools, churches, and homes” (2). Finally, Holland argues that these activists “inserted fetal politics into profoundly intimate relationships: between husband and wife, child and parent, people and their God” (2). She cleverly crafts a narrative that portrays conniving “white” anti-abortion activists foisting their “political” ideology onto unsuspecting Americans and invading their “personal” lives. Yet, she is not making the argument she thinks she is. Her whole “political-personal” dichotomy is simply just a rhetorical strategy that frames the issue of “fetal politics” in a way that trivializes it. Calling something “political” makes it seem superficial. When someone uses the phrase and accuses one of “politicizing” an issue, it is invariably used in a pejorative way. This is exactly what Holland is doing. From the beginning, she is trying to anchor the reader to this idea that immediately delegitimizes the anti-abortion movement as purely a political powerplay. She uses extremely problematic logic and argues that “because so few of these activists had themselves had an abortion, their work became not to make the personal political, but to make the political personal” (3). It’s a great turn of phrase, but alas, meaningless. To argue that one cannot find and hold an issue “personal” simply because they themselves had not experienced said issue is extremely shortsighted. This “political-personal” juxtaposition is a distinction without a difference. The two entities are inseparable and intimately linked. If an issue—like abortion—is important to a person, then they will have a strong opinion on it, making their opinion and any subsequent expression automatically political. Ultimately, the political is personal and vice versa.
Her insistence on including the issue of “whiteness” comes across as forced and merely a token inclusion of race as a lens of analysis that is, unfortunately, too common in 21st century historical works. She includes an anecdote about how Joan Weber, an anti-abortion activist in the 1970s, characterized the movement as one that knew “no ethnic boundaries” and was “racially diverse,” but committed a faux pas of mistaking an Italian immigrant as Mexican (35). Seriously? Yet she doesn’t stop there. She indicts the entire movement simply because from the late 1960s onward, “the movement was almost entirely white, as members found it hard to recruit any significant number of people of color, even ethnic Mexican Catholics or black evangelicals” (35). I get her point that the issue of abortion was perhaps not as salient of an issue among other demographic groups. But again, so what? What is her point? That a movement can only be legitimate if it is universally accepted? That a movement which centers around an issue that by definition transcends race, ethnicity, and sex, is somehow less valid because too many white people supported it? Is that logic itself (ironically) not racist? Furthermore, it genuinely seems like “white people” cannot do anything right. If they are concerned with an issue that largely affects minorities (African Americans and Hispanics account for the majority of abortions) then they are labeled as “white saviors” who “borrowed” civil rights language. If they don’t, well, then they are labeled as “racists.”
Furthermore, she makes the argument that one of the tactics that the anti-abortion movement used to further their cause was to “humanize the fetus, in an attempt to secure for it the rights of a born human” (55). Again, this clearly reveals her own biased assumption that a fetus is not a human or that it is somehow less human because its “unborn.” Even if we take a neutral position and define a fetus as its own unique entity, neither human or non-human, and that anti-abortion activists “developed a repertoire of fetal imagery” to actively “humanize a fetus,” pro-abortion activists are just as guilty of actively dehumanizing the fetus. Pro-abortion activists use the same “political tactics” that she accuses anti-abortion activists of using. It’s just that the logic is reversed and aligned with her own beliefs on the issue so it receives no criticism. Finally, she criticizes doctors who used preserved fetuses as examples of “biological truths and human origins” as engaging in political messaging (60). In the words of a former professor, I would consider this a “yes and” scenario in which both things are true. What represents “biological truths” more than the physical manifestation of a human body? I’ve never understood the push-back against legislation that requires abortion clinics to show videos or photos of aborted fetuses. Do pro-abortion activists support mothers aborting babies in utter ignorance? Should they not understand exactly how the procedure works and its impacts? How is doing your due diligence and making an informed decision universally considered a “good” thing except for when it comes to abortion? Most (but not all) supporters of abortion do not consider a fetus a living entity anyways so why would viewing a “dead” fetus bother them anyways? If people feel uncomfortable when having to face the reality of all that an abortion entails, then perhaps people should pause and try to determine what their feelings are trying to tell them.
Right from the get-go she lays out her central argument— “anti-abortion activists made the political personal to many white Americans” (2). Pro-life activists achieved this, she argues, by bringing “fetal imagery and its attendant politics into crisis pregnancy centers, onto public thoroughfares, and to schools, churches, and homes” (2). Finally, Holland argues that these activists “inserted fetal politics into profoundly intimate relationships: between husband and wife, child and parent, people and their God” (2). She cleverly crafts a narrative that portrays conniving “white” anti-abortion activists foisting their “political” ideology onto unsuspecting Americans and invading their “personal” lives. Yet, she is not making the argument she thinks she is. Her whole “political-personal” dichotomy is simply just a rhetorical strategy that frames the issue of “fetal politics” in a way that trivializes it. Calling something “political” makes it seem superficial. When someone uses the phrase and accuses one of “politicizing” an issue, it is invariably used in a pejorative way. This is exactly what Holland is doing. From the beginning, she is trying to anchor the reader to this idea that immediately delegitimizes the anti-abortion movement as purely a political powerplay. She uses extremely problematic logic and argues that “because so few of these activists had themselves had an abortion, their work became not to make the personal political, but to make the political personal” (3). It’s a great turn of phrase, but alas, meaningless. To argue that one cannot find and hold an issue “personal” simply because they themselves had not experienced said issue is extremely shortsighted. This “political-personal” juxtaposition is a distinction without a difference. The two entities are inseparable and intimately linked. If an issue—like abortion—is important to a person, then they will have a strong opinion on it, making their opinion and any subsequent expression automatically political. Ultimately, the political is personal and vice versa.
Her insistence on including the issue of “whiteness” comes across as forced and merely a token inclusion of race as a lens of analysis that is, unfortunately, too common in 21st century historical works. She includes an anecdote about how Joan Weber, an anti-abortion activist in the 1970s, characterized the movement as one that knew “no ethnic boundaries” and was “racially diverse,” but committed a faux pas of mistaking an Italian immigrant as Mexican (35). Seriously? Yet she doesn’t stop there. She indicts the entire movement simply because from the late 1960s onward, “the movement was almost entirely white, as members found it hard to recruit any significant number of people of color, even ethnic Mexican Catholics or black evangelicals” (35). I get her point that the issue of abortion was perhaps not as salient of an issue among other demographic groups. But again, so what? What is her point? That a movement can only be legitimate if it is universally accepted? That a movement which centers around an issue that by definition transcends race, ethnicity, and sex, is somehow less valid because too many white people supported it? Is that logic itself (ironically) not racist? Furthermore, it genuinely seems like “white people” cannot do anything right. If they are concerned with an issue that largely affects minorities (African Americans and Hispanics account for the majority of abortions) then they are labeled as “white saviors” who “borrowed” civil rights language. If they don’t, well, then they are labeled as “racists.”
Furthermore, she makes the argument that one of the tactics that the anti-abortion movement used to further their cause was to “humanize the fetus, in an attempt to secure for it the rights of a born human” (55). Again, this clearly reveals her own biased assumption that a fetus is not a human or that it is somehow less human because its “unborn.” Even if we take a neutral position and define a fetus as its own unique entity, neither human or non-human, and that anti-abortion activists “developed a repertoire of fetal imagery” to actively “humanize a fetus,” pro-abortion activists are just as guilty of actively dehumanizing the fetus. Pro-abortion activists use the same “political tactics” that she accuses anti-abortion activists of using. It’s just that the logic is reversed and aligned with her own beliefs on the issue so it receives no criticism. Finally, she criticizes doctors who used preserved fetuses as examples of “biological truths and human origins” as engaging in political messaging (60). In the words of a former professor, I would consider this a “yes and” scenario in which both things are true. What represents “biological truths” more than the physical manifestation of a human body? I’ve never understood the push-back against legislation that requires abortion clinics to show videos or photos of aborted fetuses. Do pro-abortion activists support mothers aborting babies in utter ignorance? Should they not understand exactly how the procedure works and its impacts? How is doing your due diligence and making an informed decision universally considered a “good” thing except for when it comes to abortion? Most (but not all) supporters of abortion do not consider a fetus a living entity anyways so why would viewing a “dead” fetus bother them anyways? If people feel uncomfortable when having to face the reality of all that an abortion entails, then perhaps people should pause and try to determine what their feelings are trying to tell them.
February 21, 2024
One of my favorite activities is to jump on the message boards and listen to the call-in shows for Mississippi State fans after a Bulldog loss. As an alumnus of their archrival, Ole Miss, I confess to my schadenfreude in reveling in their despair, ruminations of what went wrong, and how contemptible Rebel fans are. Because State fans are myopic and do not understand Rebel Nation, their conclusions conform to their presuppositions; however, they are not, in fact, grounded in an accurate assessment of their position versus their rival. I had a similar sensation while reading Tiny You. Holland is a partisan. Her writing is not polemical; it is mournful. She is writing to her "message board," trying to help them understand what is happening "on the field" and why they are in danger of losing. Reading this book was like eavesdropping on a private conversation. To no surprise... they were talking about me.
Holland's stated argument was that "anti-abortion activists made the political personal to many white Americans." (2) She argued further that "anti-abortion sermons, viewings of pro-life films in schools, or a casual glance at a fetal pin were more transformative than seeing radical activists block clinic doors." (14) I think I understand the second argument and she supports her thesis effectively. The banal activities of the grassroots pro-life volunteers characterized the movement more than sensationalized confrontations at abortion clinics. The first argument statement, however, is elusive. Her intent to feature "whiteness" in her argument was clear, but the political-personal axis confused me.
Organized into two halves, part one traces the organizational development of the pro-life movement, beginning in the 1960s. Part two fast-forwards to the 1980s and 1990s when the movement coopts the fetus as its primary iconography. Holland sets the work in the Mountain West states of Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico. She punctuates the chapters with state-specific anecdotes, seminal events, and oral histories. This organizational structure made sense and contributed to the accessibility of the history.
Her bibliography enumerated various archives visited to procure her primary sources—from my reading, the elements she used from those archives needed clarification. The use of newspaper articles, organizational literature, and oral histories was more effective than the archival material. Much of the book came across as a synthesis of the conventional historiography. Holland's intervention, how abortion became the singular issue for many conservative Americans (13), seems thin.
The introduction is overwrought with hyperbole. Holland peppered her opening with phrases like: "proliferating victimhoods," innocent fetuses sitting at apexes, and white social conservatives asking marginalized groups to fall in line. (5) She made a general practice throughout the book to append "white" or "whiteness" to cohorts without distinction. For instance, there were no social conservatives, only white social conservatives. Is the reader to believe that there were no people of color who were socially conservative? She emphasized whiteness to the extreme, yet the book's setting was in the Mountain West, a region populated mainly by white people and with few Blacks. The whiteness of the Mountain West is no more remarkable than the blackness of South Africa. She continued, "For evangelicals, especially the white ones..." but did not specify what made them special. (101) Her research amply supported the connection of Catholics, evangelicals, and social conservatives to the pro-life movement; however, the racial component was a bridge too far.
Holland featured another problematic assertion in the introduction. She wrote, "They (pro-lifers) transformed their political beliefs - that fetuses were babies and abortion was murder - into a lived reality for many Americans..." (3) These two positions are not political beliefs. They are moral, ethical, scientific, or religious beliefs. The pro-life political belief was either forensic or constitutional. By framing the argument in this incongruous manner, Holland delegitimized pro-life ethics by essentializing political power as their primary motive.
I searched through the bibliography for monographs that would be useful for my research. Holland included Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, which was already on my comps list; she did not include John Turner's Bill Bright & Campus Crusade for Christ. Excluding Turner is understandable since she already used James Dobson's Focus on the Family as an evangelical, socially conservative organization example. However, Turner speaks to many of the issues in the book. She featured Francis Shaeffer's film "What Ever Happened to the Human Race," (102) but did not cite his seminal book How Should We Then Live? This omission struck me as peculiar. Books that look promising for my research include Applebome's Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture, Baer and Singer's African American Religion in the Twentieth Century, and Rymph's Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right.
Though I found issues with the book, I gained valuable learning that will apply to my research. Including the abortion issue in my chapters on Religion and Race will add depth and nuance to my findings. While I disagreed with Holland's emphasis on race in Tiny You, her theme will apply to my study of the American South. Her use of oral histories can serve as a guide to similar primary source work in my research.
Holland's stated argument was that "anti-abortion activists made the political personal to many white Americans." (2) She argued further that "anti-abortion sermons, viewings of pro-life films in schools, or a casual glance at a fetal pin were more transformative than seeing radical activists block clinic doors." (14) I think I understand the second argument and she supports her thesis effectively. The banal activities of the grassroots pro-life volunteers characterized the movement more than sensationalized confrontations at abortion clinics. The first argument statement, however, is elusive. Her intent to feature "whiteness" in her argument was clear, but the political-personal axis confused me.
Organized into two halves, part one traces the organizational development of the pro-life movement, beginning in the 1960s. Part two fast-forwards to the 1980s and 1990s when the movement coopts the fetus as its primary iconography. Holland sets the work in the Mountain West states of Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico. She punctuates the chapters with state-specific anecdotes, seminal events, and oral histories. This organizational structure made sense and contributed to the accessibility of the history.
Her bibliography enumerated various archives visited to procure her primary sources—from my reading, the elements she used from those archives needed clarification. The use of newspaper articles, organizational literature, and oral histories was more effective than the archival material. Much of the book came across as a synthesis of the conventional historiography. Holland's intervention, how abortion became the singular issue for many conservative Americans (13), seems thin.
The introduction is overwrought with hyperbole. Holland peppered her opening with phrases like: "proliferating victimhoods," innocent fetuses sitting at apexes, and white social conservatives asking marginalized groups to fall in line. (5) She made a general practice throughout the book to append "white" or "whiteness" to cohorts without distinction. For instance, there were no social conservatives, only white social conservatives. Is the reader to believe that there were no people of color who were socially conservative? She emphasized whiteness to the extreme, yet the book's setting was in the Mountain West, a region populated mainly by white people and with few Blacks. The whiteness of the Mountain West is no more remarkable than the blackness of South Africa. She continued, "For evangelicals, especially the white ones..." but did not specify what made them special. (101) Her research amply supported the connection of Catholics, evangelicals, and social conservatives to the pro-life movement; however, the racial component was a bridge too far.
Holland featured another problematic assertion in the introduction. She wrote, "They (pro-lifers) transformed their political beliefs - that fetuses were babies and abortion was murder - into a lived reality for many Americans..." (3) These two positions are not political beliefs. They are moral, ethical, scientific, or religious beliefs. The pro-life political belief was either forensic or constitutional. By framing the argument in this incongruous manner, Holland delegitimized pro-life ethics by essentializing political power as their primary motive.
I searched through the bibliography for monographs that would be useful for my research. Holland included Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, which was already on my comps list; she did not include John Turner's Bill Bright & Campus Crusade for Christ. Excluding Turner is understandable since she already used James Dobson's Focus on the Family as an evangelical, socially conservative organization example. However, Turner speaks to many of the issues in the book. She featured Francis Shaeffer's film "What Ever Happened to the Human Race," (102) but did not cite his seminal book How Should We Then Live? This omission struck me as peculiar. Books that look promising for my research include Applebome's Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture, Baer and Singer's African American Religion in the Twentieth Century, and Rymph's Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right.
Though I found issues with the book, I gained valuable learning that will apply to my research. Including the abortion issue in my chapters on Religion and Race will add depth and nuance to my findings. While I disagreed with Holland's emphasis on race in Tiny You, her theme will apply to my study of the American South. Her use of oral histories can serve as a guide to similar primary source work in my research.
April 20, 2023
This was just great
August 7, 2023
Another book I'd recommend to everyone as a mechanism for understanding how the anti-abortion movement gained so much traction in America.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews