About the Author
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.
Throughout his life, Cavanaugh-O’Keefe has worked to cross-fertilize,
and to maintain civil dialogue with opponents. He worked with Prolifers 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 15 (plus) grandchildren.
