Hearts and Minds
An interview with Jennifer Holland on how the anti-abortion movement won the war of images.
As a continuation of our series examining abortion in America, we spoke to Jennifer Holland, an associate professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and author of Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement, a book about the modern anti-abortion movement.
This interview was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for franknews.
Tiny You focused on some areas I hadn’t thought too much about. One was this specific use of imagery and propaganda and the focus and personalization of the fetus. What prompted you to look in this direction?
Americans are all faced with some sort of anti-abortion fetal imagery, at some point in our lives. It's just simply part of American culture. So of course I was aware of the types of images anti-abortion activists use, but it was actually a particular experience with a friend in college that helped shape the project. I was a pro-choice activist, but my best friends were, personally, anti-abortion. One day, I was talking to one of them and she said that the reason why she was against abortion is that in her Catholic Sunday school, she had seen The Silent Scream, which is this famous antiabortion film from the 80s. She said the images of the film never left her. That film itself was so transformative. I mean, she wasn't even a practicing Catholic anymore, but she couldn't leave behind this film she had seen.
That really shaped some of the questions I asked when I got into the research. I asked questions about where these images were placed – often really intimate and personal spaces like church and your home and your school. And questions about how these images transformed people’s politics.
More generally, this movement built so much power with a minority. Anti-abortion activists have never been the majority, but they had a minority for whom this is the central issue. My book tries to answer how the movement successfully convinced people and then mobilized those people.
Did the success of this sort of imagery and media happen by accident – was it surprising? Or was this a directive they knew would work?
From the beginning, one of the core things the movement realized is that the only way they can get people to think of a fetus as a baby is for them to see it. From the beginning of the movement, activists have been trying to get people to view fetal bodies. In 1967, they didn't have much to work with. There were few people with access to fetal bodies in formaldehyde that would have been used in teaching settings for medical schools. The movement couldn’t rely on that. John Willke and his wife Barbara published this book called Handbook for Abortion, which was a book that contained anti-abortion arguments that people had been generating put into one volume. But the most important thing is that they included pictures. And they accumulated these photos from various medical professionals across the country. This book is small and cheap, and it was just consumed over and over again, and the images are reproduced. Activists always pair those images with arguments. The interesting thing is that the arguments are many, but they are not religious arguments. The arguments are not about souls, they are about chromosomes and toes and fingers and heartbeats and human rights and genocides and, eventually, women’s rights.
Activists always paired the bodies with these arguments to try to prove that yes, this is a baby and that abortion is murder.
It's interesting to think of these photos without the writing and the context that comes with them.
Yeah, and early on, before the movement generated its own images, Barbara and John Willke, for example, were using medical school videos with their own voice over it. There are scientists and doctors who had created those films saying, “This work was not meant to make any statement about abortion. This is not what we are saying.” But, it doesn't matter because the movement is using the video as they wish.
Have these images maintained their purpose or function over time? Are they still as impactful?
Yeah. The movement proliferated these images, and created more nuanced tools for specific situations. At first, an activist might just have really gory photos. That was the mainstay early on. But by the 1908s and 1990s, that was not working in every situation. So, for example, some activists created little plastic fetus dolls that they could take into other more sensitive situations- perhaps situations with children. Activists create buttons and pins. You can't wear a picture on your chest all day long, but you can have a pin on your vest and you can invite people to have conversations with you in the grocery line.
I think what they've done is create a whole host of fetal imagery and abortion ephemera that are incredibly useful tools. Activists can carry their abortion politics wherever they go.
The other thing that they've done is relied heavily, in the last 20 or 30 years, on ultrasound imagery. There’s so much about a regular pregnancy that now involves ultrasound imagery. The anti-abortion movement captured some of that interest and used it for its purpose. There are a lot of state laws that require abortion seekers to view ultrasounds before having an abortion.
Are state requirements to view ultrasounds informed by the success of the anti-abortion movement?
Yes. It is a product of the movement. The state laws of course are framed by that movement's argument that ultrasounds are key to stopping abortions. Those are anti-abortion laws. Their idea is that that's a key way to change people's minds.
It's so, um – religious. You said this started for you, with the impact imagery had on your friend, how did you measure this impact in strangers on a broader scale?
They change hearts and minds. They brought their imagery into everyday spaces. The change in hearts and minds is hard to trace numerically, but we can see it in the ways that the Republican Party becomes increasingly reliant on the movement. There's this acknowledgment that Republicans can't win without anti-abortion voters. You see the movement’s power in the way that state elections shift.
From what I can understand, the highly religious are a smaller percentage of this group. Obviously, the majority of the Republican party is not devoutly Christian. Why do you think it's such an easy issue for people to attach themselves to?
I don't think that it is just 1% of the Republican party that's committed to this.
The common narrative is that there is a strategy from political operatives within the Nixon campaign to capture these voters, and then as a result, white Catholics moved from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. In this narrative, that is how the transformation of the Republican Party occurs. But, I really see partisan change as the product of a grassroots movement. The anti-abortion movement convinced a large number of religious white people that this was the issue above all issues. The movement then found the party that would be a home to them. Now, it is a huge percent of Republicans who are committed anti-abortion voters, and an especially huge percent of the Republicans who are going to come out and vote. I think that is another key – the movement not only convinced people that this was an issue of genocide, but they brought those people to the polls. They made anti-abortion voters indispensable to the Republican Party.
I think that this movement was so good at yoking two really important trends of the late 20th century. On the one hand, they captured the power of rights discourse. They borrowed a lot of leftist language. They claimed to be the extension of the civil rights movement during a time when what it means to be an American and American progress is defined as giving more rights to more people. They borrowed rights discourse and eventually called themselves abolitionists. Alternatively, they say said abortion was like slavery, in that both dehumanized a group of people.
And on the other hand, anti-abortion activsts were very much at the center of the expanding power of conservative, white, religious people in American politics who actually want to return to or maintain social hierarchies. So they're able to yolk these two major trends in American life in the late 20th and 21st century together in a way that other conservative movements aren't able to do.
This combination is important in understanding how they're able to attract young people. A lot of conservative causes are made up of a lot of older people, but that's not true with this movement. The anti-abortion movement has been able to continue to enlist young people by saying they are part of a justice movement, and, at the same time, enabling them to ignore other justice movements.
You mentioned the adoption of civil rights language, and yet you have found this issue to be a particularly white one.
Well, I mean, a lot of ethnic Mexican Catholics personally oppose abortion – at higher rates sometimes than white Catholics. But, they were not activists; they were not a part of the movement. This was largely because white anti-abortion activists were co-opting racial justice language, but they weren't actually working on any other issues, and they weren't organizing in communities of color. That's changed a little bit in the 21st century, when activists put out some very specific films arguing that abortion is Black genocide, and they've taken those films to historically Black colleges. But, originally, the movement was really borrowing from people of color and not organizing them at all.
When you understand a history so well, like you do with this movement, does it become clear to you what a response to the movement looks like or should look like?
In order to secure abortion rights again, there needs to be a robust response. The anti-abortion movement is probably one of the most successful movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. To change 50 years of legal precedent is amazing. I mean, it really is this incredible victory for them. What the court has done is just immense on a broad scale – in regards to Roe but also beyond Roe.
I don't think the key to feminist success is to duplicate the strategies of the anti-abortion movement. Feminists briefly tried to put out photos of women who died of botched abortions, but that didn't really work and it was at odds with feminist commitments.
I do think that people who are committed to reproductive justice are going to be called to a grassroots movement that many haven't had to be a part of for the last 50 years. People are going to have to get in each other's lives in a way that was more common in the late sixties and seventies when people had to cross state lines and figure out how to get around the law. In that way, the pro-choice movement cannot be top-heavy anymore. It has to be on the ground every day to respond to this moment.
There was a lot more privacy in the late sixties and seventies than there is now.
People say we are going back in time, but, in some ways, it is going to be worse because of the surveillance that's possible and because the movement has spent 50 years convincing people that abortion is the same as murdering a born baby. Before Roe, abortion was illegal, but for the most part, abortion seekers were not prosecuted. They were punished; I mean, there was a deep social punishment, but it wasn't prosecution for murder and they didn't go to jail for the most part. I think that now there is going to be a lot more prosecutions of not only abortion providers and people who are aiding and abetting abortion, but also abortion seekers themselves. They are all going to be enmeshed in the legal system.