Reviewed by: Women against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century by Karissa Haugeberg Daniel K. Williams (bio) Women against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century. By Karissa Haugeberg. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Pp. x, 220. $95.00 cloth; $24.95 paper; $22.46 ebook) Women have been at the forefront of the antiabortion movement—including its most violent wing—yet their role has been understudied, Karissa Haugeberg argues. In addition to restricting access to abortion through highly effective campaigns of misinformation, these activists also engaged in violence against abortion [End Page 558] providers, often capitalizing on conservative gender stereotypes to carve out positions of influence for themselves and avoid prosecution even while engaging in criminal activity. Provocatively, Haugeberg argues that women in the mainstream, officially nonviolent wing of the antiabortion movement were much more closely connected to the movement's violent wing than they admitted, and that activists moved from one wing of the movement to another with ease. While Haugeberg makes no secret of her personal opposition to the antiabortion movement, she makes a concerted effort to allow her subjects to speak for themselves and she avoids simplistic caricatures, especially when discussing the political leanings of her subjects. Her sophisticated analysis of her subjects' constructions of gender is especially insightful, as is her nuanced study of pro-life direct action advocate Juli Loesch and other Catholic feminist "rescue" workers. Haugeberg notes that Loesch and her allies embraced the antiabortion cause in the late 1970s because they viewed a defense of fetal life as a logical extension of their peace advocacy. However, despite being grounded in a pacifist philosophy, their civil disobedience campaigns inspired a number of "rescue" workers to engage in violence against abortion doctors, Haugeberg claims. The last quarter of the book is devoted to an analysis of women who perpetrated such violence, using Shelley Shannon, a clinic bomber who attempted to kill Dr. George Tiller, as a primary case study. Haugeberg deserves to be commended for giving women leaders in the pro-life movement their long overdue recognition as political actors and historical agents. She should also be applauded for recognizing the diversity of women—ranging from centrist conservative lobbyists to left-leaning peace advocates and gun-toting radicals—who devoted their careers to the campaign against abortion. Perhaps not since Kristin Luker's landmark work Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (1984) have we seen such an extensive study of gender in the antiabortion movement. Yet Haugeberg's study probably overemphasizes the violence among female antiabortion activists. Shelley Shannon is the only [End Page 559] woman who ever shot an abortion doctor. Fewer than a dozen women have been convicted of participation in clinic bombings. Violence among pro-life women was never very widespread, and it was also largely concentrated in one particular time period—the late 1980s and early 1990s. One might question, therefore, whether a book framed around the argument that the boundaries between the mainstream and violent wings of the pro-life movement were "always porous"—or that devotes a quarter of its pages to a chronicle of the only female antiabortion activist to shoot an abortion doctor—presents a truly representative perspective on the hundreds of thousands of women who have volunteered for the pro-life cause (p. 7). Much of Haugeberg's history, especially her discussion of Shannon, will be familiar to those who have already read other histories of the modern pro-life movement, such as James Risen and Judy Thomas's Wrath of Angels. While she did examine a substantial number of archival collections and conduct original interviews, most of the women profiled in the book have also been covered in other academic or journalistic studies of the antiabortion movement, and much of the information that she presents about these women is available elsewhere. Readers hoping for a comprehensive overview of women's pro-life activism will probably be disappointed, because Women against Abortion does not present a conventional chronological narrative, but instead, a thematically organized set of selective case studies. Nevertheless, Haugeberg's book deserves to be read because of its fascinating insights and disturbing questions...