I cannot wait to teach this book.
As a professor who engages students in the interdisciplinary study of reproductive law and politics in the United States, I am always looking for texts that combine rigorous analysis of contemporary practices surrounding abortion with humane and compassionate treatment of the activists and women involved. In my courses, I keep open the question of whether pro-life feminism is possible; therefore, I look for ways to introduce information about woman-centered, pro-life, feminist perspectives. And I seek texts that make a clear argument but provide openings for students to respectfully challenge interpretations and apply a competing frame of analysis. Laura Hussey’s book is a terrific example of rigorous mixed-methods political science that has clearly stated research questions and processes, as well as outstanding data visualization, and it is written so generously that it will provide us with hours of conversation.
Hussey adopts and builds on Zaid Munson’s (2008) sociological conception of the four “streams” of the pro-life movement, arguing that pregnancy help center volunteers fall within the “individual outreach” stream (p. 3); they have as their target not abortion providers, the state, nor the public—but, rather, pregnant women (p. 14). Hussey uses political opportunity theory to frame her data-driven analysis of this activism, drawing on her two national surveys (one of pregnancy help center staff, the other of center founders/leaders) and a smaller survey of local clients. Hussey also interviewed leaders/founders and staff and engaged in participant-observation at national conferences. The book includes compelling statements from activists about their work and motivation for it. The data are embedded within an exhaustive review of the literature surrounding anti-choice and pro-choice activism.
The book begins with an excellent networked history of the help center movement and a clear articulation of its values and goals (chaps. 2 and 3). Most readers have no firsthand experience of pregnancy centers, and in the book, we learn quite a lot about them: who staffs them, where they are located, their physical layout, and the types of services provided. Hussey’s discussion of motivations, strategies, and changing tactics in chapter 4 is exceptionally clear and interesting. She explains that contemporary pregnancy center leaders both demonize Planned Parenthood and—through processes of professionalization and medicalization—aspire in some ways to compete with that organization by adopting its tactics and approach.
Chapter 5, which examines the geographies and political cultures within which these centers flourish, asks us to make connections between service provision, access to abortion, poverty, and pro-life worldviews. As Hussey writes, “public pro-life sentiment, the favorability of pro-life activists’ political opportunity structure, and the incidence of pregnancy centers initially seem to grow together” (p. 131); there are more pregnancy help centers in states where there are fewer abortion providers.
I particularly appreciate the way that Hussey highlights pregnancy centers’ intervention into the seeming disconnect between pro-life politics seeking to constrain access to abortion and conservative politics in general, which seek to dismantle the welfare state. The book “challenges conventional wisdom that the US pro-life movement devotes little attention to the circumstances that prompt women to choose abortion and the concrete implications of ‘choosing life’ for women’s lives” (p. 24). This is important, because much of the research on why women who want to be mothers choose abortion indicates that for many of them the decision is predicated on a lack of financial resources and other circumstantial pressures. It is also important from the standpoint of normative political theory, and Hussey’s examination in chapter 6 of the politics and ideologies of movement activists is a great intervention into understanding social justice-oriented pro-life activism.
Crucially, Hussey’s data also show us clearly that (contra the politics of abortion as they play out nationally and locally) there are those in the pro-life movement who resist pitting mother against fetus. Pregnancy center activists do want to reduce (and even eradicate) abortion in the United States, but they choose to focus on “serving women,” rather than “saving babies.”
It is seldom fair for a reviewer to ask a book to be something that it isn’t, and I don’t seek to do that here. But, as I read The Pro-Life Pregnancy Help Movement, I often saw places to expand, question, and redirect the research. The book is so empirically rich that I could see it becoming the foundation for several more, potentially very different, studies of the pro-life movement. I imagine a follow-up study much like Helena Silverstein’s (2007) Girls on the Stand, which traced young women’s experiences in attempting to obtain a judicial bypass for parental consent for abortion, or Rose Corrigan’s (2013) Up against the Wall, which showed the ways that rape reform failed to adequately serve survivors. Without being an exposé, scholars could build on Hussey’s work to provide a “street-level bureaucracy” look into what happens in these centers from the perspective of the women served.
Hussey understands that not every woman’s needs will be met by pregnancy help centers, that the Christian message received at them might not be welcomed by all, and that the metaphors used in some of the centers’ training materials might diminish the very empowerment the centers are attempting to develop. This insight could be a terrific starting point for a more critical analysis of the paternalism inherent in some of the language, as well as for an analysis of pro-life and pro-choice uses of “empowerment feminism,” a la Nancy Fraser (2013).
Hussey’s book will be a useful addition to scholarship on the pro-life movement, joining books like Josh Wilson’s (2013) Street Politics of Abortion that seeks to understand the relationship of activists in that movement to the state and state law, and Carol Maxwell’s (2002) investigation of the dual role of faith and lived experience in mobilizing pro-life activists. Hussey’s final chapter beautifully explores the faith articulations of activists and leaders—and makes interesting interventions into religion and politics, disaggregating Catholic and Evangelical politics; there is potential here to expand on the relationship of “charity” to “justice,” articulated by project participants.
Certainly, Hussey’s book should be seen in conversation with Kristin Luker’s classic analysis of the worldviews of pro-life and pro-choice activists, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (1984). The conversation between those texts would illuminate tremendous changes over the past 40 years, while also highlighting the continued relationship of professionalism and medicine to abortion politics and practices.
Finally, and, crucially, Hussey’s book could be reframed and extended through an explicit reproductive justice lens. Her final footnote points in exactly this direction, citing Jennifer Nelson (Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement, 2003), Dorothy Roberts (“Reproductive Justice, Not Just Rights,” Dissent 62(4), 2015), and others. An investigation of the impacts of pregnancy centers on communities and women of color, and the opportunity to articulate a reproductive justice explanation for their presence, would be an exciting contribution.
That Hussey’s book raises so much potential for further scholarly analysis and suggests different frames to be taken on the data she collected is absolutely not a critique.
Rather, it is a celebration.
Laura Hussey has written a definitive take on the pregnancy help center movement, contributing to the building of political opportunity theory, while also opening the conversation to those from different normative, analytic, and disciplinary perspectives. That is a service to our field indeed.
