ARTICLES OF FAITH:
A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars
By Cynthia Gorney
Simon & Schuster, 575 pages, $27.50
In the 25 years since Roe vs. Wade gave women a constitutional right to abortion, the landscape of our nation’s most contentious moral and political tussle has become one depicted in only the harshest of contrasts: On one side are the baby-killers, on the other, the bomb-throwers.
Largely absent from the debate over legalized abortion is any real sense of the complex, ambivalent and often contradictory personal beliefs that drive almost all of us to stand, with various degrees of unease, on one side of the dividing line or the other.
But in “Articles of Faith,” a thorough and thoroughly excellent account of the modern abortion conflict, Cynthia Gorney accomplishes what precious little other reporting about the issue has. She imbues her story with the subtle and contrasting shades of individual human emotion and intellect grappling with this difficult question.
Gorney uses as her prism the struggle over abortion rights in Missouri that would culminate in Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services, the 1989 Supreme Court case that many thought would overturn Roe. She tells that story primarily through the eyes of two individuals whose work and beliefs led them to stands on different sides of the “vs.”
In 1968, Judith Widdicombe, a registered nurse in St. Louis, helps organize an underground abortion-referral service after her volunteer work with a suicide hot line brings her into contact with desperate women seeking abortions. Widdicombe’s commitment to the issue is unflinching and matter-of-fact. She allows women to recover from the procedure in her guest bedroom, and when patients begin flying to states where abortion is legal, she coaches flight attendants on what to do if they hemorrhage on the plane returning home. After Missouri legalizes abortion, she starts Reproductive Health Services, the state’s first legal abortion clinic and, soon, its busiest.
Widdicombe’s foil is Sam Lee, an aspiring seminarian who finds in the abortion battle a focus for his strong but scattered moral passion. From a student who agonizes about the morality of giving homeless people money, he becomes a fervent demonstrator leading the local anti-abortion movement in a series of sit-ins at Widdicombe’s clinic and others.
Eventually, he helps write a state law restricting abortions that Widdicombe’s clinic challenges in court–creating the case that would become Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services as Missouri Atty. Gen. William L. Webster appealed it up to the Supreme Court.
Gorney, at the time a Washington Post reporter, was assigned to write about the case for the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. Unable to find any reference books on the history of the abortion conflict that did not primarily function as polemics, she eventually set out to write one herself, a task that would encompass six years, more than 500 interviews and archival material ranging from church fliers to leaflets advertising illegal-abortion methods.
While Widdicombe and Lee make up the main threads of the narrative, Gorney wanders through the camps on both sides of the battlefield. She touches on everything from the members of the underground feminist network who performed illegal abortions using the name “Jane” as a mass alias to the bitter infighting at the National Right to Life Committee over conflicting bills in Congress seeking to limit abortions.
Despite the in-depth legal, political and social research woven through the story, Gorney never strays far from the human element. Even characters who make only brief appearances in the narrative leave their particular stamp.
Gorney does not shy away from the contradictions, even hypocrisy, of people’s views. Widdicombe leads baptisms over some of the fetuses her clinic aborts. The clinic’s chief doctor, Michael Freiman, balks at doing second-trimester abortions after he sees a fetus’ hand during a demonstration but continues to perform thousands of first-trimester procedures. There are, too, the housewives-turned-protesters who anticipate their weekly Saturday arrests at a local abortion clinic with an excitement tinged with self-righteousness.
For those familiar only with the current status of the abortion struggle or who consider it a background buzz akin to some distant ethnic war, the issue’s evolution contains some surprises.
Although pro-choice activism is now strongly identified with the women’s movement, abortion was largely considered a medical issue when laws began changing in the 1960s. Doctors who had witnessed the ravages of illegal abortions were at the forefront of efforts to legalize the procedure.
Indeed, the book’s accounts of the consequences of illegal abortions make for harrowing reading at a time when abortion services, if shrinking, are still available and safe. At Los Angeles County Hospital, entire wards were turned over to patients trying to recover from illegal abortions.
Also enlightening is the section discussing the reluctance of evangelical Protestants to get involved in the abortion issue. The Southern Baptist Convention did not explicitly support an abortion ban until 1979, Gorney writes, and, like many other Protestant denominations, largely considered abortion a “Catholic issue.”
For their part, some predominantly Catholic groups were dismayed to see the issue adopted by the religious and political Right they felt used abortion to promote a broader social agenda at odds with a philosophy that emphasized the sanctity of all life.
By the time Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services reaches the U.S. Supreme Court, the book’s principal characters have been relegated to the sidelines in a war that has transformed itself beyond their recognition. The days when Widdicombe and Lee sat on opposite sides of the table at restaurants in St. Louis, arguing over their beliefs, hoping to sway one another with words, have long since vanished.
Amid increasing violence against abortion clinics and a lobbying bureaucracy so entrenched on both sides that Widdicombe wonders if either really wants to “win” the war, she and Lee find themselves on the edges of the fray. Lee has abandoned sit-ins for lobbying the state legislature on behalf of Missouri Citizens for Life. Widdicombe moves to Washington, D.C., to work for a pro-choice political action committee.
On the day the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the case he helped bring about, Lee camps out on the court steps so he can be among the spectators allowed inside. The day the ruling is handed down, Widdicombe returns to Missouri to wait for the decision at the clinic she founded.
Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services did not turn out to be the landmark case that many predicted. The real watershed came three years later, when the Supreme Court reaffirmed Roe in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania vs. Casey. If “Articles of Faith” has any major weakness, it is that the Casey decision and other significant aspects of the post-Webster landscape–such as the series of attacks on abortion clinics and political efforts to ban late-term abortions–get compressed into the epilogue.
By the book’s end, both Lee and Widdicombe find themselves increasingly disenfranchised from their respective movements. After her unhappy stint in D.C., Widdicombe moves back to Missouri and launches a ballot initiative to guarantee legal abortion in the state constitution, a campaign that alienates her from other pro-choice advocates who find it too risky. Lee, by compromising over language in an abortion bill, finds himself branded as insufficiently committed to the cause and gets fired from his lobbying job.
That–in one of the book’s final scenes–the two weary and disillusioned warriors exchange a hug in a hallway at the Missouri Capitol serves as a fitting and touching denouement to their stories.
This moment also offers some small note of hope that slurs and violence can somehow give way to a passionate but civil discussion that respects the complex human emotions that shape the abortion conflict.
