In September 1972, Cardinal John Francis Dearden, Archbishop of Detroit, said, “We cannot be selective in our love of life. The very same reasons call on us to protect it wherever and however it is threatened, whether through the suffocation of poverty or in villages ravaged by napalm or unborn life in a mother's womb.”

Defenders of the Unborn, historian Daniel Williams's meticulously researched account of the American pro-life movement, illustrates that people with views like those expressed by Dearden were important members of the pro-life movement prior to Roe v. Wade, the momentous 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized most abortions in the first two trimesters of pregnancy on the grounds that a woman's right to privacy included control over her pregnant body.

Williams argues that the pro-life movement was not always inseparable from the larger Christian Right, which affixed its anti-abortion views to a rejection of feminism and the sexual revolution. Pro-life was not always personified by Randall Terry, the Pentecostal preacher who founded the militant Operation Rescue and who hated birth control and non-marital sex almost as much as abortion. Rather, Williams contends that many in the pro-life movement combined opposition to abortion with a host of liberal human rights positions. Moreover, Williams asserts that the pro-life movement was at its most robust when it couched its logic in human rights and that, unlike other right-wing issues, the pro-life cause remains popular today because at its core it is about human rights.

Defenders of the Unborn offers a stark challenge to the historiography of the pro-life movement. It revises the standard narrative, as told by countless historians and pundits, that abortion was the key controversy that bequeathed us the culture wars. As the conventional wisdom goes, abortion was merely a Catholic issue before Roe. In this story, even conservative white evangelicals ignored abortion, with some even supporting efforts to legalize it. Non-Catholics only joined the pro-life movement after the implications of Roe were felt — after the number of legal abortions obtained in the United States skyrocketed from 750,000 in 1973 to over 1.5 million by 1980, or nearly one abortion for every two live births. According to this popular tale, such staggering numbers brought millions of conservatives into the pro-life movement because abortion seemed to represent the darkest side of the “Playboy philosophy” that had seeped into American culture.

Defenders of the Unborn reverses this culture wars script. Williams shows that the pro-life movement was religiously and politically diverse. In addition to Catholics, it included Mainline Protestants and people of other faith traditions not typically associated with the pro-life cause. Moreover, pro-life was not an inherently conservative position prior to Roe since defending the right to life was sometimes considered consistent with liberal opposition to war and poverty.

Whereas historians of abortion such as Rickie Sollinger insist that the pro-life movement was a manifestation of the backlash to feminism, Williams highlights pro-life activists who considered themselves feminists. They believed in women's equality but thought guaranteeing social protections to expectant mothers was the superior feminist approach to pregnancy. Yet the Supreme Court forced the movement's hand. When the court prioritized one liberal right (a woman's right to autonomy) over another (a fetus's right to life) with its Roe decision, pro-life activists did the same in reverse. In short, abortion did not give us the culture wars. Rather, the culture wars gave us a pro-life movement that was right-wing. In this way, Defenders of the Unborn is a reclamation project for pro-life liberals.

From hereon, anyone who wishes to write about the history of the pro-life movement must reckon with Williams's revisionist account. But just as the conventional wisdom is too pat, Defenders of the Unborn is also too tidy.

Far from emblematic, those pro-life non-Catholics whom Williams rescues from the dustbins of history are exceptions that prove the rule. The National Right to Life Committee, which opposed abortion as part of an over-arching conservative Catholic orientation as expressed by the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, was the heartbeat of the pro-life movement from the moment it was formed in 1967 at the behest of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. Counter-factuals are tricky business, but had millions of conservative evangelicals never joined the pro-life movement, abortion might have remained a strictly Catholic issue. In other words, Williams over-states the liberal, non-Catholic elements of the pre-Roe movement.

Even when pro-life activists spoke about abortion in the seemingly universal language of human rights — even when they pivoted away from old-fashioned rhetoric that placed abortion as yet another sin alongside birth control and non-marital sex — they alienated those outside the movement. This was most conspicuous in their invidious knee-jerk references to abortion as a slippery slope to the Holocaust. “Logic would lead us from abortion to the gas chamber,” one activist warned, an urging repeated again and again by those in the movement. To the credit of Williams, he recognizes that such language was unhelpful. “Their warnings about the logical consequences of liberalizing abortion law,” he writes, “made little sense to many Protestants and Jews, who saw the equation of abortion with the Holocaust as offensive and ridiculous.”

In their attempts to connect with feminists, pro-lifers similarly had a habit of offending those whom they sought as allies. Commonplace pro-life notions that women who got abortions were victims of money-grubbing doctors, and that men foisted abortion upon unwilling women, were not only ridiculous but incredibly insulting to women who saw abortion as necessary to female agency. Such a disjuncture no doubt stems from the fact that, as Williams recognizes, pro-life feminists were “difference” feminists in the vein of early 20th century activists like Jane Addams who sought to carve out special protections for women and children apart from the rugged male-dominated society. But what Williams misses is that difference feminism was not inherently pro-life. Those women who explicitly ascribed to difference feminism in the 1970s and 1980s were at odds with pro-life feminists on the issue of abortion. Latter-day difference feminists like Carol Gilligan did not want special protection within a patriarchal society. Rather, they sought freedom from a male-dominated society altogether, a vision accompanied by pro-choice politics.

The problem with human rights is that they are never as universal as their champions proclaim. When the rights of one group crowd out the rights of another, adjudication of claims is warranted. This is precisely where we stand now in our post-Roe world. A woman's right to bodily autonomy remains more pressing than a fetus's right to live — at least, until viability. This is a morally muddy compromise. The Supreme Court could very well flip the balance of these competing rights in the near future. But that will not make the situation any less morally compromised. It will not fulfill universal human rights. It will not be a liberal victory. It will just be the continuation of the nation's polarized abortion politics.