Recently, National Advocates for Pregnant Women posted a video that challenges the accuracy and morality of calling abortion a holocaust or genocide. They point out that even "mainstream" anti-abortion groups and reporters use this inflammatory language. Another ubiquitous anti-choice slur is "baby killer." Regardless of our stance on reproductive issues, we all now recognize the phrase as carrying an antiabortion message. So the origins of "baby killer" may surprise people who don't remember the sixties. Looking into those origins is as important as challenging the idea of abortion as holocaust or genocide, and offers another lesson in the education that Sarah Seltzer called for earlier this summer when she asked, "Where does anti-choice extremism come from?"
Before it was used as an anti-choice accusation, the phrase "baby killer" was hurled at American soldiers returning from Vietnam in the 60s and the 70s. News of atrocities such as My Lai, where defenseless civilians -- including children -- were massacred, filled the airwaves. To learn about American men killing children was a devastating thing for our country to understand, and it didn't help that the United States was defeated to a humiliating degree in Vietnam. We were supposed to be the good guys, and the Vietnam War suggested that we weren't good morally or militarily. It took a long time for America to heal from the wounds of this defeat, to shed the disgrace of being baby killers overseas. Isn't it interesting to consider, then, that one way of reclaiming our sense of being a moral nation was to replace the idea of American men killing innocent children in Vietnam with the idea of ending abortion, which was portrayed as American women killing innocent children? It was a big switcheroo: "baby killer" stopped meaning men killing in Vietnam and started to refer to women purportedly killing in the womb.
One man's story illuminates the relationship between mourning the loss and defeat of the Vietnam War and fighting women and reproductive health care providers in the abortion war. As James Risen and Judy Thomas reported in Wrath of Angels, John O'Keefe was the anti-choice strategist who staged some of the first clinic sit-ins in the 1970s and inspired the many blockades that closed down clinic after clinic in the 1980s. According to Risen and Thomas, O'Keefe was the "father of rescue," the man whose experiences and writings paved the way for Operation Rescue, the group with the paramilitary name that closed down clinics and harassed women trying to enter them.
O'Keefe had been badly disillusioned by the Vietnam War, especially when his brother, Roy, was killed in it. Many anti-war activists who were organizing against the Vietnam War did so because they protested the destruction of Vietnamese land, villages, and people, footage of which was nightly shown on television news programs. But when his brother died, O'Keefe protested the war because of "the killing being done in Vietnam, like the killing that resulted in Roy's death." O'Keefe's principles of pacifism then took a turn away from the concerns of war and toward what he perceived as another realm of baby-killing. In the process, it appears that he became less concerned with worrying about what kind of killing Roy may have done as a soldier, and began to worry about a choice his friend Suzanne had made.
Suzanne, a nurse, discussed her choice to have an abortion "in a straightforward way with O'Keefe and seemed convinced that she had made the right decision," according to Wrath of Angels. "What O'Keefe heard, however, was" not someone who had taken advantage of the new state law that made the abortion legal. Because Suzanne talked with O'Keefe for "a full hour [and] could not drop the subject," he presumed that it was because she wanted his "approval of her decision." This puzzled and troubled O'Keefe, who had never questioned the Catholic stance against abortion and began reading everything he could find about it.
"Soon the story of her abortion clicked with O'Keefe's emerging beliefs on death and pacifism," wrote Risen and Thomas. He became convinced that she was a mother, her child was dead, and she had no way to grieve for the child. She never said those things, but O'Keefe believed she was in denial and that she had been talking about the subject with him as a substitute for mourning her baby. O'Keefe equated her with the Vietnamese soldier who had killed his brother: they were both badly scarred by death and killing."
O'Keefe's logic paints both Suzanne and the Vietnamese soldier as pathologically disturbed. In O'Keefe's understanding, just as the Vietnamese soldier killed Roy O'Keefe, so did Suzanne kill her child. Just as the Vietnamese soldier and Suzanne are equated in O'Keefe's logic, so, too, are the U.S. soldier and the unborn child. With these equations, O'Keefe's focus shifted from soldiers suffering the trauma of a war that included mass killings of civilians to American women like Suzanne who are supposedly psychologically "scarred" and "in denial." O'Keefe then adopted civil disobedience as a way to oppose abortion. In the late 1970s, he staged sit-ins and explained in an influential 1978 pamphlet called A Peaceful Presence that, "unlike those used in the civil rights movements, anti-abortion sit-ins were not symbolic." In other words, he articulated the idea that disrupting the business of women's clinics was tantamount to actually "saving lives" and "rescuing" babies. Doesn't that sound just like what a hero does - save lives and rescue people? O'Keefe's anti-war pacifism and protest couldn't save his brother, but he was adamant that he was saving babies by sitting in front of a women's clinic.
O'Keefe's story suggests that the emergent militancy of antiabortion forces was part of what Susan Jeffords called the "remasculinization" of America after Vietnam. It is not only veterans who were said to have suffered a crisis of masculinity as a result of failing in Vietnam. The entire country was forced to re-think what it means to be a good American man. Movies like Rambo focused on what Vietnam had done to our boys. "Real men" found a new war through which to revive their American manhood. People stopped calling Vietnam vets "baby killers" and started applying the term to women who terminate pregnancies. Forget the swamps and jungles of Indochina. The womb was the new battlefield.
Anti-choicers, such as the late Life Advocate editor and novelist Paul de Parrie, who celebrated the murder of abortion providers and clinic workers in the 1990s made this link clear. Women were, according to de Parrie, supposedly "suffering from the now familiar Post-traumatic Stress Disorder often seen in Vietnam War vets." Anti-choice organizations still claim this even though (as Reagan's Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, made clear) there is no credible research proving it. Nevertheless, they "confirmed that ‘Vietnam' for these women" - and for the men who began killing for life - "was an abortion table," wrote de Parrie.
Given this history of "baby-killer," it should come as no surprise that nowadays it is more common to hear anti-choicers say abortion is torture. The same switcheroo dynamic may be at work. It is difficult for us to own up to the American-made torture that occurred in Guantanamo Bay, for example. By exposing and fighting the so-called torture of abortion, people may regain a sense of moral goodness about themselves and their country. More than mere appropriation of war-time rhetoric, this tendency for antiabortionists to scapegoat others for what is being done in their name was established long ago.
