RH: Why did you decide to start this project?
CG: I was sent to Missouri in the early months of 1989 by
The Washington Post because the Supreme Court had accepted
a case called Webster v. Reproductive Health Services that was
generating a tremendous reaction among both sides of the abortion
community. People had been doing very careful headcounts as the
Court's composition changed, and this looked like the first time that
an anti-Roe majority was present. Webster was a state
abortion case that would provide them the vehicle to overturn Roe
v. Wade if they were prepared to do it.
I went looking for the history that would help me write about the
background of this case, and I couldn't find it. It was particularly
distressing that I couldn't find a source that would tell me the basic
facts of how we had got to this point. Did it start with Roe v.
Wade in 1973? No, as it turned out, it had been going on for at
least a full decaade before that. But more to the point, I couldn't find
anything that told the story from the point of view of the opponents.
Everything I could find in the mainstream literature dealing with the
right-to-life people was written in condescending, demeaning
language clearly intended to make me understand why they were
wrong, why they were crazy religious zealots. I decided that if I was
going to read an objective history of the conflict, I would have to
write it.
RH: You started research in 1989. Have you been working on this
fulltime for the last decade?
CG: The idea began in 1989 as I was working on the article for
the Post, but I didn't leave the paper and begin work on the
book until 1991. So it was really six years of fulltime work.
RH: How much of that was spent in Missouri?
CG: I have family of my own, so I wasn't in a position to
simply move there for a year. So I developed a second life in
Missouri. There was a family I met who invited me to use their home
as a crash pad when I was doing research there. They were
wonderful, warm people who became like second parents to me. I
was back and forth to Missouri fairly often, staying as little as 2-3
days to over a week at a time. But between the visits and the
extensive phone calls, I was 'there' for several months.
RH: What prompted the focus on Missouri?
CG: As I learned more about what had happened all over the
United States, I found that Missouri was a very good stage from
which to tell the national tale. The people I met from both sides in
Missouri were thoughtful, articulate people whose personal
experiences formed a guided tour through their respective
movements. Both [Judith Widdicombe and Sam Lee] had been
involved for a long time, both had moved from direct civil
disobedience to more mainstream work, both grappled with the same
kinds of internal arguments about morality and pragmatism. And
they were exceptionally attractive subjects because of their ability to
talk about themselves and enable a reader to understand why they
acted as they did.
When you take a book like this, you need people who are
simultaneously very ordinary and very extraordinary. Ordinary in
that they are really representative of people working around them
doing similar things. None of the people in my book are famous; none
of them are people that you're going to know if you were outside
Missouri unless you were right inside that advocacy community. At
the same time, they're extraordinary in that they undertook
leadership on their own initiative. They identified what they saw as
a serious matter and decided they were going to do something about
it. It's something most of us don't do; we decide something is a
serious matter and wait for somebody else to do something about
it.
RH: Some readers have referred to J. Anthony Lukas' Common
Ground as a model for this type of literary journalism, and I'm
interested in discussing the desire your book shares with it to
present both sides of a volatile debate from an intimate
perspective.
CG: The notion of looking at the same events through different
people's eyes didn't begin with Anthony Lukas, of course. It's an old
literary tradition that's been applied to fiction for years and in some
ways it's the essence of great storytelling. But Common Ground
was, I think, celebrated because there wasn't a non-fiction book prior
to it that did that so effectively with a social conflict that had caused
tremendous concern among so many people. Of course I had the book
in mind when I wrote this. It's such a great book, and there are so
many of us who are reporters that admire it so much that you don't
start anything like this without thinking of Lukas.
I was fortunate enough to have met him and had some long
conversations with him before he died. He was extremely kind and
generous with his time. He happened to be close friends with my
editor; when I signed the contract, and was in a complete panic about
whether I could ever pull this off, I went to his apartment to talk. He
pulled me down off the ceiling and told me some things about how
he had done what he did, like a long story about how one of the
families he had chosen had turned out to be unacceptable quite far
into the project, and how he'd had to find another family. It was both
scary and reassuring.
There were other books that I had in mind. One of them which is less
well known, but admired by people who know about abortion, is
Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, by Kristin Luker. She
was the first person I know of who took great care to listen to people
from both sides with the same ear. She was very interested in how
pro-choice and pro-life people see not only abortion, but also the
roles of men and women in general and particularly how they view
motherhood. It was a very thoughtful and evenhanded book, and
quite respectful of pro-life people, even though you could discern
that she didn't share their views.
That was a good model for me, because it was important to me that I
not sound either like I was demeaning one or the other side or that I
come off like an anthropologist writing about the strange primitives
from another culture. I didn't want people to worry about what I
thought about abortion, but I knew that was unrealistic, so if they
were going to worry about it, I wanted them to be stumped
(chuckles). What I really wanted readers to do is think about
the people they'd read about and to feel that they had come to
understand somebody who was different from them.
RH: So much of the abortion war is based on the distinctions
between definitions for the basic terms on either side of the
fence.
CG: One of the things that makes this issue so hard to talk
about and write about is that what you are discussing is described in
entirely different vocabulary depending on what your base
principles are. I ran into conflicts over such terms as 'restrictions,'
the standard way that newspapers describe proposals put before
state legislatures. Well, it's not a 'restriction' if you consider it
'protection' of the unborn. There are more obvious arguments: 'fetus'
versus 'unborn child,' 'abortion mill' versus 'abortion clinic,' and so
on. When we can't even find a neutral vocabulary to discuss the
issue, it makes it hard to talk about what's going on.
RH: As you've been out on the road, and the 25th anniversary of
Roe v. Wade has gotten lost in the shuffle as far as the
mainstream media is concerned, what's your experience from
meeting interested readers?
CG: I don't think people care particularly about the 25th
anniversary. Roe v. Wade was neither the start nor the end of
the abortion war. The battle had been raging in states for years
before that, and of course we know that the decision didn't end the
abortion debate. What I sense is an intense interest from both sides
in trying to figure out the opposition and talk about the issue in some
other way. Both sides are heartily sick of the battle. Everybody hates
the violence. There's a tiny militant fringe that has argued its way
into justifying the bombing and murder of abortion providers, but
they really are a tiny fringe, viewed as a lunatic fringe by both sides,
and I think that people underestimate how much anguish this fringe
causes within the right-to-life community as well as the pro-choice
community.
RH: One of the heartfelt aspects of the right-to-life side's history is
their earnest belief that if they could just convince pro-choice people
what abortion really was, in their terms, they'd win them
over.
CG: The best way to describe their general demeanor of the
grassroots right-to-life activist in the early years is a state of
bewilderment. The campaigns to change state abortion laws
bewildered them; it was astonishing to them as if somebody
proposed rewriting the murder codes to allow some murders. The
Supreme Court decisions bewildered them. How could these justices
come to these amazing conclusions? How could they tell states that it
was not the state's job to protect fetal life? How can they imagine
that it's okay for the Supreme Court to duck the question of when life
begins because philosophers and doctors and theologians can't agree?
And, most bewildering, how can a broad American public
accept this?
To the right-to-life side, the answer was that people just didn't get it.
They must not have understood the humanity of the unborn, they
must not have understood what really goes on in an abortion
procedure. Now, as the right-to-life movement goes on into its third
decade, many activists have come to a grim understanding that a lot
of Americans do get it and they think it's okay. That's
obviously deeply upsetting for people who have been fighting for the
right to life for so long.
RH: After six years on this project, what's next for you?
CG: I have more appearances to do in connection with this
book, and then a lot of magazine work still to do. There are some
longterm writing projects I'll take on later this year. Although
abortion politics continues to be very interesting and complicated,
there will not be an Articles of Faith Part II; I have always
been less interested in what's going on right now than in the history
that I felt had not been told before now. There's so much writing
about what's happening now that they don't need me to add to it.
