American History, from Abortion Access to Abortion Bans
“[A]t the time of the adoption of our Constitution, and throughout the majority of the 19th century, abortion was viewed with less disfavor than under most American statutes currently in effect. Phrasing it another way, a woman enjoyed a substantially broader right to terminate a pregnancy than she does in most States today.”
~Justice Harry A. Blackmun, majority opinion in Roe v. Wade (1973)
“In this week’s leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito wrote, “The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.” Yet abortion was so “deeply rooted” in colonial America that one of our nation’s most influential architects went out of his way to insert it into the most widely and enduringly read and reprinted math textbook of the colonial Americas—and he received so little pushback or outcry for the inclusion that historians have barely noticed it is there. Abortion was simply a part of life, as much as reading, writing, and arithmetic.”
~Molly Farrell, Ben Franklin Put an Abortion Recipe in His Math Textbook
“It is telling that [Justice Samuel Alito’s] “examination” of history cited examples from the 17th and 19th centuries, when the Constitution, itself, was a product of the 18th century. At the time of the Founding, “in the early republic, abortion was largely a private matter. It was not a cause for public concern, nor was abortion a criminal act” (Poggi & Kierner, 2022). In a sensational case from the era, neither Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, nor Patrick Henry advocated prosecution for a woman who very likely had had ann abortion. The case involved a trial for the murder of a newborn, but it became clear that the body was from an abortion. Therefore, it did not result from the murder of an infant, and thus there was nothing to prosecute (Poggi & Kierner, 2022).”
~Max J. Skidmore, Abortion–Reactionary Theocracy rises in America, while declining elsewhere
For most of Christian history, a widespread conventional or even orthodox position on abortions was that it was acceptable until ‘quickening’ when the mother could feel the baby moving, a period that extends into the second trimester, about 16 to 20 weeks. It was commonly believed that this was when the soul entered the baby, but some held out soulfulness until after birth. So many died as infants and toddlers that it was maybe easier to think they didn’t have souls to suffer or, if not saved (e.g., baptized), to be damned. Life was perceived differently in the past. Besides that, when a soul enters the body is a separate matter from the starting point of life (Larry Poston, When Does Human Life Begin? Conception and Ensoulment).
The idea that life begins, with a simultaneous ensoulment, at conception came to dominance in the modern West through the bias of a scientific worldview. But the confusion is that modern fundamentalism is, well, a product of modernity and so has internalized scientific thought and language (e.g., pseudo-scientific Creationism) while anachronistically projecting it onto the past (Karen Armstrong). In many traditions, going back to the ancient world, a child didn’t become fully ensouled, fully human, and/or fully part of family and society until weeks or years after birth, sometimes after milestones like teething and eating solid foods or later with walking and talking (Facts and Details, Children In Ancient Rome). This relates to why newborn infants, into the early modern period, sometimes weren’t named. Speculation is that parents, from trauma of constant death, were resistant to becoming too attached.
On top of that, many mothers died in childbirth. Unless a family was in need of and could afford more children, it made no sense for a mother to risk her life, especially when she had other children to take care of. In early American history, from the colonial period to the early national period, abortion was treated as a private matter, and legal under all governments. It was a non-issue, not only in terms of the legal system and politics but also in terms of the larger society and religion. Benjamin Franklin, for example, published a popular book teaching Americans about safe and effective abortifacients, with no pushback from a religious right claiming “baby murder.” Nor were abortion practitioners targeted with violence and assassination, as has repeatedly happened in recent decades.
There wouldn’t begin to be something akin to a recognizable nation-wide culture war until the mid-19th century. There were many reasons for that. Urbanization and industrialization was becoming noticeable. This created a larger professional middle class, precipitating an increasing number of women seeking education and employment. It also coincided with a market for commercial products and bourgeois ideas. In the decades before the American Civil War, there were newly available vaginal sponges, vulcanized rubbers, and public seminars on sexual education. Simultaneously, the abortion rate rose to one in five pregnancies, eventually bringing on a reactionary right-wing backlash of moral panic following the war, from WASP replacement fears to Comstock laws. It was about how to save the WASP patriarchy, not how to save lives, babies or otherwise. Abortion, at the time and heading into the next century, was still relatively minor compared to broader fears about sexuality and gender (The Crisis of Identity).
The original reason for abortion bans had less to do with the definition of life, much less theological sophistry over ensoulment, and more about paternalistic control by shutting down the self-determination of sexual reproduction by women, both pregnant women themselves and the once common midwives (Denying the Agency of the Subordinate Class). Early on, women were rarely the direct target of legal prosecutions over abortion because the onus of responsibility was placed upon doctors, the male authority figures. But many doctors continued to practice abortions, as they always had. As had been the case in earlier times, it remained a private matter but now under the discretion of doctors and their patients. On this and many other issues, doctors acted according to local community standards, not governmental decrees handed out by distant political elites.
As such, though the first abortion bans were made by the growing power of state governments, there was little enforcement of them; partly because there was still a strong Anti-Federalist culture carried over from the past. It was left mostly to the decision of local communities, specifically doctors and law enforcement, but also ministers and priests who often followed their own consciences than official church authorities. Heeding local norms and practices, most Americans at the time still supported abortions, in that they continued to seek them out, especially with mass urbanization at the turn of the 20th century when large farm families were no longer needed. It was an open secret which doctors offered abortions. Whatever individuals may have thought of it, most took it as a necessary option. But the reality is that probably few, other than the small minority of Catholics, gave it much thought at all. That is how it was treated at the time, a Catholic issue having nothing to do with good Protestants, and even the Catholic Church didn’t say much about the issue until recent history (Matthew Rozsa, The Christian right didn’t used to care about abortion — until they did).
In the late 1800s to early 1900s, my great great great grandfather William Alfred Line was a country doctor in Southern Indiana, a conservative areas that is known as Kentuckiana. As had become common elsewhere as time went on, the state at the time had an abortion ban and yet he provided abortions for decades apparently without any legal problems. So many people supported such doctors because they wanted and needed safe abortions. It was a practical matter. One of Dr. Line’s own daughters, in not wanting to go to him for an abortion, attempted to do so on herself and died. Botched abortions, particularly when done by non-professionals, were a leading cause of death before improved medical procedures. The consequence of cruel and unnecessary death was a major moral concern at the time and helped promote demand for reforms in the following period.
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Within a Single Generation, from Progressive Early Life to Reactionary Older Age
“A theology emerged that said personal responsibility over one’s reproduction was what we might call a sacrament. That’s not quite the right word, but it was a moral and ethical choice and responsibility that shouldn’t be legislated by the state vis-a-vis Catholic ideas.”
~Gillian Frank, interview
“The Bible definitely pinpoints a difference in the value of a fetus and an adult. Thus, the Bible would appear to disagree with the official Catholic view that the tiniest fetus is as important as an adult human being.”
~ (1967)
“God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: ‘If a man kills any human life he will be put to death’ (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22–24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense… Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.”
~Bruce Waltke, Dallas Theological Seminary professor, (1968)
“I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”
~Rev. W. A. Criswell, fundamentalist Baptist pastor, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention (1973)
“In short, if the state laws are now made to conform to the Supreme Court ruling, the decision to obtain an abortion or to bring pregnancy to full term can now be a matter of conscience and deliberate choice rather than one compelled by law. Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.”
~Baptist Press, News Service of the Southern Baptist Convention (1973)
The centuries-old American tradition of abortion access and the millennia-old tradition before that, as a private decision of religious conscience, has been largely forgotten. Yet such a world is precisely what the oldest generations knew in their own early lives, in many cases into adulthood or even middle age. Historical amnesia is built on personal and generational amnesia. Consider the Silent Generation, a birth cohort that is supposedly moderate, conservative, and traditionalist; specifically with relatively higher rates of conventional religiosity. But they were also culture warriors on both sides, from feminist Gloria Steinem to religious right leader Paul Weyrich, including many radically leftist Christians like Martin Luther King Jr. (The Un-Silent Generation). They came of age during the moral loosening of the post-war period, precisely when medicalization of abortion was making it safer and more common — even with bans, there were many legal exemptions, for both physical and mental health, although these exemptions were more easily gained by those with the means to seek out the right doctors, as there is always an element of class war in how punitive laws mostly target the poor.
In general, numerous Silents were on the frontlines of change, many reacting to their own oppressive childhoods, but most of them probably didn’t see this as in contradiction to their Christian upbringings, as Liberationist theology began to take hold. There was a general desire to break free and let loose, once they were into adulthood, including but not limited to the personal level: “For the Silent Generation, then hitting midlife, the cultural upheaval of the 1970s meant liberation from youthful conformism, a now-or-never passage away from marriages made too young and careers chosen too early” (Neil Howe & William Strauss, The New Generation Gap). From the 1950s to the 1970s, Silents were among the most famous leaders, activists, reformers, advocates, and practitioners of: civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, anti-nuke, anti-war, childrearing, education, psychedelics, psychotherapy, etc; but also influential in avant-garde art and Rock n’ Roll. Likewise, a significant number were involved in the movement to legalize and make accessible safe abortions. That generation went in various directions, if so many of the radical leftists, Christians and otherwise, of that era were silenced by the voices on the reactionary right that drowned them out with corporate media megaphones.
Though having become one of the most politically split generations, with about half opposing abortion and about half either supporting or unsure (Gabrielle M. Etzel, A year after, public opinion steady on overturning Roe), they once took pivotal action in the movement to gain sexual freedom: same sex marriages, planned parenthood clinics, birth control availability, access to safe abortions, etc. Some of them went so far as to participate in the emerging Swinger culture of suburbia, before any hippies spoke of free love. These weren’t fights over abstract ideology but personal and social struggles for freedoms, rights, and safety; and often driven by a profound sense of moral purpose, sometimes explicitly religious. It’s ironic that maybe it was the Silent’s notorious focus on safety, like security a moral issue, that motivated them to seek liberation from oppressive and dangerous ideological systems, such as abortion bans that sometimes caused maiming, sickness, sterility, and death; particularly harming the already oppressed and disenfranchised, ya know those Jesus was always ranting about. They were literally fighting for their lives, with many ministers and priests as their allies (interview of Gillian Frank by John Stoehr, A religious movement, arising from conditions that were killing women, helped give birth to Roe).
In fact, during the ‘conservative’ 1950s of the Silents’ young and early adulthood, one in four women had an abortion (Joyce Johnson, My Abortion War Story), which is unsurprising as half of Silents had sex in their teens, one in ten by the age of 16 (Rates of Young Sluts), with almost twice as many sexual partners as the GI Generation (Randy Dotinga, Millennials More Tolerant, Less Promiscuous Than Their Parents). They are of the last generation to remember the bad ol’ days of abortion bans. If they didn’t have an abortion, then they would’ve personally known many others who did. And they would’ve known the fears and shame that went with it. “My mother endured a back-room abortion in the 1930s. I promised her that I would fight to keep abortion legal,” wrote Jill Goodwin. It was front and center for women of that era, but men also faced these dark realities of unwanted pregnancies, as boyfriends, husbands, and fathers (Robert Lipsyte, Where Are the Men?).
Yet now in old age, many Silents have forgotten the role their generation played; or else the corporate media and political elites would prefer they forget by rewriting history. Our own parents are last wave Silents, born in 1942 and 1945. It’s from our mother, in talking about family stories, that we learned of our own ancestral link to medical abortion practice. Years ago, our father told us about how, in their early marriage during the ’60s and ’70s, our mother was pro-choice, as were most Americans in that era before the Reagan Revolution backed by the right-wing Shadow Network. In fact, most Republicans and most Evangelicals were pro-choice as well. Some major religious right leaders openly spoke up in favor of abortion, partly because of bigotry toward anti-choice Catholics. The wife of President Dwight Eisenhower helped start Planned Parenthood in Texas. As part of a larger sociocultural shift, our own Silent parents were in lockstep with other Silents and other Americans. Then after decades of right-wing media exposure while living in the Deep South, our mother slurs pro-choice supporters as “baby-killers” while our father rants about “postmodern Marxists.”
Our father, at the time of telling us about our mother’s former pro-choice stance, recommended that we not speak of it with her. The reason he gave is that she’d get angry and deny it. She probably had quite honestly forgotten all about it, since maybe 40 to 50 years had passed since her ideological realignment. Back all those decades ago, our father was also more socially liberal, at a time when he was agnostic, our family attended liberal gay-marrying churches, and he was subscribed to Playboy. He said that he used to be neutral or indifferent about the abortion issue. We brought all of this up again these past few years and now he doesn’t remember any of it either, presently believing that they’ve always been strident religious right-wingers on culture war issues. Nor does he remember that our mother’s great great grandfather was an abortion doctor, even though our family had talked about it this past decade, on numerous occasions, while doing genealogy research and visiting the Line’s homestead.
One might suspect that our parents are typical of their generation. They may be more reactionary right in their old age, but they were surprisingly socially liberal in their younger age. Yet, in earlier life, they likely identified as ‘conservatives’, at a time when Republicans were pro-life, taxes on the rich were high, and social democracy was considered the norm (The American Utopia of Social Democracy). To have been socially liberal, or even economically liberal, back then wasn’t necessarily considered extremist or maybe even ‘liberal’, per se. Our parents grew up during Eisenhower Republicanism, and Eisenhower stated that liberalism was the proper way to run a government. So, without needing to be stated, a basic liberal attitude was considered the default for public life. That is to say many positions that today would be called ‘leftist’ used to be within the range of the moderate center of majority consensus. Pro-choice is one of these positions, but an important one, since the religious right took up anti-choice as a proxy for racism when they discovered they couldn’t continue to organize around racial segregation. Procreative rights were always tied up into social control of minorities, and so it was a natural fit in resonating deeply with an old reactionary worldview.
We don’t mean to pick on only one generation. The Silent Generation is merely a useful example, as the oldest living generation still in political power (The Dying Donkey) and holding the greatest wealth. But the same pattern, if less extreme, is seen in the other generations. Of course, the memory loss admittedly began with the GI Generation (e.g., Ronald Reagan, originally an FDR Progressive), but they are mostly dead at this point and the few remaining likely senile or otherwise out of public circulation (e.g., Reagan literally showed signs of early onset dementia while still president). Here is the point. This mass ignorance, by way of collective amnesia, was intentionally constructed and enforced through historical revisionism — for example, see Steve Bannon’s Boomer scapegoating in his pseudo-documentary “Generation Zero” (A Generation to End All Generations). Ironically, Bannon is a Boomer, not that he cares in his cynical realpolitik. Jeez, just leave Boomers alone, they can’t carry the load of all of society’s failures (Kevin Drum, Don’t Blame Boomers, Blame Their Parents). Reactionary demagogues using fear to target the elderly for votes or whatever is no different than the conman who calls your lonely grandmother to steal her money (Jen Senko, The Brainwashing Of My Dad; documentary and book). All they see are vulnerable marks.
Without a doubt, this tactic of erasure has been effective, despite the fact that all of these events are within living memory for older generations, and there is no American who isn’t old enough that they should personally remember nor has someone in their life who is old enough. Besides, older or not, there are approximately a million books, articles, scholarly papers, interviews, blog posts, videos, and (real) documentaries that are available a click away on the internet for anyone to find. It’s not for a lack of information, quite the opposite; and, sadly, sometimes it’s in a plethora of facts that truth gets buried. Ask most Americans of almost any generation and they won’t know about these basic facts of American history, much less the picture of truth they form. The mainstream narrative, as everyone ‘knows’, is that abortion was always illegal and considered morally wrong, that the right-wing culture wars were an expected and maybe justified backlash against the activist left that, starting in the ’60s, attacked and undermined the religious right that, for centuries, had dominated not only government but all of society and public opinion. It’s a compelling story that even many leftists, unfortunately, have embraced.
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The Silent Majority was Leftist, the American Public was Silenced
“In 1970, a Baptist View poll showed that while 80 per cent of Southern Baptist pastors opposed ‘abortion on demand’, 70 per cent favored allowing abortion to protect the physical or mental health of a woman, and 64 per cent thought that state laws should permit abortion in cases of fetal deformity. 71 per cent had no objection to abortion in cases of rape and incest.”
~Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party
“In 1972 in a study by William Ray Arney and William H. Trescher, surveying the general American public shortly before the Roe decision was released, abortion was seen to be acceptable by 83% of respondents if it was necessary to preserve the mother’s health, by 46% of respondents if needed for economic reasons, and by 38% of respondents if the person wanted no more children. These numbers jumped to 91%, 82% and 46% in a survey taken about one year later in 1973, two months after Roe had been decided. These remarkably high numbers show the odds pro-life organizers were up against.”
~Rose Elizabeth Galik Miller, Organizing After the 8th: Comparing and Contrasting the Catholic Irish ProLife Movement and Its American Counterpart
“In the summer before Roe, a newspaper column about a new Gallup poll preserved in Justice Blackmun’s case file reported that sixty-four percent of Americans (and fifty-six percent of Catholics) agreed “with the statement that ‘the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician”‘ -with “a greater proportion of Republicans (68 per cent) …than Democrats (59 per cent) holding the belief that abortion should be a decision between a woman and her physician.”” Consistent with these findings, Roe was an opinion written and supported by Justices whom a Republican president had recently appointed.” Indeed, it was at the urging of one of Richard Nixon’s most recent appointees, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., that the seven-Justice majority in Roe extended constitutional protection from the first to the second trimester of pregnancy, until the point of fetal viability.” To say the least, these legal-political alignments invert contemporary expectations, in Alice-in-Wonderland fashion.”
~Linda Greenhouse & Reva B. Siegel, Before (and After) Roe v. Wade: New Questions About Backlash
The Silent Paul Weyrich, possibly the most influential and powerful religious right leader in US history, was one of the earlier Catholics who, from behind the scenes, maneuvered the largely Protestant conservative movement toward anti-choice. Though rarely acting as a front man, as were the famous Evangelical leaders, he didn’t entirely hide from public view. He gave occasional speeches and interviews, if mostly directed to a narrow segment of society, sometimes being openly honest in a way we’ve grown unaccustomed to, at least not until the bluntness of Donald Trump. He made two admissions that are damning. First, he admitted that the religious right initially attempted to organize around racism, specifically segregated Bible schools because most of the money flowing to the far right came from wealthy racists wanting to send their children to private colleges that were Christian, conservative, and all-white. The problem, as Weyrich explained, is that the average conservative had little interest in overtly siding with racism.
Getting money to pay for political operations and an influence machine, Weyrich was good at that with his crony connections (e.g., Joseph Coors), but he wanted more, he wanted a social and political movement. That meant they needed to organize around something else that could act as a proxy for racism. Though the Southern Baptist Convention was still offering qualified support of abortion 6 years after Roe v. Wade, right up to the year before the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, abortion eventually was understood to fit perfectly because, as already mentioned, it had for generations been part of the white supremacist narrative and the eugenicist agenda (Susan M. Shaw, The history of Southern Baptists shows they have not always opposed abortion; & Randall Balmer, The Real Origins of the Religious Right). This was seen with the WASP or white replacement theory, the fear that the right kind of people would be replaced by the wrong kind. Specifically, the fear was that white women, especially WASP women, weren’t having enough kids while all other demographics were having too many. But in reality, it was not so much about losing numbers, in that Anglo-American Protestants had always been a minority going back to the colonial era, as it was about losing dominant power in controlling government and public institutions (e.g., mandatory public education used to weaken private Catholic schools). Protestants in the past embraced abortion, in opposition to the Vatican’s official position.
The religious right of previous generations, such as the Second Klan, was primarily afraid of big Catholic families pumping out litters of kids like perceived dirty beasts and vermin overrunning society and spreading disease and moral pollution, more afraid than they were of blacks who at least were American-born Protestants. And that is saying lot, considering the Ku Klux Klan originally organized around anti-black bigotry. Originally, this xenophobia was mostly directed at ethnic immigrants, the so-called “hyphenated Americans” (Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, German-Americans, Mexican-Americans, etc), as such ethnic immigrants were disproportionately Catholic. That anti-Catholicism was still the main motivating fear well into the early post-war era, but had begun to change with the election of John F. Kennedy, a Catholic of Irish descent, although he was only able to win by consistently downplaying his ethnicity and religion. This was a wake-up call for Republicans who realized they needed to compete for the growing voting demographics of non-WASPs, the groups that had long been the base of the Democratic Party.
As is common with reactionaries, such as the Catholic-raised Irishmen Edmund Burke as a politician in Protestant England, Weyrich was an outsider seeking power as an insider and it is precisely what made him such a devious Machiavellian. Corey Robin explains this is a typical pattern, as the reactionary is not only defending against the left but challenging the old order as well, challenging it in order to transform it so utterly that what it was before is forgotten, all accomplished through the rhetorical sorcery of the Burkean imagination. In the US, that old order was WASP hegemony. But as a non-WASP, Weyrich and other far right Catholics could only seize power by changing American identity. He needed to organize conservative Christians, divided for centuries according to the religious wars and pogroms of Catholics against Protestants and Christians against Jews, as a never-before envisioned singular religious right. This required convincing theologically opposed religious sectarians that they somehow had a shared theology based on mutual interests and identity, that they were red-blooded God-fearing Americans joined in a Cosmic War against treasonous Godless Commies.
That brings us to Weyrich’s second admission, which gets to the point of ideological narratives as political rhetoric. It doesn’t matter what the public citizenry privately thinks, believes, and values. It’s not even all that important what the public as individuals knows privately in their own separate minds, as private knowledge is often vague and shifting or even largely unconscious. Real power is found in what the public knows in public, what the public is allowed to know collectively, and what the public is made to think it knows as a common people. Public knowledge is what not only what the public knows but what the public publicly knows it knows. Such public knowledge can only occur when there is a public platform or other public space for the public to hear their own voices, their own opinions, to see themselves stand and act together as a public. This is the visceral power of a protest or other large-scale social event when those gathered suddenly realize they are a group, sometimes far larger in number than they previously realized. This is the reason civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. ensured the national media got film footage of the protesters standing up to police and being beat down. It created a public identity not only for the protesters but also for the viewers at home who naturally felt sympathy.
This is why perception management is essential to social control. It’s not merely those who control the voting process or the counting of votes that control a banana republic but, more importantly, those who control how people think and perceive. Control that, and then identity and behavior will follow. Weyrich understood this, as did Richard Wirthlin. It is effectively irrelevant that, in fact, most Americans are socially, economically, and politically on the left, as even Fox News data supports, if you can mislead them into falsely believing that most other Americans are on the right and that the supposed minority of leftists are dangerous radicals, violent malcontents, and out-of-touch extremists. As the main religious right organizer and the mastermind behind the right-wing Shadow Network, Weyrich helped found the Moral Majority organization. On its public opening, coinciding with Ronald Reagan’s presidential bid, Weyrich openly stated to a cheering crowd, “Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome — good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” At the start of it all, Weyrich and other aspiring social dominators knew it was a charade.
The religious right’s claim of being a ‘Moral Majority’ is what’s called the Big Lie. The bigger the lie the better, and the more it’s repeated better still. Reactionaries don’t wait for public opinion to come around to agreeing with them. Instead, they seek to manipulate the public into what they perceive as the correct opinion, or failing that to create a sense of division and polarization that disempowers the public, so that reactionary elites can wield domination and control. The reality-based community on the left is concerned about actual public opinion. But polling and survey data is, for all intents and purposes, mere abstraction if it doesn’t conform to dominant narratives propagandistically pushed by the economic, media, and political elites. And in a banana republic, it is the elite who control all of the main platforms of speech, private and public. That is how the reactionary right turned abortion, a non-contested issue for most of American and Christian history, into a perceived culture war as Cosmic War by weaponizing the high-stakes moral panic and existential crisis of World War and Cold War, and then pushing it ever into further extremes of anxiety and distress by reinforcing a high inequality socioeconomic order.
Weyrich, as a Silent, understood his generation and so he was able to capitalize on a highly focused fear-mongering and scapegoating. It’s not necessarily that he perceived a generational conflict but sought to create one and constantly feed fuel to the fire. Lying about a non-existent moral majority was successful in the short term, such as potent political rhetoric and dog whistle politics that elected many Republicans like Ronald Reagan, while terrifying the moderate reactionaries in the Democratic Party to chase the far right with hopes of some bullshit triangulation, when it turns out that the American majority probably has been to the left of the entire political establishment for a half century now. The public isn’t actually polarized in terms of false equivalency, that is to say the polarization is between the majority and one particular minority while other minorities are silenced. Perceived polarization can, over time, become real polarization. Ironically, the Silent Generation, in embracing lies promulgated to silence them, ended up silencing themselves by forgetting their own history. Then, with Silents rising to power, as that historical revisionism became mainstream history, most other Americans across the generations followed suit in falling into historical amnesia, like gnostic angels falling into demiurgic darkness.
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Conclusion: What Was the Abortion Debate About?
“It is worth noting that, from a strictly medical perspective, Roe v. Wade was a success. It is estimated that the number of illegal abortions fell from 130,000 in 1972 to 17,000 in 1974, with associated deaths likewise plummeting from 39 to five. In subsequent years Roe v. Wade saved thousands of lives by guaranteeing that women who wished to terminate a pregnancy could do so in a safe environment with qualified medical professionals. The ruling also made it easier for states to regulate abortion, as they would any other medical procedure.”
~Matthew Rozsa, The Christian right didn’t used to care about abortion — until they did
“In Africa and Asia, where abortion is generally either illegal or restricted, the abortion rate in 2003 (the latest year for which figures are available) was 29 per 1,000 women aged 15-44. This is almost identical to the rate in Europe—28—where legal abortions are widely available. Latin America, which has some of the world’s most restrictive abortion laws, is the region with the highest abortion rate (31), while western Europe, which has some of the most liberal laws, has the lowest (12).
“Lest it be thought that these sweeping continental numbers hide as much as they reveal, the same point can be made by looking at those countries which have changed their laws. Between 1995 and 2005, 17 nations liberalised abortion legislation, while three tightened restrictions. The number of induced abortions nevertheless declined from nearly 46m in 1995 to 42m in 2003, resulting in a fall in the worldwide abortion rate from 35 to 29. The most dramatic drop—from 90 to 44—was in former communist Eastern Europe, where abortion is generally legal, safe and cheap. This coincided with a big increase in contraceptive use in the region which still has the world’s highest abortion rate, with more terminations than live births.”
~The Economist, Safe, legal and falling
Obviously, the moral issue at stake isn’t about the lives of babies, much less the health and safety of women, even less so public health and public good. The religious right should be more accurately labeled anti-life than pro-life. Going by numerous polls and surveys from diverse sources, religious right-wingers strongly support theocracy, social Darwinism, racism, misogyny, defunding welfare, corporal punishment (e.g., beating children), militarized policing, capital punishment, wars of aggression, and on and on. And one is forced to point out the long violent history of anti-choice activists who have attacked, beaten, and assassinated numerous people. The dark irony is that the so-called pro-life movement is notoriously one of the most violent movements, only upstaged in recent decades by national attention turned to a different variety of right-wing religious terrorists, that of Islamic extremists, another group that one suspects would gladly join the anti-choice ranks.
About abortion directly, we know that the results of changes in abortion laws can vary greatly. That is particularly true with legalization, as it depends on what other laws and policies are in place. Abortions are the consequence of unwanted pregnancies. So, it depends on how effective is a society in preventing unwanted pregnancies. Liberal policies tend to be the most effective, as they ensure availability of birth control, family planning, health clinics, and full sex education. But legalizing abortion while doing nothing to prevent unwanted pregnancies, if representing progress, is not entirely a boon to women, children, or society. The thing is abortion legalization, as a typically liberal policy, tends to go with other liberal policies. The same is true with abortion bans that, in most cases, either don’t decrease the abortion rate or increase it, just with it being illegal, dangerous, and harmful.
In the case of the US, we can look at this nationally which is required because all that state abortion bans end up doing is forcing women to go to another state. To know the effect of a policy, we have to look across states. The difficulty is legalizing abortions at the federal level did nothing to help prevent pregnancies in conservative states that didn’t implement liberal policies to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Even so, in recent years, we’ve hit a historic low, in fact lower than it was in 1973 when Roe v. Wade was passed (Guttmacher Institute, U.S. Abortion Rate Continues to Decline, Reaching Historic Low in 2017). In countries, where national and local policy are in line, the shifting is greater in the abortion rate between abortion bans and abortion legalization. Generally, the liberal emphasis on giving women access to safe and healthy options tends to decrease women seeking abortions. Whereas, anytime conservatives govern, all indicators of public good and public health go in decline (James Gilligan, Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others).
The decrease of illegal abortions alone, even if the total number remained the same, would still be massive progress. So many women are harmed from unsafe abortions and the costs are high, both in lives and monetarily (Michael Vlassoff, et al, Estimates of Health Care System Costs of Unsafe Abortion In Africa and Latin America). This is what anti-scientific reactionaries won’t talk about. They act as if moral issues have no moral calculus, no objective measure, just black and white dogmatism decreed by an authoritarian deity. Instead of facts, they rely on emotional sway (e.g., dismissing people as “baby killers”) and false claims (e.g., abortion increases mental illness), or else theological groupthink. One time, when confronting an anti-choice protester, the individual was honest with us in admitting that he’d still be against abortion legalization even if it increased the abortion rate, the reason given being that he only cared about saving my soul. Our parents, although conservative Christians, wouldn’t quite go to such theological extremes. Yet when we tried to show them data in order to have an informed discussion, they blank-face refused to look at it.
But what underlies all of the psychological avoidance and denialism, all of the ideological smoke and mirrors? Since so many self-identified pro-lifers dismiss the data about liberal policies decreasing death, then they aren’t really pro-lifers but, as many suspect, anti-choicers. That is to say theocrats. Even then, that seems just a matter of convenience. Without religiosity to fall back on, it would simply be some other variety of authoritarianism and social dominance. Maybe the outward form isn’t particularly important. Rather, as Corey Robin suggests, it’s the reactionary defense of hierarchy and inequality, that is to say subjugation; and subjugation requires punishment, no matter the cost, for punishment in turn is the justification. That is why the same religious right will just as easily embrace social Darwinian capitalism, even as it contradicts Christian theology and morality. It’s all a charade, or at least that is true for the master manipulators who are behind the whole game, who have lured so many Americans into historical amnesia.
Guess Who Dropped Delaware’s Abortion Rate by a Third Without Reducing Access for Those Who Need It?
by by Valerie Tarico
* * *
Men and Feminism: Seal Studies
By Shira Tarrant, p. 48
Author John DeFrain writes in the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Death and dying that from the 1600s to the early 1900s, abortion was not a crime in the United States if it was performed before fetal movement, which starts at about twenty weeks into gestation.
“An antiabortion movement began in the early 1800s,” DeFrain writes, “led by physicians who . . . opposed the performing of abortions by untrained people, which threatened physician control of medical services.” The controversey over abortion gained attention only “when newspapers began advertising abortion preparations” in the mid-1800s. DeFrain explains that marketing these medicines became a moral issue–not necessarily because of questions over when life begins–but because it was feared that women could use abortion to hide extramarital affiars. “By the early 1900s,” DeFrain writes, “virtually all states . . . had passed antiabortion laws.”
A history of American thought on abortion: It’s not what you think
interview by Harry Bruinius of Geoffrey R. Stone
Americans, almost all, believed at that time that abortion had always been illegal, that it had always been criminal. And no one would have imagined that abortion was legal in every state at the time the Constitution was adopted, and it was fairly common. But people didn’t know that.
The justices came to understand the history of abortion partly because [Justice Harry] Blackmun previously had been general counsel [at the Mayo Clinic] and researched all this stuff. But this history also began to be put forth by the women’s movement. And this was eye-opening to the justices, because they had, I’m sure every one of them, assumed abortion had been illegal back to the beginning of Christianity. And they were just shocked to realize that was not the case, and that prohibiting abortion was impairing what the framers thought to be … a woman’s “fundamental interest.”
What weighed on me most was that, in the past, women could never speak out about their illegal abortions because it was a crime – even speaking about it in public was considered obscenity. So there was no public story about these things happening, except in instances when somebody died having an abortion.
But the public had no concept of how many women were having abortions or the horror they were living in. And that began to change when women began to speak out about what their experience had been. And that came into the minds of the justices. And I think those are the two factors that most influenced more conservative justices to embrace [abortion as a fundamental right], including conservative justices appointed by [President Richard] Nixon.
In the 18th century, abortion was completely legal before what was called the “quickening” of a fetus – when a woman could first feel fetal movement, or roughly four and a half months through a pregnancy. No state prohibited it, and it was common. Post-quickening, about half the states prohibited abortion at the time the Constitution was adopted. But even post-quickening, very few people were ever prosecuted for getting an abortion or performing an abortion in the founding era. […]
Partly as a result of the attitudes of the Second Great Awakening, the American Medical Association, which had just been created in the 1840s, took the view that the fetus was a person from conception. Some leaders of the fledgling organization were fiercely religiously grounded. And there’s a lot of skepticism about why they did that. One of the explanations is that they were also trying to put midwives out of business. They wanted to take over that part of the process of giving birth. So that also made a significant impact, because it was the first time that medical officials were saying that abortion from the moment of conception is killing a person.
But the message was also that women should not be trusted. One of their themes was that, when women are pregnant, they simply do not have judgment. They also made the argument that children born after a woman had an abortion suffered, because abortion would make subsequent children deranged in certain ways. All of this created the background foundation for the Comstock Laws, which banned contraception, as well as any kind of discussion about anything to do with sex. That’s why well into the 1950s, you couldn’t show a married couple in bed together on television. And it was astonishing that every state banned obscenity, every state banned abortion, and every state banned contraception. And the federal government did the same, changing and eliminating what was the case at the time of the framing of the Constitution, and basically making anything relating to sex illegal.
When the ‘Biblical View’ for Evangelicals Was That Life Begins at Birth
by Jonathan Dudley
The history of translation of the Exodus passage is informative, and scholar Mark A. Smith includes a helpful survey in his book Secular Faith. The Latin vulgate in 405 translates the key term as “abortivum,” meaning “has a miscarriage.” The first English translation of the Bible in 1384 preserved this understanding, rendering it as “makes the child dead born,” while the Douay-Rheims translation in 1609 affirms this meaning, translating it as “she miscarry indeed.” The King James (1611), Revised (1885), and American Standard Version (1901) all translate the term as “her fruit depart her,” leaving open the question of whether the fruit departs due to miscarriage or premature birth. Finally, the Revised Standard Version (1952), Living Bible (1971), and New American Bible (1971) returned to “miscarriage” or “miscarry.”
Then in 1978, the year before the Moral Majority was founded by Jerry Falwell, the evangelical publishing house Zondervan produced the New International Version (NIV). For the first time in the history of Christianity, Smith notes, the NIV translated the passage as “she gives birth prematurely,” thereby implying the “life for life” punishment applied to harm caused either the woman or fetus. Subsequent translations produced by evangelical publishing houses followed this translation, including the New King James (1982), New Living Translation (1996), and Today’s New International Version (2005).
As a proxy for broader scholarly opinion on this re-translation, Smith looks at translations produced since then by non-evangelical Bible publishers. Other Protestant Bibles continued to translate the passage as “miscarriage” or “miscarry,” including the New Revised Standard Version (1989), Contemporary English Version (1995), The Message (2001), and the Common English Bible (2011). Hebrew Bibles translated the passage variably as “miscarry,” “miscarriage,” “her fruit depart,” or “child dies,” including the Living Torah (1981), Jewish Publication Society (1985), Complete Jewish Bible (1981), and Koren Jerusalem Bible (2008). And Catholic Bibles, despite official teaching from the Church that there is a right to life from the moment of conception, continued to translate the passage in the traditional way: “miscarriage” or “miscarry” (New Jerusalem Bible, 1985; New American Bible Revised Standard Edition, 2011).
The novel translation of Exodus 21:22-23 allowed the founders of the evangelical Right to neutralize previous, Bible-based reservations about Catholic pro-life activism. By 1980, Jerry Falwell was off to the races. “The Bible clearly states that life begins at conception,” he declared in his book Listen America! Abortion “is murder according to the Word of God.” Falwell’s major reference for this claim was Psalm 139:13, where the author writes that God “knit me together in my mother’s womb.” Most biblical scholars, however, including many in the evangelical community, argue that this passage deals with God’s foreknowledge and omniscience, not with when life begins.
Although many evangelical scholars objected to these new interpretations, others strained to provide additional biblical support. “The Bible shows life begins at conception,” the professor Paul Fowler declared in a 1984 book, Abortion: Toward an Evangelical Consensus. “In the Genesis narratives alone, the phrase ‘conceived and bore’ is found eleven times. The close pairing of the two words clearly emphasizes conception, not birth, as the starting point.” He concludes at the end of the book that “Scripture is Clear!” that life begins at conception.
More recently, the leadership of Focus on the Family, even while insisting on the most stringent and traditional possible reading of passages on homosexuality, happily embraced this reinterpretation of Exodus. And they rummaged through the rest of the Bible to support the newfound belief in personhood from conception with what can only be described as desperation. After asking on their website, “Are the preborn human beings?” they answer that “The Lord Jesus Christ began his incarnation as an embryo, growing into a fetus, infant, child, teenager, and adult.” The one verse they cite as proof is the following: “While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son” (Luke 2:6-7, NIV).
That evangelicals changed their minds so dramatically on when personhood begins, and in the midst of a political crusade against the sexual revolution, doesn’t by itself show they are wrong. (Many other arguments do that). But it does weaken their claim to be the guardians of traditional morality. And it renders absurd the apoplectic reactions to Pete Buttigieg’s recent comments. When he noted that some Christians have read the Bible as teaching that life begins at first breath, he might as well have been referring to the parents of his own loudest critics.
The Progressive Roots of the Pro-Life Movement
by Emma Green
If the first advocates of abortion legalization in America were doctors, their most vocal opponents were their Catholic colleagues. […] But though these Catholics may have been theologically conservative, most of them were not what most Americans would consider politically conservative, either by midcentury or contemporary standards. “There were some political conservatives who participated in the early movement, but for the most part, the public rhetoric of the movement tended to be grounded in liberalism as seen through a mid-20th century Catholic lens,” Williams said. “It’s New Deal, Great Society liberalism.”
For most mid-century American Catholics, opposing abortion followed the same logic as supporting social programs for the poor and creating a living wage for workers. Catholic social teachings, outlined in documents such as the 19th-century encyclical Rerum novarum, argued that all life should be preserved, from conception until death, and that the state has an obligation to support this cause. “They believed in expanded pre-natal health insurance, and in insurance that would also provide benefits for women who gave birth to children with disabilities,” Williams said. They wanted a streamlined adoption process, aid for poor women, and federally funded childcare. Though Catholics wanted abortion outlawed, they also wanted the state to support poor women and families.
Other progressives, though, took a more calculating approach to poverty and family planning. Some proponents of the New Deal believed birth control could be used to implement government policy—a means of reducing the number of people in poverty and, ultimately, saving the state money, Williams said. Later, as technology made it easier to detect fetal deformities, abortion proponents commonly argued that women should have the option of terminating their pregnancies if doctors saw irregularities. “It was a widespread belief among abortion-liberalization advocates … that society would be better off if fewer severely deformed babies were born,” Williams said. The Catholics who opposed abortion “saw this as a very utilitarian perspective,” he said. “If you believed the fetus was a human being, this life would be destroyed for someone else’s quality of life, and they saw this as a very dangerous way of thinking.”
At times, there was a dark racial component to pro-abortion and birth-control rhetoric. In the early 20th century, for example, “there was substantial support in some areas of the country for the eugenic use of birth control to limit the reproductive capabilities of poor, sexually promiscuous, or mentally disabled women—especially those who were African American,” Williams writes in his book. Decades later, as public-aid spending ballooned in the 1960s, a new kind of racism entered the abortion debate. “Many whites stereotyped welfare recipients as single African American women who had become pregnant out of wedlock and were ‘breeding children as a cash crop,’ as Alabama Governor George Wallace said,” William writes. “Wallace eventually took a strong stance against abortion, but like some of his fellow conservatives,” he was an early supporter of legalization.
The History of the Pro-life Movement
by Alex Ward
Prior to the 19th century, abortion had been legal (in some instances) throughout much of the United States. Most of the early regulations were aimed at protecting women from unsafe practices, with “quickening”—when the baby could be felt moving—serving as a line for when an abortion was permitted. However, as medical technology advanced and scientists were able to see the combination of genetic material from the parents that resulted in a fertilized egg, the line moved further backward. By the early 1900s, almost every state had criminalized abortion, though this was rarely enforced
In America, we often think of the pro-life movement arising from the decision of Roe v. Wade in 1973. It is also often cast as a clear political divide, with those on the right opposing the practice and those on the left supporting it. However, as Daniel Williams has shown in his history of the movement, it has roots going back to at least the 1930s and 1940s, and there was no clear political divide.
At that time, Catholics (and it was primarily Catholics) were the strongest opponents of abortion on the grounds that it (along with contraception) was a violation of the official church teaching on the sanctity of human life. These Christians drew on the long tradition of Catholic social teaching and argued that care for the poor was a duty for Christians. On the basis of their theology, they found it easy to advocate for FDR’s New Deal program which created a stronger social safety net for the poor. And in the context of that moment, it was the poor, just as today, who were the most likely to receive (and suffer) from an abortion. Because of the limits on when doctors could provide abortions legally, it was common for women to obtain illegal and unsafe procedures which threatened their life.
Protestants were largely unconcerned with the cause of abortion. Though some fundamentalists opposed the practice, most evangelicals were silent on the issue. And mainline Protestants, who made up the largest section of the religious landscape at the time, were moving from apathetic to sympathetic supporters, especially in the 1960s.
A religious movement, arising from conditions that were killing women, helped give birth to Roe
interview of Gillian Frank by John Stoehr
Contrary to conservative belief, religious people were not opposed to abortion before 1973. Opinions were mixed. Catholics were against it. Nothing unusual there. Evangelical Protestants were indifferent. That might be surprising. More surprising, though, is the decades’ long religious movement advocating for the repeal of state abortion laws.
Why?
Because “these ministers, these rabbis, these priests, these nuns” were on the frontlines of slow-moving medical disaster in which desperate women did desperate things, resulting in mutilation or death.
“They witnessed the mass loss of life, the mutilation, the sterilizations that were inadvertent results of botched abortions – they could see the stress of women and the fear of women who were sent away because they had unwanted pregnancies,” Professor Frank said.
This religious movement was part of the social context from which arose a Supreme Court ruling that privacy is a constitutional right.
A religious movement helped give birth to Roe. […]
In the wake of what became apparent – that hundreds of thousands of people were seeking illegal abortions each year – clergy, along with other professionals, physicians and lawyers, started to issue statements calling for a reevaluation of state abortion laws.
Early ones started in 1959. They grew over time. The usual suspects were reformed Jews and Unitarians, but you would find this thinking in the leadership of just about every denomination, except for Catholics.
Even Southern Baptists supported abortion reform before Roe. […]
What you would see, however, was not just religious voices, usually from the Catholic Church and their leaders, saying no to abortion.
You would see an inter- and intra-religious debate.
Every time you saw a bishop or priest adhering to the party line, saying abortion is murder, you would see rabbis and ministers saying reproductive choice is important. It is vital. Our faith supports it.
We want repeal or reform.
We want abortion to be a matter of private conscience.
But you would also have – and this is important to the story – Catholic priests and Catholic nuns quietly supporting abortion seekers. You would have lay Catholics seeking abortions in huge numbers.
So there was a disjunct between church leadership and church laity. It’s important to emphasize. It was an inter- and intra-religious debate.
When you looked around on the eve of Roe (1973), the landscape of religion and abortion was an overwhelming consensus that the law as it stood restricting abortion was immoral. It was unconscionable.
It was criminalizing private and intimate behaviors that should be a choice between a pregnant person and their physician.
That was the consensus.
That was the norm.
Voters Reframe the Abortion Policy Debate: A Theoretical Analysis of Abortion Attitudes in South Dakota
by Pamela Carriveau
While abortion continued to be illegal in the United States for most of the 20th century, by the 1960s it was a fairly noncontroversial issue in American society as a whole and seen as a “humanitarian medical issue under the control and supervision of physicians (McConagh 2007:188). The Largest dissenting group was Roman Catholics. In 1973 when Roe v Wade reestablished the legality of abortion for American women, the arguments in favor were framed as a protection of women, returning the decision whether to terminate a pregnancy to the woman who was pregnant.
What will and won’t happen when abortion is banned
by Michelle Oberman
Prior to Roe, rather than ask judges to decide these cases, states delegated the determination to doctors, essentially leaving the medical profession to devise its own ways of complying with the law. For reasons ranging from lack of consensus about qualifying conditions, to concern over the legal implications of their decisions (which might trigger prosecution on the one hand, or a wrongful death suit if the pregnant patient dies, on the other), doctors eschewed this responsibility. By the mid-20th century, hospitals around the country used so-called ‘therapeutic abortion committees’ to establish eligibility. These committees were marked by inconsistent outcomes, stemming from a lack of consensus over what constituted a ‘valid’ reason for terminating a pregnancy, whether legally or morally. Rather than standardizing the application of the law, the committee process facilitated ad hoc decision-making.
Making the Right Choice: the polarized US abortion debate and its transnational implications.
by Olivia Murdock
Following the early 1800s, restrictive abortion regulations were increasingly implemented across the country, even though it was a widespread procedure and not particularly widely discussed until the late half of the century. This is when the issue of abortion progressed as a politicized topic in the US, and the debate originated from the arguments of elite groups of physicians portraying abortion as something linked to unmarried women lacking morals when women were expected 20 to fulfill their duties as wives. This increase in politicized debate was also influenced by the reclining birth rate of white Americans and the increase of immigrants, as well as the professional self-interest of elite groups of white male physicians who, by increasing public debate on the topic, effectively overtook control of reproductive health from the midwives (Saurette & Gordon, 2016; Davis, 2003). Following this spread of anti-abortion arguments, abortion was banned in many states and those performing or receiving the procedure could be prosecuted. The debate was highly influenced by not only the elite physicians, but by religious, demographic, moral, and racial grounds (Saurette & Gordon, 2016). However, following this development, a movement for increased reproductive freedom formed in the late 1800s and early 1900s increasing access to contraceptives. Although this was the beginning of equality-based arguments for reproductive rights, the debate was influenced by radical groups in favor of birth control for certain groups to control reproduction of, particularly, African Americans, indigenous people, criminals, sex workers, and those suffering from mental illness (ibid).
The Complicated History of Catholics, Protestants, and Contraceptives
by Molly Worthen
To many American Protestants in the late 19th century, having legions of children was not the cultural norm. They believed that dragging around armloads of screaming tots was—like massive street parades for the Virgin and bloc voting for Mob politicians—an old-fashioned and vaguely threatening thing that only Catholic immigrants did. Protestant women volunteered with the temperance league and contented themselves with an heir and a spare, or maybe a couple of spares: Between 1800 and 1920, the birth rate among native-born white (read: Protestant) women declined from 7.04 to 3.13, while Catholic families were still averaging 6.6. While upstanding, Anglo-Saxon Protestant women were buying condoms made from sheep intestines, douching with dubious solutions like “Cullen’s Female Specific,” and having furtive abortions, those Catholic babes in arms were growing up into a veritable papist army. By the turn of the century they represented 13 percent of the national population.
Evangelical activists’ concern over rising Catholic census numbers was one factor in the cocktail of Victorian moralism and anxiety about sexuality that motivated states and the federal government to ban the dissemination of information about birth control and the sale of contraception devices, and to stiffen anti-abortion laws in the late 19th century. The laws were partly intended to prevent white Protestant women from shirking their duty as mothers of the fittest race. But ethnic prejudice fueled the other side of the birth control debate, too. Liberals in the eugenics movement applauded the potential of modern birth control and sterilization to purify humanity of “criminality” and “feeblemindedness,” traits that they usually found most often among poor Catholics and people of color.
The Making of the Evangelical Anti-Abortion Movement
by Anne Rumberger
In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, adopted a resolution calling on fellow Southern Baptists to work to make abortion legal under certain conditions, namely, ‘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’. In 1973, W A Criswell, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, expressed his satisfaction with the Roe v Wade ruling:
I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.
Catholic religious leaders and grassroots activists had been organising against state abortion reform laws in the years leading up to Roe, but from the 1960s and into the late 1970s the vast majority of evangelicals and fundamentalists were ambivalent about the issue and, for most people, abortion was considered a personal issue, not a political one. Historian Daniel K. Williams discusses evangelical opinion on abortion in his book on the making of the Christian Right, God’s Own Party:
In 1970, a Baptist View poll showed that while 80 per cent of Southern Baptist pastors opposed ‘abortion on demand’, 70 per cent favored allowing abortion to protect the physical or mental health of a woman, and 64 per cent thought that state laws should permit abortion in cases of fetal deformity. 71 per cent had no objection to abortion in cases of rape and incest.
The history of Southern Baptists shows they have not always opposed abortion
by Susan M. Shaw
Early on, many evangelicals, including Southern Baptists, saw opposition to legal abortion as a “Catholic issue.”
A 1970 poll by the Baptist Sunday School board found that a majority of Southern Baptist pastors supported abortion in a number of instances, including when the woman’s mental or physical health was at risk or in the case of rape or fetal deformity.
The SBC passed its first resolution on abortion two years before the Roe decision. While the Convention never supported the right of a woman to have an abortion at her request for any reason, the resolution did acknowledge the need for legislation that would allow for some exceptions.
In fact, many Southern Baptists saw the Roe decision as drawing a needed line between church and state on matters of morality and state regulation. A Baptist Press article just days after the decision called it an advancement of religious liberty, human equality and justice.
The Convention affirmed this resolution in 1974 after Roe was decided. A 1976 resolution condemned abortion as “a means of birth control” but still insisted the decision ultimately remained between a woman and her doctor.
A 1977 resolution clarified the Convention’s position, reaffirming its “strong opposition to abortion on demand.” However, it also reaffirmed the Convention’s views about the limited role of government and the right of pregnant women to medical services and counseling. This resolution was affirmed again in 1979.
How Southern Baptists became pro-life
by David Roach
Before Roe v. Wade
Between 1965-68, abortion was referenced at least 85 times in popular magazines and scholarly journals, but no Baptist state paper mentioned abortion and no Baptist body took action related to the subject, according to a 1991 Ph.D. dissertation by Paul Sadler at Baylor University.
In 1970, a poll conducted by the Baptist Sunday School Board found that 70 percent of Southern Baptist pastors supported abortion to protect the mental or physical health of the mother, 64 percent supported abortion in cases of fetal deformity and 71 percent in cases of rape.
Three years later, a poll conducted by the Baptist Standard newsjournal found that 90 percent of Texas Baptists believed their state’s abortion laws were too restrictive.
Support for abortion rights was not limited to theological moderates and liberals. At New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in the early 1970s, some conservative students who went on to become state convention presidents and pastors of prominent churches supported abortion for reasons other than to save the life of the mother, Richard Land, former president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, told BP.
“They pretty much bought into the idea that life begins when breath begins, and they just thought of [abortion] as a Catholic issue,” Land, who attended New Orleans Seminary between 1969-72, said of his fellow students.
A 1971 SBC resolution on abortion appeared to capture the consensus. It stated that “society has a responsibility to affirm through the laws of the state a high view of the sanctity of human life, including fetal life.”
But the resolution added, “We call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”
Reaction to Roe
When the Supreme Court legalized abortion on demand in 1973 with its Roe v. Wade decision, some Southern Baptists criticized the ruling while maintaining their support of abortion rights as defined in the 1971 resolution.
Others embraced the Supreme Court’s decision. A Baptist Press analysis article written by then-Washington bureau chief Barry Garrett declared that the court had “advanced the cause of religious liberty, human equality and justice.”
Before (and After) Roe v. Wade: New Questions About Backlash
by Linda Greenhouse & Reva B. Siegel
In the summer before Roe, a newspaper column about a new Gallup poll preserved in Justice Blackmun’s case file reported that sixty-four percent of Americans (and fifty-six percent of Catholics) agreed “with the statement that ‘the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician”‘ -with “a greater proportion of Republicans (68 per cent) …than Democrats (59 per cent) holding the belief that abortion should be a decision between a woman and her physician.”” Consistent with these findings, Roe was an opinion written and supported by Justices whom a Republican president had recently appointed.” Indeed, it was at the urging of one of Richard Nixon’s most recent appointees, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., that the seven-Justice majority in Roe extended constitutional protection from the first to the second trimester of pregnancy, until the point of fetal viability.” To say the least, these legal-political alignments invert contemporary expectations, in Alice-in-Wonderland fashion.
How have we moved from a world in which Republicans led the way in the decriminalization of abortion to one in which Republicans call for the recriminalization of abortion? The backlash narrative conventionally identifies the Supreme Court’s decision as the cause of polarizing conflict and imagines backlash as arising in response to the Court repressing politics.’4 In contrast to this Court-centered account of backlash, the history that we examine shows how conflict over abortion escalated through the interaction of other institutions before the Court ruled.
There is now a small but growing body of scholarship questioning whether abortion backlash has been provoked primarily by adjudication. Gene Burns, David Garrow, Scott Lemieux, and Laurence Tribe show that, in the decade before Roe, the enactment of laws liberalizing access to abortion provoked energetic opposition by the Catholic Church.” We offer fresh evidence to substantiate these claims, as well as new evidence about conflict before Roe that points to an alternative institutional basis for the political polarization around abortion -the national party system.
Through sources in our book and in this paper, we demonstrate that the abortion issue was entangled in a struggle over political party alignment before the Supreme Court decided Roe. As repeal of abortion laws became an issue that Catholics opposed and feminists supported, strategists for the Republican Party began to employ arguments about abortion in the campaign for the 1972 presidential election. We show how, in the several years before Roe, strategists for the Republican Party encouraged President Nixon to begin attacking abortion as a way (1) to attract Catholic voters from their historic alignment with the Democratic Party and (2) to attract social conservatives, by tarring George McGovern, Nixon’s opponent in the 1972 presidential election, as a radical for his associations with youth movements, including feminists seeking ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and “abortion on demand.”” In reconstructing this episode, we show how strategists for the national political parties had interests in the abortion issue that diverged from single-issue movement actors, and we document some of the bridging narratives that party strategists used to connect the abortion conflict to other controversies.
Body politics: the secret history of the US anti-abortion movement
by Sarah Churchwell
When the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade on 24 June, permitting the state criminalisation of abortion in America, the only thing everyone could agree on was that it was a historic decision. Unfortunately for America, the history it was based on was largely fake. The ruling, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, claims that in reversing Roe v Wade, the court restores the US to “an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment [that] persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973”, when Roe legalised abortion. This assertion, however, is easily disproven.As historians have exhaustively explained, early American common law (as in Britain) generally permitted abortions until “quickening”, or perceptible foetal movement, usually between 16 to 20 weeks into a pregnancy. Connecticut was the first state to ban abortion after quickening, in 1821, which is roughly two centuries after the earliest days of American common law. It was not until the 1880s that every US state had some laws restricting abortion, and not until the 1910s that it was criminalised in every state. In the wake of Dobbs, social media was awash with examples from 18th- and 19th-century newspapers that clearly refuted Alito’s false assertion, sharing examples of midwives and doctors legally advertising abortifacients, Benjamin Franklin’s at-home abortion remedies, and accounts of 19th-century doctors performing “therapeutic” (medically necessary) abortions. […]
But there is yet another, less well-known cause for all this in civil-war era America. Although most people today assume that anti-abortion laws were motivated by moral or religious beliefs about a foetus’s right to life, that is far from the whole story. In fact, the first wave of anti-abortion laws were entangled in arguments about nativism, eugenics and white supremacism, as they dovetailed with a cultural panic that swept the US in the late 19th and early 20th century as a result of the vast changes in American society wrought by the conflict. This panic was referred to at the time in shorthand as “race suicide”.
The increasing traction today of the far-right “great replacement theory”, which contends that there is a global conspiracy to replace white people with people of colour, and has explicitly motivated white supremacist massacres in the US, is often said to have originated with a French novel called The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. Published in 1973, the same year that Roe v Wade enshrined American women’s rights to reproductive autonomy, it is a dystopian account of “swarthy hordes” of immigrants sweeping in and destroying western civilisation. But there were many earlier panics over “white extinction”, and in the US, debates around abortion have been entangled with race panic from the start. The fight to criminalise abortion may have successfully passed itself off as a moral crusade, but its origins are rooted in a political one.The idea of “race suicide” was popularised in the early 20th century largely by Theodore Roosevelt, who urged white women to have more babies to protect “native” American society against “diminishing birth rates”. He harangued Americans that “intentional childlessness” rendered people “guilty” of being “criminals against the race”. Roosevelt gave speeches declaring: “I believe in children. I want to see enough of them and of the right kind.”
The Dobbs opinion explicitly rejects arguments that anti-abortion laws were historically motivated by eugenicist nativism, rather than by religious or moral beliefs. It says that the opposition was only able to produce “one prominent proponent” of the idea that earlier anti-abortion laws were driven by “fear that Catholic immigrants were having more babies than Protestants and that the availability of abortion was leading White Protestant women to ‘shirk their maternal duties’”. Yet even a cursory survey of American discourse a century ago shows how utterly ubiquitous this idea was, as newspapers and lectures and sermons warned that abortion would mean that Catholics and other foreign-born immigrants would outnumber Protestant, native-born Americans. To take just one example among thousands, a 1903 editorial on population statistics noted that the Protestant population of the US was increasing by 8.1% while the Catholic population was increasing by 21.8%. This “alarming condition of things” was reflected by physicians reporting “on the average more than five abortions a month, none of them in Catholic families”. The piece was headlined “Religion and Race Suicide”.
The Long History of the Anti-Abortion Movement’s Links to White Supremacists
by Alex DiBranco
Hostile anti-Catholic sentiment cut both ways when it came to abortion, however. Until the 1970s, “pro-life” activism was firmly associated with Catholics and the pope in the minds of American Protestants. This deterred many Protestants from opposing abortion as a Christian moral issue—not only in the political sphere, but even as a matter of denominational teaching—because of its association with “papists” (a derogatory term for Catholics). Even the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 decriminalizing abortion did not immediately bring conservative Protestants around. As late as 1976, the conservative evangelical Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) passed resolutions affirming abortion rights. “The assumption was that it must not be right if Catholics backed it, so we haven’t,” commented John Wilder, who founded Christians for Life as a Southern Baptist ministry in 1977 as the resistance to the pro-life movement began to dissipate.
This shift occurred in light of the lessening of anti-Catholic prejudice, strategic recruitment of evangelicals by New Right Catholic leaders, and evangelical discomfort with how many abortions took place as women accessed their new reproductive rights.
The cultural position of Catholics had shifted dramatically by the 1970s. As substantial immigration from Latin America and Asia posed a new threat to white numerical superiority, Catholics from European countries became culturally accepted as part of the white race, a readjusting of boundaries that maintains demographic control. The election of Roman Catholic John F. Kennedy as president in 1960 demonstrated how far Catholic acceptance had come—at least among liberals. Although conservative evangelical opposition to his candidacy remained rife with anti-Catholic fears, the rhetoric was less racialized and more focused on concerns about influence from the Vatican.
To counter this lingering prejudice, conservative Catholic leaders seized on the opportunity offered by the specter of atheist Communism in the mid-20th century to establish themselves as part of a Christian coalition with Protestants, unified against a common godless enemy. As Randall Balmer has written, evangelical concerns about being forced to desegregate Christian schools spurred political investment that Catholic New Right leaders capitalized on and channeled into anti-abortion and anti-LGBT opposition.
For white nationalists, meanwhile, as Carol Mason wrote in Killing for Life, Jewish people replaced Catholics as targets for groups like the KKK. “Now that abortion is tantamount to race suicide…naming Catholics—whose opposition to abortion has been so keen—as enemies would be counterproductive,” Mason wrote. Militant anti-abortion and explicit white nationalist groups came together prominently in the 1990s when a wing of the anti-abortion movement, frustrated with a lack of legislative progress, took on a more violent character fed by relationships with white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
How the Christian Right Became Prolife on Abortion and Transformed the Culture Wars
by Justin Taylor
The best description is that Southern Baptists had a moderate position on abortion for much of the 1970s, both in public opinion and also official denominational statements. They took a high view of life, even fetal life, and opposed abortion on demand, but supported legal abortion in several cases beyond protecting the life of the mother.
This moderate approach is probably best reflected in a 1971 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) resolution. Baptist Press was also supportive of the Roe v. Wade decision, covering it approvingly and publishing a lengthy interview with one of the Roe lawyers who was a Southern Baptist.
In the 1970s, the pro-life position was predominantly Catholic. Before Roe, there were some liberal Protestant elements to the pro-life movement, as Daniel Williams’s book shows, but the Catholic Church was the dominant force.
By the early-mid-1970s, there was a bit of growing concern within evangelicalism. Carl F. H. Henry took a strong pro-life stance in 1971, and the National Association of Evangelicals asserted its opposition to abortion in 1971 and 1973.
But on the mass level, evangelicals were slow to join the pro-life movement. Even as late as 1979, the Baptist Joint Committee argued before a federal court that the Hyde Amendment, which restricted federal funds from being used to pay for abortions, violated the Establishment Clause because it established the Catholic religion.
It really was not until the end of the 1970s and early 1980s that conservative Christians moved decidedly in the pro-life direction. More popular groups like Baptists for Life and Christians for Life were created in the mid- to late-1970s, for example. I draw attention to Francis Schaeffer’s books and documentary films, which were popular among churches, pastors, and lay leaders. Schaeffer’s works also influenced Jerry Falwell, who helped elevate abortion activism on the national political stage. In 1980, the SBC passed an unequivocally pro-life resolution.
At the rank-and-file level, however, we see the bigger trends come later. Evangelicals were always more pro-life than non-evangelicals, but those divisions are more stark in the 1990s and 2000s.
Catholics v. the Constitution
by Ian Buruma
Even conservative Protestants supported the Roe outcome at the time. The Southern Baptist Convention stated in 1973 that “religious liberty, human equality, and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.” And yet, a decade later, evangelical conservatives, fearful that a wave of progressive secularism would threaten such cherished institutions as racially segregated Christian colleges, began to make common cause with radical Catholics. Roe became their rallying point. Their common goal was to break down the wall separating church and state, so carefully erected by the Constitution’s framers.
Some radicals now even claim that the separation of church and state was never actually intended. In the words of far-right Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert: “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk that’s not in the Constitution.” […]
The radicals appeal to “religious freedom.” If a football coach wants to pray at football games, surrounded by players who might not wish to invite his disapproval, he is only exercising his right to free speech and religious belief.
But the separation between church and state, at least in mostly Protestant democracies, such as the US, was meant precisely to defend religious freedom. Whereas the French notion of laicité was intended to keep the Catholic clergy from interfering in public affairs, the US Constitution was devised to protect religious authority from state intervention, as well as vice versa.
One reason why the Protestant elites in the US were suspicious of Catholics until not so long ago, apart from snobbish anti-Irish or anti-Italian sentiment, was the fear that Catholics would be more loyal to their faith, and thus to the authority of the Vatican, than to the US Constitution. That is why in 1960, as he campaigned for president, John F. Kennedy had to stress his belief “in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act…”
What those Protestant elites feared is now a real threat. Catholic radicals and Protestant zealots are actively trying to impose their religious beliefs onto the public realm. Alito, as well as other Catholics, such as former Attorney General William Barr, see secularism as a threat (in Barr’s words) to “the traditional moral order.” That is to say, a strict interpretation of the Christian moral order.
Organizing After the 8th: Comparing and Contrasting the Catholic Irish Pro-life Movement and Its American Counterpart
by Rose Elizabeth Galik Miller
Prior to this, in the US, particularly before the Second World War, abortion was not uncommon; some estimates claim over 700,000 abortions were procured per year in the early- to mid-1930s.157 Essentially, even though abortion was illegal in the country, Daniel Williams relayed to me that these laws were “as useless as Prohibition.”158 Prior to the 1970s, Catholics composed an overwhelming majority of pro-life organizers in the US; however, Catholics did not make up a majority of the population in any state except Rhode Island and Massachusetts. […] [D]uring the1930s and 1940s[, …] in the US many doctors would covertly perform the procedure[. …] It wasn’t until the 1960s that the abortion debate in the US became filled with contention and rancor. […]
Prior to Roe, the pro-life movement was dominated by Catholics. In fact, there was not any official position taken on abortion by many Protestants until after the passage of Roe. Prior to the fears about abortion legalization spurred by the legalization of contraception in the United States via Griswold v. Connecticut, there was less public conversation about abortion among Protestants than among Catholics.162 Paul Simmons argues that furthermore, Protestants held the belief that the separation of church and state was a positive for protecting one’s ability to “act consistent with, and not to be compelled at law to act contrary to, one’s beliefs,” and the rights of the individual; at this point in time, this theopolitical standpoint was extended to abortion in many congregations.163 The Protestant community can be distinguished from the Catholic community, by some accounts, because there is no “final authority” in the Protestantcommunity.164 While there are obviously other differences between the two Christian sects, this difference is particularly important for this study because while Protestants could, and did, have widely varying institutional opinions on abortion, from the beginning of the modern pro-life movement, Catholicism has condemned any and all abortion and contraception.165 Because of the differing theopolitical viewpoints, relative to Catholics, in many Protestant communities there was a lack of momentum for considering things like contraception and abortion on a public stage, especially organizing politically around these issues. Even if an individual family would condemn abortion, there was such a belief in the separation of church and state, as well as the right of the individual, that abortion never became a hot-button topic for most Protestants until they decided to revise these convictions once-central to their faith. […]
Prior to Roe American Catholics condemned any abortion at any stage of pregnancy, whereas their Protestant counterparts made exceptions due to circumstances surrounding the pregnancy or how far along the pregnancy was (this became termed by trimester, but prior to that American Protestants used “quickening,” when the fetus’ movement could be felt, as aterminus ad quem for performing an abortion).169 Part of what kept Protestants, particularly Southern evangelical Protestants such as the Southern Baptists, away from the abortion debate prior to Roe is that abortion was perceived as what John Jeffries terms a “Catholic issue.”170 The perception of abortion as the terrain of Catholics impacted who was involved in the movement prior to Roe because of anti-Catholic sentiments in the US, and especially anti-Irish Catholic sentiments. […]
On the tail of the tumultuous 1960s, abortion was becoming one of the most important issues in the broader American mind. In 1972 in a study by William Ray Arney and William H. Trescher, surveying the general American public shortly before the Roe decision was released, abortion was seen to be acceptable by 83% of respondents if it was necessary to preserve the mother’s health, by 46% of respondents if needed for economic reasons, and by 38% of respondents if the person wanted no more children.183 These numbers jumped to 91%, 82% and46% in a survey taken about one year later in 1973, two months after Roe had been decided.184These remarkably high numbers show the odds pro-life organizers were up against. […]
In short, Southern Baptists, and many Protestants, had a fundamentally different viewpoint on abortion in the 1970s than they do today, and even actively stood up for abortion rights. Catholics were at the helm of the anti-abortion movement long before it became a central political issue for Republicans and Democrats alike. Indeed, the movement made it so that the very political alliance of those who termed themselves pro-life shifted from the Democratic Party(because of previous Catholic allegiance) to the Republican Party, because of how powerful the Southern Baptists became in the pro-life movement.
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