Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement by Jennifer L. Holland

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement by Jennifer L. Holland Nancy Elizabeth Baker Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement. By Jennifer L. Holland. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. Pp. 324. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Twentieth-century feminists are known for the slogan, "The personal is political." In Tiny You, University of Oklahoma historian Jennifer Holland neatly flips this motto in her argument that anti-abortion activists sought to make the political a personal issue for Americans, in the process shaping not just how people saw the issue of abortion, but also how they saw their own identities. A regional case study with national implications, Holland's work focuses on four states, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. She traces the development of the anti-abortion movement throughout the post-World War II period, specifically from the 1960s to the 1990s. In the book's first half, Holland examines the early phase of the anti-abortion movement by studying its origins and the subsequent evolution of its strategies over a decade alongside the emergence of a new form of White, Christian identity centered on opposition to abortion in the later 1960s and 1970s. In the book's second half, which looks at the 1980s and 1990s, Holland explores how anti-abortion activists sought to shape the identities of women, children, and families through the use of crisis pregnancy centers, schools, homes, and churches as locations for indoctrination into the radical ideas that pregnant women needed rescuing and protection as much as their fetuses did, that children were "survivors" of abortion, and that a new definition of the traditional family as the protector of fetuses was the paramount concern of the state. Along the way, an overwhelmingly anti-feminist, White movement co-opted the language of feminism and the civil rights movement. Holland argues that the seismic political and cultural changes she describes in four western states speak to major shifts nationally. The author concludes that the anti-abortion movement has profoundly changed American culture and politics, particularly in the regions of the South, the Great Plains, the Midwest, and the Mountain West, primarily by persuading voters and politicians in those areas that abortion is the root of all violence and the cause of all social ills (therefore neatly dismissing the need to attempt any other solutions to systemic, nationwide problems of discrimination or violence). Holland predicts that what anti-abortion activists have accomplished cannot be undone and that Americans will [End Page 500] have to adapt to a changed nation, one in which abortion is accepted as the moral equivalent to murder. Holland's book relies upon a foundation of meticulous research at multiple archives. She draws on the records of anti-abortion and abortion rights groups, religious organizations, governors, legislatures, and law enforcement, as well as oral history interviews and myriad newspapers. Holland shines in her ability to craft a narrative of sweeping social and political change that is studded throughout with dozens of individuals' personal stories of the movement. Her handling of anti-abortion activists' accounts is both respectful and maintains an appropriate scholarly detachment from her subjects. For example, when Colorado housewife Margaret Sebesta claims that the anti-abortion movement developed spontaneously in her neighborhood, Holland reminds the reader that, prior to becoming involved in that movement, Sebesta belonged to an extensive network of politically conservative, White Catholics who had participated in previous grassroots crusades against birth control and pornography (52). An incisively argued and well-supported study of a timely issue, Tiny You is suitable for use in the college or graduate school classroom, but will also be of interest to the general reader with a passion for politics. Nancy Elizabeth Baker Sam Houston State University Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association