How a "Pro-Life" Makeover 
Fooled the Supreme Court

By Jill Filipovic

June 27, 2014--The anti-abortion movement has recast itself as compassionate and pro-woman.

That strategy is winning and putting women at risk.

Twenty years ago, the face of anti-abortion activism was Operation Rescue and its various presidents:

Troy Newman, a hard-eyed gray-haired man yelling outside abortion clinics, stalking staff, and picketing with bloody fetus posters; and Randall Terry, a jowly narcissist chaining himself to abortion clinics, trying to deliver a dead fetus to President Clinton, and keeping close company with men who would go on to kill doctors.

Today, it’s rosy-cheeked grandmother Eleanor McCullen, a self-identified “sidewalk counselor” who says she just wants to talk to women about their pregnancy options and brought a case before the Supreme Court challenging a Massachusetts law that created a buffer zone around abortion clinics in an effort to stem harassment and violence toward patients and staff.

Newman’s claim to fame is helping to popularize the moniker “Tiller the Killer” for abortion provider George Tiller, who was eventually murdered by a man with connections to Operation Rescue; Terry's is more than 40 arrests and two failed runs for political office.

Yesterday, McCullen won one of the most important abortion-related Supreme Court cases in the past decade.

Her name is the shorthand it will be known by.

McCullen is also a member of Operation Rescue, an organization just as radical as it was two decades ago when its name was practically synonymous with anti-abortion terrorism.

Its second-in-command, Cheryl Sullenger, is a convicted felon who conspired to bomb an abortion clinic, and several people who eventually killed or attempted to kill abortion providers met during its protests.

But you wouldn’t know about McCullen’s more extreme affiliations from Chief Justice John Roberts’ characterization of her in her namesake case.

According to Roberts, she isn’t a protestor but rather a counselor, seeking not only to voice her opposition to abortion but also “to engage in personal, caring, consensual conversations with women about various alternatives.”

The kindly granny worried about women’s well-being is not unique to the McCullen case.

It’s the new face of the pro-life movement.

It’s a strategy years in the making, and it’s working—in state legislatures, on the streets, and in the Supreme Court.

When Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, abortion was already legal in a handful of states, thanks to sustained feminist activism.

Laws criminalizing abortion forced women into dangerous and sometimes deadly situations, risking legal penalties and their physical safety to terminate pregnancies.

The second-wave feminist movement prioritized bodily autonomy in their pushes for legal and social change—the right to contraception, the right to live free of domestic violence, the right to abortion—and achieved victories so stunning that even their opposition seemed blindsided.

While mostly Catholic anti-abortion groups were organizing and protesting even before Roe, what we now call “the pro-life movement” didn’t truly get started until it dovetailed with a broader conservative backlash to increased gender and racial equality in the 1980s.

Jerry Falwell, an early pro-life leader and cofounder of the Moral Majority, was a virulent segregationist whose opposition to school integration sparked his political career; opposition to abortion and homosexuality, though, was a more socially acceptable flag to fly.

By the late 1980s and through the 1990s, the “pro-life” movement was in full force. More than 1,200 anti-abortion Operation Rescue protesters were arrested at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in the group’s “Siege on Atlanta.”

In 1991, anti-abortion protestors descended onto Wichita, Kansas, home to Dr. George Tiller and his clinic, one of the only places in the Midwest to perform late-term abortions.

In just six weeks over what activists called the “Summer of Mercy,” there were 2,600 arrests. In 1992, the same group organized a “Spring of Life” in Buffalo, NY, drawing thousands of protestors.

Both Wichita and Buffalo remained key Operation Rescue targets even after the summer and spring campaigns came to close.

In the summer of 1993, Dr. George Tiller was shot five times in his car by Operation Rescue member Shelley Shannon.

He survived that shooting but was murdered in 2009 by Scott Roeder; the phone number of Cheryl Sullenger, Operation Rescue’s policy director, was found in Roeder’s car.

In 1998, Dr. Barnett Slepian, an abortion provider, was shot by a sniper through his living room window in a Buffalo suburb.

His killer, James Kopp, had been arrested at the Operation Rescue protests at the 1988 Democratic Convention. Kopp drove to Atlanta with Operation Rescue president Randall Terry.

He was jailed alongside Terry and Shelley Shannon.

Tiller and Slepian weren’t the only ones.

In 1993, Dr. David Gunn was shot dead in Pensacola, Florida.

In 1994, Dr. John Britton and volunteer clinic escort James Barrett were killed when anti-abortion activist Paul Hill shot them at point-blank range in a truck outside a Florida clinic; Barrett’s wife, June, also an escort, was sitting in the back seat and survived a gunshot wound.

That same year, Shannon Lowney and Lee Ann Nichols, both clinic receptionists, were murdered in Massachusetts; five others were injured.

In 1997, a man shot at Dr. David Gandell through the window of his Rochester, N.Y. home, narrowly missing him.

In 1998, Robert Sanderson, a security guard, was killed in a clinic bombing in Birmingham, Alabama; Emily Lyons, a nurse at the clinic, was seriously injured and lost an eye.

There have been 17 anti-abortion attempted murders since 1991. Hundreds of arsons, bombings, anthrax attacks, and other acts of violence too numerous to detail led up to, and often followed, the murders.

By the time extremists were taking up arms against abortion providers, the American public had grown wary of their aims.

Abortion was always controversial, but the level of viciousness from the “pro-life” side seemed to be rising, and even many of the people morally opposed to abortion still found the “pro-life” habit of waving bloody fetus posters and screaming at young women repugnant.

In 1992, soon after the anti-abortion movement hit a fever pitch with its Summer of Mercy, the Supreme Court prepared to hand down an opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a case that abortion opponents hoped would overturn Roe v. Wade.

Women’s rights organizations worried about the result, and both sides sounded the alarm to their supporters.

When the case was decided, the Court upheld Roe but allowed states to pass laws regulating abortion so long as those laws did not place a “substantial burden” in the path of a woman seeking the procedure.

That same year, support for abortion rights reached a record high.

In the years after Casey, the anti-abortion movement shifted tactics.

Protestors still gather outside clinics, and Operation Rescue protestors still wave gory signs.

But from the statehouse to the street, the movers and shakers started to quietly reframe the issue as the 1990s turned into the 2000s.

With George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” came federal funding for anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers,” religious facilities which routinely posed as health clinics and gave women medically inaccurate information intended to scare them away from abortion; between 2001 and 2006, the Bush administration directed $60 million in funding to the centers.

Some abortion opponents still stood outside clinics and yelled; others stood outside clinics as “sidewalk counselors,” quietly and politely shaming women entering clinics and relying on the normal human reaction to a nice lady approaching you on the street—you pause and listen—to hand women anti-abortion literature and direct them to the crisis pregnancy centers.

In 2003, the group Feminists for Life launched their “Women Deserve Better” campaign, urging women to “walk in the shoes of your feminist foremothers” to usher in a “pro-woman, pro-life feminist revolution” because “women deserve better than abortion.”

That same year, leaders from Priests for Life and Anglicans for Life started “Silent No More,” hosting protests and events where participants held signs reading “I Regret My Abortion” and “I Regret Lost Fatherhood” in an appeal to onlookers’ emotions; the organization’s goal is to “educate the public that abortion is harmful emotionally, physically and spiritually to women, men and families, so that it becomes unacceptable for anyone to recommend abortion as a 'fix' for a problem pregnancy.”

Along with other anti-abortion organizations, Silent No More also claims that abortion causes breast cancer (the American Cancer Society says it doesn’t) and leads to “post-abortion syndrome,” which anti-abortion advocates say is a form of PTSD (no reputable medical or psychological association recognizes it).

By 2007, the narrative of the vulnerable woman hurt by abortion made its way to the Supreme Court.

In holding up a ban on a particular type of procedure opponents called “partial-birth abortion,” typically used in cases where a pregnancy went tragically wrong, Justice Kennedy wrote in Gonzales v. Carhart that having an abortion “requires a difficult and painful moral decision which some women come to regret” and is “fraught with emotional consequence.”

Best, then, to ban the procedure—“[t]he State’s interest in respect for life is advanced by the dialogue that better informs the political and legal systems, the medical profession, expectant mothers, and society as a whole of the consequences that follow from a decision to elect a late-term abortion,” he wrote.

While the public face of the anti-abortion movement seemed to embrace compassion, the movement’s political body became increasingly shrewd.

Realizing they weren’t going to overturn Roe wholesale, many anti-abortion policy-makers focused on restricting abortion rights as much as possible, taking the inch offered by the vague ruling in Casey and extending it for miles.

But the success of the “pro-life” PR makeover is striking.

The grassroots efforts to shore up a kinder, gentler, ostensibly “pro-woman” face of anti-abortion activism started to dominate state legislatures after the 2010 midterm elections, when victories of some Tea Party candidates led the Republican party to believe they had a mandate to promote the farthest right of conservative values.

The number of abortion restrictions proposed and passed skyrocketed, and by 2013, states had passed more abortion restrictions in three years than they had in the previous three decades.

Nearly all of the laws were chip-away efforts, cannily designed to make abortion harder to get.

But they rolled through state legislatures inside the Trojan horse of promoting women’s health.

Americans United for Life (AUL), which writes the model legislation that conservative politicians use across the country to draft anti-abortion bills, lists its “Women’s Protection Project” at the top of its model legislation order form.

One of the most popular anti-abortion laws of the past few years is the 20-week abortion ban, which 12 states now have on the books.

AUL suggests titling the bans the “Women’s Health Defense Act,” with the alternative title, the “Women’s Late-Term Pregnancy Health Act.”

Laws requiring that abortion facilities be unnecessarily regulated as ambulatory surgical centers are also increasingly popular; Texas’s adaption of such a law will likely result in that state having only six abortion clinics for the entire state come September.

AUL titled its model legislation for those laws the “Abortion Patients’ Enhanced Safety Act.”

That language is particularly Orwellian given the reality of abortion. In places where abortion is both legal and accessible, it is overwhelmingly safe:

The chance of a serious complication from early abortion in the United States is less than one-half of one percent.

But where abortion is outlawed or inaccessible—and make no mistake, outlawing abortion is the ultimate goal, and inaccessibility the consolation prize—it still happens, just much more dangerously.

Abortion remains one of the leading causes of maternal death worldwide, almost entirely in countries where the procedure is outlawed.

For every woman who dies, many more suffer serious physical complications.

The anti-abortion movement, of course, does still commit acts of overt violence, harassment, and intimidation.

But even the ostensibly peaceful protestors and “sidewalk counselors” are active participants in a push for laws that result in violence and harm to women.

This week, the Supreme Court’s McCullen opinion mirrored an anti-abortion makeover decades in the making.

In McCullen, the Court held that Massachusetts’ law establishing a 35-foot buffer zone around abortion clinics to insulate patients and staff from violence and harassment violated the First Amendment’s free speech protections.

The buffer zones were established in the wake of anti-abortion murders, and clinic workers say they still face regular protests and harassment.

Across the country, many abortion providers continue to fear for their lives and physical safety.

But according to the Supreme Court, McCullen and the other plaintiffs were not mere “protestors” but rather “counselors” who “maintain a caring demeanor, a calm tone of voice and direct eye contact” as they try to dissuade women entering an abortion clinic from having an abortion.

That all makes for sympathetic optics, and by most accounts, McCullen herself is a polite woman.

But behind the caring, “pro-woman” mask of today’s anti-abortion movement isn’t a sweet granny who prays the rosary.

It’s an Operation Rescue proxy, backed by networks of established anti-abortion organizations, lobbyists, and legislators who collectively realize well-groomed women speaking in contorted feminist jargon play better than angry middle-aged men yelling about babies.

But strip away the tone and the doublespeak, and what's left is abject hostility to women's ability to control their own bodies—bones of a movement so well-camouflaged, even the Supreme Court couldn't see through the disguise.