Homage to the Common Man: Confessions of an Aging Anti-Abortionist

On the 25th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, it is important to acknowledge the ordinary, nonprofessional people who did not hesitate to resist abortion from the earliest days. I think it an important social commentary that there have always been more amateurs than professionals in the pro-life movement. I find it especially scandalous that the vast majority of professional philosophers have chosen to remain silent about this crime against humanity—not only in public, but in their classrooms as well.

There are strong women all around us; always have been. What about the supremely important role that women played in the pro-life movement from its very inception? I have in mind the stereotypical housewife, frequently with no more than a high school education, who seized the initiative in the early days and rallied the pro-life forces.

I don’t know if many of today’s generation know about Ellen McCormack; it wouldn’t surprise me if hardly any of them ever heard of her. This grandmother and wife of a retired New York City police detective, a career housewife, was a stellar example of the toughness, intelligence, and determination of the “ordinary woman.” When the abortion movement and its anti-life legislation began to roll over the country, she took a gigantic step and entered politics in the hope of defeating the pro-abortion lobby. First, she made an unsuccessful attempt at the lieutenant governor’s seat in Albany, and then, in 1976, ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. How did this woman of obviously limited means hope to finance such an ambitious campaign? As luck (or providence) would have it, federal campaign laws had only recently been changed to provide matching funds to any candidate who received at least five thousand dollars in donations in the state in which he or she was stumping. That’s how McCormack financed herself, but not without initial opposition. The National Abortion Rights League brought suit against her, arguing that she was ineligible for government funds because her campaign was really a cloak for the pro-life message. While the law ruled in her favor, the charge of being a “one-issue” candidate dogged McCormack throughout her campaign. She took a lot of heat from Democrats, as well as from a snidely incredulous and predictably condescending liberal media. Newsweek referred to her campaign as having “a platform built largely on one emotion-charged issue: abortion.” As quoted in the New York Times, her reply was simple but incisive:

I stand for the rights of the unborn; I don’t see why that one issue can he overlooked. Suppose you had a candidate who embezzled fifty million dollars. You wouldn’t vote for him, would you? Well, all the other candidates are in favor of a law that could kill fifty million innocent beings.

In every state where she campaigned she won enough support to qualify for matching funds: in Massachusetts she garnered 5% of the Democratic vote, 8% in Wisconsin and 9.4% in the Vermont primary. In the end, McCormack achieved what she set out to do: She went to the Democratic national convention with enough delegates to persuade the party to allow her pro-life message to be delivered on national television.

Assessing the significance of her campaign, sociologist Gerard A. Brandmeyer wrote, “Mrs. McCormack is the first serious amateur candidate for a major party nomination in memory.” Few in today’s generation of pro-lifers know of Ellen McCormack, yet her eclipse has a poetic coherence to it. Emerging unheralded from the ranks of the common people, she did what she set out to do and returned just as quietly to the anonymous life of housewife and grandmother.

In 1966, a group in San Francisco led by Frank Filice, who was then a professor of biology at the University of San Francisco, founded a pro-life organization called United for Life. Its aim was educational rather than political, composed primarily of academics, housewives, and businessmen, with a couple of attorneys and physicians also on the roster. I thought I had already made up my mind to decline an invitation to join when I received a phone call from a gardener in the area who had heard me speak against abortion on the radio. He had come from Italy about ten years before and since then worked as a gardener, listening to talk shows on his portable radio on the job. He encouraged me to join United for Life, despite the overwhelming odds of being effective against the pro-choice movement.

With his accent, small stature, mustache, and wavy graying hair, he reminded me of the actor J. Carroll Nash, who frequently played Italian peasants or Spanish freedom fighters in ’40s movies. He told me that I must speak out against abortion, so that when future generations studied our era they would see that we took a stand against it. I remember the sense of being in a B-grade movie that evening. He persuaded me: How could I resist? I felt like a reluctant civilian who knew that in the end he must drop his plow (in my case, books) and fly to the defense of the cause. True, I was already speaking frequently in public against abortion, but joining United for Life put me in a community of likeminded people from whom I learned and drew inspiration. I’m forever in that gardener’s debt.

In the United States, the worst that can happen for speaking out against a legally or socially approved practice is the loss of your job, or in the extreme case, being charged with slander. So why is it that so very few professors have taken a public stand against abortion? Thanks to the institution of tenure, they couldn’t lose their teaching positions, and it’s unlikely they would be sued, because they don’t earn enough money to make it worthwhile. But even in the womblike coziness of our lecture halls and libraries, the vast majority of us have been content to confine our lectures, investigations, and debates to institutionally-approved topics and positions.

When the end finally comes, we will no doubt be shocked to learn many things—including who will sit at the banquet table, and who will serve them.

Author

  • Raymond Dennehy

    Raymond Dennehy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Francisco.

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