Kentucky professor links pro-life movement to ‘white nationalism’ in upcoming book

A professor at the University of Kentucky ties the pro-life movement to “white nationalism and authoritarian populism” in a book to be published next month.

Carol Mason’s From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary argues that the rise of the pro-life cause intersects with anti-democratic movements, such as the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

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According to the description page on the University of California Press website, the author perceives insincerity in the pro-life arguments. Specifically, the book claims that “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,” the description says. “Abroad, US antiabortion tactics, personnel, and funds have contributed to a global rise of the Right.”

Carol Mason is a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Kentucky. Her research interests include “critical studies of whiteness,” “race and reproduction,” “theories of gender and sexuality,” and “Right-Wing Movements.”

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In From Clinics to the Capitol, Mason also investigates the last fifty years of “primary antiabortion sources.”

“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,” the description continues. 

“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,” it notes.

Mason is not the first pro-abortion university professor to connect pro-life activism to racism and white supremacy.

In an event last year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard professor Durba Mitra gave a lecture “On the Coloniality of Abortion Bans.”

In 2022, New York University professor Sarah Leonard wrote an article defending vandalism against pro-life pregnancy centers, labeling the entire pro-life cause as “white nationalist.” 

“Anti-abortion politics is many things — an intimate attack on anyone who can get pregnant, a white supremacist strategy for growth, a religious imposition — but it must be seen now as part of a larger strategy to control the many by the few,” she said.

Campus Reform contacted Carol Mason for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.