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University of California Press

About the Book

How white nationalism and authoritarian populism have taken hold in America under the guise of opposing abortion.

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.
 
From the Clinics to the Capitol 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.

Reviews

"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