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University of California Press

About the Book

An NPR Book of the Day

"An extremely important work that sheds light on the current status… of the antiabortion movement and its relationship to other right-wing movements in ways no other work does. This is brilliant."—Carole Joffe, coauthor of After Dobbs: How the Supreme Court Ended Roe but Not Abortion

From the Clinics to the Capitol breaks down the political strategy of the anti-abortion movement and the ties between the movement and white nationalism.

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.
 
This book 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.

About the Author

Carol Mason, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Otis A. Singletary Endowed Chair in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky, is author of several books about the rise of the Right since the 1960s.

From Our Blog

Q&A with Carol Mason, author of "From the Clinics to the Capitol"

Author Carol Mason giving historical contexts for today's political rhetoric
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Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Stormy Weather

I. Victims
1. Protecting Women from Abortion around the World
2. Vulnerable Guise and Racial Demise

II. Warriors
3. Radicalization and Race in Women's Pro-Life Writing
4. Lone Wolves, Abortion Abolitionists, and the Men Who Penned Them

Conclusion: Locals and Kings

Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Reviews

"A scary read, grounded in Mason’s three decades of attendance at rightwing events and perusal of scores of books, articles and pamphlets penned by anti-abortion conservatives. Her goal? To understand the ideology and motivating factors that have propelled the movement for the past half century."
The Indypendent
"An extremely important work that sheds light on the current status (and historical evolution) of the antiabortion movement and its relationship to other right-wing movements in ways no other work does. This is brilliant."—Carole Joffe, coauthor of After Dobbs: How the Supreme Court Ended Roe but Not Abortion

"Mason has come up with a significant, indeed urgent, treatment of the antiabortion movement. She treats the full integration of antiabortion activists and organizations into the extreme right. Or rather, she demonstrates how antiabortion politics—its ideology, its groups, its figures both well known and less so—have from its beginnings through to January 6 and beyond been components of the leading edge of the most extreme US right wing, including those engaged in violent militia actions."—Lawrence Rosenthal, author of Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism