The way that Judith Widdicombe and Samuel Lee became involved with abortion seemed to happen the way many things happen in all of our lives–partly by design, partly by chance.
You’re proceeding on a personal or career path you’ve chosen, and something unexpected comes up and you must decide what you should do. And when you look back later, sometimes you can see that your decision was a turning point–and that what had come up unexpectedly wasn’t so unpredictable after all, considering the path you’d chosen.
Both Widdicombe and Lee, who are the protagonists in a superb new history of the battle over abortion, were confronted with a difficult choice they didn’t expect to encounter, and both did what they thought was right–morally, ethically, religiously.
And in following their consciences, they ended up on different sides, which is what has happened again and again in the noisy, fractious abortion conflict, of course, and which is a reason why some people believe it’s the most divisive issue this country has had since slavery.
In 1968, the year she began helping women obtain illegal abortions, Judy Widdicombe was a 30-year-old obstetrics nurse at a large Roman Catholic hospital in St. Louis. She was married and the mother of two young sons, and she and her husband, who drove a newspaper delivery truck, sang in the choir of a United Methodist church.
While organizing a church youth program, Widdicombe learned about a new suicide-prevention hotline and volunteered to counsel callers from her home one night a week. As the service garnered media attention and its phone number circulated, she and other counselors began getting calls from pregnant women and girls who were desperate for information about where they could receive a safe abortion.
Interested in helping the callers, the woman who headed the hotline discovered a clandestine abortion-referral service in St. Louis that was formed in 1965 and composed of physicians and pastors; after establishing contact with the group, she asked Widdicombe to be part of a new “Problem Pregnancy Counseling” group that she was connecting to the secret abortion-referral service. Widdicombe said yes.
In 1978, just before his 21st birthday and five years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade ruling gave women a right to abortion, Sam Lee came to St. Louis to enter St. Louis University and study to become a Catholic priest.
Devoted to the Church throughout his youth, he had a profound religious experience at age 15 that seemed to give him a sense of peace and purpose. When he became a priest, he said, he didn’t want to teach or lead a parish; his goal was serve people on life’s margins, perhaps as a member of a religious order.
He lived for a time in New York City among the poor, taking back-breaking day jobs and in the meantime devouring books on theology, philosophy, religious history, the lives of the saints, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi.
Soon after arriving in St. Louis, Lee stopped by the Franciscan center near the St. Louis University campus, happening upon a meeting about plans for a sit-in at an abortion center, the first use in St. Louis of this tactic, which had been recently introduced into the anti-abortion movement.
Lee was excited about the idea, but before signing on, he typically read as much as he could about abortion, weighed all the arguments for and against and pondered the proper ethical responses by those who opposed it. By the third planning session, Lee was pushing the leaders to act quickly.
An obvious target was Reproductive Health Services, the first abortion center in St. Louis and one of the largest in the Midwest. Its executive director and founder was a former nurse named Judy Widdicombe.
Over the next decade, the lives of Widdicombe and Lee would cross on many occasions, and now the two are linked as central figures in “Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars” (Simon & Schuster), an enthralling, skillfully balanced narrative about this important and complicated national debate.
The author is Cynthia Gorney, a former writer for The Washington Post and a recipient of the “Best Newspaper Writing in America” award in 1980, when she was 27, from the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
As a Post reporter, Gorney was assigned in 1989 to write an article on a Missouri case before the Supreme Court that people on both sides saw as having the potential to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
The case was William L. Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services, which, in a sense, was another collision between Widdicombe and Lee.
Her abortion center had been the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging a restrictive Missouri abortion law co-authored by Lee, who had become a lobbyist for Missouri Citizens for Life. (Webster was Missouri’s attorney general.)
“This was the most passionately contested abortion case in 20 years, perhaps the most passionately contested case ever,” Gorney recalled in a recent interview. “There were more `friend-of-the-court’ briefs filed in Webster than in any case in history. There were massive marches in Washington by both sides. The case was on the cover of all the magazines.”
In preparing her story, Gorney found many books on abortion, but none was what she was looking for: an evenhanded history.
“Most books were argument, authors explaining why you should believe what they do,” she said. “Even those that presented themselves as impartial used language that made it clear that the person being described was right or wrong.”
After completing the article, Gorney stayed with the story, leaving the Post in 1991 to write the book she had not been able to find.
“My book is not written to persuade anyone,” she said. “It’s a story about people and why they did what they did. Arguing abortion, I think, is exhausting to everybody. You come to a decision, and it’s painful, and you don’t want to think about it anymore. But I found it would be possible to see the entire drama through the lives of the extraordinarily passionate and articulate people whom I met on both sides.”
Gorney won’t say where she stands.
“I’ve never had an abortion or been in a situation where the decision arose, but I’ve had close friends who have had abortions, and I’ve held their hands through the process.
“But I’m lucky. I’m happily married and have two children. And I think it’s fair to say I had never really understood the right-to-life position from beginning to end. I never had looked at the world in a serious right-to-life way. That was the most fascinating thing, in a way, in reporting this book.
“I would move from one world to the other and try to see each as best I could. I do believe the history of the right-to-life movement has remained until now largely untold in mainstream books. We don’t understand the richness of writing and argument and thought and soul-searching that have gone into this for a long time.
“I sometimes got into arguments because of this. I live in a very liberal community in northern California, and it’s not one that understands the right-to-life position. I would find myself at parties with people who said to me, `How can you talk to those people?’
“No one had ever said that to me when I did stories about murderers and drug dealers and child abusers. Doing this book heightened my sympathies for both sides, and I came away with feelings that are infinitely more complicated. The world looks a great deal more complex than when I started this book.”
During her research, she also discovered things she had not known. Among her surprises:
– A national abortion underground directed chiefly by mainline Protestant pastors. “By 1968, there were in fact approximately 1,000 ministers working in this semi-shadowed fashion around the American states,” Gorney writes. In Chicago, she writes, the Illinois Clergy Consultation Service provided referrals to illegal abortionists considered reliable.
– The development of the vacuum aspirator. The device originated in Europe and Asia and was refined in this country by a California engineer. The prototype of his toaster-sized vacuum mechanical pump was made from a paint sprayer and went on the market in 1968, transforming abortion from an expensive hospital operation into a simple, 10-minute procedure that could be done in an office or clinic.
– Chicago’s Jane collective. “They were Chicago feminists who taught themselves abortion techniques,” Gorney said. “Their influence spread across the country. They wanted to demythologize abortion and medicine. They all called themselves Jane. A woman named Jane would escort you to an apartment, and another woman named Jane would hold your hand while another Jane performed the abortion.”
– The reluctance of evangelical Protestants to join the abortion issue. “The evangelicals were very much outsiders for many years,” Gorney said. “They were somewhat suspicious, thinking it was a Catholic issue. The Southern Baptists even endorsed Roe vs. Wade.”
Gorney’s intent is to avoid angry rhetoric and undermine false stereotypes.
“To many opponents, the pro-choice person has no ambivalence about abortion, which isn’t what I found. The women who worked in clinics certainly have a lot of ambivalence. They see abortion more clearly than the rest of us. They know that it’s bloody and difficult and that there really are visible fetal parts in a lot of the procedures. And in the main these are women who have had children of their own. But they are also women who have come to believe very deeply that for a lot of the people who come into the clinics, abortion is the lesser of evils.”
And to many of their opponents, the anti-abortion person is an evangelical Protestant who disrupts abortion clinics when not throwing bombs. “Again, that ignores the hundreds of thousands who are genuinely appalled by violence and whose work is quiet and doesn’t get press attention,” Gorney said. “The problem is this has been a debate about law, about what is legal, and this kind of debate doesn’t accommodate the kind of ambivalence that arises for people on both sides of the issue.”
