Women Betraying Women

Until the late 1960s, anti-abortion was a white male Christian enclave. Women began to enter the fray at that time, and became radicalized. They brought passion and zeal, and also exaggeration, lies, vandalism, firebombing, harassment, threats, stalking and murder to the effort. They portrayed themselves as being called by God. They worked with groups called Army of God or Lambs of Christ, and moved from state to state avoiding prosecution and jail sentences. At the peak, they committed four figures of criminal incidents a year in the USA. They were for all intents and purposes, American terrorists.

Karissa Haugeberg has summarized the period, focusing on the lead characters who drove it. Every decade had its prominent figures. They were white, Christian women, Catholic in the early days, and evangelicals later. The one exception in Women Against Abortion was Mildred Jefferson, a black woman, who maintained that abortion was a tool to eliminate blacks. The other featured women are Joan Edwards, whose career spanned nearly twenty years, Juli Loesch, Shelley Shannon, who will finally be released from prison next year, Myrna Shaneyfelt, and Marjory Mecklenburg, the earliest activist. Her Crisis Pregnancy Centers now blanket the country. From her position in government she would routinely lie about the risks of abortion, saying for example, that 50% of women die from it. (The truth is that childbirth in the US has 25 times the risk of death.) She also helped invent “post-abortion syndrome”, a horrible disease that does not exist.

Haugeberg says Crisis Pregnancy Centers are staffed by volunteer female evangelicals. They tend to have no medical staff, but the volunteers dress in scrubs. They give ordinary drugstore pregnancy tests to worried women, and then delay the results while they show them horrific videos. They have been known to lie about the results, in an effort get the women past the time limit for an abortion. They have been known to immediately call the emergency contact to snitch on her. And they actually offer no help – no funding, no medical assistance, no classes. They have often named themselves to appear to be abortion services. Their manual tells them things like “At no time do you need to tell them what test you are doing.” They are there to prevent abortion at all costs, and that is all. With that accomplished, the woman and the baby are on their own. Haugeberg says the centers are “straightforwardly deceitful”.

The book is a nice balance of history and characters. The result is a poster child of a totally dysfunctional healthcare and morals system.

David Wineberg ( )