Defenders of the Unborn
By Daniel Williams, OUP, £23
Daniel Williams’s Defenders of the Unborn is a fascinating, revealing and even-handed account of the early history of the pro-life movement in America.
The movement is usually presented as a reaction against the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v Wade, which led to the legalisation of abortion throughout the United States. But, as Williams shows, the debate on abortion began as early as the 1930s when a small number of doctors began to advocate a utilitarian philosophy in which the welfare of the pregnant mother was considered to take precedence over that of the unborn child. They were opposed by the National Federation of Catholic Physicians’ Guilds, founded in 1937 to combat new ethical challenges in medicine including contraception, sterilisation and abortion.
