Wrapped in the Flag (36 page)

The next day, I called a group of Catholic men and women I knew and invited them to my home. Together we launched an anti-abortion committee aligned with Wisconsin Citizens Concerned for the Unborn, the organization that would become the Wisconsin Right to Life Committee.

On January 22, 1973, the same day that former president Lyndon Johnson died, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down the
Roe v. Wade
decision. The sweeping decision, supported by a 7–2 majority, removed all restriction on abortion in the first trimester and hampered the right of states to limit abortion in the second. Justice Blackmun, in writing for the majority, declared that only after the fetus was developed enough to survive on “his” own—usually during the seventh month—“may a state regulate and even proscribe abortion except where it is necessary . . . for the preservation or health of the mother.”
¹⁴

While feminists celebrated, I girded for war. It would take a national movement to overturn
Roe
, and I intended to be part of it.

A couple of weeks after
Roe
, I had coffee with Linda, the friend who had warned me about a new crusade. “I won’t say I told you so,” she said.

“This is different,” I fired back. “I have to do this.”

Unfortunately, Linda and I found ourselves at loggerheads over the issue, and our friendship became the first casualty of my fifteen-year anti-abortion battle.

In early July of 1975, my husband and I packed our three kids in our van and drove to Whitewater, Wisconsin, for the holiday weekend. I was excited to be out of town for a few days to enjoy time with our dearest college friends, Nancy and Bob, the very same “Socks” I’d met on my first day in Dallas.

As usual, we stayed with our friends in their Whitewater home, but in a nod to my pregnancy, we planned fewer activities. I’d been having a rough go with daylong bouts of morning sickness. I kept telling myself that I’d be better in another week, or another two weeks, or another month. But I was nearly at the end of the first trimester, and I still felt no better.

On the Fourth, while Nancy and I were strolling through the kiddie section of the Milwaukee Zoo, I started to gag. In the restroom, I realized I was not only vomiting; I was bleeding. I didn’t want to ruin the holiday, so we rented a wheelchair. I enjoyed the penguins and the elephants from the four-wheeler while the other three adults kept track of the kids. No easy task with eight to watch: three of ours and five of Nancy and Bob’s. When we got back to Whitewater, I was banished to bed, where I was treated to “room service”
and uninterrupted naps. After two days, the bleeding slowed and then stopped. “All I needed was a mini-vacation,” I told my husband. “I’m fine now.”

Back at home in Marshfield, we’d just unpacked the car when the bleeding started again. My husband rushed me to the hospital where my doctor determined that I hadn’t lost the baby. I was sent home for three days of complete bed rest. “After that, we’ll have to see,” the doctor said.

I kept the windows in the bedroom open so I could hear the kids playing in the yard below. Squeals and shouting drifted in on every puff of breeze and I realized the three kids had filled squirt guns and were racing around soaking each other. While I eavesdropped, I dreamed of hearing our new baby laugh with her brothers and sister. (I was so sure this child was a girl that I’d already named her Emily.)

After three days, the bleeding stopped and I was cleared to return to normal life. My freedom lasted about an hour before a new rush of blood sent me right back to bed. After that emergency, I was in bed for two months, waiting.

Every morning, I worried that the new day would bring cramps, labor, and death for little Emily. Every night, I worried that my baby would slip away while I was dreaming. I kept a baby blanket, a small vial of holy water, and a prayer book under the bed, just in case. Next to these things, I had a small overnight bag packed. If I had to be rushed to the hospital, I was ready.

In the middle of September, on my husband’s thirty-third birthday, the bleeding stopped, completely. By the next day, I knew that the crisis had passed. I wanted to hug my children and throw in a load of laundry. I wanted to crank the stereo and dance to We Five. I wanted to bake cookies and clean out the refrigerator, but I was afraid to do anything until my doctor gave me the thumbs-up.

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” he said after examining me. “But you’ve bled for a prolonged period of time. I’ve ordered more tests, just to be on the safe side.” He handed me the name of a specialist in Madison, 145 miles away, who would get me in for amniocentesis before I was too far past the twenty-week limit. “We don’t do it here,” he said. “Catholic hospital and all.”

“What?” I asked.

“Amniocentesis will tell us if there are anomalies,” he answered. “You could still terminate.”

From someplace far, far away, I heard myself roar, “No, I will never abort this baby.”

“Don’t you want to know?” he asked.

“Why? I’ve been in bed for months saving this baby. I could never kill her, no matter what.”

My doctor never mentioned Madison or termination again. At night, when I worried, I put my hands over my belly and prayed. “You’re safe, Emily. Nothing will happen, now. Nothing.”

Four months later, I delivered a tiny baby boy. He was so little and so fragile that I could only hold him a minute before he was whisked off to the preemie nursery.

“He’s perfect,” my husband said through his tears. “But, we can’t call him Emily anymore, can we?”

Before
Roe
, the anti-abortion movement had no political clout and no organizational umbrella. It was a collection of local, unaligned groups like the one I headed in Marshfield. That changed immediately after
Roe
when pro-life activists gathered in Detroit and organized the National Right to Life Committee. The new group selected Marjory Mecklenburg, a Methodist, as its first chairman.

Abortion foes understood that the movement would make little headway until it found support beyond Roman Catholics. In 1976, Francis Schaeffer, the most prominent evangelical Christian in the country, proclaimed abortion to be “the final leg in Western civilization’s death march.”
¹⁵
That statement from his popular book
How Should We Then Live?
, coupled with the three-part film of the same title, helped “cultivate a new generation of shock troops for the coming culture war.”
¹⁶

Later, Schaeffer’s son, Frank, said, “My father and I were amongst the first to start telling American evangelicals that God wanted them involved in the political process. It was the
Roe v. Wade
decision that gave Dad . . . and me our platform.”
¹⁷

Schaeffer explained, so perfectly, how he felt about abortion and, to a large extent, how most of us in the movement felt. “Abortion became
the
evangelical [in my case, read: Catholic] issue. . . . The anger we stirred up at the grass roots was not feigned but heartfelt. And at first it was not about partisan politics. It had everything to do with genuine horror at the procedure of abortion. The reaction was emotional, humane and sincere. It also was deliberately co-opted by the Republican Party.”
¹⁸

The Schaeffers empowered other leaders who shaped, defined, and controlled the pro-life movement: James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. I first heard of Dobson through his hugely popular (and, in my mind, awful) book
Dare to Discipline
. It was my pleasure to deposit the book in the garbage only a few hours after my mother gave it to me. Spanking children as
young as eighteen months old was simply not going to happen in my house.

Evangelical preacher Jerry Falwell built his “Moral Majority” into a political juggernaut, while Pat Robertson built an empire selling salvation on TV’s
700 Club
. Together, these folks and a few idea men like Paul Weyrich and Ralph Reed created the “religious right.” Of it, Frank Schaeffer wrote, “The new religious right was all about religiously motivated ‘morality,’ which it used for nakedly political purposes.”
¹⁹

Only a few months after my son Kevin was born, I went full-steam ahead into the pro-life movement. I used the story of my pregnancy to illustrate the importance of stopping the abortion juggernaut. I believed that the Court had made a terrible mistake, but for me, pro-life went beyond abortion. The issue was always about baby and mother—before birth and after. I felt strongly that the government—federal, state, and local—had obligations to mothers and children, including food, shelter, child care, and education. I expected all prolifers, regardless of political party, to agree with me.

In the summer of 1976, my parents offered the first clue that I might be wrong.

“You can’t stop abortion with government programs,” Mother said.

“Government is never a solution,” Dad added. “Private charity is always the answer.”

I rolled my eyes and pushed back, but Mother and Dad dug in. They brought out the latest John Birch Society bulletin, a special edition to honor America’s Bicentennial. In it, Robert Welch surveyed the highlights of American history, focusing on those aspects that the right-wingers favored: freedom and tiny government.

Of the early twentieth century, Welch wrote, “There was still plenty of poverty in many areas, of course, but it was a
healthy kind of poverty
, where every man took for granted that relief from dire want was entirely his own problem and responsibility . . . even
the poverty was offset by the enormous blessing of freedom
.”
²⁰

“So,” I said to Mother, “you want women and their newborn babies to enjoy that same healthy kind of poverty, free from interference by the government?”

“There you go with those bleeding-heart liberal tendencies,” she answered me.

“Government never fixes anything,” Dad added. “It can only destroy freedom.”

Before long, I’d have to consider that a whole lot of Republicans who were pro-life to their core agreed with my parents and Robert Welch.

That fall, pro-lifers scored their first major legislative victory, the Hyde
Amendment, which prohibited all federal funding of abortion, primarily affecting the Medicaid program.
²¹
Women’s groups and other advocacy groups howled about the impact of the new rules on poor women, but I couldn’t hear them. As far as I was concerned, every life snatched from the grasp of the abortionists was my personal victory.

It was years before I could even acknowledge that those pro-choice organizations had a valid point: poor women were denied abortions while their rich sisters could always find a doctor to “help” them. Poor women went to the back alley. Rich women went away for a “rest.”
²²

Over the next ten years, my activism took me from leader of my local anti-abortion group to state board member of Wisconsin Right to Life. I spoke in high schools, churches, and colleges across the state, led pro-life demonstrations, and wrote scores of letters. I debated members of the National Organization for Women, gave interviews to local papers, and testified in favor of pro-life legislation at the capitol in Madison.

Within a few years, the pro-life movement had fashioned itself into a one-issue constituency. No one cared about candidates’ positions on other issues—abortion was the litmus test. It didn’t matter if candidates believed in closing day-care centers or cutting food stamps, as long as they supported the Human Life Constitutional Amendment. No one blinked if candidates supported war at the expense of domestic programs to help the needy, as long as they supported the Hyde Amendment. It didn’t matter if candidates wanted to cut Medicaid for poor children, as long as they believed that a zygote was a human being.

I started to have my doubts, doubts that pushed me to think outside the pro-life box. My first jolt came over the question of abortions for rape and incest, exceptions pro-lifers had opposed. We called those abortions “the hard cases.”

In every speech I gave, I argued that one act of violence (the rape or the incest) doesn’t justify a second (the abortion). I leaned on the authority of Dr. Charles Rice, who wrote: “To legalize abortion in pregnancies caused by rape would affect an infinitesimal number of cases. . . . In any event, the rape issue is an emotional lure used by those who seek a general relaxation of the abortion laws.”
²³