In 1998, Dr. Barnett Slepian was shot by a sniper's bullet while standing in his kitchen in Amherst, New York, a quiet suburb of Buffalo. Dr. Slepian was one of only a few doctors who performed abortions in Buffalo. The man who killed him, James Kopp, was an anti-abortion activist known for his religious fundamentalism and his radical views. Journalist Eyal Press, whose Israeli-born father is also an abortion provider in Buffalo, decided to return to his hometown to find out how the city landed in the center of the emotional and violent national debate about abortion. His book, Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America (Henry Holt, February 2006), is a gripping and elegantly written combination of memoir, history, and social commentary on one of the most divisive issues in America.
Why did you decide to approach the issue of abortion as a memoir and as a history of Buffalo?
I had never written about abortion prior to this book, and I really didn't want to write about it. I had been a journalist for many years, but because I grew up seeing the intensity of emotions and the passion surrounding it up close and probably closer than most people because my father was an abortion provider who was targeted by protesters, I really didn't want to write about it. In the book, I talk about the shame and embarrassment that rubbed off on me without my even knowing it as I was growing up. Then, in 1998, my father's colleague Barnett Slepian was shot and killed in his home. He had four sons and a wife who survived. It [the shooting] was first and foremost a tragedy for that family, but it resonated very powerfully for me for obvious reasons -- it occurred in my hometown to a doctor my father knew and to a doctor who had been targeted by the same protesters who had targeted my father. I really felt a need to understand what had led to this. What is it about abortion in America that inspired so much protest and so much rage, that dominated the headlines for years in a city where I grew up, that nearly turned my father's practice on its head, that clogged the courts, all of that which is true in America and not true in countries like France and Italy and other places? It's almost like the story sought me out rather than me seeking it out. After the murder, I felt that this was a story that I had to tell.
What was it like when you were researching the book to talk to some of the pro-life advocates who supported violence against doctors like your father and Dr. Slepian?
It was chilling to talk to people who believe that being pro-life and shooting people, murdering them -- what happened in the case of Dr. Slepian -- is justifiable. It's probably similar to the experience of reporters who speak with people who believe suicide bombers who kill innocent people are also honoring their God. I talk in the book about how this is a strand of fundamentalism and extremism that exists in this country around the issue of abortions and in other countries and other faiths exists around other issues. It's certainly not unique, so it was chilling. It's not the general view within the right-to-life movement, but there's a wing of the movement that grew out of Operation Rescue that embraced violence.
You mention that a lot of pro-life groups are led by men. Why have men invested so much energy into what many people view as a women's issue?
That was a transformation that I trace in the book that took place both in Buffalo and nationally, and it wasn't true in the 1970s. In the 1970s, the typical right-to-life activist was a Catholic housewife who had pre-1960s social values, was more likely to be a stay-at-home mom, was focused on church and family, and saw the feminism of the 1960s and the legalization of abortion as a personal threat to her beliefs and her way of life. But in the 1970s, they [right-to-life activists] tended to be women, and they tended to avoid quoting the Bible. They framed their arguments in the language of science, and that was because the right-to-life movement back then was almost exclusively Catholic, and they wanted to avoid being perceived as forcing their religious beliefs on a pluralistic society. Then, in the 1980s, you have a new group of activists who join the movement and radicalize it. And as you say, a large number of them are men. They are lay ministers who come out of Bible colleges, and often they are born-again Christians, Pentacostals, and Baptists who view abortion as part of a broader war against secular humanism and the secular values and lifestyle that they've rejected as born-again Christians. In Buffalo, you had the Schenck brothers, Paul and Rob Schenck, who are Pentacostal ministers who radicalized the movement there. Why do men make it more radical? That's a good question. I think that a lot of these men were brash and rebellious and kind of enjoyed being in the limelight and getting in people's faces, mugging for the camera, and so forth.
How are minority and low-income women affected by changes in abortion laws?
Very directly and dramatically. In my book, I tell the story of Arthur Eve, an African American who was an assemblyman for east Buffalo, which is largely black. He was personally opposed to abortion, but in 1970, he provided one of the crucial votes in the assembly to pass a law legalizing abortion. Why did he do it? The NAACP sent him a coat hanger in the mail to remind him who the women were who were suffering the most when abortion was illegal. They tended to be black or minorities, those with the least money, those without the ability to travel. Eve also described to me a call that he got from his mother, who had worked in a black movie theater in Miami where illegal abortions were performed upstairs. She would see young girls going up there, and sometimes she watched the ambulance come because there were no qualified medical personnel.
Some activists in the Black Power movement believed that state-sponsored abortions were another way of controlling the black population. Did you come across this idea in your research?
Correct. There's a point in the book where I talk about the pro-choice network in western New York. This group formed in Buffalo, and it was these very brave feminists who started organizing to help women get in and out of clinics. They escorted them and did all kinds of grassroots organizing to stem the tide. They did a lot of great things. But they did come up against this issue, which was both a perception and a reality, that the pro-choice movement was more middle class and more white. Partly, that reflected the backgrounds of the women who were involved, but partly it also reflected ambivalence, skepticism, and sometimes hostility within minority communities about abortion and family planning. Part of that goes back to the days in the South when family planning organizations were set up in the community with, what many people felt, was not a desire to empower women but to keep the population down. In the 1980s, in a different way, you have talk of welfare queens and black women having too many kids. So, if you're a minority woman, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. If you have the child, you're perceived as a “welfare queen” in Reagan rhetoric, or if you don't have the child or have an abortion, then you're viewed as immoral.
How do you think the recent Supreme Court appointees will influence abortion laws?
I think it remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will chip away at abortion rights, which is what many people believe, or will go for outright overturning Roe v. Wade, which isn't yet unlikely but could be if another justice or two were to retire or step down before Bush's term is up. Right now, most people assume that Alito will vote with Thomas and Scalia, who are very firmly against abortion. Roberts is more complicated. Some people think he'll be in that group, others think he'll be more respectful of precedent. It will probably take a few more appointees before Roe would be overturned, if it's going to be overturned. But, to chip away at Roe, that's realistic. It's already happening.
What do you think would happen if Roe vs. Wade were overturned?
I think the misperception that America would return to the 1950s when abortion was illegal everywhere is unlikely. The more likely scenario is that it will be turned back to the states. What you'll have is a patchwork of more liberal blue states that will have legal abortion services, and those that never accepted Roe v. Wade's legitimacy will return the legality of abortion. You'll have tens of thousands of women crossing state lines, those who can afford to, to have abortions. That will reinforce the class and race divisions that already exist in terms of access.
As you've mentioned before, women already travel long distances to get abortions.
I wrote a New York Times op-ed in which I pointed out that this fear of what could be is already reality in many places. In Wyoming, for example, 95 percent of the women having abortions in Wyoming travel across state lines to do so. That figure is above 60 percent in Mississippi, and it's gone up in a couple of other states as the number of abortion providers has declined.
Abstinence-only education is increasingly the only type of sex education that is being allowed in school curricula. How important is education in reducing abortion rates?
My suspicion is it's extremely important. Let's take the case of Buffalo, a city that had so many years of protests and violence and where a doctor was shot. The abortion rate in Buffalo and Eerie County declined by 30 percent in the 1990s. Why did it decline? One of the reasons was stated clearly in 2002 by the Buffalo News, “Blunt sex-ed effort cuts teen pregnancy.” You had more after school programs that emphasized not just sexual abstinence but also talked about things like contraception and sex. That's just a reality that has to be confronted if we want to be serious about reducing the number of unwanted and unplanned pregnancies, particularly to young people who did not grow up knowing what the consequences of sex may be. The irony in Buffalo is that in the late 1980s, you have these massive demonstrations to prevent women from going into clinics to have abortions, but simultaneously you have no comprehensive sex education in the curriculum of public schools and one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in all of the state.
As part of your research for the book, your father suggested that you visit his clinic and talk to women who were thinking about having an abortion. How did your conversations with these women affect your understanding of the issue?
It brought home what a broad cross-section of women in this country have abortions. We forget that roughly 4 in 10 women aged 45 and under have had an abortion in America. That's a very broad swath of the population. The majority of those women are mothers. Sixty percent of women having abortions have also had one or more children. This image we have of mothers on one side and women who have abortions on the other is an illusion. The other illusion is that it's just people who grow up in libertine households in San Francisco or New York. One of the first women I interviewed at my father's office, when I asked her what it was like when she passed the protesters on her way to have an abortion, she said, “I used to be one of them.” She told me that in high school, she wrote papers about how abortion was wrong and then she found herself having to deal with an unplanned pregnancy and decided that she wasn't ready to be a mother. I spoke to people not just at my father's office but in other places in Buffalo, such as where Dr. Slepian used to work, who said that this was pretty common. There was a disconnect sometimes between what people believed in the abstract and what they chose to do when they found themselves in a situation that they hadn't expected to be in.
How many abortion providers are still working in Buffalo today?
It's complicated. There is the abortion clinic where Dr. Slepian worked, which remains open. There is a Planned Parenthood [clinic] in nearby Niagara Falls. There are a few doctors who perform abortions in nearby Rochester. And then, there's my father, who is the only physician remaining in the Buffalo area who does abortions as part of a more general OB/GYN practice. That's something that many people have lamented. Because of the stigma and the protests, abortion has been pushed into a corner of the medical world so that it's increasingly separated from women's general reproductive health. In some states, you'll have only one specialized clinic. No hospitals, no doctor's offices, and that speaks to the success of the stigma.
Since Republicans seem to have convinced pro-life activists that they support their beliefs, is there anything that Democrats can do to attract more pro-life voters in their party?
That's a tall order, but I think that what I talk about in the book is that the Republican Party seized social issues like abortion to draw a new constituency into the ranks of the conservative movement in Buffalo and in many other parts of the country. They used issues like abortion and now gay marriage to draw in working- and middle-class Catholics and church-going evangelicals. What emerged was a right-wing conservative populism that spoke of the interests of the common people versus the elites, but the elites were not defined in economic or class terms. They were defined in cultural terms as people who support gay marriage or people who support abortion rights. For the Democrats to change the dynamic would require reorienting that kind of populist message in America away from raw cultural issues towards issues of economic justice, equality, and wages. I don't think liberals can win this shouting match over the cultural issues even though the majority of the country does hold views on those issues that are not those of the religious right. The liberals can't win the shouting matches because the right has very emotional, simple answers to those issues. To them, gay marriage is wrong, and abortion is wrong. The left tends to have much more conflicted and nuanced views on many of the cultural issues. It becomes very difficult to articulate that in a culture that is so polarized.
LaNitra Walker is a doctoral candidate in art history at Duke University.
