The Evil of Abortion and the Greater Good of the Faith: Negotiating Catholic Survival in the Twentieth-Century American Health Care System

In 1949, the critic and controversialist Paul Blanshard launched a broadside attack on the Catholic hierarchy in the United States with the publication ofAmerican Freedom and Catholic Power,his harshly critical exploration of the Catholic church's involvement in American public life. An instant best-seller,American Freedom and Catholic Powerwent through eleven printings in its first year and continued to draw new readers throughout the 1950s. Blanshard's mission was to alert Americans to the movements of a Catholic hierarchy that was becoming, he charged, “more and more aggressive in extending the frontiers of Catholic authority into the fields of medicine, education, and foreign policy.” He reserved some of his most stinging commentary for the church's intrusion into the world of medicine.