Above: John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe
One aspect of the American anti-abortion movement that is seldom remarked upon is how its initial leaders came not from the evangelical right, but rather from the Catholic left.
This is not to say that Catholic leftists pioneered American anti-abortionist politics in general. Rather, left-wing Catholic radicals in the 1970s spearheaded anti-abortionism as a modern, confrontational, street-level protest movement characterised by direct action.
The key figure here is John O’Keefe. Born in 1950 to an Irish-American family who lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland, O’Keefe’s Catholicism deepened after his older brother Roy was killed in Vietnam in 1968. During his freshman year at Harvard, O’Keefe came to oppose the war, though he felt alienated from the peace movement on campus.
Through his sister Mary, O’Keefe was introduced to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement. The Charismatics emphasised belief in the power of baptism in the Holy Spirit, which they saw as returning believers to the simple faith of the first Christians. Unlike other Catholics, they held prayer meetings that featured prophecy, faith healing, and speaking in tongues.
Whilst certainly fundamentalist, Charismatic Renewal did not teach withdrawal from or hatred for the modern, secular world. In the late 1960s, some of its young adherents who had been involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements combined their new, zealous Catholic Pentecostal theology with the teachings of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Merton advocated nonviolent activism as a form of personal service to God and the truth.
After reading Merton’s 1964 essay collection Seeds of Destruction, O’Keefe became convinced that killing was always wrong. He reasoned that this was because killing had only two possible outcomes: either the deceased’s soul goes to heaven, in which case one has taken God’s place in judging their stewardship of the world’s goods, or it goes to hell, in which case one has robbed the deceased of the chance to repent their sins.
As well as strengthening his convictions against war, this ideological development directly led O’Keefe to the cause with which he would become most associated: anti-abortionism. Since Catholic doctrine holds that “ensoulment” occurs at conception, to O’Keefe, having or performing an abortion was like being a soldier who has killed another in combat.
O’Keefe’s interest in abortion intensified after Roe. In O’Keefe’s view, mainstream anti-abortion bodies like the Value of Life Committees were much too timid in their approach. Recalling the fever-pitch of the antiwar movement in his Harvard days, O’Keefe believed that the anti-abortion cause needed to employ more dramatic and self-sacrificing direct action tactics like arrests, sit-ins, and occupations. Such actions would be in “solidarity with the unborn”.
Reading Martin Luther King Jr. convinced O’Keefe that civil disobedience in the name of a cause could lead to personal redemption through martyrdom. It also convinced him that, like King had worked to free whites from their blindness, his own cause could cure the “blindness” of those who did not realise that abortion was the killing of children. This led O’Keefe to realise that the anti-abortion movement had to gain control over the very language of the abortion debate.
Joining a small group of other young Catholics who had begun to perform small direct actions at abortion clinics in 1975, O’Keefe devoted himself to building the anti-abortion protest movement. He organised a new round of sit-ins at clinics and became the nascent movement’s de facto leader. He linked up with other Catholic radicals like Juli Loesch, who had been part of Cesar Chavez’s farm workers' movement. As they waited to be arrested inside the clinics they targeted, his group would sing civil rights protests songs like “We Shall Overcome” with new lyrics about abortion.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given legal abortion’s centrality to the feminist movement, O’Keefe’s hopes to build a coalition with the wider left and antiwar movement never materialised. Still, he threw himself into spreading his ideas about anti-abortionist civil disobedience. He circulated pamphlets and gave workshops at conferences held by the National Right to Life Committee and other anti-abortion organisations.
By 1978, O’Keefe’s efforts were paying off. He drew in a layer of young Catholics frustrated by the caution and failures of the mainstream anti-abortion movement. On 6 January that year (the feast day of Epiphany), O’Keefe coordinated sit-ins in six East Coast cities. His activism had strong ripples across the anti-abortion movement. Conservative Catholic activists like Jack O’Brien and Michael McMonagle began to stage their own sit-ins. Anti-abortionists saw the ideological power of O’Keefe’s insistence that direct actions at clinics were not merely symbolic but literal acts of rescue.
As the 1970s progressed, Protestant evangelicals – many of whom had previously been reluctant to be militantly active on what was traditionally seen as a “Catholic issue” – became more heavily involved in anti-abortion politics. This was thanks in part to a documentary series by the evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer and his son Frank, which drew in audiences of thousands at evangelical churches. The series was based on the former’s 1976 book How Should We Then Live: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture and featured a call to action against legalised abortion.
With the movement’s growth, O’Keefe’s emphasis on suffering gave way to a language of wrath and judgement that better resonated with evangelical sensibilities. As James Risen and Judy L. Thomas put it in their 1998 book Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War, one of the “great ironies in O’Keefe’s life…was that his efforts to attract Catholic peace activists to his cause led instead to the creation of the first conservative civil disobedience movement in modern American history, a movement that mobilized Protestant fundamentalists for political action for the first time in more than fifty years”. (p. 68)
Another irony was how violent terrorism came to characterise what O’Keefe conceived as a nonviolent movement. Unfortunately, O’Keefe’s own standpoint against violence was compromised at key moments. In 1982, members of the Christian terrorist group Army of God (AOG) kidnapped abortion doctor Hector Zevallos in Edwardsville, Illinois.
In a letter to Joseph Scheidler, a fellow pioneer of anti-abortionist direct action, O’Keefe wrote that, whilst he had significant disagreements with AOG leader Jon Anderson and still believed that “non-violence is an urgent necessity”, “kidnapping can be consistent with – even mandated by – some theories of nonviolence”. O’Keefe went on to say that Anderson’s response “was courageous, and in a bloody war courage is a higher value than ideological purity”. Hours after an abortion clinic bombing in Wheaton, Maryland in 1984, he told the Washington Post that, whilst it was not “prudent”, the bombing was “just” because “[h]uman life is far more valuable than property”.
This is not to deny the numerous differences between O’Keefe’s early anti-abortion protest groups and later, violent organisations like AOG. I also do not doubt the regret O’Keefe expressed over the eventual direction of the movement he spearheaded.
Nevertheless, the left should see the story of O’Keefe and his movement as a stark warning against compromising secular principles of political organising and the Marxist critique of religion as ideology. It is easy to assume that, as long as the religious left is currently fighting for (more or less) the same things as us, their worldview will never lead them into serious conflict with the secular left’s objectives.
O’Keefe believed wholeheartedly that he was saving souls – and that is precisely what prevented him from seeing abortion’s centrality to women’s liberation.