SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
Professor Carol Mason has gotten used to students rushing into her office at the University of Kentucky, alerting her to a far-right group demonstrating on campus. Mason is a humanities professor who's written several books on extremist movements and reproductive politics, so she's become a local authority on the matter. But during the first year of the first Trump administration, Mason noticed a change in rhetoric, particularly with anti-abortion groups. Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land in 2017, but the movement had taken on a new directive.
CAROL MASON: I saw a slogan that was new to me - ignore Roe. And I thought, well, that's interesting. Not overturn Roe, not end abortion, but ignore Roe. And I think that signaled to me that something was up with the anti-abortion movement, that they had come to see the rule of law as something to be ignored.
MCCAMMON: The cover of Mason's new book, "From The Clinics To The Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary," features a metal barricade that many have come to associate with the videos of people storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 - the bike racks being ripped aside by violent pro-Trump extremists determined to get inside, where lawmakers were certifying the election for Joe Biden. But Mason recognized the metal barricades from somewhere else.
MASON: We know those barricades as what became necessary to keep anti-abortionists away from clinics and their clients.
MCCAMMON: In your book, you argue that the anti-abortion movement and white nationalism have slowly become more and more intertwined over time. What were some of the early signs for you? Where did you see that?
MASON: Some of the earliest depictions of that, I picked up when I was writing my first book in the '90s, where a Klan group from Florida basically said abortion is genocide of the white race. The Genocide Awareness Project is another anti-abortion campaign that goes around to different colleges. They started out as a connection to the Promise Keepers back in 1997, I believe.
MCCAMMON: The Promise Keepers were a group focused on conservative Christian men, emphasizing things like family and fatherhood and traditional roles. Right.
MASON: Absolutely, and more so the idea that men need to take back their communities from forces that they felt were detrimental to Western Christian civilization. And so, the Genocide Awareness Project chose its name and the G-A-P to correspond with the theme of the Promise Keepers' rally at that time, which was called Stand In The Gap.
MCCAMMON: What did that mean to them, standing in the gap?
MASON: Standing in the gap means, to them, obeying God's law over man's law, a way to get in the middle of people they see as enemies, as attackers.
MCCAMMON: I want to go back to the idea of the January 6 insurrection and the connection you see between that kind of movement and the anti-abortion movement. How and where does the issue of abortion show up among the J6 rioters?
MASON: It shows up, I think, in that idea of child sacrifice, that there is a global cabal, a deep state that is a bunch of elites that is actually orchestrating things. They share this kind of conspiracy theory.
MCCAMMON: You know, I've covered the abortion issue for a long time. I think most anti-abortion activists would say that they are equal opportunity. They want to, as they would put it, save babies. This isn't about race. Explain to me where you see the connection with white supremacy.
MASON: Well, I think that the anti-abortion movement has facilitated a lot of intersections among far-right groups. And so, for example, I go back and look at the Army of God manual. It was an underground manual that was unearthed in 1993 when an anti-abortion person was basically arrested for trying to shoot an abortion doctor. And I think there you get an early iteration of this idea that Western and Christian civilization is what's at stake here. And that seems, to me, to be the bridge to current white nationalist ideas that suggest that we are in white demographic decline. Other people have expressed this in terms of a replacement theory, that abortion is somehow part of that.
MCCAMMON: You know, when it comes to the great replacement theory, which, of course, is a racist and antisemitic conspiracy theory - and faced with some of these critiques, anti-abortion activists tend to point out that women of color, particularly Black women, access abortion at significantly higher rates compared to white women. And some Black conservatives have pointed to this data and argued that abortion is disproportionately harmful to Black Americans, that were it not for abortion, there would be more Black Americans. How do you square that reality with the argument that the anti-abortion rights movement is just trying to produce more white babies?
MASON: Well, if you look at the history of those kinds of campaigns, you'll see that those groups change their tune according to whose votes they want to mobilize. For example, in 2010, in the midterm elections during the Obama administration, there were huge billboard campaigns to try and convince African American voters that abortion is a Black genocide. And so it's who their audience is and how that relates to electoral goals.
MCCAMMON: One of the themes of your writing is that the anti-abortion movement frames women both on the one hand as sort of warriors and heroes and on the other hand as victims. Can you explain what you mean by that?
MASON: Well, for years, the anti-abortion movement has sort of suggested that women need to be protected from abortion, that abortion is something that harms women. And I think one of the things that is really astonishing to me is to see how much pregnant people are seen as giving up their entitlement to call themselves part of the nation if they have an abortion. So their sense of belonging in their home nation is dependent on whether they're mothers, and these ideas of protecting women sort of goes hand in hand with protecting the nation.
MCCAMMON: Now that, in many respects, the anti-abortion movement has achieved what was its No. 1 goal for decades - the overturning of Roe v. Wade - where do you see that movement headed next?
MASON: I see them sort of converging with other far-right groups. We see the idea of not just regulating pregnancies but ending abortion altogether. And I think that this kind of absolutism is reflective of and also egging on some of the most theocratic and white nationalist impulses that are around today.
MCCAMMON: That's author Carol Mason. Her new book is called "From The Clinics To The Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary." Thanks so much for joining us.
MASON: Thank you, Sarah. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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