1. For some of the literature on social movements, see Staggenborg, Suzanne, The Pro-Choice Movement: Organization and Activism in the Abortion Conflict (New York, 1991), 3–8Google Scholar. See also Kelly's, James “Seeking a Sociologically Correct Name for Abortion Opponents,” in Jelen, Ted G. and Chandler, Marthe A., eds., Abortion Politics in the United States and Canada (Westport, Conn., 1994), 14–40Google Scholar.

2. Two older histories of the movement are Merton, Andrew H., Enemies of Choice: The Right to Life Movement and Its Threat to Abortion (Boston, 1981)Google Scholar, and Paige, Connie, The Right to Lifers: Who They Are, How They Operate, Where They Get Their Money (New York, 1983)Google Scholar. Both contain useful information, but the Paige book is more extensive. Both are essentially journalistic accounts, hostile in tone and lacking balance. Some of the writings of the sociologist James Kelly are helpful in understanding the movement. His critique of Enemies of Choice is significant. He compares Merton's conclusions with the actual contents of one of the interviews Merton taped and says: “It was as though he had not listened to his own taped interviews when he sat down to write his book”; “Turning Liberals into Fascists: A Case Study of the Distortion of the Right-To-Life Movement,” Fidelity 6 (July–August 1987): 17–22Google Scholar. See also Kelly's “Beyond the Stereotypes: Interviews with Right-To-Life Pioneers,” Commonweal, 20 November, 1981, 654–59; “Toward Complexity: The Right to Life Movement,” Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion 1 (1989): 83–107Google Scholar; “Learning and Teaching Consistency: Catholics and the Right-To-Life Movement,” in Byrnes, Timothy A. and Segers, Mary C., eds., The Catholic Church and the Politics of Abortion: A View from the States (Boulder, Colo., 1992), 152–67Google Scholar; and “Seeking a Sociologically Correct Name for Abortion Opponents.” Spitzer's, Robert J.The Right to Life Movement and Third-Party Politics (Westport, Conn., 1987Google Scholar) deals with New York but contains information relevant to an understanding of the larger movement.

3. While pro-lifers tend to be viewed negatively, abortion itself is given a more complex treatment. Celeste Condit Railsback notes: “Even in the strongest cases, therefore, the mass cultural medium of television admitted abortion only as an ambiguous and constrained practice”; Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change (Urbana, 1990), 139Google Scholar. On television's treatment of abortion, she summarizes a number of shows in which prolifers appear and it is striking how frequently they appear as violent picketers or as arsonists and bombers. Pro-lifers have frequently lamented what they perceive as negatively biased treatment: see, for example, Andrusko, Dave, “Zealots, Zanies, and Assorted Kooks: How the Major Media Interprets the Pro-Life Movement,” in Dave Andrusko, ed., To Rescue the Future: The Pro-Life Movement in the 1980's (Toronto, 1983), 183–200Google Scholar. Support for the view that the media present a biased view of the movement can be found in a series of articles by David Shaw in the Los Angeles Times, 1–4 July, 1990, and in Olasky, Marvin, The Press and Abortion, 1838–1988 (Hillsdale, N.J., 1988)Google Scholar. There is a lengthy discussion of media bias in the treatment both of the abortion issue and of the pro-life movement in Hunter, James Davison, Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America's Culture War (New York, 1994), 154–67Google Scholar. In this connection it is significant that Lichter, S. Robert, Rothman, Stanley, and Lichter, Linda S. report in The Media Elite: America's New Powerbrokers (Bethesda, Md., 1986) 29Google Scholar, that 90 percent of news officials interviewed took a pro-choice position.

4. In a review of public opinion polls dealing with abortion, the sociologist James Davison Hunter notes: “Outside the rank and file of the anti-abortion movement, the average American—even when numbered among the closest allies of the anti-abortion movement …—tends to view the anti-abortion movement the same negative way that the pro-choice coalitions do. The average American is much more likely to view the anti-abortion movement as unconcerned about women and the poor, and marked by judgementalism, extremism and intolerance”; “What Americans Really Think About Abortion,” First Things 24 (June–July 1992): 20Google Scholar. A similar discussion by Carl Bowman, “The Anatomy of Ambivalence: What Americans Really Believe About Abortion,” is found in Hunter's Before the Shooting Begins, 85–119.

5. Hunter, in ibid. (20), notes: “The success of the activists of the abortion rights movement in demonizing the anti-abortion movement is all the more surprising when one compares image to reality. When asked in the surveys to express their personal concerns on a wide range of issues, individuals who identified themselves as being ‘pro-life’ were, with but a few exceptions, as ‘liberal’ as, and in most cases even more ‘liberal’ than, the so-called socially progressive abortion rights group.”

6. This is a central theme in Paige's The Right to Lifers. Rosalind Pollack Petchesky stresses the connection of the New Right to the anti-abortion movement in Abortion and Women's Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom (New York, 1984)Google Scholar. Nonetheless, she notes that “the organized antiabortion movement, however, in its political and ideological roots is distinct from the New Right and should not be confused with it” (254).

7. For an expression of this view, see Granberg, Donald, “Pro-Life or Reflection of Conservative Ideology? An Analysis of Opposition to Legalized Abortion,” Sociology and Social Research: An International Journal 62 (April 1978): 414–29Google ScholarPubMed.

8. Thus Susan Faludi in her book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York, 1991)Google Scholar declared that “the patriarch's eclipsed ability to make the family decisions figured as a bitter subtext, the unspoken but pressing agenda of the anti-abortion campaign” (403). A similar theme can be found in Faux, Marian, Crusaders: Voices from the Abortion Front (New York, 1990)Google Scholar.

9. Luker, Kristin, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), 193, 194Google Scholar. The comparison of the two groups is made on 194–97.

10. Ibid., 159.

11. Ginsburg, Faye, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 7Google Scholar. Conover, Pamela Johnston and Gray, Virginia, Feminism and the New Right: Conflict Over the American Family (New York, 1983)Google Scholar, suggest that the abortion issue “does appear to be a life-style conflict rooted in basic values central to how people view the American family” (127).

12. For discussions of the “symbolic crusade” thesis, see Markson, Stephen L., “The Roots of Contemporary Anti-Abortion Activism,” in Sachdev, Paul, ed., Perspectives on Abortion, (Metuchen, N.J., 1985), 33–43Google Scholar; Leahy, Peter J., Snow, David A., and Worden, Steven K., “The Antiabortion Movement and Symbolic Crusades: Reappraisal of a Popular Theory, ”Alternative Lifestyles 6 (Fall 1983): 27–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Fried, Amy, “Abortion Politics as Symbolic Politics: An Investigation into Belief Sytems,” Social Science Quarterly 69:1 (1988): 137–54Google Scholar.

13. Ginsburg in Contested Lives argues: “Viewed from an anthropological perspective, one can see in the abortion controversy the most recent manifestation of an ongoing process in which struggles over the material, political, and symbolic definitions of gender are intertwined, dramatized, coded and continualy transformed. As the abortion debate has come increasingly to stand for opposing views of gender, the possibility of mutual recognition seems to decrease as each side claims to speak a truth regarding contemporary as well as past and future generations of women” (220).

14. Jo Neitz, Mary, “Family, State, and God: Ideologies of the Right-to-Life Movement,” Sociological Analysis 42:3 (1981): 277CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Cuneo, Michael, Catholics Against the Church: Anti-Abortion Protest in Toronto, 1969–1985 (Toronto, 1989)Google Scholar.

16. Cuneo states: “As evidence by their different social backgrounds, value commitments, and aspirations, it is clear that not all activists inhabit the same cognitive and cultural world. … In addition to its Procrustean bent, Luker's thesis suffers from an implicit monocausality: the impugned status of housewives in the face of the exodus of women from homemaking into the public workplace is adduced as the primary if not exclusive impetus behind anti-abortionism. This explanation perhaps conceals an ideological bias. In locating the roots of anti-abortionism in the sociocultural circumstances of activists it seems to imply that the question of abortion itself cannot or should not carry sufficient moral weight to arouse people to activism. Rather than taking seriously the claims of anti-abortionists regarding the inherent value of fetal life, these claims are dismissed tout court as a facade for what is essentially an alarmist reaction to the realignment of gender roles in contemporary society”; Catholic, 82.

17. Kelly, “Toward Complexity,” 83–107.

18. Cook, Elizabeth Adell, Jelen, Ted G., and Wilcox, Clyde, Between Two Absolutes: Public Opinion and the Politics of Abortion (Boulder, Colo., 1992)Google Scholar.

19. Ibid., 192. Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox note (80) that opponents of abortion are indeed more likely to be supporters of traditional gender roles. However, multivariate analysis makes it clear that these attitudes are not the cause of abortion beliefs. Thus they also note that “for all denominational families, feminism is not strongly related to abortion attitudes, once other attitudes have been taken into consideration” (125).

20. Granberg, Donald, “The Abortion Activists,” Family Planning Perspectives 3 (July–August 1981): 162Google Scholar.

21. The belief that the ERA would result in the mandating of abortion funding was based in part on the experience of several states with state ERAs. See Oliphant, Lincoln C., “ERA and the Abortion Connection,” Human Life Review 7 (Spring 1981): 42–60Google Scholar; Hyde, Henry J., “The ERA-Abortion Connection,” Human Life Review 9 (Summer 1983): 81–86Google Scholar; and Noonan, John T., “The ERA and Abortion,” Human Life Review 10 (Spring 1984): 29–46Google Scholar. The NRLC took the position that the ERA was unacceptable unless it was rendered “abortion neutral” by the insertion of clarifying language. The same position was taken by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops; for the latter, see National Right to Life News, 3 May 1984, 1.

22. Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, Between, 123 (Table 4.7). The Beta for the correlation with euthanasia attitudes was – .27; for sexual morality it was – .20; 125. See also Finlay, Barbara, “Right to Life vs. the Right to Die: Some Correlates of Euthanasia Attitudes,” Sociology and Social Research 69 (July 1985): 548–60Google Scholar.

23. Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, Between, 76. A finding consistent with this is reported in Hunter's Before the Shooting Begins, 103–6. Donald Granberg in “Pro-Life or Reflection of Conservative Ideology?” disputes the notion that opposition to abortion “is part of a more generalized pro-life stance” (421). However, his test of such consistency is open to question because he believes that pro-lifers should be “disproportionately opposed to capital punishment, have less confidence in the military, and to favor increased spending to improve and protect the health of people while favoring a decrease in expenditures on the military and armaments” (421). Clearly this is one view of what a pro-life philosophy ought to entail, but it is hardly the only one possible. Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, Between (74), point out the problems with the sort of consistency test used by Granberg. Interestingly, Granberg's survey of abortion activists revealed that NARAL and NRLC members were similar in their opposition to capital punishment (60 percent and 56 percent, respectively) and far more likely to oppose it than the general public (28 percent); Donald Granberg and Donald Denney, “The Coathanger and the Rose,” Society (May–June 1982): 40.

24. While this is not proof that the status of motherhood is indeed the fundamental concern, since all of these issues may be driven by a deeper set of ideological, philosophical, or religious concerns, it does at least leave open the possibility.

25. For an expression of their views, see Sweet, Gail Grenier, ed., Pro-Life Feminism: Different Voices (Toronto and Lewiston, N.Y., 1985)Google Scholar.

26. For a clear statement of this view, see “Why Is N.R.L.C. a Single-Issue Organization?” by Douglas Johnson, the NRLC legislative director. This statement has frequently been inserted in the program for the NRLC's annual meeting and clearly is an official statement. It says in part the NRLC “has defended the principle that every innocent human being has a right to life” and “socially sanctioned abortion, infanticide and euthanasia all violate that principle” (quoted from the 1990 program [108–9]).

27. The pamphlet was entitled “Death Without Dignity: Killing for Mercy” (Minneapolis, 1975). A later version was entitled “And Now Euthanasia” (Washington, D.C., 1985). Other pamphlets produced by the movement on this subject inlcude Handler, Denyse, “Mercy Killing: How, Why, and Where” (Lewiston, N.Y. 1977)Google Scholar. Books include Horan, Dennis J. and Mall, David, eds., Death, Dying, and Euthanasia (Washington, D.C., 1977)Google Scholar, and Grisez, Germain and Boyle, Joseph M., Life and Death with Liberty and Justice for All: A Contribution to the Euthanasia Debate (Notre Dame, Ind., 1979)Google Scholar. A number of films used by the movement also deal with infanticide and euthanasia, including The Slippery Slope (1982) and Death in the Nursery (1984).

28. Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, Between, 72. Donald Granberg and Beth Wellman Granberg reported an even weaker linkage: “We conclude that although abortion attitudes are not completely independent of political ideology, the two are not closely related”; “Abortion Attitudes, 1965–1980: Trends and Determinants,” Family Planning Perspectives 12 (September-October 1980): 250–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, Between, 141.

30. Ibid., 138. Baker, Ross K., Epstein, Laurily K., and Forth, Rodney D., “Matters of Life and Death: Social, Political, and Religious Correlates of Attitudes on Abortion,” American Politics Quarterly 9 (January 1981): 89–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar, report that “we found no relationship between the abortion scale and questions which tapped attitudes on the government's role as a guarantor of employment and its role in aiding minorities” (97; emphasis in the original).

31. Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, Between, 141.

32. Ibid., 87. The pattern of opposition to abortion they note is complex: opposition to euthanasia is the best predictor of opposition to abortion for “traumatic” reasons, this is, for rape, incest, and fetal deformity; attitudes toward sexual morality are the best predictors of attitudes toward “elective” abortion (the terms are those of Cook et al.).

33. Ibid., 48: “Of all the social characteristics that help us understand abortion attitudes, education is the best predictor.” Granberg and Granberg, “Abortion Attitudes, 1965–80,” also reported that of five indicators of social status (prestige, formal education, income, informal education, and social class), “the level of formal education is more strongly related to abortion attitudes than the other four indicators” (253).

34. Baker, Epstein, and Forth, “Matters of Life and Death”; Rhodes, A. Lewis, “Religion and Opposition to Abortion Reconsidered,” Review of Religious Research 27 (December 1985): 158–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Legge, Jerome S., “The Determinants of Attitudes Toward Abortion in the American Electorate,” Western Political Quarterly 36:3 (1983): 479–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blake, Judith and del Pinal, Jorge H., “Predicting Polar Attitudes Toward Abortion in the United States,” Burtchaell, James Tunstead, ed., Abortion Parley (Kansas City, Mo., 1980), 29–56Google Scholar.

35. Hunter, James Davison, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York, 1991), 118Google Scholar. Along similar lines Robert Wuthnow argues that among the most important changes in the role of religion in public life in America “has been the deepening polarization between religious liberals and religious conservatives”; Christianity in the Twenty-First Century: Reflections on the Challenges Ahead (New York, 1993), 140Google Scholar.

36. Hunter, Culture Wars, 44.

37. Hunter, “What Americans Really Think About Abortion,” 18.

38. Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, Between, state that “an important part of the relationship between high levels of education and liberal attitudes toward legal abortion is clearly due to the socializing experience of education” (52).

39. Along these lines Randall A. Lake has argued that “pro-choice forces, I suggest, confront more than adamant beliefs about abortion; they also confront a powerful set of beliefs about the very nature of morality and the process of ethical judgement”; “The Metaethical Framework of Anti-abortion Rhetoric,” Signs 11:3 (1986)Google Scholar. Lake further asserts that “anti-abortionists view humans as at best weak, selfish, and callous, and at worst maliciously immoral.” The warrant for this remark is dubious and attributes to members of the movement a homogeneity of view that simply does not exist.

40. Legge, “Determinants of Attitudes” (488): “It would appear that the overall structure of abortion attitudes among the American public is relatively weak with few consistent predictors.”

41. Kelly makes this point as well in “Toward Complexity”, 91–92. Ronald G. Walters made a similar suggestion with respect to the diversity of organizations among the abolitionists: “The very diversity of antislavery after 1840 probably encouraged the maximum number of people to enlist in the cause”; The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830 (New York, 1978), 5Google Scholar.

42. Luker discusses the social-class differences between pro-choice and pro-life activists in Abortion, 194–97. The argument that abortion is a class issue was first advanced by Skerry, Peter in “The Class Conflict over Abortion,” The Public Interest 53 (Summer 1978): 69–84Google Scholar. The educational attainments of the two groups, and their standing relative to the general population, have been compared by Professor Raymond J. Adamek of the Sociology Department of Kent State University in an unpublished work, “Socio-Demographic Characteristics of Pro-Life and Pro-Choice Activists as Reported in Four Studies, Compared to the U.S. Adult Population (In Percent).” Professor Adamek draws upon the work of Kristin Luker, Marilyn Falik, and Donald Granberg. Luker's California data are found in Abortion and the Meaning of Motherhood and also in “Abortion and the Meaning of Life” in Sidney, and Callahan, Daniel, eds., Abortion: Understanding Differences (New York, 1984), 25–45Google Scholar. Falik's, data are in Ideology and Abortion Policy Politics (New York, 1983)Google Scholar. The relevant work by Granberg is cited above in notes 20 and 23; Adamek also uses his “Comparison of Pro- and Anti-Abortion Organizations in Missouri,” Social Biology 28 (Fall–Winter): 239–52.

43. Lasch, Christopher, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (New York, 1991), 491Google Scholar. In his view an upper class fully committed to the mystique of progress believes that the future is and ought to be controllable and it therefore supports abortion as a necessary means of achieving that goal. In his judgment, “The debate about abortion illustrates the difference between the enlightened ethic of competitive achievement and the petit-bourgeois or working class ethic of limits” (489). While he overstates the degree to which abortion is a class issue, he reinforces Hunter's point that what is involved is the collision of competing worldviews. Lasch bases his observations on his reading of Luker's work but gives it a distinctive turn: Luker recognizes class differences between abortion activists but does not assign to class the centrality ascribed by Lasch.

44. Tribe, Laurence, Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes (New York, 1990), 238Google Scholar.

45. Ibid., 239.

46. This point was made forcefully by Blake, Judith in “Negativism, Equivocation, and Wobbly Assent: Public ‘Support’ for the Prochoice Platform on Abortion,” Demography 18 (August 1981): 309–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is reinforced in Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, Between, who declare that “the majority of Americans hold positions that do not fall neatly in either camp—they support legal abortions in some but not all circumstances” (37).

47. This disjunction of morality and legality was discussed in Henshaw, Stanley K. and Martire, Greg, “Morality and Legality,” Family Planning Perspectives 14 (March–April 1982): 53–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It has been observed in other polling data, for example, the Wirthlin survey commissioned by the NCCB in 1990. In his discussion of this survey James Kelly observes: “In the N.C.C.B. survey, the ‘pro-life’ advantage recorded on answers about the moral dimension of abortion shrank on the explicitly legal questions, from about a three-quarter predominance to about half, and sometimes less”; “Abortion: What Americans Really Think and the Catholic Challange,” America, (2 November 1991), 310–16, 314.

48. That the Supreme Court decision had run ahead of public opinion was also the opinion of Karen Mulhauser of NARAL, who said: “The country wasn't with us at that point. Had we made more gains through the legislatures and referendum process, and taken a little longer at it, the public would have moved with us.” The quote is from Roger Williams, “The Power of Fetal Politics,” Saturday Review, 9 June, 1979, 12.

49. This is discussed in Staggenborg, The Pro-Choice Movement, 139, and in Tribe, Abortion, 174–75.

50. Kelly, “Toward Complexity,” 87.

51. Interview with Edward Golden, Troy, New York, 1 June, 1989. Interview with Mrs. Geline Williams, Houston, Texas. 2 July, 1994.

52. Tatalovich, Raymond and Daynes, Byron W., The Politics of Abortion: A Study of Community Conflict in Public Policy Making (New York, 1981) 62–63Google Scholar.

53. For an early instance of tension between a group of conservative Catholics and Monsignor McHugh, see “A Catholic Abortion,” which reprints the communications between them over a proposed national pro-life initiative, in the conservative Catholic magazine Triumph, April 1971, 7–12.

54. The addresses setting out the “seamless garment” philosophy are found in Fuechtmann, Thomas G., ed., Consistent Ethic of Life (Kansas City, Mo., 1988)Google Scholar, along with a number of essays discussing them. See also Jung, Patricia Beattie and Shannon, Thomas A., eds., Abortion and Catholocism: The American Debate (New York, 1988)Google Scholar. For a criticism by a conservative Catholic, see Hitchcock, James, “The Bishops Seek Peace on Abortion,” Human Life Review 10 (Winter 1984): 27–35Google Scholar.

55. Interview with William Hunt, 1 July, 1989; interview with Joe Lampe, July 1989. The ACCL approach is also apparent in Fink, Judith and Mecklenburg, Marjory, “Developing Alternatives to Abortion,” in Facing the Future (Waco, Texas, 1976), 123–36Google Scholar.

56. Staggenborg has discussed this issue in relation to the pro-choice movement and suggests that professionalization did not hinder but rather may have facilitiated grassroots mobilization; The Pro-Choice Movement, 109. Certainly the pro-life movement tried to stimulate the organization of new members through the efforts of professional staff, although the degree of success remains uncertain.

57. Interview with David Mall, 9 July, 1983. Mall was AUL's second executive director, taking over in 1972 and overseeing the move to Chicago.

58. Interview with Burke Balch, 16 July, 1982.

59. For a discussion of the origins and work of HLI, see Fr.Marx, Paul, Confessions of a Prolife Missionary: The Journeys of Fr. Paul Marx, OSB (Gaithersburg, Md., 1988)Google Scholar.

60. For some discussion of these materials, see Condit, Decoding Abortion Rhetoric. For more studies on the rhetoric of the abortion controversy, see Mall, David J., ed., When Life and Choice Collide: Essays on Rhetoric and Abortion, Vol. 1, To Set the Dawn Free (Liberty-ville, Ill., 1994)Google Scholar. The Eclipse of Reason, in response to criticism of The Silent Scream, another film, was produced.

61. One of the first pro-life books, Rice's, CharlesThe Vanishing Right to Live: An Appeal for a Renewed Reverence for Life (New York, 1969)Google Scholar manifests this clearly. Not a single biblical text was cited and the essential argument was “the compelling secular and constitutional reasons against abortion” (28). Again Jack, and Willke's, BarbaraHow to Teach the Pro-Life Story (Cincinnati, 1973)Google Scholar suggested that arguments were to be secular: “Perhaps it is best then to take the whole package of theologic judgement of this question, give it the honor it is due, and place it on the pedestal where it belongs” (18–19).

62. It is instructive that the Christian Action Council's Abortion Debater's Handbook (Falls Church, Va., 1984)Google Scholar devoted the first fourteen pages to “Biblical and Theological Material.”

63. Quoted by Carolyn Gerster in National Right to Life News, 12 January, 1981 “What Is the Best HLA Wording?” 1.

64. Interview with Joseph Lampe, 1 July, 1989, Minneapolis.

65. This episode is discussed in McKeegan, Michele, Abortion Politics: Mutiny in the Ranks of the Right (New York, 1992), 43–44Google Scholar; Moen, Matthew C., The Christian Right and Congress (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1989), 103–6Google Scholar. The somewhat belated Protestant support for the Hatch Amendment was reported in National Right to Life News 9.8 (22 April, 1982): 1. Representatives of the National Association of Evangelicals, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Moral Majority, Pro-Life Ministries, and Lutherans for Life, along with James Robison, “came down firmly on the side of pro-life unity, and endorsed the Hatch amendment, apparently in response to president Reagan's calls for a united front by pro-lifers.”

66. See Blake, Judith, “The Abortion Decisions: Judicial Review and Public Opinion,” in Abortion: New Directions for Policy Studies Manier, Edward, Liu, William, and Solomon, David, eds., (Notre Dame, Ind., 1977)Google Scholar. Ebaugh, Helen Rose Fuchs and Haney, C. Allen, “Shifts in Abortion Attitudes: 1972–1978,” Journal of Marriage and the Family (August 1980): 491–99Google Scholar, see a sharp jump in approval of abortion after the 1973 decision and a subsequent stabilization or decline in levels of support. They attribute the decline in support in the 1975 figures to “the influence of the Pro-Life movement” (493).

67. An early expression of this view in the wake of the 1983 defeat was Lynn D. Wardle, “Restricting Abortion Through Legislation,” in Andrusko, ed., To Rescue the Future, 101–17.

68. The conference, entitled “Reversing Roe v. Wade Through the Courts,” was held in Chicago on 31 March, 1984. For a report on it, see National Right to Life News, 3 May 1994, 12. Its proceedings appeared as Abortion and the Constitution: Reversing Roe v. Wade Through the Courts, ed. Horan, Dennis J., Grant, Edward R., and Cunningham, Paige C. (Washington, D.C., 1987)Google Scholar.

69. New York Times, 26 June, 1970, 40.

70. Safire, William, Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House (New York, 1975), 556–58Google Scholar.

71. Tatalovich and Daynes, Politics, 198.

72. For the argument that abortion was not a major factor, see Vinovskis, Maris, “Abortion and the Presidential Election of 1976: A Multivariate Analysis of Voting Behaviour,” in Carl E. Schneider and Maris Vinovskis, eds., The Law and Politics of Abortion (Lexington, Mass., 1980), 184–205Google Scholar.

73. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities (Washington, D.C., 1975), 11–12Google Scholar.

74. NCHLA, one-page flyer (Washington, D.C., n.d.).

75. Wilcox, Clyde and Gomez, Leopoldo, “The Christian Right and the Pro-Life Movement: An Analysis of the Sources of Political Support,” Review of Religious Research 31 (June 1990): 380–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76. Moen, The Christian Right in Congress, 153–56.

77. For the poor image of the New Christian Right as early as 1980, see McKeegan, Abortion Politics, 27; for its later problems, see Moen, Christian Right, 151–53.

78. McKeegan, Abortion Politics, 25–26.

79. Paige, The Right to Lifers, 223.

80. The founder and director of the program is Felicia Goeken, who indentified the states with the best VIP organizations as Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Ohio; interview, 11 July, 1989.

81. Useful information about this subject can be found in Wilcox, Clyde, “Political Action Committees and Abortion: A Longitudinal Analysis,” Women & Politics 9:1 (1989): 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82. Andrews, Joan with John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe, I Will Never Forget You: The Rescue Movement in the Life of Joan Andrews (San Francisco, 1989)Google Scholar, and Terry, Randall A., Operation Rescue (Springdale, Pa., 1988)Google Scholar.

83. For an expression of this view, see Rice, Charles, No Exceptions: A Pro-Life Imperative (Notre Dame, Ind., 1990)Google Scholar.

84. The unnamed leader is quoted by Arkes, Hadley in “The Strategy of ‘The Modest First Step,’” Crisis 12 (February 1994): 17Google Scholar.

85. Staggenborg, The Pro-Choice Movement, 138.

86. See Arkes, “The Strategy of ‘The Modest First Step’ ”; see also William McGurn, “Abortion and the GOP,” National Review, 15 March, 1993. The 1992 exit poll conducted by Voter Research and Surveys, an association of leading news organizations, revealed that while 55 percent of Bush voters saw abortion as an important issue, only 37 percent of Clinton and 8 percent of Perot supporters did so as well. Newsweek, November/December 1992, 10.

87. Kelly, “Toward Complexity,” 103–4.