AILSA CHANG, HOST:
A small network of anti-abortion rights activists has been making surprising progress advancing an unpopular agenda in state houses. They're pushing for bills that would classify people who get abortions as criminals, and they're trying to build support by leaning into the heightened national discussion right now about what manhood should be. NPR domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef reports.
ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: Outside a women's health clinic in Greenville, South Carolina, dozens of anti-abortion rights activists waved signs at passing cars. They were in town for a regional anti-abortion conference. Some held signs about abortion, but many carried a different message. Quote, "what is a man? Provider, protector, spiritual leader."
JASON STORMS: Every abortion involves a man, right?
YOUSEF: Jason Storms is national director of Operation Save America.
STORMS: I would argue probably the majority of abortions involve a selfish and irresponsible man who's failing to properly love the woman in his life.
YOUSEF: Storms' movement sees its anti-abortion work as tightly bound with another campaign to promote a traditional and nostalgic interpretation of what manhood should be. Storms calls it biblical manhood.
STORMS: What does godly biblical manhood look like contrasted with what our world is presenting to young men? On one side, sort of a weak, passive, - on the other side, sort of the overcompensated, you know, gangster rapper or the - you know? Both are faulty images of masculinity.
YOUSEF: Storms says Christian men should be chivalrous and like knights in shining armor. But he also emphasizes another characteristic in sermons he has given.
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STORMS: Our text in Ecclesiastes says there's a time for war. There is even a time to kill. There's a time to fight. There's a time for Christian men to engage in physical conflict.
YOUSEF: Storms says Christian men have a duty to...
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STORMS: Get an AR-15, get a combat weapon and get some other combat gear.
YOUSEF: He says they should form tactical units and train. He said he started doing this with men in his church during the pandemic. This idea that men need to be a certain way is paired with an inflexible notion of how women should be. And when those ideals are met, there's a belief that abortion will largely go away. Many who are pushing hardline policies against abortion frame them not as instruments of punishment or female oppression, but as a spur to establish godly order in America. But Dana Sussman says the reality is that restrictive abortion policies do not produce benevolent patriarchy. Instead, they put pregnant women in danger.
DANA SUSSMAN: That is the most vulnerable time for them to be victims of violence, including homicide.
YOUSEF: Sussman is with Pregnancy Justice, a legal advocacy organization for pregnant people.
SUSSMAN: And when people can't obtain abortions or have to do so surreptitiously, they are connected to their partners or their ex-partners in ways that might be really dangerous to them.
YOUSEF: And the dynamics within this extreme faction of the anti-abortion rights movement can be telling.
CAROLINE HODGES: It is heavily male led.
YOUSEF: For a few years, Caroline Hodges was involved with a group of extreme anti-abortion activists in Michigan. She ended up getting arrested with several of them in 2022.
HODGES: Being arrested by the FBI was the best thing that's ever happened to me, ever.
YOUSEF: Hodges now describes the group she was with as a cult. And she says it was part of a national network that was basically, quote, "a bunch of dudes."
HODGES: It's, like, in Operation Save America, you have, like, a handful of men that everybody looks up to. But then there's, like, this man looks up to this man, and this man looks up to this man, and this man looks - and then you have this web of people who have people underneath them all over the country.
YOUSEF: Hodges says it was sometimes shocking to see how women were treated. She recalled a male pastor who yelled at her in front of a group for having spoken in the presence of men.
HODGES: I haven't spoken to my mom in three years, but at the time, I called her in tears because of the way that I was being treated for being a woman.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Oh, that's exactly right. We are teaching our children to expose evil.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: You go out and harass businesses and...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: ...Just hand out...
YOUSEF: In Greenville, some of the anti-abortion activists moved on from the clinic protest that morning. Their next target, a catering business - they were calling out an employee who is supportive of abortion rights. But some friends of the business also showed up to distract and disrupt them. And on that tight patch of sidewalk, tensions flare between those friends of the business and the teenage boys who are being raised in these anti-abortion circles.
HANNAH MCSHERRY: Dude, you're in the way.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: I'm just...
HANNAH MCSHERRY: Say excuse me. Say excuse me.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: I wasn't walking.
HANNAH MCSHERRY: I'm a lady.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: I just stood there.
HANNAH MCSHERRY: Treat me like a lady.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: You don't look like a lady.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: You're a female, not a lady.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: That's a woman?
HANNAH MCSHERRY: I'm a lady.
HANNAH MCSHERRY: I'm a lady.
They're empowered to do that. They're raised to do that. Their fathers are proud of them doing that.
YOUSEF: Hannah McSherry is a Greenville native who says she will help any woman who needs an abortion to get one. She says the teenage boys she encounters on the protest line aren't embodiments of chivalrous, respectful, Christ-like men. But she says she feels compassion for them because the lack of nuance they're being taught about gender ends up not preparing them for what they see in real life. In her case, that looks like women who speak up, speak over men and support other women.
HANNAH MCSHERRY: I'm also a tall drink of water, you know, and a woman of size, and they are threatened by me.
YOUSEF: The panic over the state of manhood in America seems to have reached into every corner. It was the topic of a documentary by Tucker Carlson...
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TUCKER CARLSON: The decline of manhood, of virility, of physical health, all of which together threatened to doom our civilization.
YOUSEF: ...To powerful tech heads, like Mark Zuckerberg...
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MARK ZUCKERBERG: I do think a lot of our society has become very, like - I don't know. I don't even know the right word for it, but it's, like, kind of, like, neutered or, like, emasculated.
YOUSEF: ...To Congressman Glenn Grothman on the House floor, saying men have been robbed of their purpose and casting blame.
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GLENN GROTHMAN: In the 1960s, in addition to the Marxists, we had the angry feminist movement.
YOUSEF: I asked Jason Storms why, on social media, he follows Andrew Tate, a misogynist who's been charged with rape and human trafficking of women.
STORMS: Yeah, well, he's a cultural influencer. He influences millions of particularly young men.
YOUSEF: Storms says if Tate is guilty of the crimes he's been charged with, he should be executed.
STORMS: That being said, Andrew Tate - there's a lot of truth in some of the things that he says. One of the big ideas that he has is that men in this culture are - have been weakened and made effeminate.
YOUSEF: Storms says whether it's him or Tate, a message is resonating with young men who are looking for something that provides them purpose and strength and meaning. Odette Yousef, NPR News.
CHANG: This story was made possible in part by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
(SOUNDBITE OF TURNSTILE'S "LOVE LASSO") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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