Michelle Goldberg

Since the issues raised by this reader engendered such a spirited discussion in our office, we decided that it was worth pondering in a public forum. Why have children, anyway? And should you have them if you don’t feel a biological or emotional urge? If you don’t, will you feel those urges later, and regret it? Does having kids make old age less painful? Does choosing not to have children mean you’re selfish? Or are those people who choose to have children to fulfill themselves, or to ease loneliness, or to take care of them in old age, the really selfish ones? Are the sacrifices to your body, your finances and your freedom worth it? And why do so many parents preach the procreation gospel to their nonparent friends? Beginning today with Michelle Goldberg’s essay “Married Without Children” and continuing until Mother’s Day on May 11, we will run a series of essays that explore these questions and investigate perhaps the most critical decision that anyone makes over the course of a lifetime — to breed or not to breed? This week, that is our question.

- – - – - – - – - – - -
By Michelle Goldberg

May 6, 2003  |  When I tell people that I’m 27, happily married and that I don’t think I ever want children, they respond one of two ways. Most of the time they smile patronizingly and say, “You’ll change your mind.” Sometimes they do me the favor of taking me seriously, in which case they warn, “You’ll regret it.”

I’ve heard this enough that I’ve started worrying that they might be right. After all, I’m not completely insensitive to the appeal of reproduction. In fact, I have a name chosen for the daughter I don’t plan to have, and sometimes I imagine the life I could give her. Unlike me and my mortifyingly provincial childhood, she’d be one of those sparkling, precocious New York City kids I’ve always envied. I’d take her around the world, to study languages in Europe, to see the Potala Palace and the Taj Mahal. She’d have all I wish I’d had.

My husband doesn’t particularly want children either, but there’s no doubt he’d dote on her — he’s said as much. His wonderful family lives within walking distance of us, which is why his sister has more of a social life than any other young mother I’ve met. I think of his grandmother and grandfather, who live in a rambling house in rural Maine. Three generations of their adoring descendants admire them as few people admire the very old anymore, and seeing that makes me think that family can be the key to the best kind of life.

Still, the vague pleasures I sometimes associate with having children are either distant or abstract. Other women say they feel a yearning for motherhood like a physical ache. I don’t know what they’re talking about. The daily depredations of child rearing, though, seem so viscerally real that my stomach tightens when I ponder them. A child, after all, can’t be treated as a fantasy projection of my imagined self. He or she would be another person with needs and desires that I would be tethered to for decades. And everything about meeting those needs fills me with horror. Not just the diapers and the shrieking, the penury and career stagnation, but the parts that maternally minded friends of mine actually look forward to: the wearying grammar school theatrical performances. Hours spent on the playground when I’d rather be reading novels. Parent-teacher conferences. Birthday parties. Ugly primary-colored plastic toys littering my home.

Raising a child is hard even for those who like all that stuff, according to Rick Hanson, a California clinical psychologist and co-author of “Mother Nurture: A Mother’s Guide to Health in Body, Mind, and Intimate Relationships.” “Most parents, men and women, say they dramatically underestimated how intensely demanding, stressful and depleting parenthood would be,” Hanson says.

I’m just not up for it. I can sort of see that it might be nice to have children, but there are a thousand things I’d rather spend my time doing than raising them. The daily grind of motherhood seems like a prison sentence to me.

But is it one I’ll regret not serving?

Actually, never mind me — even I find my own existential dilemmas a little tedious. But what about you? If you’ve read this far, it could be because you are or think you might be one of the quarter of American women who, according to Hanson, will never have children. The numbers are similar in other developed countries. According to an article published last year in the Guardian, 41 percent of British women born in 1969 don’t have children. Some of these women can’t have kids, but others simply have other priorities. Hanson says that of the quarter of American women who don’t have children, three-quarters are physically able.

They won’t always be. Fertility starts declining in your mid-30s. Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s 2002 book “Creating a Life” may have been shoddy, irritating and smug, but it was accurate in its assessment of the dismal odds stacked against women who seek fertility treatments in their 40s. After a certain age, having a baby is no longer an option. So will women who choose not to have children regret their effrontery in defying the whole history of the human race? Are they — or we — setting ourselves up for a lifetime of barren desolation?

The answer, happily, is no.

When I started writing this story, I would have described myself as ambivalent about childbearing. Yet when experts told me I was unlikely to suffer debilitating psychological fallout if I spared myself motherhood, I felt enormous relief, as if I’d been let off the hook. It turns out that people who choose not to have children (as opposed to those who desperately want to have children, but can’t) tend to have better marriages, better finances, less stress, and are no more likely to be unhappy in old age than parents. Most people, and especially most women, have a physiological yearning to reproduce, whatever the costs, and are glad they did. Yet being born free of that desire can be a gift.

“Some women really do love mothering,” says Madelyn Cain, author of “The Childless Revolution: What It Means to Be Childless Today.” “I happen to be one of them. I love being a mother. It’s the greatest joy of my life, but what makes me happy and brings me fulfillment doesn’t necessarily make everyone else happy.”

The notion that different people have different desires shouldn’t be a difficult one, but when it comes to motherhood, many people can’t get their heads around it. Even Cain had trouble at first. She began “The Childless Revolution” in part because she was angered by the dismissive way her childless friends were treated, and because she was struck by the newfound social acceptance she experienced when she had her first baby at 39. Yet part of her still believed that “deep down every woman wanted to be a mother,” a misconception undone by the more than 100 interviews she did for her book.

What she discovered was that choice, not motherhood, is the real key to happiness. Cain divides the women in her book into three groups — those who affirmatively decide not to have children, those who can’t have children, and those for whom circumstances never align to make motherhood happen. Citing her own interviews as well as books like Elaine Campbell’s “The Childless Marriage: An Exploratory Study of Couples Who Do Not Want Children,” Elaine Tyler May’s “Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness,” and Marion Faux’s “Childless by Choice: Choosing Childlessness in the Eighties,” Cain says, “The ones who decide they don’t want children, they don’t regret it.”

Cain has come to believe that lack of interest in childbearing might be biological, like being gay. “Researchers have found that within mice there is a gene, the Mest gene. When it was in place in mice, and the mouse gave birth, it was a nurturing mother. When the mouse was Mest-deficient, it was a non-nurturing mouse. I think down the line we’re going to discover that just as homosexuality is something that’s physical, the same thing will be discovered about women. Why do some women melt at the sight of babies while other women are indifferent? It would seem to me it’s something innate.”

That’s why Cain says women who don’t want kids should ignore the well-meaning advice they’re often bombarded with. “Don’t second-guess yourself,” she says. “Trust your instincts.”

That might seem obvious, but the strange thing about being a woman without much interest in mothering is that many people you love and admire will tell you not to trust your instincts. Motherhood, they say, is, for all its struggles, an experience of such ineffable joy that those who’ve done it can’t imagine life without it. Motherhood evangelists have a store of conversion stories. Either they, or someone they know intimately, had once been like me, cherishing their independence and impatient with children. But when bathed by the blissful hormones that accompany procreation, they saw the light and now their lives are richer and more meaningful than they ever thought possible. They say those who haven’t parented can’t even begin to comprehend its radiant satisfactions.

People do not behave this way about other pleasures. I enjoy sex with men, but don’t go about badgering lesbians to see what they’re missing.

That’s why some defiantly childless women insist that maternal proselytizers are expressing an unconscious insecurity. “I don’t know why people have to take this so personally,” says 35-year-old Shauna Wright, a San Francisco woman who runs the Web site and mailing list Childfree.net. A decade ago, Wright called off an engagement when she realized her fiancé was determined to be a father, and she was sure she didn’t want to be a mother. She’s never wavered from that decision. About those who try to cajole her, she says, “They’re jealous. They have a lot of self-doubt, otherwise they wouldn’t feel the need to trumpet their decision and try to talk me into doing the same thing.”

Yet Hanson insists that there’s often authentic passion behind preaching mothers. “For most people, that switch flips and they are besotted because this extraordinarily intense biological process kicks in, hormones start to flow and people become smitten with their kids,” he says. “Often those happy, goofy smiles you’re seeing are genuine. They really do think it’s fantastic, even though before having kids they weren’t sure it would be that great.”

And that’s what makes the decision to breed so hard. There are few experiences in life that come more highly recommended than parenting, so how can you ever know if you’re making a mistake by rejecting it? It’s fairly easy to find stories of those who regret not having children, but it’s difficult to find a mother who will say she wishes she’d made a different choice.

“It’s very rare for a woman who has children to regret having children,” says Hanson. “You will find women who say, on the one hand, ‘I love my children, they’re profoundly fulfilling and I can’t imagine not having had them.’ But on the other hand they’ll say, ‘Boy, this is really stressful. This has really strained my marriage. My health has never been up to par since I had my first or second child. I really regret the impact of having kids on my career. Having children has made me financially dependent and really limited my options for making money.’ I hear them say all those things, but you rarely hear moms actually saying, bottom line, I should never have done it.”

Yet Cain insists that more women feel that way than might admit it. She points to a famous survey advice columnist Ann Landers took of her readers in 1975. A woman wrote to Landers with qualms much like mine — she and her husband were torn about childbearing and asked, “Were the rewards enough to make up for the grief?” Landers put the question to her readers, asking, “If you had it to do over again, would you have children?” Astonishingly, 70 percent of her respondents said no.

Hanson agrees that even if mothers say they don’t regret having children, as a group they’re not more satisfied with their lives than nonmothers. For all the truth about the innate physiological rewards of mothering, he says, “The happy people are the ones who wanted kids and had them or didn’t want kids and didn’t have them.”

This is true even in old age, a time when many assume the childless will suffer alone while their peers are comforted by grandchildren. Tanya Koropeckyj-Cox, a sociology professor at the University of Florida who researches aging, recently completed a study based on surveys of 3,800 men and women between the ages of 50 and 84. “For years we have heard warnings that if you don’t have children, you will regret it later,” she said in a press release. “But beliefs about childlessness leading to a lonely old age are simply not supported by our study.” In a previous report published in 1998, Koropeckyj-Cox concluded that there is “no significant differences in loneliness and depression between parents and childless adults.”

Besides, what some parents gain in intimacy with their children, they lose in intimacy with their partners. Hanson says, “Research has shown that on the average the greatest challenge to a couple is becoming parents. Many marriages hold together for a few years when the child is young, but they’ve been strained beyond repair by everything that comes from having kids and the couple divorces, maybe by the time the kid reaches first grade. Some people think they will save their relationship by having children. It almost never happens.” He cites a study by John Gottman, a renowned expert on marriage at the University of Washington, which estimates that couples have eight times more arguments after becoming parents. Hanson says he’s seen this in his life as well as his practice. “Many couples overcome all this and having children brings them closer together. That’s certainly true for my wife and myself. But during the early years — our kids are now 15 and almost 13 — boy, we quarreled and were emotionally distant and troubled in our marriage like we’d never been. We argued about all the issues that new parents commonly argue about — how to raise the children, who is doing more, the inevitable lack of time for an intimate relationship.”

Cain reprints one of those 1975 letters sent to Ann Landers in her book: “I am 40, and my husband is 45. We have twin children under 8 years of age. I was an attractive, fulfilled career woman before I had these kids. Now I’m an overly exhausted nervous wreck who misses her job and sees very little of her husband. He’s got a ‘friend,’ I’m sure, and I don’t blame him. Our children took all the romance out of our marriage. I’m too tired for sex, conversation or anything.”

Such alienation is less likely when people don’t have children. “Statistics show childless couples are happier,” Cain says. “Their lives are self-directed, they have a better chance of intimacy, and they do not have the stresses, financial and emotional, of parenthood.”

This assessment is shared by Shari Bennet-Speer, a 34-year-old corporate trainer in Richmond, Va. The decision not to have children, she says, “has absolutely 100 percent” improved her relationship with Geoffrey, her husband of 12 years.

Bennet-Speer says she’d never been very interested in children, but had assumed she’d have them because “that’s what you do, get married and have kids.” When she met her husband and he told her he didn’t want to be a father, it hit her that parenthood was a choice, and she didn’t have to choose it. “It sounded perfect to me,” she says. “I truly was fine with [not having kids] as soon as he suggested it as a possibility.”

“My husband and I are madly in love,” she adds. “We hold hands, we cuddle in movies, we take long walks, we talk late into the night, we road trip every anniversary, just to celebrate our time together. We get to live spontaneously and we get to make life choices that are important to us. There are not many people who’ve made our choice, but I’ve never regretted it.”

Much of Karman’s early history is hazy, but one horrific incident stands out. In 1955, one of the women who sought Karman’s help died of an infection, and he was charged with both murder and abortion. A court rejected his insistence that he was a mere middleman between the woman and a doctor, finding that he himself had tried to induce a miscarriage using a speculum and a nutcracker. Nevertheless, he was convicted only of the lesser charge, and after serving two years in prison, he emerged unfazed to resume the work that had become, for him, a kind of crusade.

A man of the nascent counterculture, Karman dabbled in experimental films and worked with juvenile delinquents and at Head Start, but abortion remained his consuming passion. A sympathetic doctor told him that if he could induce just a small bit of bleeding in a pregnant girl, she could be admitted to the hospital and her abortion could be completed legally, a technique he adopted. In fact, all around the world, in countries where abortion is restricted, that’s often how it’s done. According to Malcolm Potts, an Oxford-educated doctor who is one of the world’s leading authorities on abortion, the “extralegal person is usually trying to produce uterine bleeding that will take the woman to the public hospital where she will be cleaned up.”

However standard, this system struck Karman as crazy, and he started trying to devise something better. Karman “was a very dexterous person,” said Potts, who later became his friend. “He used to make model airplanes when he was young. I once locked myself out of my car, and I’d never seen anybody break into a car as quickly as Harvey did. And he’s pretty good at breaking into the uterus.” As Potts recalled, Karman read the medical literature about abortion in Eastern Europe, where it had been legal since the 1950s. He wanted a method that was as painless as possible, allowing a woman to get up and walk away as soon as it was over. So he started experimenting in his kitchen. Karman cut the end off a large, plastic, handheld syringe, attached some polyethylene tubing to it, and soon came up with the prototype for the manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) syringe, a simple, hand-operated device that today is used all over the developing world. “It’s probably done many millions of abortions since then,” Potts said.

Starting in the 1960s, Karman used his invention to perform illegal abortions out of a rented room next to a dentist’s office in Los Angeles. Charismatic and swaggering, he was remembered by some in the nascent abortion rights movement as a hero, by some as a huckster. He added a Ph.D. to his name, though his degree came from a dubious Swiss diploma mill. Without a doubt, there were abundant reasons to be suspicious of him, but he was no mercenary backroom butcher, and many recall him as more interested in spreading word of his discovery than in profiting from it, giving free demonstrations to interested doctors and health care workers. “I was most impressed … because of the safety for the women and because [the technique] made it possible to bring the price way down. And Harvey never charged a cent for his visits,” one San Diego Planned Parenthood official told Ms.

In 1972, the device came to the attention of Reimert Ravenholt, the head of population affairs at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Ravenholt, a roguish figure gleefully dismissive of political sensitivities, had already decided that poor countries sorely needed abortion equipment that could be run without electricity. USAID was primarily focused on spreading contraception, but government officials knew that birth control was always going to fail for a certain percentage of people, especially in places where access was sporadic and use inconsistent. As a then classified 1974 government report on overpopulation would conclude, “[I]ncreasing numbers of women in the developing world have been resorting to abortion, usually under unsafe and often illegal conditions … [A]bortion, legal and illegal, now has become the most widespread fertility control method in use in the world today.” To Ravenholt it seemed obvious that no comprehensive American program to bring family planning to the world could ignore abortion. Besides, after Roe v. Wade was decided at the beginning of 1973, the issue seemed to be settled. Abortion was legal in America. Why shouldn’t American aid reflect that?

Reimert had USAID contract with the Battelle Corporation to reengineer Karman’s innovation for mass production. It was a modified 50 cc syringe topped with a thin plastic tube, or cannula. When the plunger was pulled, a thumb-operated valve retained the vacuum. The abortionist would insert the cannula through the cervix, then gradually release the valve to suction out the uterus. “This was a very efficient way of terminating early pregnancies,” said Ravenholt.

If there was a risk in putting an illegal abortionist to work, albeit indirectly, for the U.S. government, it seems not to have occurred to Ravenholt. “I knew what we needed, and Harvey had done something along that line, so what the hell?” he said. Through the U.S. government’s General Services Administration, he ordered a thousand “menstrual regulation kits” that included a syringe, a dozen cannula, a speculum and a plastic basin, and he supplied them to doctors all over the world. The feedback was positive, so he ordered ten thousand more. His staffers would bring suitcases full of them when they went on trips abroad. The technology has since been introduced in over one hundred countries.

It’s hard to believe now, after years in which the United States has exported its antiabortion movement all over the globe, that the American government was once responsible for bringing safe abortion to great swaths of the developing world. Hard to believe, too, that support for distributing contraceptives to remote corners of the planet was once a solidly bipartisan undertaking. As George H. W. Bush wrote in 1973, “Success in the population field, under United Nations leadership, may, in turn, determine whether we can resolve successfully the other great questions of peace, prosperity, and individual rights that face the world.” (As a congressman, Bush earned the nickname “Rubbers” for his enthusiastic interest in family planning.)

Today abortion is broadly legal in the vast majority of the developed world and in Asian countries, including China and India; more than 60 percent of people live in countries with liberal abortion laws. Another 14 percent or so live in nations like Colombia and Ghana that allow abortion under certain circumstances. But in many poor countries, including large parts of Africa and Latin America and parts of Asia and the Middle East, abortion is either banned entirely or allowed only to save a woman’s life.

Twenty-six percent of the world’s women and men live under such laws, which are largely the relics of colonial constitutions promulgated by European countries that have since abandoned such restrictions for themselves.

Given that so many abortion bans are artifacts of colonialism, it is particularly ironic when the contemporary global antiabortion movement accuses reproductive rights activists of neoimperialism. Yet it’s also true that realpolitik-driven fears of swelling third world population, more than humanitarianism, drove early efforts by the United States to bring family planning to poor countries. America’s international commitment to birth control was intended to fight communism, not to liberate women. If it did the latter, that was at best a bonus. Eventually, the national security rationale would give way to a focus on women’s rights, leaving birth control programs far more politically vulnerable to right-wing attacks, since nothing but women’s lives was at stake.

The vicissitudes of the United States’ policies on birth control and abortion have always had at least as much impact abroad as they do domestically. Americans don’t pay much attention to what goes on beyond their borders, giving those working on issues of sexual health abroad a freer hand than at home, whether that means blanketing neighborhoods in other countries with packets of pills or channeling money to abstinence-promoting, condom-excoriating missionaries. American officials have introduced safe abortion into foreign countries, and they’ve interfered to make abortion more perilous. The United States pushed to create the United Nations Population Fund, the world’s premier agency promoting reproductive health, in 1969. Decades later, the United States government tried to destroy it.

By then it was in some ways too late: The family planning infrastructure that America did so much to build had taken on a life and a legitimacy of its own. At the same time, the forces of cultural globalization — undermining sexual taboos and celebrating individual rights above community attachments — continue to be associated with Americanization. Thus a country like Nicaragua can pass abortion legislation that mirrors the position of the party then in power in the United States and still spin it as a blow against Northern imperialism.

The global spread of family planning has vastly changed the world. Even as the planet’s population increased nearly fourfold in the twentieth century, from 1.6 billion to 6.1 billion people, fertility rates have declined sharply in most countries, and smaller families have become the norm. “In the 1950s, women in less developed regions had an average of six children,” wrote UN demographer Joseph Chamie. “[T]oday’s average is closer to three. By mid-century, the global fertility average is anticipated to be close to replacement levels of around two children per couple.” There are many reasons women are having fewer children, but many studies show that a substantial part of the decrease is due to increased access to contraception, now used by more than half the couples in the world.

In some countries effective family planning programs have been a great boon to development. Falling birthrates, which for a time increase the percentage of working adults to dependent children in a society, create a window where a greater share of the population is productive. Demographers call this the “demographic dividend,” and it can be a major spur to development. Harvard economists David Bloom, David Canning, and Jaypee Sevilla have argued that the demographic dividend created by East Asia’s postwar embrace of family planning “was essential to East Asia’s extraordinary economic achievements, accounting for as much as one-third of its ‘economic miracle.’” (The Philippines, conversely, is the only big East Asian country to eschew family planning, and the only one whose economy never took off.)

Perhaps most important, the global family planning movement has — often inadvertently, and in the face of great internal resistance — given rise to a new vision of universal women’s rights that has changed both international law and individual lives. At the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, more than 180 countries adopted a program of action proclaiming, “Advancing gender equality and equity and the empowerment of women, and the elimination of all kinds of violence against women, and ensuring women’s ability to control their own fertility, are cornerstones of population and development-related programs. … The full and equal participation of women in civil, cultural, economic, political and social life, at the national, regional and international levels, and the eradication of all forms of discrimination on grounds of sex, are priority objectives of the international community.”

This was a remarkable statement (and to some social conservatives an appalling one). Like most UN declarations it remains more a goal than a reality. Given the persistence of sexual oppression and even terror in much of the world, the half a million women who die due to pregnancy complications each year, the millions more who have their genitals cut in the name of purity, and the plague of illegal abortion that fills hospital wards from Nicaragua to Nigeria, the Cairo program of action can today seem like empty verbiage. But just as peacekeeping remains a crucial endeavor despite the endurance of war, and human rights law matters despite constant violations, the global commitment to reproductive rights represents an important attempt to unite humankind against an ageless scourge: the wholesale devaluation of women.

There have been setbacks and backlashes, some caused by right-wing forces in the United States, others by related movements in countries such as Nicaragua. In all likelihood there will be more, since fundamentalism and feminism are both spurred by the upheavals of globalization. Still, slowly, in frustrating fits and starts, a relatively new international ideal of women’s rights as human rights is altering laws and societies in subtle but systematic ways, forcing changes to discriminatory inheritance laws and patterns of education, draconian abortion bans, child marriages, and other sources of female misery. The attempt to liberate half the world’s people from the intertwined tyrannies of culture and biology is one of the least heralded but most ambitious global initiatives in history.

Given such intimacy with horror, one might expect him to be aloof from the seemingly less urgent cultural disputes that dominate domestic American politics. Yet in the rise of America’s religious right, Hedges senses something akin to the brutal movements he’s spent his life chronicling. The title of his new book speaks for itself: “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” Scores of volumes about the religious right have recently been published (one of them, “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism,” by me), but Hedges’ book is perhaps the most furious and foreboding, all the more so because he knows what fascism looks like.

Part of his outrage is theological. The son of a Presbyterian minister and a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Hedges once planned to join the clergy himself. He speaks of the preachers he encountered while researching “American Fascists” as heretics, and he’s appalled at their desecration of a faith he still cherishes, even if he no longer totally embraces it. Writing of Ohio megachurch pastor Rod Parsley and his close associate, GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell, he says, “[T]he heart of the Christian religion, all that is good and compassionate within it, has been tossed aside, ruthlessly gouged out and thrown into a heap with all the other inner organs. Only the shell, the form, remains. Christianity is of no use to Parsley, Blackwell and the others. In its name they kill it.”

I first met Hedges at last spring’s War on Christians conference in Washington, D.C., where Parsley, a wildly charismatic Pentecostal who loves the language of holy war, electrified the crowd. (“I came to incite a riot!” he shouted. “Man your battle stations! Ready your weapons! Lock and load!”) It was shortly before the publication of my book, and as Hedges and I spoke, we realized we had similar takes on our subject. Both of us relied on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarian movements in their early stages, and on some of the concepts that historian Robert O. Paxton elucidated in his book “The Anatomy of Fascism.” But where I, anxious not to be seen as hysterical, tried to treat these ideas gingerly, Hedges is unabashed and unsparing. His rage and contempt for the movement’s leaders, though, is matched by sympathy for its followers, because he understands the despair, the desperate longing for community and even the idealism that often drives them.

Hedges spoke to me on the phone from his home in New Jersey.

Let’s start with the title. A lot of liberals who write about the right see echoes of fascism in its rhetoric and organizing, but we tiptoe around it, because we don’t want people to think that we’re comparing James Dobson to Hitler or America to Weimar Germany. You, though, decided to be very bold in your comparisons to fascism.

You’re right, “fascism” or “fascist” is a terribly loaded word, and it evokes a historical period, primarily that of the Nazis, and to a lesser extent Mussolini. But fascism as an ideology has generic qualities. People like Robert O. Paxton in “The Anatomy of Fascism” have tried to quantify them. Umberto Eco did it in “Five Moral Pieces,” and I actually begin the book with an excerpt from Eco: “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.” I think there are enough generic qualities that the group within the religious right, known as Christian Reconstructionists or dominionists, warrants the word. Does this mean that this is Nazi Germany? No. Does this mean that this is Mussolini’s Italy? No. Does this mean that this is a deeply anti-democratic movement that would like to impose a totalitarian system? Yes.

You know, I come out of the church. I not only grew up in the church but graduated from seminary, and I look at this as a mass movement. I give it very little religious legitimacy, especially the extreme wing of it.

You say they would like to impose a totalitarian system. How much of a conscious goal do you think that is at the upper levels of organizing, with, say, somebody like Rod Parsley?

I think they’re completely conscious of it. The level of manipulation is quite sophisticated. These people understand the medium of television, they understand the despair and brokenness of the people they appeal to, and how to manipulate them both for personal and financial gain. I look at these figures, and I would certainly throw James Dobson in there, or Pat Robertson, as really dark figures.

I think the vast majority of followers have no idea. There’s an earnestness to many of the believers. I had the same experience you did — I went in there prepared to really dislike these people and most of them just broke my heart. They’re well meaning. Unfortunately, they’re being manipulated and herded into a movement that’s extremely dangerous. If these extreme elements actually manage to achieve power, they will horrify [their followers] in many ways. But that’s true with all revolutionary movements.

The core of this movement is tiny, but you only need a tiny, disciplined, well-funded and well-organized group, and then you count on the sympathy of 80 million to 100 million evangelicals. And that’s enough. Especially if you don’t have countervailing forces, which we don’t.

If there’s a historical period that’s analogous to the situation we have now, it would come close to being the 1930s in the United States. Obviously we’re not in a depression, but the situation for the working class is very bleak, and the middle class is under assault. There has been a kind of Weimarization of the American working class, and there’s a terrible instability in the middle class. And if we enter a period of political and social instability, this gives this movement the opportunity it’s been waiting for. But it needs a crisis. All of these movements need a crisis to come to power, and we’re not in a period of crisis.

How likely do you think a crisis is?

Very likely. The economy is not in healthy shape. I covered al-Qaida for a year for the New York Times. Every intelligence official I ever interviewed never talked about if, they only talked about when. They spoke about another catastrophic attack as an inevitability. The possibility of entering a period of instability is great, and then these movements become very frightening.

The difference between the 1930s and now is that we had powerful progressive forces through the labor unions, through an independent and vigorous press. I forget the figure but something like 80 percent of the media is controlled by seven corporations, something horrible like that. Television is just bankrupt. I worry that we don’t have the organized forces within American society to protect our democracy in the way that we did in the 1930s.

Since the midterm election, many have suggested that the Christian right has peaked, and the movement has in fact suffered quite a few severe blows since both of our books came out.

It’s suffered severe blows in the past too. It depends on how you view the engine of the movement. For me, the engine of the movement is deep economic and personal despair. A terrible distortion and deformation of American society, where tens of millions of people in this country feel completely disenfranchised, where their physical communities have been obliterated, whether that’s in the Rust Belt in Ohio or these monstrous exurbs like Orange County, where there is no community. There are no community rituals, no community centers, often there are no sidewalks. People live in empty soulless houses and drive big empty cars on freeways to Los Angeles and sit in vast offices and then come home again. You can’t deform your society to that extent, and you can’t shunt people aside and rip away any kind of safety net, any kind of program that gives them hope, and not expect political consequences.

Democracies function because the vast majority live relatively stable lives with a degree of hope, and, if not economic prosperity, at least enough of an income to free them from severe want or instability. Whatever the Democrats say now about the war, they’re not addressing the fundamental issues that have given rise to this movement.

But isn’t there a change in the Democratic Party, now that it’s talking about class issues and economic issues more so than in the past?

Yes, but how far are they willing to go? The corporations that fund the Republican Party fund them. I don’t hear anybody talking about repealing the bankruptcy bill, just like I don’t hear them talking about torture. The Democrats recognize the problem, but I don’t see anyone offering any kind of solutions that will begin to re-enfranchise people into American society. The fact that they can’t get even get healthcare through is pretty depressing.

The argument you’re now making sounds in some ways like Tom Frank’s, which is basically that support for the religious right represents a kind of misdirected class warfare. But your book struck me differently — it seemed to be much more about what this movement offers people psychologically.

Yeah, the economic is part of it, but you have large sections of the middle class that are bulwarks within this movement, so obviously the economic part isn’t enough. The reason the catastrophic loss of manufacturing jobs is important is not so much the economic deprivation but the social consequences of that deprivation. The breakdown of community is really at the core here. When people lose job stability, when they work for $16 an hour and don’t have health insurance, and nobody funds their public schools and nobody fixes their infrastructure, that has direct consequences into how the life of their community is led.

I know firsthand because my family comes from a working-class town in Maine that has suffered exactly this kind of deterioration. You pick up the local paper and the weekly police blotter is just DWIs and domestic violence. We’ve shattered these lives, and it isn’t always economic. That’s where I guess I would differ with Frank. It’s really the destruction of the possibility of community, and of course economic deprivation goes a long way to doing that. But corporate America has done a pretty good job of destroying community too, which is why the largest growth areas are the exurbs, where people have a higher standard of living, but live fairly bleak and empty lives.

In the beginning of the book, you write briefly about covering wars in Latin America, the Middle East and the Balkans. How did that shape the way you understand these social forces in America? What similarities do you see?

When I covered the war in the Balkans, there was always the canard that this was a war about ancient ethnic hatreds that was taken from Robert Kaplan’s “Balkan Ghosts.” That was not a war about ancient ethnic hatreds. It was a war that was fueled primarily by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia. Milosevic and Tudman, and to a lesser extent Izetbegovic, would not have been possible in a stable Yugoslavia.

When I first covered Hamas in 1988, it was a very marginal organization with very little power or reach. I watched Hamas grow. Although I came later to the Balkans, I had a good understanding of how Milosevic built his Serbian nationalist movement. These radical movements share a lot of ideological traits with the Christian right, including that cult of masculinity, that cult of power, rampant nationalism fused with religious chauvinism. I find a lot of parallels.

People have a very hard time believing the status quo of their existence, or the world around them, can ever change. There’s a kind of psychological inability to accept how fragile open societies are. When I was in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, at the start of the war, I would meet with incredibly well-educated, multilingual Kosovar Albanian friends in the cafes. I would tell them that in the countryside there were armed groups of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who I’d met, and they would insist that the Kosovo Liberation Army didn’t exist, that it was just a creation of the Serb police to justify repression.

You saw the same thing in the cafe society in Sarajevo on the eve of the war in Bosnia. Radovan Karadzic or even Milosevic were buffoonish figures to most Yugoslavs, and were therefore, especially among the educated elite, never taken seriously. There was a kind of blindness caused by their intellectual snobbery, their inability to understand what was happening. I think we have the same experience here. Those of us in New York, Boston, San Francisco or some of these urban pockets don’t understand how radically changed our country is, don’t understand the appeal of these buffoonish figures to tens of millions of Americans.

But don’t you feel like the tipping point is still quite a way off? Speaking personally, when I’ve read about totalitarian movements, I’ve always imagined that I’d know enough to pack up and go. That would seem to be a very premature thing to do here.

Well, most people didn’t pack up and go. The people who packed up and left were the exception, and most people thought they were crazy. My friends in Pristina had no idea what was going on in Kosovo until they were literally herded down to the train station and pushed into boxcars and shipped like cattle to Macedonia. And that’s not because they weren’t intelligent or perceptive. It was because, like all of us, they couldn’t comprehend how fragile the world was around them, and how radically and quickly it could change. I think that’s a human phenomenon.

Hitler was in power in 1933, but it took him until the late ’30s to begin to consolidate his program. He never spoke about the Jews because he realized that raw anti-Semitism didn’t play out with the German public. All he did was talk about family values and restoring the moral core of Germany. The Russian revolution took a decade to consolidate. It takes time to acculturate a society to a radical agenda, but that acculturation has clearly begun here, and I don’t see people standing up and trying to stop them. The Democratic policy of trying to reach out to a movement that attacks whole segments of the society as worthy only of conversion or eradication is frightening.

Doesn’t it make sense for the Democrats to reach out to the huge number of evangelicals who aren’t necessarily part of the religious right, but who may be sympathetic to some of its rhetoric? Couldn’t those people be up for grabs?

I don’t think they are up for grabs because they have been ushered into a non-reality-based belief system. This isn’t a matter of, “This is one viewpoint, here’s another.” This is a world of magic and signs and miracles and wonders, and [on the other side] is the world you hate, the liberal society that has shunted you aside and thrust you into despair. The rage that is directed at those who go after the movement is the rage of those who fear deeply being pushed back into this despair, from which many of the people I interviewed feel they barely escaped. A lot of people talked about suicide attempts or thoughts of suicide — these people really reached horrific levels of desperation. And now they believe that Jesus has a plan for them and intervenes in their life every day to protect them, and they can’t give that up.

So in a way, the movement really has helped them.

Well, in same way unemployed workers in Weimar Germany were helped by becoming brownshirts, yes. It gave them a sense of purpose. Look, you could always tell in a refugee camp in Gaza when one of these kids joined Hamas, because suddenly they were clean, their djelleba was white, they walked with a sense of purpose. It was a very similar kind of conversion experience. If you go back and read [Arthur] Koestler and other writers on the Communist Party, you find the same thing.

This is a question that I get all the time, and you’ve probably heard it too: Do you think Bush is a believer, or do you think he and his administration are just cynically manipulating their foot soldiers?

I think he’s a believer, to the extent that this belief system empowers his own arrogant sense of privilege and intellectual shallowness. When you know right and wrong, when you’ve been mandated by God to lead, you don’t have to ask hard questions, you don’t have to listen to anyone else. I think that plays into the Bush character pretty well.

I think there are probably other aspects or tenets of this belief system that he finds distasteful and doesn’t like. But in a real sense he fits the profile: a washout, not a very good family life — apparently his mother was a horror show — a drunk, a drug addict, coasted because of his daddy, reaches middle age, hasn’t done anything with his life, finds Jesus. That fits a lot of people in the movement.

What do you think of the argument, exemplified by David Kuo’s book, “Tempting Faith,” that this administration has duped the Christian right and hasn’t really given them much in exchange for their support?

It’s given them a lot of money. It’s given them a few hundred million dollars. I wouldn’t call that nothing.

Kuo’s argument is that Bush promised $8 billion for the faith-based initiative but that there was actually very little new funding. What’s missing in what he says, I think, is that while there was little new money, there was a massive effort to shift money that was already appropriated from secular social services to evangelical groups. But if you believe, as Kuo apparently did, that compassionate conservatism really meant helping the poor, then Bush hasn’t really done anything to further it.

Well, [Bush] never wanted to help the poor. That was just to sell us on a program — he didn’t have any intention of helping the poor.

Did you start out to research this book with the intellectual framework that comes from Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper in mind?

Yes. I studied a lot of Christian ethics, a lot of Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, that’s how I was formed, so when I covered conflicts as a foreign correspondent, the peculiarity of my education made me look at those conflicts a little differently. I was always very wary of utopian movements because I had it pounded into me that utopianism is a dangerous phenomenon, of the left or the right. I was very critical of liberation theology because it essentially endorsed violence to create a Christian society. The way that I articulated that was really through writers like Popper and Arendt. I needed Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt to get a lot of the despotic movements that I was covering, to give myself a vocabulary by which to explain these movements to myself. Even when I teach journalism classes I tend to make them read “The Origins of Totalitarianism” because I think it’s such an important book. I’ve read the book seven or eight times.

When did you see its relevance to the Christian right?

Because of my close coverage, or close connection with movements like Hamas or Milosevic, or even some of the despotic movements in Latin America like Eframn Rmos Montt in Guatemala, I’d already been conditioned to smell these people out. And then of course coming out the church and coming out of seminary, the combination was such that as soon as I came back from overseas, I had a sense of who these people were. There was a strange kind of confluence from my experience as a reporter and my academic background that came together and gave me a kind of sensitivity to the Christian right that maybe other people didn’t have immediately. I don’t know how much it’s apparent, but it’s an angry book.

That’s very apparent.

Good. My father remains the most important influence on my life, and he was a Presbyterian minister, a devout Christian. I quote H. Richard Niebuhr saying, “Religion is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people.” I wouldn’t describe myself as particularly pious but I certainly would describe myself as religious. And when I see how these people are manipulating the Christian religion for personal empowerment and wealth and for the destruction of the very values that I think are embodied in the teachings of Jesus Christ, I’m angry.

The country is a traveler’s paradise. The beaches are beautiful, and the coast is dotted with lovely, bohemian seaside towns like Kas where you can buy local pomegranate wine and swim in the Mediterranean. The lunar landscape of Cappadocia, with ancient houses and churches carved out of the soft, pale volcanic rock, is otherworldly. You can take a ride in a hot air balloon, and they’ll dip low enough so you can pick apricots off the trees. Istanbul is one of the most gorgeous cities in the world, like a cross between Paris and Jerusalem, with street life to rival Barcelona’s.

But Turkey is intriguing for reasons that go far beyond touristic pleasures. For anyone interested in the fate of a world tormented by authoritarianism, emerging fundamentalism, ethnic animosities and post-colonial furies, Turkey is an endlessly fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking puzzle. Americans can see flashes of their own situation in a nation struggling to balance its secular foundations with populist religious fervor. The collision between democracy and enlightenment modernism — an agonizing one for liberals to contemplate — animates much of its politics, as popularly elected Islamists are checked by the power of the resolutely secular army. Stretching between Greece and Iran, the country wants to join the E.U., but its past is bound up with the Middle East. Istanbul, which literally straddles Europe and Asia, is a rare Muslim city that retains a Jewish community, but Turkey is far from a beacon of pluralism — attempts by the country’s Kurds to express their identity are ruthlessly suppressed. The capital feels open and European, and yet its writers are censored and tormented by a government jealous of its national pride. In as much as it is part of the Middle East, Turkey is both one of the region’s great success stories and the birthplace of many of its miseries, since it was the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent Western redrawing of national boundaries that gave the world such unfortunate artificial configurations as Iraq.

If you want to understand how the multiethnic Ottoman Empire gave way to the fierce nationalisms of the modern Middle East, there’s no better book than David Fromkin’s “A Peace to End All Peace” (1989). Fromkin tells the story of how, after World War I, the European victors carved up the Ottoman Empire into the countries that exist today. His sprawling history portrays the prewar ferment among the modernizing young Turks, the exploits of Mustapha Kemal — now known as Ataturk — the army officer and revered founder of modern Turkey, the adventures of Lawrence of Arabia and the intrigues of various kingmaking Western Orientalists.

Fromkin’s book is enormously enlightening, but novels can be even more helpful than histories in really trying to grasp the soul of a place. Turkey’s most famous writer is Orhan Pamuk, and his hallucinatory 2002 novel “Snow” — first published in English in 2004 — is a parable of the country’s current struggle over religion and democracy, in which liberalism is backed by the undemocratic might of the military. The story begins with an exiled poet and former student radical named Ka returning to Turkey from Germany and traveling to the eastern city of Kars. He’s ostensibly investigating a string of female suicides, but he’s really hoping to kindle an affair with Ipek, a ravishing former classmate.

The suicide epidemic among young Turkish women is real; as the New York Times reported in July, “Every few weeks in Batman and the surrounding area in southeast Anatolia, which is poor, rural and deeply influenced by conservative Islam, a young woman tries to take her life.” According to the Times, the suicides are encouraged by parents who want to spare sons the punishments associated with honor killings.

The disturbing story “Snow” tells, though, is far more than a dramatization of these horrors. It’s a vertiginous thriller and an enigmatic intellectual drama hinging on the nature of freedom and authenticity. Some of the girls kill themselves because of misogynist abuses, but one takes her life after the authorities outlaw the wearing of head scarves in school, a move intended to enforce secularism. A radical, avant-garde theater troupe arrives in Kars to perform a play about a heroically modern woman who burns her head scarf and is threatened by fundamentalist thugs. But the actors themselves turn thuggish, instigating a surreal, farcical coup against local Islamists. The troupe’s leader, a lover of European culture, defends authoritarianism in the name of liberty, saying, “If we don’t let the army and the state deal with these dangerous fanatics, we’ll end up back in the Middle Ages, sliding into anarchy, traveling the doomed path already traveled by so many tribal nations in the Middle East.”

Reading “Snow,” it’s clear that Islamism isn’t really a resurgence of tradition in Turkey; it is its own kind of political radicalism. Conservative Islam is barely a factor at all in the rural world of one of Turkey’s most famous novels, the Kurdish writer Yashar Kemal’s 1955 “Memed, My Hawk.” A Robin Hood story that reads like an epic folk tale, “Memed, My Hawk” seems to take place far from the modern world. It’s the tale of Memed, a poor, fatherless boy, who, tormented by a sadistic feudal landlord, grows up to be a legendary brigand striving for justice and revenge. Kemal’s language immerses readers in Anatolian village life; it can be alternately sublime and cheerfully ribald. I love this offhand exchange between an innkeeper and a friendly old man:

“Loudly enough for the innkeeper to hear from where he was scurrying to and fro, the old man shouted: ‘There’s that pimp who calls himself an innkeeper. Go and tell him your troubles.’

“The innkeeper heard and laughed. ‘Listen, if you’re looking for a pimp, the real chief of all pimps is that white-beard by your side. His beard has grown white from his misdeeds!’

” ‘Look,’ said the old man, ‘you pimp-in-chief, these young men want a bed.’”

While “Memed, My Hawk” feels timeless, the brilliant Elif Shafak writes novels that are audaciously postmodern and politically courageous. She is, as the Economist has written, “well set to challenge Mr. Pamuk as Turkey’s foremost contemporary novelist.” She’s also facing state persecution for writing about the Armenian genocide in her latest book, “The Bastard of Istanbul.” It won’t be published in the United States until next year, but Maureen Freely quoted one inflammatory passage in a recent piece in the New York Times Book Review: “My father is Barsam Tchakhmakhchian, my great-uncle is Dikran Stamboulian, his father is Varvant Istanboluian, my name is Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian, all my family tree has been Something Somethingian, and I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives in the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915, but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the genocide because I was raised by some Turk named Mustapha!”

Several of Shafak’s earlier works are available in translation, including “The Gaze” (1999), an utterly strange, surprisingly riveting novel that goes back and forth between the story of an obese women and her dwarf lover in modern Istanbul and that of a freak show more than a hundred years earlier. Shafak loves to portray the rich cosmopolitanism of the Ottoman Empire; in one scene she conjures a crowd of women, “Jewish women from the miserable shacks of Balat, Gypsy women who carried their babies on their backs and their secrets in their bosoms, spoiled, pink-skinned Circassion girls, Arab women with mascara and jet-black hair, brides-to-be who tied silk handkerchiefs to the branches of the trees around the tent, rich Armenian women with palanquins inlaid with mother-of-pearl, Persian women who smelled of hot spices” The book is compelling for much more than its local color, though. Shafak pulls off the almost impossible trick of turning feminist theory into art, capturing the humiliating sting of strangers’ appraising gazes better than anyone I’ve ever read. It would be fascinating no matter what city it was set in and can be appreciated anywhere, but I can think of few things lovelier than reading it on the roof deck of one of the small hotels in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet District, the Blue Mosque in the background.

About 100 people gathered for the rally in the vicious heat, many of them, from huge-bellied men to toddlers, wearing Benham’s T-shirts. It was three days into Operation Save America’s weeklong siege of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the last abortion clinic in Mississippi. From July 15 to July 22, protesters — sometimes a few dozen, sometimes more than 100 — surrounded the clinic, an off-white stucco building ringed by a metal gate, hoisting photos of aborted fetuses blown up to the size of 4-year-olds. The clinic brought in McCoy Faulkner, a security expert who specializes in violence against abortion providers. It changed its hours to deal with the onslaught, scheduling some appointments before 6 a.m. so patients could dodge the horde of demonstrators who converged a few hours later. Still, even at dawn, women had to brave a gantlet of shouting people.

At the Capitol, demonstrators formed two makeshift walls with huge signs that juxtaposed photos of aborted fetuses with lynching victims and corpses piled up at Nazi death camps. Behind them rose a statue — a monument honoring Confederate women — of garlanded ladies succoring a fallen man. Organizers set up speakers and played the kind of celestial music that signifies heaven in Hollywood movies, lending the proceedings a kitschy intensity. Standing before the assembly, Benham, a sturdy Texan with sun-cured skin, short brown hair, and the hearty manner of a high school football coach, cried out, “What is happening in Jackson today is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany!”

To Benham, waiting for a new Supreme Court justice to overturn Roe v. Wade is like being a German who heard and saw nothing. Impatient for change, he and his followers are determined to make Roe functionally irrelevant — the right to an abortion doesn’t mean much if women can’t exercise it. In their struggle, they’ve made the Jackson Women’s Health Organization their ground zero. Theyre convinced that if they can close down the last abortion clinic in the state, where abortion rights already hang by a political thread, their crusade will gain momentum across the country. On July 30, another antiabortion group, Oh Saratoga, based in upstate New York, commenced its own seven days of protests in Jackson. Its Web site promises to bring a “summer tsunami against that states final ‘abortuary.’”

“We’re not waiting for the president, we’re not waiting for the Congress, we’re not waiting for the Supreme Court,” Benham told me a few days before the rally. “This issue can’t be won from the top down.” At Benham’s side for much of the week was Norma McCorvey, the Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade, who since 1995 has been an evangelical antiabortion activist. “It would really please the Lord God if Mississippi becomes the first abortion-free state,” she said, as she stood in front of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization one scorched morning. “Then all he’d have to worry about are the other 49.” She happily reeled off the names of states where abortion bans have been introduced or passed: “South Dakota, Ohio, Louisiana”

Benham’s “ecclesiastical court,” a ritualized indictment of the Supreme Court for breaching God’s law, dramatized his contempt for the current legal regime. Before him sat a small grill like the kind football fans use at tailgate parties; he asked the two dozen or so children in attendance to gather around it.

One by one, as Elysian hymns poured from the speakers, Benham produced the texts of objectionable Supreme Court decisions. He started with 1947′s Everson v. Board of Education, the case where Justice Hugo Black wrote, “In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a wall of separation between Church and State.” He went on to decisions outlawing school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading. As each decision was introduced, a man sounded a shofar. Benham shouted denunciations and asked the kids to rip up the pages and throw them onto the grill. Someone pounded a bass drum.

“There’s coming a time when it might cost you your life to stand up for King Jesus,” Benham told the children. “It is our prayer that if you go down, you go down standing up in the name of Jesus.”

When Benham got to Roe v. Wade, he summoned McCorvey, a short woman with curly brown hair, dressed in a violet T-shirt and shorts. She and Benham go way back. He opened Operation Rescue’s national headquarters next to the abortion clinic where she worked; he gradually won her over during her smoking breaks. In 1995, Benham baptized her in a backyard swimming pool in Dallas. At the Capitol, he handed her the pages of the decision bearing her alias and she ripped it up, telling the crowd, “You’re so beautiful. I’m so sorry for what I did.”

“We love you, Miss Norma,” Benham said. He continued with his excoriations, condemning 1993′s Planned Parenthood v. Casey and 2003′s Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down the state’s anti-sodomy law. “Lawrence versus Texas did away with all 4,000 years of historical law,” he said. “It does away with everything the Bible says!”

Benham then produced a rainbow gay flag. As he lamented the way homosexuals “stole the colors of the rainbow,” several men in attendance grabbed pieces of it and ripped it to shreds. Then he held up a paperback copy of the Koran and said, “We have one more issue that we must deal with. With this issue we have three choices. We can either kill them, be killed by them, or we can convert them to Christ.” Several cheers went up in the crowd, and then, after several more minutes of preaching, Benham began to tear the Koran apart. He offered pieces of the book to the men in the crowd — hands seemed to reach out from all directions to take them — and they destroyed the pages further, throwing the scraps onto the grill.

Rows of cops were standing behind him, ready to move the moment they saw an illegal spark. Evidently, Benham didn’t want to go to jail that day, so he waited until the evening, when the group held its regular meeting at the Making Jesus Real Church in the nearby town of Pearl. The Operation Save America members put the grill in the church parking lot. McCorvey struck the match that burned the shredded symbols.

Operation Save America can seem more like a farce than a threat. Yet for abortion-rights advocates, it’s both. On the surface, Benham’s Mississippi sojourn didn’t look victorious. There were, at most, a few hundred demonstrators in Jackson. The daily protests at the Jackson Women’s Health Organization created a constant, low-level state of emergency among the clinic’s staff, intimidated many of the patients, and added to the anxiety that plagues doctors living with the omnipresent threat of violence. But it was a far cry from the 1990s, when the group, then known as Operation Rescue, brought tens of thousands of protesters to cities like Wichita and Buffalo, where they tried, and sometimes succeeded, in physically shutting clinics down.

Lately, though, the tension has been rising. The same day as Benham’s rally at the Capitol, protesters descended on the block of Dr. Joseph Booker, a gynecologist at the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, for the first time in 10 years. They went door to door, ringing bells and telling people their neighbor was a baby killer. A few weeks before, protesters led by Benham showed up at the Raleigh, N.C., home of Susan Hill, owner of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization. It was the first time that had ever happened. Soon Hill started receiving death threats. “We worry that they’re being emboldened,” Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation and a longtime friend of Hill’s, said of militant antiabortion activists. “There does seem to be an increase in activity and harassment.”

Betty Thompson, former director of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, noted that someone has rented an apartment across the street from the clinic as a base for protesters. “I think they feel they have the power,” she said. “All eyes are on Mississippi now.”

Thompson retired from the clinic in 2004 due to health problems; these days, she’s a consultant. She’s a warm, 58-year-old black woman whose work has been inspired by the misery she endured when she got pregnant as a 16-year-old high school student in a small Mississippi town. She had the baby and today adores her grown son. But she still wishes she’d had a choice. “It was a real tough time, a real tough time,” she said, recalling the anger of her family and the ostracism of her peers. “It’s too hard on the woman, too, too hard. So you’re either on the side of the fetus or the side of the woman.”

A decade ago, there were six clinics in Mississippi, but the combination of constant harassment and onerous state regulations led one after another to shut down; since 2004, Jackson Women’s Health Organization has been alone. “They’re using the tactics of a war of attrition,” Smeal said. “What you do is you [attack] in the hinterlands, don’t hit them in their strong point until you become so strong that you can penetrate it. So they target, and then they move on. Close that clinic, move to the next. It’s a classic strategy.”

The Jackson Women’s Health Organization won’t fall easily. Hill and Booker are every bit as committed as Benham and his crew are. Hill owns five clinics throughout the country and is used to being on constant alert. Over the years, her facilities have been subjected to 17 arsons or fire bombings, as well as butyric acid attacks and anthrax threats. One of the doctors who worked for her, David Gunn, was murdered. “Fortunately we’ve been safer in the last few years for whatever reasons,” Hill said. “Thank God there haven’t been the shootings. But there is a feeling that things are ramping up. The protesters are more vocal — they’re screaming, not just protesting, more like they were in the late ’80s.”

By and large, the people who’ve shown up in Jackson have not been as belligerent as their rhetoric. Historically, though, the doctors who’ve been targeted by protests have been the ones most likely to be assaulted or killed by extremists. “All we can say is, when protests at a clinic go up, that’s when there tends to be a shooting,” Smeal said. Many of the abortion providers who’ve been shot, including George Tiller in Wichita, Kan., John Britton in Pensacola, Fla., and Barnett Slepian in Buffalo, N.Y., had been subjects of repeated demonstrations and threats. Their names were put on hit lists, and wanted posters and information about them circulated throughout the violent wing of the antiabortion movement.

Booker is one of the gynecologists who’ve been singled out by militant antiabortion forces. He’s been stalked repeatedly, and during the 1990s, he was put under the protection of federal marshals. “We were very fearful he was going to be killed,” Smeal said.

Booker had a police escort during the recent protests, but if he’s afraid, he won’t admit it. A 62-year-old black man with a trim, white-streaked mustache and goatee, and a stud in his left ear, Booker said the harassment has been increasing, but he dismissed the protesters as “more bark than bite. If you don’t dont get intimidated, they get frustrated and don’t show up as much.” Raised on the poor outskirts of Pittsburgh and educated in San Francisco, Booker described himself as “a Yankee, pro-choice, outspoken and black. And that’s a bad combination in Mississippi.” He added, “You don’t mess with a ghetto person and think they’re going to back down.”

The doctor said he has a “deep passion in my heart” for a woman’s right to chose. He was in medical school in 1973 and recalled doing a rotation at the San Francisco General emergency room. “I saw a lady come through who had an illegal abortion,” he said. “And when you see a lady come through who is hemorrhaging, who has a fever of 104 or 105, has severe peritonitis because she had her uterus punctured, that’s a sight you don’t forget.” Nothing the protesters can do, he insisted, will close down the Jackson Women’s Health Organization. “There’s too much spirit by me, and too much spirit by Susan Hill. We are both fighters, we’ve both been through the wars. They thought we’d be closed down this week because we’re afraid of them, but they don’t know me and they don’t know Susan.”

The protests are just one side of the vise in which the Jackson Women’s Health Organization is caught. It’s also being squeezed by an expanding array of antiabortion legislation that’s made Mississippi perhaps the most difficult state in America to terminate a pregnancy. Even as the clinic hangs on, Mississippi offers the country’s clearest view of the religious right’s social agenda in action. It’s a case study of the way conservatives are making Roe irrelevant and a harbinger of an America without choice.

The state government recently came close to passing a sweeping abortion ban, and many expect it will do so in the next legislative session. Republican Gov. Haley Barbour — who declared an official “a week of prayer regarding the sanctity of human life” before the anniversary of Roe v. Wade — has said he intends to sign it. Even without the ban, the state leads the nation in antiabortion legislation. It’s one of only two states in America where teenagers seeking abortions need the consent of both parents, and one of only two where abortion providers are required to give patients medically inaccurate information linking abortion to breast cancer. Abortion facilities must comply with 35 pages of regulations, including vague directives like one mandating that clinics be located in an “attractive setting.”

The same strategy at work in Mississippi is being used all across the country. According to the National Abortion Federation, 500 state-level antiabortion bills were introduced last year, and 26 were signed into law. The number of abortion providers dropped 11 percent between 1996 and 2000, and almost 90 percent of U.S. counties lack abortion services. At the national level, Republicans are working to strengthen these restrictions; last week, the Senate passed a bill making it a crime to take a minor across state lines to evade parental consent laws.

Not everyone in Mississippi is antiabortion, of course, but the movement’s ideology tends to pervade public life. One morning, a white taxi that said “Choose Life” on its side pulled into the parking lot of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Out jumped one of the clinic’s surgical technicians. She had been driven to work by her boyfriend, a cab driver, whose boss, the owner of Veterans Taxi, had emblazoned the antiabortion message on every car in his fleet. Many people drive cars with special state license plates that say “Choose Life”; Mississippi gives much of the proceeds from the plates to Christian crisis pregnancy centers.

More than two dozen such centers operate in the state, serving as the most prominent dispensers of reproductive health advice. They look very much like ordinary women’s health clinics and offer free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds, but they exist primarily to dissuade women from having abortions. When Booker ran a clinic in Gulfport, Miss., a crisis pregnancy center set up right next door. It imitated his sign, and a lot of his patients ended up wandering in there by accident, only to be confused when people who looked like nurses tried to talk them out of aborting.

Crisis pregnancy centers, or CPCs, have a record of misleading women. During a recent investigation into CPCs, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., had staffers call 25 centers posing as pregnant 17-year-olds. They reached 23 of them, and of those 23, 20 provided false or misleading information about abortion. “Often these federally funded centers grossly misrepresented the medical risks of abortion, telling the callers that having an abortion could increase the risk of breast cancer, result in sterility, and lead to suicide and ‘post-abortion stress disorder,’” Waxman wrote in a report released this month.

None of those claims is true. The National Cancer Institute concluded in 2002 that “induced abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk.” Similarly, medical consensus holds that first-trimester abortions don’t impair fertility. The American Psychological Association reports: “The best studies available on psychological responses to unwanted pregnancy terminated by abortion in the United States suggest that severe negative reactions are rare, and they parallel those following other normal life stresses.”

Like other crisis pregnancy centers nationwide, those in Mississippi tell their clients that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer, infertility and a host of psychiatric disorders. Although the women who come to them are virtually all both sexually active and unprepared for motherhood, they are counseled against contraception, told that abstinence is the only answer for the unwed.

At Jackson’s Center for Pregnancy Choices, which gets roughly $20,000 a year in payments from the state’s sale of Choose Life plates, I picked up a pamphlet about condoms. It warns that “using condoms is like playing Russian roulette … In chamber one you have a condom that breaks and you get syphilis, in chamber two, you have an STD that condoms don’t protect against at all, in chamber three you have a routinely fatal disease, in chamber four you have a new STD that hasn’t even been studied.”

According to Barbara Beavers, the pretty, honey-voiced mother of four who runs the Center for Pregnancy Choices, as many as 40 percent of the pregnancy tests the center administer come back negative. Some of the women who take them live with their boyfriends, making a commitment to abstinence unlikely. But Beavers is unapologetic about her opposition to birth control, in part because she thinks a woman whose contraception fails might feel more entitled to an abortion. “They think, it wasn’t their fault anyhow, so let’s just go ahead and kill it,” she said. The best birth control, she added, “is self-control.”

A girl in Mississippi would have to do some digging to find other sources of information about contraception. When it comes to sex education, the schools teach either abstinence or nothing at all. “You would be surprised what they don’t understand about their own bodies,” Thompson, the former director of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, said about the clinic’s patients. “It still amazes me what they don’t know.”

Even when girls and women manage to learn about birth control, getting it isn’t always easy. Besides private physicians, the only places that provide birth control prescriptions are the Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the offices of the State Department of Health. Once a woman gets a prescription, there’s no guarantee she’ll be able to fill it. Mississippi is one of eight states with “conscience clause” laws that protect the jobs of pharmacists who refuse to dispense contraceptives. It’s especially hard to obtain emergency contraception. According to a survey by the Feminist Majority Foundation, of 25 pharmacies in Jackson, only two stock EC. Booker said he’s written several EC prescriptions, only to find his patients unable to fill them.

There’s no indication that Mississippi’s policies have led to increased chastity. There is, however, plenty of evidence that both women and their children are suffering. Mississippi has the third-highest teen pregnancy rate in the country and the highest teenage birth rate. It is tied with Louisiana for America’s worst infant morality rate. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, more than half of the state’s children under 6 years old live in destitution.

Despite all the hurdles placed in their way, many women in the state remain determined to end their unwanted pregnancies. They come from as far as three and a half hours away to reach the Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Often they have to make the trip twice — or spend the night in their cars — because Mississippi mandates a 24-hour waiting period between a woman’s initial consultation and her abortion. Even when Operation Save America isn’t in town, a handful of protesters maintain a constant presence.

The most faithful is C. Roy McMillan, who sees protesting abortion as his full-time job and says he’s been arrested 65 times. His wife, a former abortion provider who, after being born again, became a gynecologist who refuses to prescribe contraceptives, supports him financially. McMillan is one of 34 signatories to a 1998 statement that calls the murder of doctors who perform abortions “justifiable … for the purpose of defending the lives of unborn children.” He describes the late Paul Hill — the murderer of gynecologist Dr. John Britton and his bodyguard, retired Air Force Lt. Col. James Herman Barrett — as a friend.

By Mississippi law, women seeking abortions must sign informed consent forms, certifying that they’ve been told about the risks of abortion, including “danger to subsequent pregnancies, breast cancer, and infertility.” Thus doctors in Mississippi are legally required to mislead their patients. At least, that seems to be the intention. Booker gets around it by taking the wording of the law literally. When patients come in for a consultation, he tells them about the links between abortion, breast cancer and infertility, explaining they are nonexistent.

For Thompson, the fact that women will leap through so many hoops to terminate their pregnancies shows that abortion will never disappear, no matter how hard the government makes it. “I’ve found that if a woman wants an abortion, she’ll do whatever it takes,” she said.

Despite the determination of everyone at the clinic, both the size and length of the protests were clearly interfering with normal operations. Thompson suspects the demonstrators kept some women away — at least temporarily. One day, in the heat of Operation Save America’s campaign, she sighed and said, “Those people who can wait, I’m sure are waiting. The clinic is probably going to have a lot of work next week.”

In 2000, some of those involved in the murders were finally brought to trial. “The stakes could not be higher,” writes Ebadi. “It was the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic that the state had acknowledged that it had murdered its critics, and the first time a trial would be convened to hold the perpetrators accountable.”

The victims’ lawyers were given 10 days to review massive stacks of government files on the case. Recalling an afternoon bent over the dossier, Ebadi writes, “I had reached a page more detailed, and more narrative, than any previous section, and I slowed down to focus. It was the transcript of a conversation between a government minister and a member of the death squad. When my eyes fell on the sentence that would haunt me for years to come, I thought I had misread. I blinked once, but it stared back at me from the page: ‘The next person to be killed is Shirin Ebadi.’ Me.” As she recounts, she didn’t have time to process the shock, because she needed to keep working. “Only after dinner, after my daughters went to bed, did I tell my husband. So, something interesting happened to me at work today, I began.”

Neither death threats nor incessant harassment were ever able to stop Ebadi, 59, from challenging the Iranian regime on behalf of its most beleaguered citizens, and in 2003, her advocacy for Iranian women and human rights activists earned her the Nobel Peace Prize. In her often fascinating memoir, she tells of fighting for justice in a country where the rule of law has disappeared, replaced by a brutal, arbitrary absurdism worthy of a Persian Kafka.

Like many liberal intellectuals, Ebadi hated the shah and supported Iran’s Islamic revolution, but it quickly turned on her. While only in her 20s, Ebadi had become one of Iran’s first female judges. Once Ayatollah Khomeini took over, the same revolutionaries who had previously sought her support decreed that women jurists were un-Islamic. “In a cruel bureaucratic shuffle, I was appointed secretary of the same court I had once presided over as a judge,” she writes.

No matter how many indignities she suffered, Ebadi refused to leave her country, eventually building a pro-bono law practice to represent the regime’s victims. One of her most perverse cases involved the family of Leila Fathi, a young girl who was raped and murdered by three men. One of the men committed suicide in prison, and the other two were sentenced to death. Under Iranian law, though, a woman’s life is worth only half that of a man’s. “In this instance, the judge ruled that the ‘blood money’ for the two men was worth more than the life of the murdered nine-year-old girl, and he demanded that her family come up with thousands of dollars to finance their executions,” Ebadi writes. The family ruined itself trying to raise the money; both Leila’s father and brother were reduced to trying to sell their kidneys.

Ebadi waged both a legal and a media campaign on behalf of Leila’s family. She didn’t win them any measure of justice, but she focused both national and international attention on the regime’s misogynistic abuses, taking great risks to do so. “We lived with daily examples of even prominent grand ayatollahs who had been defrocked (unheard of in Shia Islam) or placed under house arrest for speaking out against executions and harsh forms of criminal punishment, such as the chopping off of hands,” she writes.

Ebadi would eventually be imprisoned, and her life was repeatedly endangered. But her determination to change Iran from within hasn’t wavered. When the reformist President Mohammad Khatami was elected in 1997, many hoped for a loosening in the Iranian regime. “For a few stretches during the years of 1998 and 1999, the country experienced a flowering of open debate and freedom of the press that some optimistic souls called a Tehran spring,” she writes.

The optimists have since been disappointed. Last year’s election elevated the hard-line Mahmoud Ahmedinajad. Iran is now locked in an escalating confrontation with America over its nuclear program, and the government’s rhetoric is militant and apocalyptic. In a despairing New York Times profile, Abbas Abdi, one of the hostage takers at the American embassy who later became a reformist, said the reform movement no longer exists. But Ebadi says she still believes that democracy will come to Iran from within, as long as America doesn’t try to bomb it into being.

Salon spoke to Ebadi at her hotel during her recent visit to New York. A small woman who doesn’t cover her hair outside of Iran, she spoke through a translator. Throughout, her voice was even and her manner impassive except when she was talking about the plight of Iranian women. Then she would softly, almost unconsciously pound her fist on the table.

In “Iran Awakening,” you write that you didn’t know how winning the Nobel Prize would affect your ability to work — whether it would afford you a measure of protection, or give the authorities new motivation to crack down on you. How has your situation in Iran changed since then?

Working in the field of human rights is never easy. I already had difficulties before getting the prize. I had been in prison, and on several occasions they wanted to murder me. I’m used to getting threatening letters.

After I got the prize, my situation did not change inside the country. When I won, the radio and television — the state radio and television — did not even want to announce the news. It was only 24 hours later that one of the channels on TV — at 11 p.m. in the evening, when practically everybody goes to bed — announced the news. And then that was it.

So I won’t say getting the prize has made things easier for me inside the country, but obviously at an international level, things have become much easier for me. Because of this my voice is better heard at the international level.

Has the situation for women in Iran changed under Ahmadinejad?

The situation for women is not good in Iran, unfortunately. But that doesn’t mean it was better before Ahmadinejad. I can give you several examples of our laws. A man can have four wives, and he can divorce his wives without giving any reasons. But getting a divorce for a woman is extremely difficult, and in some situations impossible. The value given to the life of a woman is half that given to the life of a man. And on matters of testimony, the testimony of two women is equivalent to the testimony of one man. When a lady is married and she wants to travel, she has to have the written authorization of her husband in order to get her passport and the right to travel. But these are all laws that precede Ahmadinejad.

In your book, though, and in other stories from Iran, it seems as if the enforcement of such laws and the day-to-day persecution of women changes depending on the political situation.

During the reformist government, two laws were changed in favor of women. One of them was about custody rights for women. It used to be that after a divorce, the custody of sons until the age of 2, and the custody of girls until the age of 7, was with the mother, and then after they had reached that age, they would be taken away, if necessary by force, and given to the father. Obviously, women were very much protesting against this law. The answer of the government was systematically that this is Islamic law, and we cannot change it.

But then the women kept on fighting, and when I got the Nobel Prize and came back to Iran, about a million people were there expecting me at the airport, and most of them were women. When they came to welcome me so overwhelmingly, they wanted to show one thing to the government — they wanted to demonstrate that they were not satisfied with the legal status of women in Iran. And the government got scared and changed the law.

In the book, you write about how, after the revolution, the sudden legal inequality between you and your husband made you resentful and caused tension in your marriage. Your husband agreed to a progressive solution: He signed a “postnuptial agreement” giving you the right to divorce him at any time and retain custody of your children. But he is the exception — most husbands wouldn’t do that. So how does inequality affect Iranian relationships?

What happens usually is that when people are to be married, they add a number of conditions in their contract so that this inequality disappears. For example, my daughter Negar was married last week. When she was getting into the marital contract, one of the conditions was that she will be free to walk out of the marriage whenever she wants. So this is something that’s authorized — you can add conditions to your contract. But that’s not sufficient. I think the law should protect all women.

One of the most interesting things that I learned from your book is that women now outnumber men in Iranian universities, and that this is an inadvertent consequence of the Islamic revolution. You write, “If the universities had been dens of sin in the shah’s Iran, what were they now? Rehabilitated! Healthy! There was no pretext left for the patriarchs to keep their daughters out of school, and they slowly found themselves in classrooms, and away from their parents in dormitories in Tehran.” Now there’s a huge wave of educated Iranian women. When do you think it will finally crest, and these women will start demanding much more freedom?

It is already bearing fruit. I talked about this law on the custody of kids. I think this is the beginning, and women will be getting more in the future.

In February, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice requested $85 million for a plan to promote democracy in Iran, partly by funding reformists and dissidents. Has this increased the suspicion and harassment of reformists in Iran?

I think that this is not in favor of democracy in Iran. The people who live in Iran will never dare accept any foreign money, because this would be the first proof of treason.

In January, you co-wrote an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times saying that America was undermining Iran’s “fledgling democratic movement” by demonizing the country. As the conflict between our governments heats up, what effect has it had on your country’s reformists?

It’s very well known that any time a country is under threat from outside, the government uses it as an excuse and starts talking about the necessity of preserving national security, and therefore individual liberties suffer.

A recent article in Time magazine suggested that the administration might ratchet up the conflict in order to get Americans to rally around the president again. How worried are Iranians about the possibility of an American attack?

Some people are worried. People are very critical toward the government, but I think that if there is an attack against Iran, people will forget about their criticism, and they will rally with the government. Any attack on Iran will be good for the government and will actually damage the democratic movement in Iran.

Even after Iraq, there are still some Americans who insist that many Iranians want our country to liberate them, and that they’ll support us if we try to institute regime change. What would you say to them?

Again, the people of Iran are very critical of their government, but they will not allow a single American soldier to step foot in Iran. The problems between Iran and America have only one solution — direct negotiations between the two countries.

Do you see similarities between the fundamentalists in America and those in Iran?

Once in a while I have the impression that what Mr. Bush says is very much like what Mr. Ahmadinejad says. For example, when Mr. Bush says he has a mission from God to settle the problems in the Middle East. Mr. Bush sometimes wants to bring democracy through the use of force, like the government of Iran wants to push people by force into paradise.

The other day, the New York Times ran a profile of one of the hostage takers at the American embassy in 1979 who later became a reformist. He was very pessimistic about Khatami’s failure to bring more freedom to the country, and said that the reform movement no longer exists. Do you agree? Is the reform movement dead?

I don’t agree with that. People are unhappy with the situation in Iran, and they’re also very tired of all sorts of violence. You should not forget that during the past 27 years, the population has known one revolution and eight years of war with Iraq. So there’s no other way than reform.

What will it take to bring democracy to Iran? Will there have to be another great outpouring, like the mass demonstrations that led to the fall of the shah?

That was a revolution. But I don’t think the 21st century is the century of revolutions. It’s the century of reforms. It should be done in an amicable way, just as the women were able to change the custody law, although the government had resisted any change for 20 years, and had always insisted this is an Islamic law and we simply cannot modify it.

If the people support the goals of the reformists, how did Ahmadinejad get elected?

Because the electoral law says that any candidate who puts his name forward must be approved by the Guardian Council. Any person who is slightly critical of the government is considered not competent. More than 90 percent of candidates are considered incompetent for electoral purposes.

Let me give you a comparison that will show you how Mr. Ahmadinejad was elected. We have a population of 70 million. Forty-nine million can vote. Mr. Khatami was elected with 22 million votes. Mr. Ahmadinejad, during the second round of the elections, when all the other competitors had been eliminated, got 14 million votes.

Why do you think fundamentalism has been on the rise in so many countries?

It is fanaticism — that’s the source. I’ll tell you an old Iranian tale. God was sitting in seventh heaven, and truth was like a mirror in the hands of God. This mirror fell from seventh heaven to earth, and it was shattered into little pieces, and every piece went into a house. All people got a little piece. So everybody has a piece of the truth. Therefore, you have as much truth and rights as I do. If you talk in this way, and prune this idea, then there won’t be any problems among people.