Sam Lee's abortion extremism, and my own
On Catholics and Amendment 3
I wrote about some wild Missouri history that is highly relevant to our current debate over the Amendment 3 abortion ballot measure for The Pitch KC.
Sam Lee leads the opposition to Amendment 3 as head of the PAC Missouri Stands With Women (reminiscent of Trump’s "whether the women like it or not, I'm going to protect them"). The A3 opposition, like opponents of abortion legalization measures across the country, has adopted a strategy of portraying the initiative as “too extreme” and has tried to make the debate about everything under the sun (sex trafficking, transgender people, human cloning…), everything other than whether we should end Missouri’s abortion ban.
The argument goes “even if you’re moderately pro-choice, this is too extreme.” I find this incredibly dishonest not just because of the specific lies about what Amendment 3 would do, but also because the A3 opponents are seriously hardcore extremists. In Lee’s case, we’re talking went-to-prison-for-breaking-into-clinics-and-physically blocking-women-from-seeing-doctors level extremist. Please go read it and then meet me back here because there’s more.
I talked to Missouri abortion care pioneer Sylvia Hampton, 87, for that article and, boy, does she have stories. I want to recount a few that go to two things that have been on my mind watching the Amendment 3 debate unfold: (1) Catholicism and (2) how I arrived at my “extreme” viewpoint that the law just doesn’t belong in abortion beyond standard medical regulation.
Sylvia worked at Missouri’s first abortion clinic, Reproductive Health Services in St. Louis. RHS was founded by Judy Widdicombe, an obstetrics nurse who first got into abortion referrals in the illegal days because she had been volunteering for a suicide hotline where many of the callers were women with unintended pregnancies.
Sylvia led counseling sessions at the clinic like the one Sam Lee infiltrated and also gave sex education talks in the community. One time “Father Something from St. Something in East St. Louis” called and asked her to give a talk to ninth graders at a Catholic school. She asked if he’d gotten permission from his principal or his bishop or whoever because if not, they’d have a problem.
“Darn right we have a problem,” she remembers the priest telling her. “These girls are getting pregnant and don’t know how it happened.”
Sylvia talked to her husband, who told her not to do it because maybe they wanted to assassinate her. But she thought the priest had sounded very genuine.
She recalls arriving at the school and being met by the priest in his long black vestments. “I was really kinda amazed.”
She showed a class of boys and girls her plastic side view of male and female genitalia, pills, and condoms. She explained that once you get your period, your body is preparing for pregnancy once a month.
A girl fainted during her talk. As the priest dragged her out of the room, he said, “keep talking.”
Sylvia recalls RHS would get calls from “the Jezzies” (the Jesuits) at St. Louis University seeking abortion care for university students who they recognized were much more vulnerable to unintended pregnancy because of their Catholic upbringing.
She recalls trying to get Catholic girls on birth control after their abortions and hearing that contraception was sinning every day, while an abortion was just one thing that needed to be forgiven.
With the clinic getting so much opposition from the Catholic church, but the patients seeming to be disproportionately Catholic, Sylvia decided to try to “get scientific.” She asked a colleague to pull every fifth patient file and note their religion. They found that the percentage of their patients who identified as Catholic was nearly twice that of the St. Louis population identifying as Catholic.
Sylvia told me about the time a clinic protestor who she regularly saw walking up and down the block outside RHS called and asked for a meeting with Judy, the clinic director.
The protestor’s high school daughter was pregnant. She needed an abortion. “She had a whole list of reasons why her daughter was different and needed an abortion. We gave her the abortion.”
“Every case is a ‘special case’,” as Sylvia put it. The story of a dedicated clinic protestor who ends up needing an abortion is one I’ve heard many times before. It’s a decades old cliché in abortion care that people support abortion bans with exceptions for “rape, incest, and me or my family.”
Which brings me back to the present day and my “extremist” view that the law just doesn’t belong here. I think abortion discourse is completely divorced from the reality of abortion, which is that every case is indeed a special case and laws that seek to pick and choose who can end a pregnancy and when only have negative consequences—primarily (1) making people who don’t want to be pregnant have abortions later than necessary and (2) making life extra hellish and dangerous for people who have complications with wanted pregnancies.
Amendment 3 has a gestational cutoff at viability, but I would be fine if it didn’t. I want to be clear about this because I’ve been accused of hiding the ball: to the supposedly gotcha question of “so you think abortion should be legal up until birth?” My answer is yes, laws that prohibit things that aren’t problems only cause problems.
The concern about “late term” abortion is 50% disingenuous use of the tragedies of people trying to have babies by people who want abortion to be a crime from the moment of conception and 50% historical anachronism. When Roe was decided in 1973, neither the medical technology (like medication abortion) nor the infrastructure were in place for very early abortion to be the norm. The Supreme Court was expected to legalize abortion only in the first trimester, but Justice Blackmun was persuaded that it would be logistically impossible for most women to end a pregnancy by then.
Today, the only thing stopping us from super early abortion being the norm (like, the same week you realize your period is late) are bad laws, while third trimester abortion is a miserable multi-day procedure that can cost $10,000 before travel and is only provided by a handful of doctors in the country. No one is doing that without a terrible reason. It does not need to be micromanaged by law.
Here’s the world I want to live in, which Amendment 3 would get us closer to:
if you are pregnant and do not want to have a child, you can go to a local doctor or nurse practitioner and end the pregnancy immediately.
The Church that I grew up in stops lobbying the government to impose by law what it has utterly failed to inspire its parishioners to do, and instead uses its massive dollars and influence to lobby for policies supporting healthy, fed, and sheltered children, mothers, and families.
I can dream and I can vote.