Over at JOTWELL, former LHB Guest Blogger
Mary Ziegler has posted "
The Costs of Constitutional Principle." It is a review of
Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (Oxford University Press, 2016), by
Daniel K. Williams (University of West Georgia). Here's a taste:
The law delivers uneven benefits for the protagonists of Daniel K. Williams’ masterful study of the early decades of the pro-life movement. Williams chronicles the transformation in the 1960s of what had been a religious crusade against contraception and abortion into a secular, rights-based cause that also appealed to some left-leaning Catholics and Protestants. Williams argues that antiabortion activists invested more in legal strategies after the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. Leaders of the movement became preoccupied with a constitutional amendment overturning Roe. Entanglement with law ultimately undercut demands for material benefits that some pro-lifers believed women required to have a real reproductive choice.
Williams first takes readers into the poorly understood years of early pro-life activism when “the campaign against abortion was almost inseparable from the Catholic Church’s fight against contraception.” (P. 4.) By studying the predominantly religious and medical debates that dominated the 1930s and 1940s, Defenders of the Unborn recovers a mostly lost prehistory of the abortion battle. At this time, as Williams shows, debate often turned not on the meaning of the Constitution but on the medical need for abortion and the religious beliefs of those opposed to it. Williams also traces the origins of now-ubiquitous comparisons of abortion and the Holocaust to this period.
Read on
here.
