This piece by JIll Filipovic about the history of the abortion wars is an important read as we ponder what to do next about this issue since it’s clear the right wing Trump Court majority is going to overturn Roe vs Wade one way or the other.
With abortion functionally outlawed in Texas (at least for the time being), abortion rights advocates are gearing up for the potential reversal of Roe v. Wade, while abortion opponents are scrambling to bring Texas-style abortion bounty laws to red states across America (and, I would imagine, to conservative nations outside of America’s borders). That makes it an important time to assess how abortion became the contentious political issue it is, and how it became such a uniting force for the right — including the get-off-my-lawn libertarians who claim to value individual freedoms above all else, but don’t qualify pregnant women as individuals.
Thomas Edsall touches on some of that history in the Times this week. The first thing to know is that abortion was chosen to be a partisan political issue by conservative activists, and has not always been nearly this divisive. When the oldest Millennials were being born, pollsters were finding significant opposition to and support of abortion rights in both the Democratic and Republican parties. That changed in part because of waning support (particularly among liberals) for unvarnished racism and segregation. As public opposition to the civil rights movement softened — as racism persisted, but as it became less socially acceptable to be pro-segregation, and as racist dogwhistles took the place of George Wallace’s bullhorn — conservatives needed a new issue that would prove just as politically useful and just as energizing to their white base as racial integration had long been.
Abortion was it.
Abortion rights were central to the feminist movement, which engendered significant religious and right-wing outrage. Abortion was central to women’s abilities to go to school, enter the workforce, and have basic life independence, all of which threatened the (largely) male monopoly on working for pay and the attendant financial freedom and personal power. And conservative activists saw the potential for Evangelicals, some of whom had previously been fine with abortion but were very upset about racial integration and women’s growing power, to connect with anti-abortion Catholics and form a religious coalition centered on forcing women to stay pregnant and give birth against their will.
Even in the 1980s, this was all relatively new. As Edsall points out, just two years before the Supreme Court decided Roe in 1973, the Southern Baptist Convention resolved “to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”
A few decades later — just last year — they were sounding a very different tune: “We affirm that the murder of preborn children is a crime against humanity that must be punished equally under the law,” a 2020 Southern Baptist resolution said. Read that again: abortion is a crime against humanity that must be punished equally under the law.
The Southern Baptists went from advocating for allowing safe abortion for rape survivors or a threat to the pregnant woman’s health to advocating that women who end their pregnancies be put in jail — or be put to death. Those are, after all, the punishments under law doled out to murderers and those who commit crimes against humanity.
That total reversal suggests that opposition to abortion isn’t simply about age-old moral codes, or even the word of the Bible and scripture. It’s about conservative strategy.
Indeed it is. Filipovic’s piece goes on to discuss how the right was apoplectic about desegregation but was finding it more and more difficult to openly organize around it. She quotes religion historian Randall Ballmer:
“So how did evangelicals become interested in abortion?” Balmer writes. “As nearly as I can tell from my conversation with Weyrich, during a conference call with Falwell and other evangelicals strategizing about how to retain their tax exemptions, someone suggested that they might have the makings of a political movement and wondered what other issues would work for them. Several suggestions followed, and then a voice on the line said, ‘How about abortion?’”
Filipovic adds:
Evangelicals were still angry they couldn’t racially segregate their institutions and still get tax breaks. But “the right to segregate” no longer had the wide appeal it once did. “The right to life,” though — that was a winner.
I’ve told this story here on the blog over the years but I think it’s even more salient today as we see just how intrinsic race is to all of our culture war battles. Now that the right to abortion is truly in serious danger it’s more important than ever to understand exactly what brought us to this place.