Eyal Press’s “My Father’s Abortion War” in today’s New York Times magazine is a sometimes sobering, sometimes frustrating reflection on Press’s father, an ob-gyn who devotes part of his practice to performing abortions, and the larger struggle over choice.

Eyal Press provides keen insight into opposition to abortion — the sobering part — but blames Roe v. Wade for the ongoing abortion wars — the frustrating part.

Dr. Press’s medical practice is in Buffalo, New York. Until 1998 he and Dr. Barnett Slepian often covered for each other on weekends at a Buffalo abortion clinic. Then Dr. Slepian was murdered — shot in the back by an anti-choice fanatic — and Eyal Press feared his father was next. Both Dr. Slepian and Dr. Press had been “subjected to abrasive treatment – protests in front of their offices and homes, harassment of their patients, death threats,” writes Eyal Press. “I had witnessed some of this firsthand while growing up.”

After Dr. Slepian’s murder, Eyal Press tried to persuade his father to retire.

There was silence. He cupped his chin in his hands and sighed. Then, looking over in my direction, with weariness but no hint of acquiescence in his eyes, he started telling me about his upbringing in Israel, how he got used to living in a world full of danger and not allowing it to deter him from doing what he felt was right.

“It’s wrong, wrong,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“To give in to fanatics, to terrorists.”

The very next morning, around 10, as I was talking to my mother, the phone rang. She picked it up.

“Death threat?” she said. “Death threat?. . .Excuse me, you’ll have to speak with my son.”

Her hand shook as she passed me the phone. It was a detective from the Police Department. He was calling to inform us that a newspaper in Hamilton, Ontario, which days earlier received a package containing a photograph of Slepian with an X drawn through his face, had just received an anonymous threat that my father was “next on the list.”

After interviewing a soft-spoken woman who has dedicated her life to abortion clinic protests — Eyal Press doesn’t say if he told her his father was an abortion provider — Press praised her religious sincerity, and added,

Yet as the scholar Jessica Stern notes, there are two sides to religion – “one that is spiritual and universalist, and the other particularist and sectarian.” The flip side of the desire to rid the world of evil in accordance with your spiritual beliefs is the impulse among some of those convinced of their righteousness to demonize, and in extreme cases to want to eliminate, anyone who does not subscribe to them, something that, as I saw up close in Buffalo, is not a mind-set unique to Islamic fundamentalists. When the police removed protesters from a clinic in Buffalo one time, a spokeswoman for the local branch of Operation Rescue likened them to Nazi storm troopers. When a group of local religious leaders sympathetic to abortion rights held a meeting on another occasion, a protester assailed them as “ministers of Satan.” Driving past my father’s office while still in high school, I saw the signs emblazoned with his name. “Murderer!” “Baby-Killer!” On several Jewish holidays, including Yom Kippur and Hanukkah, a group called Project House Call organized demonstrations in front of doctors’ homes, choosing as their targets two local physicians who happened to be Jewish: my father and Slepian. Later, during the Spring of Life, radio ads blared, announcing: “Some doctors deliver babies. Some doctors kill babies!” My father and several other physicians were singled out by name. On the corner of Maple and Exeter Roads, a quarter-mile or so from my parents’ home, a six-foot red banner reading “Press Kills Children” was unfurled. In case anyone missed the banner, leaflets were distributed throughout the neighborhood.

I call Eyal Press’s work frustrating because it is too much written through the prism of his experiences in Buffalo, New York, a city with a large Catholic population that is far, far away from the Bible Belt. In Eyal Press’s version of anti-choice history, abortion didn’t become a hot-button issue until after Roe v. Wade, and the anti-choice movment didn’t get organized until well into the 1980s. “During the 1970’s, when the opposition to abortion indeed came almost exclusively from Catholics – the Catholic Physicians Guild, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo – the right-to-life movement wasn’t terribly radical,” he writes. But the mid-1980s saw the “political reawakening of evangelicals” who began “filtering into the movement.”

Had Eyal Press grown up closer to the Bible Belt, he would have seen a very different history. The way I remember it is that before Roe v. Wade the Missouri state legislature was engaged in a Second Civil War over whether to legalize abortion. The state capitol at Jefferson City was besieged with pros and antis, and it seemed little else was on the legislative agenda. In 1972, when I was a journalism student at the University of Missouri, contingents from various evangelical student organizations regularly marched into the newsroom of the Columbia Missourian (the J School publishes a community daily newspaper to provide students with real-world experience) demanding that their anti-abortion press release du jour be given space on page 1, unedited. (Fortunately the “professors,” who were mostly former newspaper reporters, were a thick-skinned crew who didn’t like being told what to publish.)

Eyal Press of Buffalo, New York, thinks that Roe v. Wade began the abortion wars, but in Missouri and other midwestern states the announcement of the Roe decision in 1973 brought about a temporary cease-fire. State legislatures were allowed to turn their attention to other matters, and anti-choice groups withdrew to consider new strategies.

Abortion clinic arsons began three years later, in 1976. Bombings began in 1978.

Other nations are not tearing themselves apart over abortion, writes Press.

“No other nation obsesses about abortion the way we do,” the columnist Michael Kinsley noted recently. Not Italy, home to the Vatican; not France, England or Germany. Only in America is a medical procedure that was legalized more than three decades ago at risk of once again being criminalized. Only here have doctors routinely taken to wearing bulletproof vests and hiring armed guards for protection.

He blames Roe v. Wade for this. “By short-circuiting a debate that was only beginning (not unlike the issue of gay marriage today), Roe would escalate the very conflict it was designed to quell.”

Many argue that if only the SCOTUS hadn’t handed down Roe v. Wade, by now most state legislatures would have at least partly legalized abortion, and the American people would have reached something like a consensus. Some even argue that most states were well on the way to legalizing abortion, and the Roe decision had the effect of making anti-choice opinion more entrenched. To which I say … hooey. In a large part of the country the abortion wars were hot and heavy before Roe v. Wade was decided, and I believe that in most of the South and Midwest abortion would never have been legalized.

The argument is that most citizens, even in the South and Midwest, support keeping abortion legal; therefore, state legislatures would have bowed to the will of the majority and legalized it. Maybe; maybe not. A pro-choice majority nationwide doesn’t seem to stop the U.S. Congress from passing anti-choice legislation. And geographic proximity does not make state legislatures more sensitive to the public will; if anything, most citizens know less about what their state legislature is up to than they do about what goes on in Washington. As long as social reactionaries are able to swing close elections (or convince politicians that they can), politicians will cater to them.

Press writes that, in Europe, nations “decriminalizing abortion on the grounds of health rather than rights” and left open the possibility that abortion could be re-criminalized through regular legislative channels. Hence, anti-abortion terrorism didn’t catch on there. But according to Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns and Money,

What’s interesting about this is that Canada’s abortion policy–there are no legislative restrictions on abortion at all–was created by the judiciary, which struck down a national abortion law. While many people assert that judicial policy-making is much more “divisive” than when issues are resolved by legislatures, the court’s intervention is so popular 15 years after the fact that proposing even modest abortion legislation is electoral suicide. The lesson of this is obvious: people evaluate judicial policy-making the same way they evaluate other forms of policy-making. The idea that prior to Roe v. Wade American abortion policy was represented by a stable consensus is absurd, but a convenient myth for people who oppose abortion, because the legislative status quo was heavily slanted against the pro-choice majority. Abortion policy in the U.S. is divisive because it’s divisive; it doesn’t matter whether it’s courts or legislatures that do the policy-making.

I agree with Scott. I believe hysteria over abortion reflects something in American culture; the same something that keeps us fighting over evolution and other aspects of modernity long accepted in the rest of the civilized world. And later today or tomorrow I want to blog about the parallel between the abortion controversy and the abolition of slavery — and it’s not the parallel the Right sees, believe me.

See also: Other recent Mahablog posts on abortion; Blog for Choice.