Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars

by Cynthia Gorney

Overview

Nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Articles of Faith is a powerful exploration of one of the most divisive issues in our recent political history, and the only book to portray the passion of both sides of the abortion conflict.
Drawing from more than five hundred interviews as well as previously unseen archival material, Cynthia Gorney has written a compelling narrative that explores the years between Roe v. Wade (1973) and William L. Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), the first case to challenge the Roe decision before an anti-Roe court.
Meet Judith Widdicombe, the registered nurse who runs the abortion underground in 1960s St. Louis and then the first legal clinic after Roe v. Wade. And meet Samuel Lee, a young pacifist and would-be seminarian whose provocative abortion bill becomes the centerpiece of William L. Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. The Supreme Court case brings the two advocates head-to-head.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780684867472
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	01/05/2000
Pages:	576
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Cynthia Gorney was a reporter for The Washington Post from 1975 to 1991 and was its South American Bureau Chief from 1980 to 1982. She is Associate Professor of Journalism at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.

Read an Excerpt

From Chapter One

What happened in Sedalia was not a thing that Robert Duemler talked about: not the place, or the smell, or the low sick feeling that came to his stomach when he thought about it afterward. Doctors see things they wish they had not seen, he understood that about being a doctor, and Robert Duemler was a quiet man who delivered babies for a living at a big Catholic hospital where they were cordial to him even though he belonged to the United Church of Christ. The hospital was outside St. Louis, which people liked to call a Catholic city, as though the great domed cathedral somehow spanned the length and breadth of the city limits, and when Duemler was at work there were nurses in nuns' habits who bustled briskly down the corridors and nodded to him in their deferential nurses' way: Good morning, doctor.

Among the obstetrical nurses in this hospital was a big smart opinionated woman named Judith Widdicombe, and sometimes after deliveries Duemler and Widdicombe would lean against a wall in their scrubs and watch the commotion around them and talk. Duemler was in his thirties then, but he was older than she was, and it amused him to see Judy Widdicombe irritate the senior physicians by pointing out when and where she thought they had bungled their work. She was not deferential. She had no concept of deference. She thought some of the older nurses had used themselves up and should be let go, and she thought the hospital cheated its nurses by forcing them to take unpaid after-shift time to prepare the next crew, and she would say these things in a resonant contralto that carried through the halls of the hospital. There was some undiplomatic clarity of vision to Judy Widdicombe that Duemler admired, as though she didn't care what she clipped as she swung the machete before her, and he thought she saw as he did the full and splendid sweep of obstetrical practice: they might be attending the birth of a patient's sixth or seventh child and know, without exactly saying it to each other, that sometimes this felt like bringing forth the miracle of life and sometimes it just felt like handing a small squalling package to a tired woman who was not visibly interested in receiving it.

Judy Widdicombe would say casually to Duemler, not looking at him: "I bet she doesn't really want that kid."

Maybe not, Duemler would say. And they would talk about something else. But he understood that Widdicombe, who was not a nun, and who apparently was not a Roman Catholic either, was signaling him. There was a code at work, and Duemler was not sure what it was, but he knew that he was in on it somehow, and that it had to do with ideas that might be dangerous even for the undiplomatic to discuss in a public place.

After a while, when no one else was listening, he told her what had happened in Sedalia.

He was in the Air Force, a young Air Force doctor, and in 1962 he was dispatched to central Missouri to serve on the base at Sedalia. He was the first obstetrician the base had ever had, and every morning he would get up in his military housing and go over to the little Air Force hospital to examine patients. Sometimes they would call him in the middle of the night and he would switch on the light and fumble into his trousers and go out the door in the unsteady gait of a man working hard to mimic alertness. That was when this call came, in the middle of the night, and when Duemler walked into the emergency room what he saw, in more places than he would have thought possible, was blood. There was blood on the walls. There was blood on the floor. There was blood on the gurney and on the towels and on the hands and arms of the emergency crew, who were silent now, and no longer moving rapidly. Beneath them lay a woman whose skin had gone pallid and slack, and when Duemler lifted her legs into the stirrups and cleaned some of the blood away, he saw that someone had pushed inside her vagina with a sharp instrument and aimed it toward the cervix and thrust straight up. The blood vessels to either side of the cervix had emptied all over the Air Force emergency room and the car in which this woman's husband had driven her twenty miles, which was the distance between the hospital and the abortionist.

The husband told Duemler they had five children already.

Five children already: Duemler remembered that for a long time afterward, when he was no longer able to summon up the husband's height or the color of his hair or anything except the flat bewildered look on his face as his wife was pronounced dead on the examining table. Expired was what Duemler wrote, in his precise physician's notation; nobody ever told him why they could not have six children or what kind of person she might have been when she was alive in the house with the five they had. He had learned in medical school that you pull down the shade when you have to, that you cannot climb into the life of every patient and still show up for work in the morning; but after it was over he would think about Sedalia and the words stupid, stupid would press up inside him. It was a stupid death. When he was a resident, two years before the Air Force, an older doctor had asked him to assist at a dilation and curettage, and Duemler had stood there and handed over the cervical dilators while the older doctor cleaned out a woman's uterus under general anesthesia in the sterile operating room of a fine St. Louis hospital. The older doctor told him that the patient was a nice young woman whose boyfriend had come from a family of high social standing and that they had all invented a plausible diagnosis requiring termination of pregnancy to save her life. Duemler understood that his job was to hold the dilators and shut up, but when he thought about Sedalia he always thought about this other woman also, the one with the fancy boyfriend.

So he told Judy Widdicombe that story, too.

Then she knew she had been right about Bob Duemler, and she came to him one day and said: Listen. There is a group of us, and we are doing something illegal. We need your help.

Copyright © 1998 by Cynthia Gorney

Table of Contents

Contents

PART ONE: THE PHONE ON THE PORCH

1 Codes

2 The Wedge

3 Heaven and Earth

4 The Writing in the Heart

5 Exhibit A

6 The Ruling

7 The Target

PART TWO: A HOUSE AFIRE

8 The Education of the Pharisee

9 A Lesser of Evils

10 A House Afire

PART THREE: THE SEVENTH QUESTION

11 The Litmus Test

12 The Count

13 The Seventh Question

14 Zealots

Epilogue

Sources

Notes

Index

What People are Saying About This

David Remnick

"Cynthia Gorney's remarkable history of the abortion debate in America is not the first book to take Anthony Luka's Common Ground as its model, but it is the rare book that realy earns the comparison. With her remarkable skills as a reporter and as a storyteller, she has written a book that is all the more profound for providing us with vivid, complicated human beings rather than familiar rhetoric. It's been a long time since Roe v. Wade and the libraries are filled with books on the subject. Articles of Faith is the most vivid of all, an essential book." -- author of Lenin's Tomb

Margaret O'Brien Steinfels

"The fierce passions in the struggle over abortion have penetrated every institution in American society -- including the media. That makes Cynthia Gorney's fair-minded report remarkable on two counts. First, she does exactlly what we expect good jounalists should do -- report the facts adn tell the story as it happened. Second, her focus on two advocates, Judity Widdicombe and Samuel Lee, displays an empathy so rare in this debate that we grasp not only their competing moral and political arguments, but the religious beliefs and social experiences that move each to give their lives for over two decades to the opposing camps in the abortion wars." -- Editor, Commonweal

David Halberstam

"This is contemporary history at its very best. A gifted reporter has taken one of the most emotional and divisive of today's issues, abortion, and, with what seems to me scrupulous fairness and very considerable literary skill, has traced its path to the very top of today's conflicted social and politicl agenda."

Eugene Kennedy

"Cynthia Gorney's Articles of Faith is an extraordinary accomplishment. The narrative Ms. Gorney lays out compels your attention even if you feel you know everything or are reluctant to read more about this conflict of views. Comparable to Norman Mailer's re-creation of Gary Gilmore and his world in The Executioner's Son, this is a book that makes our times come alive and issues come clear through the stories of people we have met previously only as blurred figures on the evening news or vauge partisan fighters behind the headlines. This book is a model of how events can be reported and causes humanized by a master of the craft." -- Author of My Brother Joseph: The Spirit of a Cardinal and the Story of a Friendship

Peggy Orenstein

"What Common Ground was to school desegration, Articles of Faith is to the battle of abortion. This is a breathtaking piece of journalism: Gorney's reporting is dazzling, her writing elegant, her perspective remarkably fair. Her story, spanning the two decades since abortion laws began changing, is an absolute must-read -- regardless of which side you're on -- if you want to understand one of the most explosive debates of our time." -- Author of Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap

Editorial Reviews

Wendy Kaminer The Boston Globe Cynthia Gorney has written a gripping, comprehensive history of the abortion war that ought to become a classic.

Elizabeth Mehren Los Angeles Times Stunning....Gorney is an exquisite storyteller...[she] makes us care more about the characters than their ideological inclinations. [You'll] find yourself rooting for someone whose position on abortion you'd ordinarily find abhorrent.

Cynthia Leive Newsday A startling empathy for both sides....Vivid detail and grand scope.

Tessa DeCarlo San Francisco Chronicle Gripping narrative...jammed with provocative anecdotes and surprising insights....This beautifully written book uncovers the untidy realities and self-contradictory beliefs and fears lying beneath the rhetoric of absolute right and wrong.

Susan Lydon San Jose Mercury News An amply rewarding journey....Presents both sides of a complex issue and brings it alive through character, detail, context, and a narrative so compellingly written that at times it reads like a novel.

Paul Galloway Chicago Tribune An enthralling, skillfully balanced narrative about this important and complicated national debate.

David J. Garrow The New York Times Articles of Faith illuminates the two distinct faces of the post-Roe drive against abortion, those of protestors and those of legislators. Gorney's portrait of Sam Lee is impressive.

Samuel G. Freedman Newsday In Cynthia Gorney, this subject has at last found its ideal chronicler....Best nonfiction book of 1998. More than that, it is a book that deserves to last for its evenhanded and immensely readable quality....Gorney's reporting, while balanced, is anything but blandly "objective." She brings equal passion, vigor, and empathy to each character, making their battle of principles rage in a reader's brain.

Beryl Lieff Benderly The Washington Post Book World Gorney can write with great power.

Micheal J. Ybarra Los Angles Times The book abounds in poignant detail.

From the Publisher

America's struggle over legalized abortion, which will be both celebrated and mourned in January on the 25th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, has forced the legal system and each individual to explore new definitions of medicine, law and morality in a search for answers to one of the most vexing questions of our time. Former Washington Post reporter Gorney has made a remarkable contribution to our understanding of this complex debate in her compelling and evenhanded history, an objective view of the events that have absorbed such enormous energy as each side has fought for what it sees as the only defensible position. Focusing on what turned out to be a pivotal state battle in Missouri, where the Roe decision's most serious threat came from the 1989 challenge, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, Gorney tells with great compassion and sensitivity the stories of individuals on both sides whose passions fueled the political machine. These driven women and men, many without political or legal experience, learned to write bills and appeal decisions, to establish services and defend their clinics, and to lobby and organize in an enormous grassroots effort to see justice done. Critical for a subject this divisive, Gorney does not demand that the reader take a position, but explains the motivations for each side's actions, for their shifting strategies and similarly divisive internal struggles as the debate has raged on with increased intensity and heightened political stakes. The result is an important and engaging work that should help further the conversation in constructive ways for both sides. (Feb.) . (Univ. of California, $45 301p ISBN 0-520-20256-2; $16.95 paper -20952-4)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Gorney's journalistic training comes through in this anecdotal account of the "abortion wars" from pre-Row v. Wade until the 1990s. Gorney, formerly a reporter for the Washington Post, looks at the issue of abortion from the perspectives of medical ethics, religion, legislation, and personal experiences. The narration focuses on the state of Missouri and relates the case study to the events of the time. Gorney traces the legal and political battles in public policy and court decisions on abortion at both the state and federal levels. Her strengths lie in an attention to legal reforms and court decisions, particularly of the Supreme Court. Publication of this book coincides with the 25th anniversary of Roe and offers an opportunity for reflection on the state of debate on abortion issues. The possibilities for clarifying the debate are limited, however, by the length and convoluted format. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/97.]Tricia Gray, Miami Univ.

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