As a former Pro-Life Activist from 1984 to 1992, I have always been interested in reading literature others have written about the movement that I was a part of for 8 years. Carol J. C. Maxwell holds a Ph. D. and is an anthropologist. She wrote this book, Pro-Life Activists in America, Meaning, Motivation, and Direct Action as a part of her anthropological studies. On page one of her book, she stated that she, “embarked on two years of field observations to provide an anthropological account of this social movement (i. e. the pro-life activist movement).” All though I would agree that the pro-life activist movement qualifies as a “social movement” per se, I think the scope of Dr. Maxwell’s study was too narrow. The reason there was a pro-life activist movement, was because our civil government abolished laws that protected its unborn human citizens. The origin of the movement was solely based on a re-action to the federal government’s action. Hence there is a reason the movement came about in the 70s. The reason a pro-life activist movement did not exist in the 60s, 50s, 40s and earlier is because unborn babies were legally protected in the decades leading up to the 70s.
I think an anthropological study of legalized abortion as a whole and its impact on American society as a whole would have been more comprehensive angle to take as opposed to studying a single facet of that issue. As of the date of this article, 53 million babies have been aborted since 1973. I think a study documenting how the loss of 53 million potential wage earners and taxpayers has affected our national economy and the solvency of Social Security and Medicare /Medicaid would be a much more constructive and comprehensive anthropological study. Doing an anthropological study on just the pro-life activist movement would make about as much sense as doing an anthropological study on the abolitionist and the underground railroad during the pre-Civil War 1800s without doing an anthropological study of slavery in America and how it affected American culture. Or, doing an anthropological study on Corrie Ten Boom and other Christian Nazi resistors who hid and harbored Jews without doing an anthropological study of Hitler and the Nazi holocaust as a whole. BTW, when pro-lifers equate their cause for the unborn to Slavery and the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews, Dr. Maxwell calls that an attitude of “ethic of extensivity.” (page 12)
Another thing that gave me pause about this book is Dr. Maxwell taking a neutral posture on the abortion issue. She wrote on page six:
When interviewees asked my position on abortion, I told them that I had trouble reconciling abortion with my personal values, but neither could I know what another woman would best do. As I recall, only one activist pushed me to take a stand on one side or the other of the pro-choice/pro-life divide, but I did not feel the need to define myself according to that dichotomy. The other interviewees appeared to accept or at least tolerate, the neutrality created by the tension of my beliefs.
Dr. Maxwell said that she spent two years (from September 1989 to August 1991) “making field observations” of pro-life activists. Yet, she said that her neutrality on abortion was created by the tension of her beliefs. What? During my 8 year tenure as a pro-life activist, there was one thing you could always count on. Pro-Lifers displaying placard sized photos of aborted babies. I would find it very hard to believe that Dr. Maxwell never once saw a picture of an aborted baby during those two years of interviewing. I find it very hard to believe that she is totally unaware of the carnage that is taking place at the abortion mills where she conducted her interviews. This woman is smart enough to write a book and earn a Ph.D. Yet, she doesn’t know “what another woman would best do” concerning the killing of her unborn baby? Suppose it was legal to kill one week old neo-natal babies. Would Dr. Maxwell still say that she would not “know what another woman would best do”? What other issues in the political spectrum is Dr. Maxwell having an internal struggle over? What about gun control, same sex marriages, illegal immigration and universal government run health care? Is Dr. Maxwell neutral on those issues also?
On multiple occasions, Dr. Maxwell wrote that the motivations of the pro-lifers participating in direct action as being “complex.” When it comes to the pro-life side of the abortion issue, I can assure you that our motivations for activism were quite simple. Babies are killed at the abortion mills and they were there to stop the killing. That is the root motive, you need not go any further than that. And if Dr. Maxwell learned anything during her two years of field observations, she would have known that.
I found one piece of data that Dr. Maxwell gave on page three to be very interesting. She wrote:
By the early 1990s, an estimated forty thousand individuals had participated in sit-ins at abortion facilities and related locations in the United States (Ginsburg 1993:564).
The footnote in the parentheses references the following source:
1993 Saving America’s Souls: Operation Rescue’s Against Abortion. In Fundamentalism and the State: Remaking Politics, Economics, and Militance. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Applebby, eds. Pp. 557-88. Chicago: University Press.
Now I could be wrong, but 40,000 seems a little high to me. I have often wondered how many pro-life activists have been arrested prior to 1994 and my estimate was much lower than that. I would be curious to know how Martin E. Marty or R. Scott Appleby arrived at that number since Dr. Maxwell cited them as her source. I wonder if they made the distinction between total arrests of pro-life activists and total number of pro-life activists who have been arrested since a lot of them have been arrested multiple times.
Dr. Maxwell published some statistical data on pro-lifers in the appendix of her book. She displayed over a dozen different statistical tables that covered basic demographic fields such as level of education, age, average household income, occupations, religious affiliation, marital status, family size and so on. Her data was compiled within a two year period of a movement that spanned a little more that 20 years and the data gathered was isolated to the pro-life activists working in the mid-west region of America. Anybody who knows anything about compiling sats knows that the data compiled is based on a small sampling size of the body of work that you are investigating and analyzing. However, as thorough as Dr. Maxwell was in compiling and presenting her data, (and I don’t question its accuracy) I don’t think her sampling size was not big enough to paint an accurate demographic picture of the pro-life activists movement as a whole. Especially if she thinks 40,000 pro-life activists has participated in sit-ins.
This book is not an easy read, and is not well formatted in a ready friendly way. As I drudged through the book, I kept asking myself, who is her audience? Her writing style and vernacular was very academic. I don’t think the pro-abortion people would take an interest in this book, why would they want to read an academic dissertation on pro-life activists? They already think that they were a bunch of crazy loons. I can’t imagine very many pro-lifers wanting to read this book either. The pro-life activists who participated in the rescue movement already know what motivated them to action. As for the non-activist pro-lifers, half of them thought that breaking the law was wrong, and the other half were too scared to break the law or just too lazy. As interesting as some of the stats might be, in the end, this book was written by an academian for a bunch of other academians.
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