Like many people who are drawn to anthropology, I wanted to conduct research that would debunk common stereotypes about “natives.” Unlike my colleagues who departed for distant shores to earn their Ph.D.'s in the early 1980s, I was drawn to the abortion issue in the United States. Why does it excite such profound emotions and political virulence in our society? What motivates activists? What kind of political activity occurs beyond the rhetoric and polarizing demonstrations organized by the leaders of both sides? Perhaps most important, I wanted to see whether activists in both camps could find any new, more-creative ways to deal with each other and the controversy surrounding abortion.
I felt that the abortion debate needed the kind of research that anthropologists and other qualitative social scientists undertake: studies that try to understand people as part of a community, getting to know them over time and in context, so that we can see the world from their point of view and comprehend why certain issues become more pressing than others in their lives.
Unfortunately, except for a few sociological works, such as James Davison Hunter’s The Culture Wars and Kristen Luker’s The Politics of Motherhood, as well as the historian Rickie Solinger’s The Abortionist, most scholarly and popular writing on abortion seems to rely on stereotypes.
Journalists generally have focused on the most-violent aspects of the conflict -- the headline-grabbing protests at clinics by Operation Rescue and the murders of two doctors and three clinic workers by activists invoking what they considered to be the “Christian” principle of “justifiable homicide.” And surveys and statistical research have relied on multiple- choice questions about variables assumed to influence attitudes on abortion, such as religion, income, or education.
Much of this research is enormously valuable. For example, the stability of public opinion on the issue for more than two decades -- with half to two thirds of the public favoring abortion in some circumstances -- is a stunning bit of data that has frustrated many an activist trying to push legislative change.
Yet such work does not provide a rounded, complex sense of who the activists are, the diversity of opinion and philosophical divisions within each side of the debate, or where new political possibilities for a solution to the conflict might emerge.
Scholarship can help place current “news” in the historical context of the ebb and flow of social movements. For example, the extreme violence that has characterized anti-abortion activism in the 1990s is a relatively new phenomenon. Through the mid-1980s, most activists on both sides of the issue were moderates -- people who felt strongly but were fundamentally committed to public civility, such as non-confrontational protests and attempts to enact legislation.
Moderates still make up the majority of activists, but their presence is much harder to detect as radicals engage in deliberately provocative acts. Yet, despite all the clamor among activists and the shifting positions of politicians, the legality of abortion, established by the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, has remained largely unchanged. And the confrontational and violent tactics of anti-abortion extremists have turned off some potential supporters and aggravated philosophical differences among pro-lifers. Some more-moderate opponents of abortion have begun focusing on activities such as educational programs on fetal development and centers that try to help women with prenatal and obstetric care.
Academic work that looks beyond the front-page stories can help to illuminate new political possibilities that offer a brave counterpoint to the atmosphere of increasing violence. In a number of small cities, activists have grown tired of the polarized battles and are trying to find alternative ways to accomplish their agendas at the grassroots level. At a time when our country and the rest of the world seem dominated by the politics of hate, it seems especially important to locate and study how people are finding more-constructive ways to accomplish their political and social ends.
I was fortunate to encounter some of this activity while doing field research on grassroots abortion activists during the 1980s. My work focused on the small, prairie city of Fargo, N.D., where the opening of the Fargo Women’s Health Organization in 1981 -- the first, and still the only, clinic in the state to offer abortion services -- has provoked continuing local controversy. In Fargo, I witnessed some remarkable political creativity among activists on both sides, especially those involved in a group called Pro-Dialogue. For a brief time, those activists dared to step out of their stereotyped positions; they tried to imagine a way to work on their different agendas that was driven not by hate and violence, but by a desire to use the political process to improve the conditions faced by pregnant women.
Pro-Dialogue was formed during a meeting of the North Dakota Democratic Women’s Caucus in March 1984, in preparation for that year’s state Democratic convention. A pro-choice plank on abortion was proposed for the state party’s platform, and, after much debate, was defeated. A woman who found she had friends arguing on both sides of the issue suggested a compromise position based on areas of agreement. The result read: “The North Dakota Democratic party believes public policy on abortion should provide some positive alternatives which would stress effective sex education, continued research on safer means of contraception, improved adoption services, support for parents of exceptional children, and economic programs which make it possible for parents to both raise children with love and pursue a productive work life.”
Pro-Dialogue expired after only a few years, when Fargo -- like many small American cities -- was subject to prolonged anti-abortion protests by extremists from outside the community. Compared with the recent years of violence, Pro- Dialogue represented only a fragile moment in the abortion conflict.
But fragility is not the same as insignificance. In the past five years, the germ of the idea that emerged in Fargo a decade ago has begun to blossom independently; groups have formed around the country, made up of pro-choice and pro-life activists determined to find alternatives to divisive rhetoric and violence. Like strong families, these groups are finding ways to tolerate differences among their members and work toward common goals, such as helping women with difficult pregnancies. They have created an organization called the Common Ground Network for Life and Choice, whose members are trying to work together on issues such as teen-age pregnancy, ways to provide adequate resources for impoverished mothers and children, and guidelines for protests at abortion clinics.
When I first heard about Common Ground, I thought that it must have been founded by people who were interested in the abortion issue but had not put themselves on the front lines. In fact, exactly the opposite was true. Groups have emerged in places where the abortion battle has been the most prolonged and divisive -- Buffalo, Milwaukee, Boston, St. Louis, and even Pensacola, Fla., the site of several abortion-clinic bombings in the 1980s and the murders of two doctors and one clinic worker in the 1990s. Indeed, one of the first local Common Ground groups to form was begun by the principal adversaries in the 1989 Supreme Court case, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, a decision that allowed states to impose restrictions on abortion services, such as banning the use of public funds for counseling or for providing abortions.
Following that ruling, B.J. Isaacson Jones, the woman who directed the largest abortion clinic in St. Louis, and Andrew Puzder, the leading anti-abortion lawyer in Missouri, decided to find areas in which the two sides could work together. The efforts of the group they founded have resulted in legislation in Missouri providing assistance to drug-addicted pregnant women. Last year, the group issued a position paper on “Adoption as Common Ground.”
Creative political imagination can flower in many different ways, inspiring people to protest peacefully, to dehumanize their opponents, or to commit murder in God’s name. Public and even scholarly understanding of why people are driven to particular forms of activism is as rare as deep knowledge of the “exotic” people whom anthropologists and other social scientists traditionally have studied. Ethnographic research on a divisive issue such as abortion can give much-needed visibility to people who are trying to create new, positive action on social and political issues.
Perhaps if more attention had been paid to groups such as Fargo’s Pro-Dialogue in the mid-1980s, we might have had a Common Ground network much earlier, which might have helped to prevent the murders of the past few years. Much as Margaret Mead studied other cultures, in part, to help Americans rethink their own cultural habits, contemporary anthropologists and other social scientists can, by the cases they choose to study and write about, help to redefine the way we think about cultural conflict and its resolution.
Social movements are built on trust and dialogue as well as on disagreement, but cooperative actions rarely attract as much media coverage as violent forms of protest do. Yet in an era of profound cynicism, when distrust of anyone unlike ourselves seems to dominate politics, it is crucial for academics to focus more research on people whose actions contradict our stereotypes. Such analyses can help expand and reframe the public discourse on controversial issues and, in the abortion debate, remind us of the key concern that seems to have been lost: how we can make our society more supportive of women in their childbearing years, and help people have and raise children under the best possible circumstances.
Faye Ginsburg, author of Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (University of California Press, 1989), is a professor of anthropology at New York University, where she directs the Center for Media, Culture, and History.