The Pre-Roe Pro-Life Movement in Minnesota and New York

oadly. At the same time, Minnesota represented a unique and important battleground
for the evolution, development, and continuation of the state- and nation-wide abortion
debate.
While Carolyn Gerster, the pro-life activist from Arizona, recalled her state as
“very slow awakening” in joining the abortion debate, the Minnesota pre-Roe MCCL
story begs the opposite conclusion. 3
In this way, MCCL provides a lens to observe the
successes of the pre-Roe anti-abortion movement, when the debate was held on a state
level and employed non-religious, bi-partisan, moral, and medical language, and involved
and recruited activists on a local and community grassroots level. MCCL effectively
entered the debate its MCLTP opposition constructed to hold off what many other states
could not: the liberalization of nineteenth century anti-abortion laws.
While MCCL leaders started to develop a more unified contemporary national
organization in the late 1960s and early 1970s in light of the less organized and Catholicdominated
National Right to Life Committee, the story of MCCL’s purely state-focused
efforts in hindsight came to an almost predictable close with the biggest blow of the
movement’s existence, one that “disgusted…disappointed…and surprised,” 4 but certainly
did not halt, its sympathizers. Roe v. Wade did not discourage many MCCLers nor its
founders, but instead bound the group more closely with pro-life groups in other states.
Despite its continuation, the group could not effectively achieve everything the general
pro-life movement wished on its own, as the primary movement shifted from a state to a
national stage; the Supreme Court decision both nationalized and politicized the abortion
debate. Instead, state groups fought some of the decision’s restrictions in their own
3 Gerster, quoted in Gorney, 178.
4 Abernathy Interview Transcript, Boxed 9 April 1993, Box 2, Folder 300, Kristin Luker Papers.
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