Sam Lee was sitting in a doorway when he met Roberta, a white girl in her early 20s with glasses and long brown hair. She couldn’t get past him, and that was his goal. It was around 1980, and in those early years of the pro-life sit-in movement, Lee was experienced in using his body to barricade abortion facility entrances. He was 23 and had been doing it since 1978. 

John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe co-founded in 1977 the Pro-Life Nonviolent Action Project and was arrested more than 20 times at sit-ins. In recent years he’s concentrated on supporting immigrants and opposing racism. My questions and Cavanaugh-O’Keefe’s answers follow.

Last year’s COVID-19 lockdowns in the United States sparked fights between state governments and abortion groups over whether abortion is essential or elective. State governments in March and April halted nonessential medical procedures to conserve medical supplies. Governors in states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia carved out exceptions for abortion facilities, while 11 other states deemed abortion procedures elective. 

In 2002 the Harvard Club on 44th Street in Manhattan planned to erect a glass-walled addition to the classic building. Many alums were angry. At one meeting, Lawrence Lader, 82, got so worked up the governing board shut off his mic. He was still a frenzied orator, just as he’d been as a student in the 1930s and a self-described “street fighter” who led the movement to abolish America’s abortion laws in the 1960s.

The move toward swallowing abortion pills at home takes us back to an earlier era when abortion-seekers avoided surgical abortion, a risky proposition for women not only morally but physically, due to the great risk of infection. Abortifacients—potions designed to produce abortion—included oil of savin, ergot, rue, tansy oil, and wormwood, all of which caused a horrible shock to the entire body of the maternal user. Dosage was key, and effects could range all the way from a slightly upset stomach to death of child or death of mother and child.

In Spring 2020, abortion advocates went to war. As COVID-19 spread, some U.S. abortion facilities closed. Others limited in-person procedures. Some governors called abortions nonessential, and the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute was livid: “Reproductive health care needs and decisions cannot be put on hold.” Its April press release claimed abortion is “as essential to people’s lives as food, shelter and security.” 

Three centuries plus five years. That’s how long American legislators have tried to stop the use of abortion pills. In 1716 New York City enacted an ordinance requiring midwives to swear they would “not Give any Counsel or Administer any Herb Medicine or Potion, or any other thing to any Woman being with Child whereby She Should Destroy or Miscarry.”