Olasky / Savas The Story of Abortion in America

A Street-Level History, 1652-2022
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4335-8047-5
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 512 Seiten

Tracing the History of Abortion in America by Looking beyond the Laws to the Dramatic Stories and Colorful Personalities of the People They Touched Fifty years ago, the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision to legalize abortion-on-demand sparked nationwide tensions that continue to this day. In the decades since that ruling, abortion opponents and proponents have descended on the Capitol each year for marches and protests. But this story didn't begin with the Supreme Court in the 1970s; arguments about abortion have been a part of American history since the 17th century. So how did we get here? The Story of Abortion in America traces the long cultural history of this pressing issue from 1652 to today, focusing on the street-level activities of those drawn into the battles willingly or unwillingly. Authors Marvin Olasky and Leah Savas show complex lives on both sides: Some sacrificed much to help the poor and others sacrificed the helpless to empower themselves. The Story of Abortion in America argues that whatever happens legally won't end the debate, but it will affect lives.  - A Fair Survey of the History of the Debate: Opening with a foreword by renowned social conservative thinker Robert P. George, this book explores historic cases and key cultural moments from 1652 to 2022 - Examines 5 Selling Points Used by Each Side in Different Eras: Anatomy, Bible, Community, Danger, and Enforcement - Chronicles the History of Abortion through Personal Narratives: Includes the memorable stories of Isaac Hathaway, Susan Warren, Elizabeth Lumbrozo, John McDowell, Hugh Hodge, Madame Restell, Augustus St. Clair, Inez Burns, Robert Dickinson, Sherri Finkbine, Henry Hyde, John Piper, Lila Rose, Terrisa Bukovinac, Mark Lee Dickson, and many others - Written for a Diverse Audience: While particularly useful for Christians who want to understand the history of abortion and its impact on American politics and culture, the book speaks to anyone who cares about abortion 

Marvin Olasky (PhD, University of Michigan) is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute and an Acton Institute affiliate scholar. He is the author of twenty-eight books, including The Tragedy of American Compassion and Lament for a Father. From 1983 through 2021 he was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the editor in chief of WORLD. He and his wife, Susan, have four sons.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Olasky, Marvin

Savas, Leah

Leseproben

1

Street Level vs. Suite Level

“Individuals and groups that seek to restrict access to abortion often use sonograms, photos, and plastic models of prenates [unborn children] to play on people’s emotional associations with newborn babies.”1

Journalists for centuries have wrestled with how much attention to pay to the creature in the womb. Here’s a headline at the top of page one of the New York Times on the first day of summer, 1883: “TWENTY-ONE MURDERED BABIES.” The story showed a detective pushing his shovel through basement dirt and finding tiny skulls, ribs, and leg bones: the remnants of 400–500 unborn children killed by Philadelphia abortionist Isaac Hathaway.2

Was it right for the Times to report that, when a district attorney shook the cigar box containing the twenty-one corpses, the bones rattled like “hard withered leaves”? Or how about the specific detail in a Philadelphia newspaper: The bones had “their natural shape.” The pieces included “the outer-line of an eye-socket. . . . remnants of arms and hands, shoulder-blades.”3

Back then a judge exclaimed, “It was murder.” Newspapers across America ran with the story, including its specific detail. In Anderson, South Carolina, The Intelligencer lamented, “A Philadelphia Golgotha.” In St. Louis, the Globe-Democrat screamed, “Philadelphia’s Ghoul . . . The Men Had Hardly Dug Down Six Inches when They Struck THE SKULL OF A BABE.” In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, The Gazette front-paged “A Philadelphia Abortionist Makes a Babies’ Cemetery in His Cellar.” In Mineral Park, Arizona, the Mohave County Miner moaned about “A Ghastly Discovery.”4

And that was not all. In 1883, via the new Associated Press and other press collaboratives, readers across the United States read sensational stories about abortionist Hathaway in colorfully named newspapers like The Public Reaper (Farmer City, IL), the Santa Cruz Surf, The Biblical Recorder (Raleigh, NC), the Vernon County Censor (Viroqua, WI), The True Northerner (Paw Paw, MI), The Opposition (Crete, NE), and The Whisperer (Portis, KS).

These newspapers were small but avidly read. Their cumulative circulation of these stories was immense. I traced the Hathaway coverage in 1883 across one state, Kansas, the geographic center of the contiguous United States, and imagined a salesman on a dirt road taking a break from his labors by reading the local newspaper, then jumping up and down, yelling “baby-butcher!” That’s what headlines—in the Garden City Irrigator, the Morris County Enterprise, The Bronson Pilot, and The Pleasanton Herald—called Hathaway.5

A song popular in the 1960s and still broadcast, “I’ve Been Everywhere,” features a rapid-fire “Reno, Chicago, Fargo . . . Boston, Charleston, Dayton . . . Louisville, Nashville, Knoxville . . . Pittsburgh, Parkersburg, Gravelbourg . . . I’ve been everywhere, man.” Try putting to that tune the 1883 Kansas abortion stories in Wichita, Salina, Topeka, Oneida . . . Leon, Atchison, Holton, Hutchinson . . . Concordia, Emporia, Arcadia . . . Hays City, Mound City, Elk City, Strong City. That’s one state. The message—abortion equals horror—went “everywhere, man.”6

Some reporters and editors spared readers the grisliest detail, but other newspapers piled on. In Illinois, the Monmouth Evening Gazette ran a “BURIED BABIES” headline followed by “Infant Bodies for Dog Meat—A Ghastly Recital.” Readers learned about Hathaway’s “voracious dogs in the cellar. Sometimes when pressed for time he did not go to the trouble of dismembering the bodies of his little victims, but tossed them into the cellar, where they would be quickly devoured.”7

An angry Mrs. Hathaway said her husband sometimes threw the tiny corpses into their cooking-stove, “preparing the dinner from the heat from the human fuel.” She said Hathaway even aborted their own twins and planned to turn them into fuel, but she was “not quite hardened enough to see her own flesh and blood burned before her eyes.” They buried the bodies in their yard.8

The Hathaway arrest in 1883 received more nationwide attention than any other abortion case in the 1880s. As we’ll see, abortions that resulted in the deaths of a mother and a tiny victim received broad attention in 1890, 1893, 1896, 1907, 1910, and other years, but the next discovery of numerous corpses in one place did not come until ninety-nine years after the discovery in Hathaway’s basement.

That’s when the owner of a Los Angeles pathology lab failed to make payments on a container in which he had stored 16,500 dead unborn children. Workers emptying the container on Thursday, February 4, 1982, discovered the bodies packed in formaldehyde-filled jars stuffed into boxes stacked eight feet high.

Two days later, the Los Angeles Times ran on page 27 a headline, “500 Fetuses Found in Metal Container,” and reported that “health and safety code violations may be involved.” Times reporter Judith Michaelson included in her story the reaction of forklift operator Ron Gillett: “I saw one fetus with legs 2½–3 inches long, and the body and head were demolished. I was scared, frightened, and had tears in my eyes.”9

Was it right that the Los Angeles Times and its news service on subsequent days avoided any further description and went up the “ladder of abstraction”? Headlines emphasized the detective aspects: “LA County Tries to Unravel Fetus Mystery,” “LA Officials Studying 500 Fetuses to Check whether Crime Occurred,” and (on page 54) “Secret Meeting Set in Fetus Discovery Case.”10

An Associated Press story on February 6—“500 Fetuses Found in Huge Metal Container”—made its way onto page 26 of the Tacoma News Tribune and received similar placement in newspapers such as the Clarion Ledger in Mississippi and the St. Cloud Times in Minnesota. AP stories on subsequent days ran under headlines like those in the Los Angeles Times: “Fetuses Are Probed for Abortion Status,” “Fetuses to Be Examined,” “Fetuses under Guard during Disposal Probe,” “Probe Continues in LA Fetus Case,” and “Fetus Disposal Probe Continues.”11

The stories could have been different, as they were in one small newspaper. The News-Pilot of San Pedro, California, close to the disposal site, ran its story at the top of page one. Staff writer Rex Dalton, unlike his counterparts in 1883, used the word “fetus,” but he humanized the “hundreds of fetuses, some more than five months developed, with expressions on their faces. . . . They varied in development from a few weeks to more than five months, officials said. Larger fetuses—some weighing more than 3 pounds—were in 1-gallon, ice cream-type containers, while smaller ones were in jars marked ‘dentures.’”12

Dalton also quoted Nick Martin, owner of the company that repossessed the container: Martin believed that “abortion is wrong. Anybody seeing what is in that container would, too.” But other reporters did not give readers specific detail about what was in the container. Hank Stolk, one of the truck drivers who repossessed the corpse-filled container, later told the author of a pro-life book about the discovery, “We kept trying to get the reporters to talk about . . . these babies that were killed. But they wouldn’t listen or ask any questions about that.”13

In mid-February Nick Thimmesch, a columnist syndicated by the Los Angeles Times, wrote about “the ghastly container” and criticized the way some officials and reporters referred to its contents as “medical waste”: Thimmesch asked, “But what is medical waste? An amputated leg, a cancerous growth, an unborn child?” The Times itself, though, did not run that column, and it apparently appeared only in small newspapers. By the end of February the story seemed dead.14

The story had a brief revival late in May, when headlines such as “Caskets Ready for 40 of the 17,000 Aborted Fetuses” appeared, and President Ronald Reagan endorsed the desire of pro-life advocates to have a burial service for them. The Central New Jersey Home News quoted Hank Stolk’s description of what he saw back in February: “a leg with a little foot on it . . . a hand and part of an arm.”15 But larger newspapers ran neither descriptions nor photographs, and the Los Angeles Times quoted abortion advocate Gloria Allred’s contention that showing photos of the dead was “a sleazy, callous, and cheap political trick at the expense of women who have already suffered enough.”16

That put the issue well. Was reporting at street level cruel, and an indication of bias? Did abortion advocates have to stay at suite level and push an...