Date of Award

Fall 2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History of Science and Medicine

First Advisor

Rogers, Naomi

Abstract

My work shows the inextricability of what I call “pro-life science” from religious, moral, and violent anti-abortion activism. While activists tried to distinguish their scientific pro-life work from “other” kinds of activism, these research programs were built on and then reinforced the movements pro-life scientists tried to distance themselves from. This project spans the three turbulent decades of pro-life activism that bridges the liberalization of American abortion laws to twenty-first century abortion restrictions. The dissertation begins in the years preceding Roe v. Wade, as anti-abortion activists created pro-life reproductive health centers. After the 1973 decision to legalize abortion in the United States, anti-abortion movements renegotiated the goals, methods, and arguments underpinning their pro-life stances. Some activists grounded pro-life arguments in science, developing research programs and rhetorical strategies. By studying the evolution of a science that was largely published and circulated outside of the scientific mainstream, but that nevertheless had profound political impacts, this study provides insight into the development of authority claims that are so prominent in our current moment (such as “alternative facts,” and “fake news”). In short, this project uses anti-abortion activism to show how “alternative facts” came to have such cultural and political power. The first two chapters of this dissertation center the Crisis Pregnancy Centers that equipped activists with technological and rhetorical expertise and disseminated anti-abortion information. My first chapter traces the historical evolution of the CPC, founded in Toronto, Canada in the late 1960s by pro-life activist Louise Summerhill. This chapter argues that the CPC foregrounded the relationship between clinic operations, ideology, authority, and patient experience, providing a political blueprint for the legitimacy claims of other pro-life thinkers. Chapter Two takes up the mobilization and increasing radicalization of CPCs, particularly through a close examination of The Pearson Manual, a guidebook by Hawaii activist Robert Pearson for operating such centers, instructing volunteers how to run pregnancy tests, and counsel (and sometimes deceive) women. This was a site where the pro-life movement became professional, medical, and developed compelling rhetoric about maternal and fetal health. In these first two chapters, I also set up an analytic tool that I call the “pro-life narrative,” a genre which strategically employs tropes about gender, race, and personhood to frame abortion as unthinkable. Chapters Three and Four focus on psychological harm and trauma. These chapters follow the CPC logic about maternal health, specifically the anti-abortion diagnosis of post-abortion syndrome (PAS), demonstrating how PAS counseling reinforced gender essentialism and anti-abortion understandings of fetal life, and created new ways of pathologizing abortion. Professional and amateur counselors worked through confessional group therapy sessions that taught women how to heal from trauma by explicitly embracing a pro-life point of view. Chapter Five looks at the use and legitimization of PAS in court, as pro-life activists worked to establish pro-life jurisprudence by training and placing pro-life experts in as many court cases as possible. This coalescence of experts exemplified how anti-abortion activists strategically used technological and medical expertise developed in CPCs to effect political change. Chapter Six focuses on the personal and professional narratives of pro-life physicians Beverly McMillan, Bernard Nathanson, and Mildred Jefferson. These three physicians have different life stories with common elements: they discussed the vocation of a physician and how that related to their thinking about life, they discussed the ways that medical technology shaped their pro-life views, and they rooted their emotional and spiritual well-beings in their pro-life work. This chapter explicates the connections between vocation, emotion, and medicine by thinking about the interactions of physicians and pro-life science, and examines the ideological and religious diversity within anti-abortion movements, how ideas of whiteness shaped anti-abortion thinking, and how Black activists challenged these norms. The final chapter of my dissertation examines the Partial Birth Abortion Ban, debated and vetoed twice during the Clinton presidency until being put into effect under George W. Bush. The story of “Partial Birth Abortion” is the story of an effective implementation of pro-life science: pro-life physicians and experts reframed the procedure and ultimately changed the possibilities for reproductive health care in the United States. My final chapters excavate how the political implementation of pro-life science was enmeshed in the emotional and spiritual commitments of activist clinicians and researchers. The project’s epilogue ties my historical work more explicitly to twenty-first century applications of pro-life science. As twenty-first century political debates increasingly question the stability of “facts,” public health practices are increasingly polarized, and reproductive rights are decimated, the epilogue connects recent developments in pro-life science to its historical origins.

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