From the Clinics to the Capitol : How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary

How white nationalism and authoritarian populism have taken hold in America under the guise of opposing abortion. Antiabortion stories, images, and policies have primed Americans to embrace attitudes and politics once deemed extreme. Abroad, US antiabortion tactics, personnel, and funds have contributed to a global rise of the Right.  From the Clinics to the Capitol is a scholar’s story of why and how abortion foes join other militants in waging war against the federal government. Reflecting on her thirty years of analyzing the intersections of race, reproduction, and right-wing movements, Carol Mason examines primary antiabortion sources that influenced political currents of the last fifty years. From Cold War conspiracism and apocalyptic fundamentalism to anti-statist terrorism, Tea Party populism, and MAGA insurrection, opposing abortion has come to imperil democracy worldwide.

How white nationalism and authoritarian populism have taken hold in America under the guise of opposing abortion.

Over the course of the past few decades, the right-wing politics of abortion have centered on the idea that America is a white, Christian nation whose government protects its enemies. While these politics profess these ideals, they also decry that America has been deprived by Black criminality and welfare dependency and preyed upon by a genocidal state-authorized abortion industry.

Drawing on primary sources from antiabortion militants, white supremacists, and pro-life women from the 1970s to the present, right-wing studies scholar Carol Mason shows how white nationalism and authoritarian populism have for decades made inroads in the American imagination under the guise of opposing abortion.

Bringing white poverty and precarity into revealing dialog with right-wing organizing, religion, and race thought, From the Clinics to the Capitol elucidates the disturbing reality of US politics today.