Stephen Monacelli
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
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Sanger coined the term birth control in 1915, and just before World War I, launched a movement that promoted contraception as sexual and political reform aimed to reduce human misery.
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She had to flee the country in 1914 because her publication, The Woman Rebel, intentionally defied the Comstock Law and promoted the distribution of information about contraception through the United States Postal Service. When she returned to this country, she was an international celebrity for women's rights and free speech.
Behind the Bastards
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And she opened a family planning clinic, which faced continual police harassment. Lack of access to birth control, Sanger complained, led to abortion, as she has said in a 1957 interview with reporter Mike Wallace on CBS News.
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It may surprise many today that the woman who founded the American Birth Control League, which later evolved into Planned Parenthood of America, actually opposed abortion and advocated easing access to birth control as a means of making it vanish. Meanwhile, around the time of Sanger's interview with Mike Wallace, Texas doctors became friendlier to abortion rights.
Behind the Bastards
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The Texas legislature even considered loosening abortion restrictions in its 1967 and 1968 sessions, although neither effort was successful in spite of support from conservative state Senator George Parkhouse and a growing number of churches and physicians. In the end, activists carried the day.
Behind the Bastards
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Two Texas lawyers, Linda Coffey and Sarah Weddington, took up the cause of Norma McCovey, who had sought an abortion in Dallas. Almost a century earlier, Texas doctors had argued whether to allow an abortion for unmarried upper-class women so they could contribute to the gene pool by bearing children with comparably privileged men. Those Victorian doctors did not have someone like McCovey in mind.
Behind the Bastards
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Before his name would forever be linked with the history of American abortion law, by the time of Norma McCovey's suit, Henry Wade enjoyed a reputation as one of the most successful district attorneys in the country. His reputation in Dallas was built on ruthlessness, racism, and the advantages a brutally unfair criminal justice system in Texas gave him. Wade would claim a 90% conviction rate.
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But in many of those cases, he faced off against poor defendants that were bullied, lied to, and coerced into confessions by Dallas police officers. In one infamous murder case, Tommy Lee Walker, an African-American man with several alibi witnesses, was threatened with a beating if he didn't sign a confession.
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He was misled about the consequences of signing an admission of guilt and later died in the electric chair in 1956.
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During his time as district attorney, Wade directed police to raid gay bars and vigorously prosecuted violators of the state's sodomy laws that banned oral and anal sex, including a straight couple arrested in Dallas in 1961.
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While Wade may have racked up wins against badly outmatched targets, before Roe, he bungled his most famous case, a murder covered by Dallas radio reporter Gary Dillon of KLIF-AM.
Behind the Bastards
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The Wade team apparently did similarly sloppy work in the Roe v. Wade case. In abortion cases, Wade's office had generally prosecuted amateur abortion providers who had killed or badly injured their clients, and the Dallas DA's office and the city police had not focused on enforcement of abortion laws on the books.
Behind the Bastards
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Legal experts would later characterize the Dallas DA's office filings and the Roe case as perfunctory, especially compared to the exhaustive constitutional research done by Weddington and Coffey. Texas Assistant General Jay Floyd won no allies on the Supreme Court when he opened his argument with comments considered sexist and condescending even by the standards of 1973.
Behind the Bastards
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When the Supreme Court rendered its verdict, Wade reportedly never bothered to read it,
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Stay with us through this ad break to learn more. It took a while for the country, and particularly Texans, to absorb the news about the Roe decision. The Supreme Court ruling was announced on the same day as another big news story that, over the next few days, absorbed attention south of the Red River.
Behind the Bastards
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Cronkite was on the air when the press secretary of a former giant of Texas politics called the newsman to tell him a former president had died.
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Opposition to the legalization of abortion quickly formed and would build to homicidal intensity over the decades. In 1970, three years before the Roe decision, when abortion was still illegal in Texas, Michael Schwartz, a student at the conservative private university of Dallas in the suburb of Irving, staged what might have been the first anti-abortion protest in American history.
Behind the Bastards
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He held a sit-in at the Planned Parenthood headquarters not far from downtown Dallas because the organization provided assistance to pregnant women planning on traveling to states where abortion was already legal, not unlike situations that Texans face today.
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Strangely enough, the backlash to abortion rights included Norma McCovey. One day, Flip Benham, a leader of the extremist anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, approached her while she was autographing copies of a book she had authored called I Am Roe.
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They became friends, and she later claimed that she changed her mind about abortion when she saw photos of fetuses at different stages of pregnancy. After being baptized in a swimming pool by evangelicals in 1995, an event filmed and widely disseminated in the anti-abortion movement, McCovey became a popular fixture at anti-abortion protests.
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At first, McCovey embraced evangelical Protestantism, and by 1998, she converted to Catholicism. But towards the end of her life, while being interviewed for a 2020 documentary called AKA Jane Roe, McCovey confessed that her religious conversion had been a scam and that she had been financially benefiting from her transition into a star of the evangelical anti-abortion circuit.
Behind the Bastards
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In recent years, Abbott has led the charge to erase many of the gains women have won in the fight to control their bodies.
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Under Abbott, Texas has passed some of the most intrusive and extreme anti-abortion laws that tightly regulate women's bodies. In 2021, Texas passed Senate Bill 8, which banned abortions after the six weeks of pregnancy. It made performing an abortion a first or second degree felony unless the mother's life is in danger or there is risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.
Behind the Bastards
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The vagueness of that latter provision has terrified Texas doctors into not providing care to several women who have shown up in emergency rooms at death's door. Texas physicians have become less willing to perform emergency abortions than they were in the days before the Roe decision, even as far back as the 19th century.
Behind the Bastards
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In 2021, Jocely Barnica, a mother of one, was joyful when she realized she was pregnant. She hoped to deliver a sibling for her daughter, but on September 21st, 17 weeks into her pregnancy, she was miscarrying with the fetus pressing against her cervix and about to exit the womb.
Behind the Bastards
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Barnica's life was in danger, but doctors at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest told her and her husband that because of Texas's law, they could do nothing until the fetus's heartbeat had stopped. Fearing criminal charges, doctors refused to medically accelerate the delivery of the dying fetus and let 40 hours pass.
Behind the Bastards
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Varnika writhed in agony, begged to be allowed to see her daughter, and a fatal bacterial infection ravaged her body. She would die three days later, leaving her young child without a mother.
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Barneka and Crane's stories were revealed by the investigative news outlet ProPublica just days before the 2024 presidential election. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris made abortion rights a central part of her doomed campaign.
Behind the Bastards
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And I'm Stephen Monticelli, an investigative reporter and columnist in Texas who covers extremism and far-right movements as well as dark money and other fun things.
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When an anticipated red wave expected to bring a Republican majority in the 2022 congressional elections fizzled, and a number of abortion rights initiatives passed, even in traditional Republican strongholds like Kansas and Ohio, many pundits believed that a Dobbs effect had heralded a permanent political realignment, or at least the upcoming presidential election results.
Behind the Bastards
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This phenomenon clearly failed to materialize for Harris. Abortion rights referenda passed in seven states, including Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and New York in November 2024. But they foundered in Nebraska and South Dakota, as well as Florida, because the support of 57% of voters fell short of the required 60% supermajority.
Behind the Bastards
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In Texas, Trump, once a pro-choice person but now the proud instigator of the Dobbs decision, carried 56% of the vote. One of the most prominent Trump supporters, University of Texas Ph.D.
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Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, might soon be in a position to see his dreams of a national ban on the so-called abortion pill Mifepristone and even the reversal of the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court decision. that overturned state laws banning control pills and devices.
Behind the Bastards
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Texas government has become big enough to regulate women's bodies and small enough to fit inside of its citizens' bedrooms.
Behind the Bastards
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Even though abortion rights have always enjoyed far greater support than Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has suggested, the right of women to control their own bodies and get the vital medical care they need to prevent bodily harm or their premature deaths seems on the precipice of vanishing.
Behind the Bastards
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This grim reality is not deeply rooted in America's history or traditions, but unfortunately, it is the current status quo. And Texas has played a major role in bringing us to this place. I'm Stephen Monacelli.
Behind the Bastards
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Samuel Alito says that a right to abortion services is not, quote, deeply rooted in this nation's history. Whatever one might think about Alito as a jurist, he fails as an historian. In fact, for much of American history, abortion was quite accepted.
Behind the Bastards
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When men first formed the American Medical Association in the 1840s, they had to wage a campaign against abortion in part to eliminate competition for patients from midwives, who were the primary provider of such services. The 19th century anti-abortion laws focused on the health and safety of women primarily, and not the life of the fetus, as the modern laws tend to do.
Behind the Bastards
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And the anti-abortion campaign at the time itself had to do not just with limiting women's autonomy, but also with racism and anxiety over immigration.
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The often dour Puritans who established the British colony of Massachusetts in the 1620s may have created an oppressive theocracy, but they proved surprisingly indifferent when it came to women's decisions when and if to have children. Based on British common law, the colonies in New England allowed abortion up to the quickening, which is when women can first feel fetal movement.
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In that era, it was the first clear sign of impregnation. This moment varies widely for women, but it generally happens during the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy.
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Before the 1840s, such actions provoked little or no controversy. Even the Catholic Church adhered to the quickening standard until after the American Civil War. By the 1840s, abortion had become so deeply rooted in American history and culture that abortionists advertised their services, albeit in euphemistic but widely understood terms.
Behind the Bastards
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These advertisements were carried in popular newspapers such as the New York Sun and the Boston Daily Times. Abortionists told patients they could provide, quote, French cures for what was referred to as, quote, menstrual blockage.
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The drive against abortion wasn't all that it seemed. Abortion opponents were worried that the wrong women, or in other words, white wealthy women, were choosing to limit how many children they had. The fertility rate for white women fell by almost 55% between 1850 and 1930.
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Horatio Storer, the leading anti-abortion crusader at the time, railed against non-infantomania among upper-class white women, a trend that the sociologist Edward A. Ross would call, quote, race suicide. President Theodore Roosevelt later argued that white women had a patriotic duty to bear at least four children.
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If biologically fit Anglo-Saxons, quote, have only one child or no child at all, while the Irish, Italians, and Jews have, quote, eight or nine or ten, Theodore Roosevelt warned, it is simply a question of the multiplication table, he wrote. The future of American civilization, Roosevelt believed, depended on reproductive math.
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White women could not be allowed to become voluntary non-combatants in a racial demographic war.
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Daniel could be surprisingly supportive of abortion rights under limited circumstances, however, if it ensured that well-off white women had long and fruitful careers as mothers.
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Daniel wrote approvingly of how electric currents might be used to end ectopic pregnancies, cases in which fertilized eggs attach to the fallopian tubes or elsewhere outside the uterus, which can be dangerous and can kill or leave a woman infertile. Both outcomes undesirable for a eugenicist like Daniel, who cared for fit white patients.
Behind the Bastards
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Because of sexual double standards, several of these Texas doctors argued that such women would no longer be considered a socially acceptable mate by a high-status man, and thus should be denied the chance to become an, quote, ornament and useful member of society.
Behind the Bastards
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Regardless of Texas's abortion law, a surprising number of doctors in the state performed abortions not only to save women's lives, but to save their reputations and to relieve them of the financial and physical hardships of unwanted pregnancies.
Behind the Bastards
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Texas law at the time had not eliminated abortion, but instead had driven the practice underground. Because of this, doctors received little or no training in how to perform such procedures. That proved fatal for Maddie Wheat. Dr. Jenkins performed the abortion in the home of a woman identified by the local press only as Mrs. Smith. And he made a mistake.
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She got increasingly and dangerously ill, and then after 10 days of this ordeal, Jenkins rushed Wheat into Waco's city hospital. He claimed she was suffering a severe attack of dysentery. She then died, and an autopsy revealed a bowel perforation, which had been left during the botched abortion. Law enforcement arrested Jenkins on November 1st for the operation, charging him with murder.
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While the court was in session, Hugh Wheat, the brother of the deceased woman, stood, aimed a gun at Dr. Jenkins, and pulled the trigger. A bullet fatally struck the physician, just underneath the ribs. As the assassin fled, Jenkins' brother-in-law, John Halligan, shot back but missed. That a murder trial ended in another homicide is not surprising in a place as violent as 19th century Texas.
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But because of the modern image of Texas as reliably and even harshly anti-abortion, it might be startling that the public 125 years ago actually sympathized with a doctor who faced prison after his patient died as a result of an incompetently performed abortion.
Behind the Bastards
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Social reformers noted that burying multiple children often shorted women's lives and drove their families into poverty, and they battled for women to gain control over their reproductive choices. One such reformer was Margaret Sanger of New York, the daughter of a radical Irish father and mother who died at 50 after burying 11 children.