By Dave Andrusko

A few weeks ago I wrote about a new book co-authored by the former Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times. Titled Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court's Ruling," the authors are Linda Greenhouse (who now has an online legal column for the Times and a teaching position) and Yale Law School Professor Reva B. Siegel. Both are pro-abortion through and through.

I ordered the book yesterday, so what I have to say here is based on an interview Greenhouse gave this week to Terry Gross, host of the radio talk program "Fresh Air," produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and distributed by NPR. (You can listen to the full interview at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127931932.)

It sounds very much like the book, for all its obvious pro-abortion slant, will have a lot of primary source material rarely seen, and not at all in the last few decades.

Greenhouse talks about some of the people who were pivotal on both sides. On the pro-abortion side there is Mary Calderone, medical director for PPFA. "She wrote some influential articles depicting abortion as a serious public health issue," Greenhouse said, "and basically started calling on the medical profession to take a new look at this old issue."

She also talked about a woman by the name of Jimmye Kimmey who popularized (if perhaps not in a strict sense originated) the term "the right to choose." If you weren't listening carefully, you'd miss that she was also the executive director of one the earliest abortion "reform" groups which, Greenhouse said, "migrat[ed] from reform to outright repeal" of all abortion laws.

That was the evil genius of the abortion "reform" movement: it moved seamlessly from making reassurance noises about "moderating" abortion laws into loudly demanding the overthrow of all abortion statutes.

On the pro-life side Greenhouse spoke of former NRLC President J.C. Willke, MD, whose 1971 book, Handbook on Abortion, that he co-authored with his wife which "got distributed like wildfire" and "became a Bible of the right-to-life movement."

Again, based on the interview, it appears Greenhouse gets some of the most important points correct (so far as she goes) only to lapse into the conventional pro-abortion explanations. For example, she tells Gross that the American Medical Association was a key player in the mid-19th Century enactment of anti-abortion statutes in all states, but only because all surgery was dangerous at the time and because doctors (virtually all of whom were men) were territorial, not wanting non-physicians--who were mostly female mid-wives-- to encroach on their territory. This is the conventional narrative established by James Mohr in his 1978 book, Abortion in America.

In fact, as Susan Wills explained in her review of Professor Joseph W. Dellapenna's book Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History, "Physicians opposed abortion because science had begun to unlock the mysteries of conception and fetal development." And they were hardly alone. "The citizens who lobbied most vocally for stricter laws against abortion were in fact the early feminists," Wills wrote. "Lawyers, journalists, and clergy also are on record as supporting stricter laws against abortion."

Finally Greenhouse was right on the money when she told Gross that the feminist movement that began in the 1960s said virtually nothing about abortion until the end of the decade. She attributes the turnabout to a speech by the late Betty Friedan (probably a gross simplification), but the larger consideration is accurate: the feminist movement initially focused on issues of workplace equity and non-discrimination.

"Feminism" did not initially equate with manic support for abortion. Pro-life feminists insist genuine feminism is and always has been staunchly pro-life.

As I say you can hear the interview and read a portion of the introduction at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127931932.

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