John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe is best known for his work as an
activist, building the nonviolent branch of the pro-life movement. He has been called by “Father of the Rescue
movement” by Time, NY Times Magazine, Joan Andrews, Joe
Scheidler, and others. LA Times
writer Jim Risen’s history of the rescue movement, Wrath of Angels, also uses this title. Cavanaugh-O’Keefe notes that the title is
odd, because the real leaders of the rescue movement were mostly women,
including Jeanne Miller Gaetano, Dr. Lucy Hancock, Jo McGowan, Joan Andrews, Juli
Loesch Wiley, Kathie O’Keefe, ChristyAnne Collins, Monica Migliorino Miller,
and others. Nonetheless, his writing –
especially No Cheap Solutions and Emmanuel, Solidarity: God’s Act, Our
Response – influenced activists in the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, all over
Europe, Philippines, Korea, and Australia.
Cavanaugh-O’Keefe has been arrested 39 times for civil
disobedience. He was in the first group
that was jailed for pro-life nonviolent action (in Connecticut, 1978). He was among the three organizers of the “We
Will Stand Up” campaign, the most successful event of the rescue movement,
closing all the abortion clinics in eight of the nine cities that Pope John
Paul II visited in 1987. He initiated
the Tobit Project, taking bodies out of dumpsters in the Washington area and providing
respectful burials.
He has written extensively about eugenics and population
control; see especially The Roots of
Racism and Abortion. He participated
in efforts to resist the population reduction campaigns, particularly in South
Africa under the apartheid government, and in Bangladesh; see especially
“Deadly Neocolonialism.” He supported
the work of the Information Project for Africa, which brought feminists and
pro-lifers together to resist coercive depopulation measures at the UN
population conference in Cairo.
He has written about eugenics and human cloning. When President Clinton established his
National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC), Cavanaugh-O’Keefe helped form a
grass-roots commission in response – the American Bioethics Advisory Commission
(ABAC), and served as the ABAC’s first executive director. The first policy question that the Clinton’s
NBAC addressed was human cloning, and their report has sections on eugenics and
dignity that were written in response to input from Cavanaugh-O’Keefe. When the NBAC completed published a report
supporting human cloning as long as the clone is destroyed in the embryonic or
fetal stage, the ABAC worked with the United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops against this “clone-and-kill” proposal.
He has written about eugenics and immigration; see
especially The Sign of the Crossing
and Welcome Date TBD – and the work
in progress, McGivney’s Guests.
Throughout his life, Cavanaugh-O’Keefe has worked to
cross-fertilize, and to maintain civil dialogue with opponents. He worked with Pro-lifers for Survival, as
editor of the group’s publication, P.S. This ambitious organization brought peace
activists and pro-life activists together; their challenging work was later
taken over by Cardinal Bernardin.
Cavanaugh-O’Keefe was proud to be invited to contribute to the Women’s Studies Encyclopedia; crossing
an ideological divide, he wrote their article explaining the pro-life
movement. He worked with a common ground
group in the Washington area, bringing pro-life and pro-choice activists
together – not to find compromises, but to encourage respect and understanding.
In 2012, Cavanaugh-O’Keefe began working to strengthen the
unity of the Catholic Church by encouraging pro-life and pro-family activists
to re-consider their positions on immigration, and encouraging pro-immigration
activists to reconsider their positions on life and marriage. See www.SignoftheCrossing.org.
He and his wife live in Maryland, where they raised six
children and now enjoy 14 (plus) grandchildren.