When Roe was overturned in June of 2022, I was shocked. Angry. So shocked and angry that I wrote an entire book. Having extensively written about witch hunts and sexuality, I understood that reproductive freedom and the witch label are intertwined and have been since the days of antiquity, from the Inquisition to the message boards of QAnon.
However, after writing Reproductive Rites: The Real-Life Witches and Witch Hunts in the Centuries-Long Fight for Abortion, my biggest personal takeaway was that I should not have been surprised. About halfway through my research, I looked at the stack of books I was sourcing from and realized they were all written by pro-abortion authors and historians. What kind of journalist would I be if I didn’t read books written by the other side? So, I did.
The anti-choice crowd is not stupid. They’ve been planning the overturning of Roe since it came to be in 1973. And it wasn’t even a secret. It was laid out in well-researched and insightful books that too many liberals, like me, just didn’t take the time to read.
I get a lot of people who tell me, “Yay, I’m a witch!” when they learn that I have a book coming out about reproductive justice and witchcraft. But I have to warn readers that the occultists are not always the “good guys” in this book. From Aleister Crowley, to the uglier side of #WitchTok, spending two years researching the occult made me want to distance myself from it. While I still loathe the Reagans’ politics, they became an example of a “bad guy” far more complicated than I thought. They even turned out to be, well … witchy, further complicating the narrative of the witch.
Enjoy this excerpt from the 1980s chapter—one of my favorites—of the forthcoming Reproductive Rites: The Real-Life Witches and Witch Hunts in the Centuries-Long Fight for Abortion.
Despite Reagan’s willingness to court the Moral Majority and be swept off his feet by Mildred Jefferson, perhaps the greatest hypocrisy of the time (and an indication that the worst was yet to come) is that, despite their affiliated anti-abortion politics, Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s daughter, Patti Davis, claimed that her parents’ views on the topic were actually more liberal than you’d imagine—which is exactly what you would expect from a couple who went from being Hollywood elite to living in the White House.
Davis wrote that her father was originally more pro-choice, as demonstrated by the 1967 Therapeutic Abortion Act, signed as governor of California, which made abortion legal for victims of rape and incest and in cases where a woman’s health was in danger. Ironically, this act helped make California the state most prepared to protect abortion rights when Roe was overturned.
“My father’s views on abortion obviously shifted over the years. Throughout those years, he wrestled with his feelings,” Davis wrote in The New York Times, referring to the death of Reagan’s infant child with his former wife and actor, Jane Wyman, an experience that helped him eventually solidify his anti-choice stance.
“While he stated that abortions after rape or incest fell into the category of ‘self-defense,’ as did saving a woman’s life if pregnancy or childbirth would threaten it, he couldn’t accept the notion that a woman would choose to abort a fetus for other reasons,” she continued.
And according to Davis, when she asked her mother whether abortion should be a choice left to the pregnant person, Nancy Reagan responded, “Yes, it should.”
When Reagan was elected president, he quickly let down the Moral Majority, and they realized how easily the actor could trick and use the Christians for his own gain. As much lip service as he’d paid the anti-choice crowd, it was obvious that Reagan wasn’t going to confront Roe head-on.
And he really pissed them off when he appointed Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman justice, to the Supreme Court in 1981; O’Connor refused to join the other conservatives and work to overturn Roe, even if she did personally find it “abhorrent.” But Reagan had promised on the campaign trail to add a woman to the bench, and his selection of O’Connor in 1981 covertly threw liberals for a loop by advocating for gender equality. By the time of O’Connor’s retirement in 2006, only one other woman, Clinton nominee Ruth Bader Ginsburg, had joined the bench.
On the plus side, O’Connor was really into Halloween. Each year, the O’Connors transformed their home into a haunted house for neighbors and trick-or-treaters to visit. Sandra always dressed up in a witch costume featuring an all-black gown—“a lot like her future robe would look like,” her son Jay commented. Guests were served “poison” cider from a punch bowl smoking like a witch’s brew thanks to dry ice.
“Bottom line, our parents liked to have fun, and in a lot of different ways,” her other son Brian said, per The Arizona Republic.
None of the justices Reagan appointed remain on the Supreme Court today. Reagan appointed Scalia in 1986, and while he would die before Roe was overturned, he was a crucial piece in the Republicans’ long (and shrewd) endgame plan to kill Roe. Scalia’s death raised suspicions about the inner workings of a secret society when, at age 79, he was found dead of apparent natural causes one Saturday morning at the West Texas Cibolo Creek Ranch.
But there was never an autopsy. His body was found on a trip with fellow members of the International Order of St. Hubertus, a secret, archaic society for 1-percenters who are also hunters, complete with robes, grand titles and rituals dedicated to St. Hubert, the patron saint of hunters. This led many online, especially QAnon types, to become convinced that a liberal elite deep state assassinated Scalia due to his conservative point of view. But if that had been a liberal conspiracy, it would have been an unsuccessful one: Scalia was eventually replaced by President Trump’s nominee Neil Gorsuch, who voted in favor of Dobbs.
When it came time for Reagan to nominate an additional justice in 1987, his initial choice was Douglas Ginsburg, who withdrew before he could be nominated. The drama? His wife performed abortions during her time in medical school. And—clutch your pearls—his history includes smoking cannabis as a student and as Harvard faculty. Anthony Kennedy would get the seat instead (a seat that would one day belong to Brett Kavanaugh).
But despite all these juicy tidbits from the justices, it would be the Reagans’ practice of consulting an astrologer about the timing of everything—from the press briefings, to Air Force One departures—that would provide even better fodder for dinner-party gossip. Donald Regan, not to be confused with Ronald Reagan, was the 66th U.S. secretary of the Treasury from 1981 to 1985 and the White House chief of staff from 1985 to 1987. Regan wrote in his book For the Record that Nancy Reagan had “absolute faith in a woman astrologer in San Francisco.” That astrologer was a woman named Joan Quigley.
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