Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Joshua Prager is an award-winning journalist, former senior writer for the Wall Street Journal. He served as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright distinguished chair at Hebrew University. He’s the author of several books, including The Echoing Green, which won the Washington Post Best Book of the Year. His most recent work, The Family Roe, tells the story behind the 1973 Supreme Court case, Roe v. Wade. And that is the topic of our conversation today.
Joshua Prager, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Joshua Prager:
Thank you for having me, Dr. Mohler.
Albert Mohler:
There are a few subjects about which more has been written in American life than abortion. And yet you’ve taken on a more than 600 page work, which I want to say is I think that from now on indispensable, but understanding Roe V. Wade, Norma McCorvey, and how the story came together. How did you get onto this story? Why this book? Why you?
Joshua Prager:
Well, first of all, thank you for the kind words. I was not a person who would’ve been pegged to write this book. What I mean by that is I knew little about Roe V. Wade. I hadn’t given it much thought. But as a feature writer and an investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal, I’d written several times about people whose lives were connected to history and people whose lives centered on secrets. To give just one example, there was only one anonymous winner in the history of the Pulitzer Prizes, a person who took a photograph of an execution. And that picture was an indictment of the Islamic revolution. I went to Iran and I found that man.
So I was interested in secrets and it suddenly occurred to me when I read an article that Norma McCorvey, Jane Roe, though, her case had brought about the legalization of abortion, it had been decided too late for her to get the abortion. And so somewhere, there was a baby whose conception had led to Roe V. Wade, that baby was now a grown woman. I wanted to find that person. And I came to see that the pro-life referred to her or him, they didn’t know who they were as the Roe baby. And it was that realization that led me into the book. And it very quickly spread from finding that one person to writing about Norma and then Roe and the whole of abortion in America.
Albert Mohler:
I met Norma. I would not say that I knew her, but I met her more than once. And yet I knew very well, many of the people who are actually in your book. And so there’s a sense in which I have a personal connection at many points. But I also come to this book with moral pre-commitments. I’m a very clear, and I hope, consistent advocate against abortion rights and for the sanctity of life of the unborn. But the story is of such importance and your analysis of the story is so comprehensive. It really adds to our knowledge of how not only abortion became legalized through the Roe V. Wade decision in 1973, but how major currents in American life came together in a way that really can only be understood in retrospect.
Joshua Prager:
Absolutely. I didn’t know, as I said, much of this history, and I just followed the story, as they say, in the old journalism cliche. And it was fascinating to me that Roe was not what it is today. Now it is really the tip of this like large ideological iceberg that divides this country into, if where someone stands on Roe, you’re generally going to know where they stand on a lot of other issues. And I traced back, I came to understand through Roe, and understanding Roe, through Norma, how we got to this point. It is wrong to think that it was the political issue that it is today.
In fact, pre-Roe, in 1967, it was Ronald Reagan as governor of California who signed into law the most liberal abortion law at the time. There were many women and girls who flew to California from 1967 on to get abortions. I mentioned that, because at the time, it had broad bipartisan support. But over years, and I go into the story, how that happened. Over years, things changed. Politicians flipped. Reagan, of course, Bush, on the other side, Reverend Jesse Jackson, Dick Gephardt, Al Gore, and on and on and on. And so just following this issue, I came to see really how America, in many ways, came to be the polarized country that it is today.
Albert Mohler:
This story just corresponds in so many ways with my own life, with the lifespan that I have known. I had nothing to do with Roe V. Wade or the immediate response to it. And that immediate response, by the way, on the part of any Southern Baptist is fascinating in and of itself. I was 13 years old when the decision was handed down. But in so many ways, my life has tracked with this. I know so many of the people in the story that you tell so comprehensively, not only in Baptist life, but in political life. I worked for Ronald Reagan as a 16 year old volunteer in 1976. And by that time, the abortion issue had caught fire. My own mother was a pro-life activist. I came home from school in the eighth grade and found pictures of evidence of abortion on the dining room table. So I understand how this story unfolded, but the backstory is as interesting as the front story.
Joshua Prager:
Yeah. The backstory is fascinating. I mean, just to say my approach here as someone who is not a legal scholar, is not a lawyer, was to humanize the issue, to look at abortion in America, not through politics, but people. And I started with Norma, of course, Jane Roe.
But then I surrounded her and her three children with three other people through whom I could look at abortion and how it had gone into every corner of American life. A doctor named Mildred Jefferson, who was the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, became one of the architects of the pro-life community. A man named Curtis Boyd, who was a doctor and started in Texas, started providing abortions pre-Roe in Texas and really came, not only is he today the largest provider of third trimester abortion in America, but the reason I focused on him is because he pre-figure the attitudinal shift in the pro-choice camp from being, they famously looked at it as President Clinton said, as something that ought to be safe, legal, and rare to something that is, as he said, a social and moral good. Why should it be rare? I wanted to look at that and how we got to this.
And then lastly, Linda Coffee, one of the two lawyers who represented Norma and really was totally overshadowed by her Co-Counsel Sarah Weddington because it was Weddington who argued the case in the court. But Coffee, I argue, who was a Baptist, a religious Baptist in Texas, and saw in the beginning when she brought this case in 1970, no issue there. I look at her as well as really the matriarch of this from a legal point of view. And again, as a person who was not a lawyer to examine the issue through these human beings, I was able to tell a story that I think is new and valuable.
Albert Mohler:
Well, it’s a story that’s certainly newly told and newly plowed. I mean, you’ve done an incredible job of investigative research here. But I just wanted to tell us, go back for a moment, Roe V. Wade was hardly inevitable in 1973.
Joshua Prager:
That’s right.
Albert Mohler:
And so a lot of pieces had to come together and one of them was a plaintiff. And you humanized Norma McCorvey. And frankly, you reveal a very great deal about which I think almost no one knew. But how did this happen? How do you get the intersection of Coffee, Weddington, Norma McCorvey? How does that happen?
Joshua Prager:
It’s really fascinating. Norma was a woman who grew up in a religious home. Her grandparents were Catholics, turned Pentecostals. Her parents were Jehovah’s witnesses. She renounces religion when she’s a teenager. She, at around that same time, she tells her mother that she’s gay. Her mother beats her for that. She’s sent off. Norma sent off to a school for delinquent children because she’s often in trouble. And she gets married when she’s 16 years old to a man. And by the time she’s pregnant for the third time in 1969, she has already relinquished her first two children to adoption. And she is unfit to be a mother and does not want to be a mother. At that point, she does not want to go through the ordeal again of giving birth to a child. She simply wants to abort it and she tries desperately to have an abortion.
Now, one of the things that was complicated writing about Norma was she lied endlessly. And I go into that. But so one of the lives she told, for example, was that she had gone to a clinic that had just been shuttered in a legal clinic, and there was blood on the floor. She said it reeked of death and on and on, everything was this rate hyperbole. The truth was something much more commonplace. She simply could not afford the $500 of cost to go to an illegal abortion provider in Texas and she could not afford to fly to California. She asks the man who had brokered her previous adoptions, a lawyer named Henry McCluskey, if he knew of anyway she could have an abortion. And McCluskey happened to have gone to college, to law school, excuse me, with Linda Coffee. And he says, hey, Linda Coffee is looking for a plaintiff so that she can challenge the abortion statutes here in Texas.
I’ll mention as an aside. What’s so interesting is I didn’t know till I started this book about the overlap between the fight for gay rights and the fight for women’s rights. So McCluskey was gay, Coffee was gay and Norma was gay. And that isn’t a coincidence as I explore in the book. Anyway, Linda Coffee then takes over the case of Norma’s case and introduces her to her Co-Counsel Sarah Weddington. And they then file the case on Norma’s behalf. One of the things that was really distressing to read, whether you are for or against Roe, it was remarkable how bold, how boldly the lawyers used her and had no intention really of helping her to have the abortion she sought, which was truly remarkable given that Norma was desperate for an abortion. And Sarah Weddington had actually, not only had an abortion, but had worked for an abortion referral network. And so it could have helped her, but they, of course, wanted a plaintiff.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Now one sub-story in all of this is the fact that, that’s not as rare an occurrence in public interest laws as described as we might like to think. Plaintiffs are often useful to a case. And very sadly that turned out to be the case, just in terms of the personal neglect of Norma McCorvey.
Joshua Prager:
Yeah. I quote someone from a liberal think tank, actually, in the book saying that, yes, the plaintiffs often end up sacrificial lamps for these cases. Again, no matter where you stand on the issue, it’s depressing to read of this story because Norma was uneducated, she wasn’t duped, she later lied and said that her lawyers got her drug. No, there was none of that. She knew what she was getting into, but they could have at least tried to help her have the abortion if she wanted it and they didn’t. And then the moment they filed the case, they let her go. And in fact, it was anger at Weddington above all that led to Norma becoming then a born again Christian and becoming pro-life. It is true that religion was something that was a genuine comfort to her, but it is also true, she said it over and over and over again, that she was furious that Sarah Weddington, she felt marginalized and exploited. And that I think explains above all, why she then left her.
Albert Mohler:
I want to get to the sub-story here, which includes the Southern Baptist Convention and prominent Baptist and one of whom I personally worked as a staff member and I’ll get to that. But I’ll just simply say your book was an extremely shocking revelation, and I can add actually some data points to your story that makes sense only in retrospect. But let me hold that for a moment. The other thing is that by the time you get to the mid 1970s, when I’m a teenager, you’ve got the pro-life and pro-abortion movement, and that’s just the language I’m going to use here. That if we’re going against abortion rights, they had clearly begun to create a massive political and moral cleavage in America, because either go back to 1960, of course, it’s not mentioned, and as a matter of fact, it’s not mentioned in a major party political platform until the 1970s.
Joshua Prager:
1976.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. And that’s so it’s after Roe V. Wade that it’s mentioned. But all this begins to explode and names like Sarah Weddington became very famous, Linda Coffee, not so much. She was in the background. She actually sought, as you detail, Sarah Weddington to take the case. I had no idea Sarah Weddington had, had an abortion ordered in America. But in terms of the morality of this tale, it’s really clear and you document that Sarah Weddington lied about Norma McCorvey.
Joshua Prager:
Yeah. That was one of the most interesting things that I found. So I mentioned how Coffee, and Weddington exploited Norma. What was interesting was how obviously uncomfortable Weddington, in particular, was with that fact. Weddington, it was hard for women when they were graduating law school back in those days to get a job with a firm. And the first job that she took was actually helping a former professor of hers draft the ethical standards of the American Bar Association. So this is a woman who knew better. And what’s very interesting is starting right around this time, 1976, I found three instances where she lied.
She says that the reason Norma did not have the abortion, the reason she carried her pregnancy was because she wanted to ensure that she would have legal standing in the eyes of the court. Now that is simply a lie. The reason Norma did not have an abortion is because, although she was desperate to have one, they did not point her in the direction to do so. And it is amazing that she lied and said this. But again, what I found also particularly interesting about it was that it clearly was a source of discomfort. She starts lying about it right after the Roe decision. And that was an appalling thing to find.
Albert Mohler:
Sarah Wedington had to make the oral arguments for Roe V. Wade before the Supreme Court twice.
Joshua Prager:
Yes. Because when the case was initially argued, two of the justices had recently retired. They were both ill and they thought that for such an important case, they wanted to have a full compliment of judges also to be justices, also to be perfectly honest. Part of the reason was that Justice Blackmun, Harry Blackmun, who wrote the opinion, his fellow justices were not pleased, were not impressed with the initial papers with his initial reasoning, his initial memos that he circulated when the case first came before the court in 1971. And so they wanted to have more time. And so that also explains why it was then re-argued.
Albert Mohler:
Now just looking at the case as it arrived at the Supreme Court. So we’ll just fast forward to the Supreme Court in 1971, 72, 73. And the case was handed down in January, 1973 had been re-argued the previous year, initially argued in 71. It was not inevitable that it would be a seven, two decision in favor of a newly constructed abortion right. It was not inevitable that Harry Blackmun, would write the majority opinion. You tell the story, it is one of the most important parts of your book. How exactly did that happen?
Joshua Prager:
Well, Justice Berger, and Blackmun were called the Minnesota twins. They were both in Minnesota. They knew each other when they were young. There was speculation that the reason Justice Berger actually gave the opinion to Justice Blackmun, who was the second most junior justice on the court for such an important case, was that he would be able to influence his writing a bit. Other people feel that no, it was because Justice Blackmun had, had experience as the Council for the Mayo Clinic. So he’d had dealings with the medical community and he actually felt strongly about a woman’s right to choose. He felt that. He talked about this to various people. And what was not known later on, one of the most important things I found or just discovered on my own was that in the beginning of the Roe opinion, Justice Blackmun writes a preamble, where he says that if you want to know where a person stands on abortion, it is often their personal experience that informs that conviction. He says, there are exposure to the raw edges of human existence.
He does not mention, however, that his own daughter had been unhappily pregnant a few years before in college. Similarly, one of his fellow justices, Justice Powell, also a Republican appointed justice, he had had an experience that had to do with abortion. He had been working at a law firm when one of the men who worked in the mail room came to him for help. He said that his girlfriend had wanted to have an abortion, that he had brought her, he said, to in a legal abortion provider and that she had then died. And he was now wanted on charges of manslaughter. This influenced Justice Powell as well. And one of the things that I focus on, of course, the pro-choice will point to those instances, they won’t point to the people who are influenced on the other side. And I look at both of those sides to give just examples.
Many of the leaders on the pro-life side, including people I write about in my book, including Randall Terry, for example, who was the head of operation rescue, Flip Benham, who was the Evangelical minister, who brought Norma over to that side of the issue, they had had personal experiences with abortion. Minister Benham had pleaded with his wife to have an abortion when she was pregnant. He was not yet a religious man. She refused, she had then given birth to twin boys, and those boys were the lights of his life. And I think it’s telling that when people have a personal connection to an issue, they then look at that issue just as Justice Blackmun had said they would through the prism of their own experience.
Albert Mohler:
I grew up with Harry Blackmun, basically. Let’s just say I understood him primarily before I understood anything else as the architect of Roe V. Wade. And intellectually, as I was coming of age and having to deal with how to interpret a text and the meaning of the constitution and what it meant for the United States to be a constitutional Republic. I’ll admit, I’ve had this fascination with Harry Blackmun, trying to figure out how in the world he could rationalize a decision like Roe V. Wade. You point out a part of the backstory and I’ve looked deeply into this over the years. His role at Mayo made him feel that, I mean, you can see this,~ I don’t think I’m just reading this on, made him feel like he had a certain expertise in writing about medical issues, but he also turned to Mayo and asked for basically advice and they knew what they were working on.
Joshua Prager:
Absolutely. He writes a letter. He says, “I’m going to come to your library. You can imagine why I asked.” Absolutely. He asked for information to help him basically write about abortion. One of the interesting things is if you read the ruling, again, I’m a guy, who’s not a lawyer, it’s incredibly easy reading. What I mean about that, it’s not like a deep, legal, complicated thing. He writes about the history of abortion in different societies. And it’s very short unconstitutional analysis. It has almost nothing. I think it’s just a few sentences. He does cite a few dozen cases where he intuits the right to abortion from the constitution. But again, it has almost no constitutional justification for abortion. And that, of course, is one of the reasons why even people on the left like Justice Ginsburg, who famously, of course, supported abortion rights and argued on their behalf, she criticized it and said that the right to abortion ought to not have been couched in a right to privacy, but in a right to equality.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. And that was basically the shift between the Roe V. Wade decision in 73 and the Casey decision in 1992-
Joshua Prager:
That’s right.
Albert Mohler:
When David Souter among others basically helped to redefine, Anthony Kennedy, very crucially and Sandra Day O’Connor helped to bring all that about.
Joshua Prager:
I’m sorry to interrupt. I’ll just say one of the things that was fascinating for me, it had been rumor for many years, that there was a memo that one of Justice Souter’s clerks had written that had swayed the justice and helped him to orchestrate this 11th hour change on the court. Because previous to that change, people were sure that the court was going to overturn Roe just as many are now. And I found that memo and it’s fascinating how exactly the law, as we know it today, in terms of abortion, the new undue burden standard of regulating abortion, all of that came from this one clerk’s memo.
Albert Mohler:
Let me make an admission, I’ve looked for that memo. I have not been able to find it. But my access to it is through your book. But it is interesting how that memo basically worked its way into the logic of the Casey decision. And at that point, I was very much involved in the issue. I was editor of the Christian Index in Atlanta. The Southern Baptist Convention was thoroughly pro-life and consistently pro-life in terms of its public statements and its expectations.
Joshua Prager:
What year are you speaking about?
Albert Mohler:
I’m speaking of Casey. So let’s just say 91, 92.
Joshua Prager:
Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
And so I knew there was great hope. I think we’re speaking with the Dobbs decision from Mississippi, not yet decided, but speculation about it. And I will simply say that I’m chastened by the sad experience of 92, from anticipating exactly what the court might do. I’m very hopeful for a reversal of Roe V. Wade. But in any event, the court, I think would not have taken the case, even in granting certiorari, unless it was going to do something. We’re about to find out what it’s going to do. But then there will be another backstory. But I want to take us to what we just talked about and you cover it with an unusual dimension of, I’ll just say, religion in this story.
And you basically pointed Linda Coffee, was, and so far as I know, is a member of Park Cities Baptist Church in Dallas. A church, was for decades, were perhaps the most establishment Baptist Church in the Metroplex of Dallas, right there in Park Cities, which is perhaps still synonymous with wealth and power in Dallas, right there on Northwest. And the Southern Baptist Convention sent a very uncertain sound. In anticipation of Roe, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution that was basically, certainly not consistently pro-life. And then after Roe, basically called for what can only be described as at least support for abortion in need, if not abortion on demand. I think today Southern Baptists will be absolutely shocked by that.
Joshua Prager:
Yeah. First, in terms of that, before we get to Coffee, it was fascinating to me. I did not know the history here. In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention resolves very, it’s not complicated language. Basically, it is a wholehearted support of a woman’s right to have an abortion. It doesn’t just say when her life or even her mental health is in danger. And then in 1976, I apologize, what is the name of Wayne the head of-
Albert Mohler:
Wayne Dehoney, yes.
Joshua Prager:
Yes. He also again, says that he feels that abortion poses no moral or ideological problem, I’m paraphrase for the Southern Baptist Convention. In 1980, there’s a big about phase. And of course, in the years, just previous to that, there is sort of an exodus, or well, there are a lot of evangelical Christians who are changing on this and basically the Southern Baptist Convention has to get with the program. I did not know any of that. And it made sense to me because, again, I started seeing, hey, 67, I mentioned Ronald Reagan’s law there. What happens is, in California, Mildred Jefferson, who I mentioned earlier, who takes over the National Right to Life Committee. She is really more than anyone. The first one, and she, by the way, is the one who brings over Ronald Reagan to the pro-life cause.
She, more than anyone, recognizes what she sees as like great political promise in politicizing abortion. She feels that there are religious Catholics, primarily at that point, who are Democrats, but who oppose abortion. And she feels that this ought to be paid attention to, and it is under her leadership that the National Right to Life Committee really politicizes abortion in 1976. The Republican National Committee, they then adopt a resolution saying that, we oppose Roe basically. Then the Democrats follow suits saying that they’re uneasy with any and it heads off from there. Linda Coffee is no longer a member of that church. But what was very interesting, she personally felt that she said, and I found a wonderful interview with her that was conducted days after Roe, by a newsletter put out by the Southern Baptist Convention, the Baptist press. And she feels that while she feels that a woman ought to have the right to choose, she personally, she says, could not do that.
And you can see that this is how she’s making peace with her work. And then as the years passed, not only does the Southern Baptist Convention, which as you know, was a very important part of her life, her grandfather was a deacon in that church. Her whole childhood was spent at that church with band practice and all these different things. First, they repudiate abortion and then homosexuality, and then also feminism, in so many words. And she really feels that she no longer has a place at that church. And so she is no longer could be called a religious Baptist. She now lives in Mineola in east Texas with her partner. Just as an aside, it’s fascinating. Here you have one of the heads, as I said, one of the mothers of Roe V. Wade, and yet she has been completely forgotten by the pro-choice movement. She lives in a house with no heat and lives on food stamps, which I find a remarkable thing.
Albert Mohler:
And you tell the story, it’s very complex as to why that is the case. And it’s just more of the human toll that is reflected in the story of Roe. I’ve got to get back to connect some dots here with you. What you write, so far as I know, you have really thoroughly covered a lot of the issues related to the SBC and Ronald Reagan in 1967 with Reagan. It is really interesting that the pro-abortion side or pro-abortion right side tends to speak of Reagan and an end of Richard Nixon as if they were merely politically expedient. I don’t believe that’s true at all.
Joshua Prager:
I agree with you. I’ll just say, I agree with you about President Reagan. The reason I agree with you is because after you see in these private letters that were never publicized that I found, private letters where Reagan is writing to Jefferson saying, “You have convinced me, you’ve changed my mind, and let me know how I can help you. Let me know what I can do.” Now, I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that he knew that there might be votes to one as for example, a few years before Patrick Buchanan is telling Richard Nixon and telling Nixon to about face on the issue. But I do believe that his rebirth was completely genuine.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. And look, I’m not about to argue for the truthfulness of Richard Nixon under almost any circumstance. But I will say that it is interesting when you go back, as you do with 600 pages including documentation, if you go back to something like Richard Nixon’s policy statement, the Executive Order related to whether people on military basis could get abortions or local hospitals. I mean, Nixon basically claims federalism as the cause. And very clearly, makes a pro-life convectional statement that was very unusual for a Republican at that time.
Joshua Prager:
Absolutely. But it also follows, it does not seem to come from some genuine, something suddenly occurred to him. It is laid out in bullet points by one of his advisors, Buchanan saying, hey, Mr. President, this will help your cause.
Albert Mohler:
Well, again, I am not about to take up the cause of Richard Nixon’s integrity. That is not my purpose. More so for Ronald Reagan, because even in the political context, yes, Reagan had the votes to gain among Republicans, but at the same time, the conventional wisdom was those were votes to lose at a greater magnitude in the general election. And when he wrote abortion in the conscience of a nation, again, I was a very young man in my 20s, but for those of us in the pro-life movement, it was an amazing statement of conviction by someone who had, at that point, politically more to lose than to gain by it.
Joshua Prager:
Well, I mean, just a few things to say about that. He didn’t write it. It was written by his advisor.
Albert Mohler:
I understand that, but he put his name on it. Yes.
Joshua Prager:
He absolutely attached his name to it. And he actually disappointed a lot of people in the pro-life movement at that time, because there was still, and this was led by Mildred Jefferson. There was still a great hope on their part, that there would be passed a human life amendment to the constitution, which would basically say that abortion is illegal from the point of conception. And that was soundly defeated politically and President Reagan then did not support that anymore. And so even Mildred Jefferson, who had brought him into the fold was very upset by that. I mentioned that because I do think even if his conviction was genuine, he nonetheless held his finger to the wins of politics. He knew which way those wins blow. What he then did was, he more than anyone at that point, decided the way to overturn Roe V. Wade is through the judiciary and that was his foresight. And a lot of people believe that he, to this day, was correct, which is a good way to bring up Dobbs. I’m just curious if I’m allowed to ask you a question.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely.
Joshua Prager:
What do you believe will be the outcome of Dobbs?
Albert Mohler:
Well, given the question the court is taken, I believe there’s no reason to believe that the court just having granted sir, takes four justices to take the case. And then you look at the composition of the court. I believe that the Mississippi law will be upheld. And in one sense, the logic of Roe will be reversed. Whether there is a frontal declaration that Roe is reversed, that’s a very different thing. And I think probably has more to do with the Chief Justice and how he lands on the issue and how he assigns it. That’s the way it looks to me at the moment. I don’t believe there’s much possibility at all, they will strike down the Mississippi law. Because otherwise, I don’t think they would’ve even granted the case.
Joshua Prager:
I agree with you. And I think we could tell from the arguments in Dobbs that the Chief Justice actually does not want that banner headline Roe overturned. He sort of was intimating that. But I think he’s going to lose. I think that they’re going to actually overturn Roe itself because the two justices who I was paying most close attention to, Justice Barrett and Justice Kavanaugh Justice Kavanaugh kept pointing to other instances when the court literally had overturned precedent and Justice Barrett kept pointing to adoption as a viable option for a woman who does not wish to become a mother.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I can simply say I’m with many others, hoping and praying that is the case just speaking from a pro-life perspective. I have to go back to the Baptist story here. So if you’ll allow me, let me connect some dots.
Joshua Prager:
Please.
Albert Mohler:
Texas is a big part of this. When the Southern Baptist Convention in 1971 adopts that resolution, it does so at the instigation largely of Texans, and also critically a Foy Valentine who was head of the Christian Life Commission. The SBC was far more run from inside a very tight leadership circle and Texas had an out-sized influence in that. Those Texans knew each other very well. There are connecting points, whether it’s Baylor or Southwestern Seminary at that time, or they were in a small world. And they were a part of a world in which abortion rights, at least to some degree, according to their own understanding was an extension of a kind of radical individualism by which they define being Baptist. Now, the winning argument in the Southern Baptist Convention was contrary to that. Thus, I sit here today. But I was taught by many of those people. So I know.
And I also know that like Sarah Weddington was held up as a hero or heroin, I should say. And others were very tightly connected. I was very much a part of the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention. And I will make the argument to my dying day that even though the inerrancy of scripture was that the front and most important theological issue, abortion was the moral issue that coalesced an understanding in the SBC that there had to be a leadership change. In other words, it wasn’t that Southern Baptist changed their mind, it was a different Southern Baptist were in the room. And so I’m not saying you were wrong. I’m just saying that Southern Baptist by and large did not change their mind, that they changed who was in the room making the decisions.
Joshua Prager:
Well, you obviously know this far better than I, what all I could do was I think what happens nowadays, we tend to see things the way they are now and think they were always that way. And I wanted to just at least track how the official statements of the convention changed.
Albert Mohler:
It’s important.
Joshua Prager:
What fascinating to me, I’ll tell you was, I didn’t know that and I also didn’t know the history of Catholicism on abortion. We tend to think also there was a blanket denunciation from day one. No, it was only in 1917, that that position was codified for 700 years for all. But three of the previous 700 years, basically a woman would only be excommunicated if she’d had abortion post quickening. And what was also interesting to me is looking, where did that idea come from? And part of that comes from a mistranslation of the single verse in the Old Testament, that in any way, addresses abortion. Where it says that if two men are wrestling or fighting and they bang into a woman and cause her to miscarry, then if the fetus dies, they must pay a fine, but if the woman dies, they must pay with their lives. So clearly, the Bible is differentiating between the loss of life of a fetus and of the mother.
But in the Septuagint, the original Greek translation of that verse, they don’t say that the differentiation is between the mother and the fetus. They say rather it is between a fetus formed and unformed. Now, I happen to be a traditional Jew who speaks good Hebrew and knows the Bible well, and that translation is wrong. That was fascinating to me too. Looking back at the history, see how we get here, it doesn’t all just come from on high, there are human errors, human decisions that led us to where we are today.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and even just the history of Christianity, very early in the teaching of the early church, you have a document know as the Didache in the very earliest period of the church, in which it’s very clear as a condemnation, a direct condemnation of abortion, per se. But the question has been transformed by several things. And we take for granted modern medicine and our knowledge of gestation and reproductive issues that, frankly, were not known and were not even determinable throughout most of human history.
Joshua Prager:
Absolutely. That was fascinating to just see, I think it was, I don’t want to get it wrong, but Aristotle thought that a male fetus doesn’t achieve, I don’t remember what the word is, not sentience, but personhood until 40 days, whereas the female it’s 80 days, just things that are completely off.
Albert Mohler:
Right. And certainly, they knew of the basics of human reproduction and they understood that even without ever having until the invention of the microscope seen a sperm cell, they knew that the mail was contributing seed. I mean, that’s a good word translated from the Hebrew. And yet the general assumption to most educated was that it was a very small, but fully formed human being.
Joshua Prager:
Yeah. They are homunculus. Right?
Albert Mohler:
Right.
I got to go back to something else. I served on Wayne Dehoney’s staff.
Joshua Prager:
Interesting.
Albert Mohler:
Okay. So you blow a hole in the hole of my vessel with that, just in terms like a torpedo, but it also helps to connect some dots. Let me just tell you, I came to Louisville in 1980 as a student. And because my boyhood pastor and Wayne Dehoney were good friends, Wayne Dehoney hired me on his staff as a seminary student. So I was at one point minister to college students at Walnut Street Baptist Church. And so this would be 1980 and then minister to students at one point. And here’s the amazing thing, there was a huge controversy over Wayne Dehoney. His name’s on a center for the research in the local church here at the institution I lead. I knew Dr. Dehoney very well over a course of decades.
There was a controversy when I arrived that had come when the Walnut Street Baptist Church, and he’s a former President of the SBC, very major SBC figure. He led the church to buy a large and abandoned hospital. And in the hospital was an abortion clinic. And it raised a massive controversy within Walnut Street Baptist Church. And when I was there, I was told just on the staff, don’t worry, the church’s pro-life, it was by accident and without knowledge that the church basically became a landlord to an abortion clinic. And it turned out later, that was not true. But I had no idea, frankly, of some of what you record here in the book. I’m looking at page 165 about Wayne Dehoney. Basically, I can only describe what he articulates here as a pro-choice position.
Joshua Prager:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s interesting to hear your experience and your reaction to that. Look, I came from, again, I mentioned that when I started this book, I didn’t know much about Roe V. Wade, but I have always felt that the way to examine an issue is through people. The constitutional scholar, Lawrence Tribe, he was wrote a book called, “The Clash of Absolutes” about abortion in this country. And he lamented the sad state where we were. And he said that the only way that we might ever get to the other side of that is to humanize both issues, he says, the two sides of the verse Roe V. Wade. As a smallest side, I found it fascinating that it turned out that Wade himself was pro-choice, no one knew that. Wade’s own son told me that. But so I came from this saying, hey, I happen to believe that abortion is fraught for good reason. I think it is a complicated issue.
And it was fascinating to see, it isn’t only the pro-life side that evolved. I mentioned, for example, on the pro-choice side, something that they would never want to fess up to nowadays, which was that Dr. Tiller, who before his murder, was the largest provider of third trimester abortion in this country and became a hero to many on the pro-choice side for his sort of unbound work. Even though the day after he was shot, the first time he returned to work the next day, while he was cast away, he was pushed aside by the National Abortion Federation. They wanted to have nothing to do with him. They thought he was too radical. Of course, a few years later, they then gave him their highest award. So they were very both sides, I think changed. I’m sorry, the last sentence to say on that, the way for me to track that was through the evolution of people like Dr. Boyd and Dr. Jefferson and see how we got to this point.
Albert Mohler:
I think we see this in argumentation and in the unfolding of time, right? In the 16th century, Martin Luther begins the Reformation, at least in part by accident. He’s calling for a reform of the church, not for a cleavage or a schism in the church. But he has to make public arguments defending his calls for reform. And eventually, he works his way into the souls of the Reformation. The same thing’s true with the colonists in pre-revolution America. They don’t start out calling for revolution, they start out calling for the King to vindicate them with parliament. But they work themselves into the revolution because the middle position disappears.
In my view, that’s what happened in abortion. The middle position has disappeared. And now you’re basically at a point where those of us on the pro-life side want to say that abortion is the intentional termination of an unborn human life, which is a human person and is a violation of the law, should be of the law of man, but certainly the law of God. But then as you point out in the book, the pro-abortion side is now pretty much in the position of saying that abortion ought to be justified under any claim or no public claim.
Joshua Prager:
Well, it was fascinating to watch how the language, for example, in the Southern Baptist Convention resolutions changed every few years.
It was more and more and more sort of forceful in proclaiming the unborn, a full, independent human life. That happened little by little and the exact same thing happened on the other side. And it was fascinating for me to see. So Dr. Mildred Jefferson, again, I mentioned her before, head of the National Right to Life Committee. At the time when she is the head of the NRLC, she’s one of, let’s say there were 50 or so members on their board, only three of them. She was one of three, she and Judy Brown, and I forget the third, believe that abortion ought to never be okay, not in instances of rape, incest and no one, then would’ve guessed that 40 years later, here we are, where all of these states are passing laws that basically trigger laws, should Roe be overturned, abortion will literally be illegal in all of those instances.
I do feel, again, Norma McCorvey/ Jane Roe was really the latchkey for me to open up and look at this entire issue. And here’s what’s really fascinating about her. She absolutely needed to ring a living out of her plaintiff ship. She had very little, she was a disenfranchised woman. I show how her life was very sad. She tried to commit suicide. She was a prostitute for a time, all of this. And when she was speaking for the pro-choice, she just parroted whatever they said about Roe. When she went over to the pro-life, she parroted, whatever Father Frank Pavone told her to and Flip Benham, etc. But she did actually have an opinion. She had a genuine opinion. And I know it was genuine because the very first time she was ever interviewed, days after Roe, by that same Baptist newsletter, first interview she ever gave in her life, she said that she felt that what she had initially done with Roe was wrong. She felt that abortion ought to be legal just through the end of the first trimester. After that, she would feel uncomfortable with it.
Fascinatingly, she then repeats those exact same words days after she becomes a born gay Christian and is interviewed by Ted Koppel on Nightline. Her friends and Operation Rescue are a gasp because she’s saying that she feels that abortion ought to be legal through the first trimester. And she then repeated those same words to me again, at the end of her life, literally on her deathbed. I was with her when she died and in the days leading up to her. And so she did have an opinion. She represented what she called the mushy middle, and it’s the majoritarian middle ground in America because we all read the stats put out, but a majority Americans their support for abortion dwindles by the trimester. But a majority of Americans feel that abortion ought legal through the first trimester.
Albert Mohler:
I don’t contest the polls in that respect. I also think most Americans are heavily influenced by whatever reasoning they have just heard about abortion and how even those questions are posed. And I think you would agree at least with that.
Joshua Prager:
Yeah, I think that’s true.
Albert Mohler:
The reality is that inevitably, the law is going to say one thing or another. And that’s where we are now down to, not only the Dobbs case before the Supreme Court, but I mean, state by state efforts. And I think in your book, by the time you end, you suggest that if Roe is struck down, something like 26 states will have abortion outlawed and-
Joshua Prager:
It’s almost right down the middle. It’s fascinating. And on the left, you’ve got the Senate for Reproductive Rights. On the right, I was speaking to Clarke Forsythe, Senior Counsel for the Americans United for Life. They disagree as to the exact number, but it’s simply a matter of degree. But yes, it will pretty much go down the middle. And whether you think it’s good or bad, those states, the division of those states correlate to, well, the bottom line will be that often women of color and women who are poor are the ones who have to travel the most to obtain an abortion. It will be illegal in the states where they live.
Albert Mohler:
Just looking at this whole equation, there’s this tragedy everywhere you look. And as a Christian theologian, I just have to say that that is exactly what we should expect to see when we’re talking about life and death. And we’re talking about the human carnage of so many public events and public issues. But the closer you get to abortion, the more grotesque the picture becomes. And I found your book very difficult to read, I have to say. And a part of it was because I was in meetings, for instance, at the March for Life on the 20th anniversary. So that would’ve been 1993, January of 1993.
And I was on the board at one point of two pro-life organizations. And you got there. And yet after the public events, there were a series of meetings. But one of them in particular that got to an absolutely gruesome state because of disagreements over whether the Human Rights Amendment should be resurrected as an effort or whether this should be through the judiciary. One of the things you point out well is that on both sides of this argument in public, there are many different positions contesting for influence.
Joshua Prager:
Yeah, absolutely. I can tell you that I came away a little cynical or a way maybe a better way to put it as this, again, Norma was the perfect prism through which to examine this issue in America. The reason that she was so conflicted about abortion was as she saw, there was an irreconcilable between things that had to do with sex and religion. She was the third generation in her family, third straight generation of women who had, had an unwanted pregnancy. And that fact shoots them in very different directions. But what was so interesting to me was the leaders on both sides of the issue, unfortunately, did not, by and large, treat her well. But you know what? Conversely, the people in the grassroots did. There are genuine people, whether you disagree with them or agree with them. There are people who genuinely, well, they treated Norma well, and they arrived at their opinions in honest ways.
One of the fascinating women that I write about in the book is a woman named Judy Wiggins. A pro-life advocate works, at a crisis pregnancy center in Mississippi, where she got to know Norma. There was a period in her life where she had four abortions in just a few years, a period of recklessness and a lot of drug use, etc. Anyway, she said that she believes, to this day, despite her work, that we need to understand that abortion is complicated and that her own experience opened her eyes to the fact that it is complicated. And there are sometimes incredibly compelling reasons whether you disagree with them or not, that a woman will want to have an abortion. Similarly, there are incredibly compelling reasons that a person feels that abortion ought to never be allowed. And I didn’t shy away from those facts in my book.
You mentioned that it was difficult to read. One of the things that I made sure to do is write about the procedure itself just to, maybe this is a horrible analogy, but it’s very easy to eat meat if you never have to be the one to slaughter the animal. If you’re simply buying your chicken in a prepackaged thing in an aisle in a supermarket. And I think that if you want to believe that a woman should have a right to choose, okay. I happen to believe that. But I wanted to confront the reality of abortion and understand that it isn’t fair to say that there are never third trimester abortions that happen for any reasons other than that the woman’s life is in danger, for example, or just understand how we got here. It’s complicated. And that’s why I examined it through people to write about it in human terms.
Albert Mohler:
Well, you did write about it in human terms. But you also did so in a way that documents incredibly thorough research. Coming to this from a pro-life perspective and commitment, I understand the human lives are complicated. I don’t believe that the theological and ontological questions about the unborn child are all that complicated. And on that, we will just have to disagree. But the story of how fallen human beings, sinful human beings, by my understanding, deal with these things in private and in public, that always gets complicated. And it’s going to be complicated after the Supreme Court rules in the Dobbs case. And once the situation, if that case goes, I hope it will in its decision, it will simply mean that all this energy gets transferred into 50 states, where there will be battles untold.
Joshua Prager:
Absolutely. If people think things after Dobbs, they’re not no matter what decision. It’s going to get only much more complicated.
Albert Mohler:
Well, that might mean that your research needs to continue. And again, just want to thank you for the work you put into this book. Your personal relationship with Norma McCorvey had to be an incredible journalistic stewardship. And I think you’ve written of her very honestly, but also with respect. And I respect that.
Joshua Prager:
I appreciate you saying that. I will tell you that she was a complicated woman and complicated to write about. But at every turn and I don’t deserve the Nobel Prize for this, I was mindful that she was a woman who had, had a difficult life and I always was remembering and telling myself, look, you want to be a good journalist, but first and foremost, you want to be a good person. And this is a person who had been used and abused. And I tried at every point to be as empathetic as I could. And I would like to think if I may say that it is really empathy that, above all, informed the writing of this book. It’s very easy for people to judge other people, but let us walk in their shoes and then judge them. And I spent a lot of time in Texas with them and her children, all of whom we didn’t discuss those three children, Melissa, Jennifer and Shelly, the youngest of whom was the Roe baby.
These are very difficult things that they inherited. To be Norma’s child was not an easy thing, even if you were given up for adoption and didn’t know who she was because of your genetic inheritance. Norma also used drugs during her pregnancies, which was a complicated thing for the girls and then women she gave birth to. I tried at every step to be fair. And Norma felt, in the end, that I was an ally. And she had forgotten because she was so used to telling lies. She had forgotten kind of what happened where. And when I found her private papers in the garage of her former partner’s home, they were a roadmap to help me write what actually happened. And she helped me do so. For example, she was incredibly happy when she remembered the name of the man who was the biological father of her youngest child, so that I could tell his story. She really was my partner in this.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I have to say that as one who’s been involved in this issue for a very long time, and as a theologian trying to grapple with this issue, as a Christian, I would simply have to say that given the gravity of this issue, it would be hard not to expect brokenness just about everywhere you look. I met Norma, to my knowledge, twice. And in both cases, it certainly struck me that she had lived an incredibly hard life.
Joshua Prager:
I totally agree with you. And that goes for people on both sides of the issue to have your life defined above all or to be using your life above all in the service of one side or another in this to define your life by abortion is a very difficult thing. The name of the book is, “The Family Roe” and it refers to two families. There’s Norma and her immediate children, but there’s also the tens of millions of Americans whose lives are connected in one way and defined in one way or another by this issue. And that is a very difficult life. These are fractured families. And Norma, she’s the one connection there. And so, as I say, writing about her was really a human way into writing about this much larger issue.
Albert Mohler:
Mr. Prager, you are obviously a very gifted, talented and hardworking journalist. I appreciate all the work you have put into this book, and I especially appreciate the generosity of this conversation today for Thinking in Public.
Joshua Prager:
Well, thank you for having me. I’m really delighted to speak to your audience and to you.
Albert Mohler:
Thank you again, sir.
Joshua Prager:
Thank you.
Albert Mohler:
Sincere thanks to my guest Joshua Prager, for thinking with me today.
If you enjoy today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 150 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab, Thinking in Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, go to boycecollege.com.
Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public. Until next time, keep thinking.