(THE CONVERSATION) Supreme Court decision voiding protection of Roe v. Wade for abortion rights was a predictable partisan move. All of the justices appointed by Republican presidents voted to uphold Mississippi’s abortion-restricting law, while the three appointed by Democratic presidents dissented.

Consistent with this partisan trend, the states currently restricting abortion are in Republican strongholds in the South, Midwest, Great Plains, and Mountain West. Those protecting abortion access are Democrats and are heavily concentrated in the Northeast and West Coast.

But that was not the case at the time of the landmark Roe v. Wade in 1973. Before and immediately after the Roe v. Wade, many prominent Republicans, such as First Lady Betty Ford and New York Governor and later Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, supported abortion rights. At the same time, some liberal Democrats have spoken out against abortion rights, including Senator Edward M. Kennedy, vice-presidential candidate Sargent Shriver and his wife Eunice Kennedy Shriver, and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson.

The anti-abortion movement was strongest in the strongly Catholic and Democratic states of the Northeast, and its supporters believed that their campaign for the rights of the unborn child dovetailed well with the liberal tenets of the Democratic Party.

When I researched the early history of the anti-abortion movement for my book “Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade”, a startling discovery was that the anti-abortion movement pre-Roe was filled with liberals. Democrats who had supported federal anti-poverty initiatives associated with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and President Lyndon Johnson’s social programs in the 1960s. They wanted to associate abortion restrictions with additional efforts to fight poverty and expand government-funded health care.

catholic and democrat

Most pre-Roe anti-abortion activists in the United States were inspired by 20th-century Catholic social teaching that linked the right to life for the unborn child to a broader ethic of concern for the less fortunate. . Like the majority of Catholic voters at the time, many were Democrats and hoped that a party that stood up for the poor would also be interested in protecting fetal life.

Many of them, in accordance with the teachings of their church, held conservative views on issues of sex and reproduction. They also believed, in accordance with Catholic social teaching, that the state had a responsibility to care for the poorest of its citizens and therefore supported liberal democratic economic initiatives.

Many of these abortion opponents, including Liberal Republican Senator Mark Hatfield, an Evangelical Baptist, and Lutheran minister Richard John Neuhaus, who later converted to Catholicism, opposed the Vietnam War, which they believed to be a violation of the right to life, just as abortion was.

They did not want to condemn women who resorted to abortion, but rather hoped to offer them social assistance that would help them avoid this choice. “It’s not so much that the woman rejects the child that society rejects the pregnant woman,” said Edythe Thompson, a member of the student organization Save Our Unwanted Life, which characterized itself as “an extremely liberal group,” in 1971.

Switch to the political right

After Roe, the anti-abortion movement’s advocacy of fetal rights came into conflict with the feminist movement’s insistence that abortion rights were non-negotiable women’s rights. Abortion opponents have often argued that abortion hurts women emotionally and physically and gives men an excuse to abandon their responsibilities as fathers. As the self-proclaimed anti-abortion feminist Juli Loesch put it in the 1980s, legalized abortion meant that “a man can use a woman, suck her out, and she’s ready to be used again.”

But the women’s rights movement did not accept this argument, and after the mid-1970s neither did a growing number of liberal Democrats. The Democratic Party endorsed abortion rights in its 1976 platform and strengthened that endorsement in the 1980s.

Although anti-abortion activists began their movement with a strong belief in an expanded social welfare state, their search for allies in their quest to protect fetal life through public law led them to an alliance with conservative Republicans. who did not support an expanded social safety net. .

Ronald Reagan’s support for a proposed anti-abortion constitutional amendment that would have banned abortion nationwide has been applauded by anti-abortion activists across the political spectrum.

Although Cardinal Joseph Bernardin – the Archbishop of Chicago – and other political liberals in the anti-abortion movement have criticized the Reagan administration’s buildup of nuclear weapons, politically conservative opponents of abortion do not generally have not done. The nation’s largest anti-abortion organization, the National Right to Life Committee, used its political action committee to raise money for any candidates who would vote to restrict abortion and said nothing about the position of the Reagan administration on nuclear weapons, because its leaders believed that the fastest way to reverse Roe v. Wade was to work with all politicians who opposed abortion rights. In practice, this meant that most candidates supported by the organization were Republicans, especially after the early 1990s.

With few exceptions, anti-abortion activists have largely abandoned the goal of expanding maternal and prenatal health care or treated it as a secondary priority removed from their primary task of legally restricting abortion.

As recently as 1995, the National Committee for the Right to Life feared that a conservative welfare reform backed by both President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress would increase the abortion rate in limiting social assistance to low-income single women who had additional children. In the 21st century, however, concerns about welfare cuts were off the table as it increasingly focused on the Supreme Court’s move toward the right to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The movement of large numbers of Southern white evangelicals into the anti-abortion movement also encouraged this conservative turn. Unlike many Northern Catholics, white evangelicals in the South had a deep antipathy for the welfare state, and when they became anti-abortion activists in the 1980s, their political efforts focused almost entirely on restrictions on abortion, not on anti-poverty initiatives.

The politics of the anti-abortion movement today

By the time the Supreme Court struck down Roe, the anti-abortion movement had become so allied with conservative Republican politics that it was hard to imagine a time when liberal Democrats who supported an expanded welfare state would be the leaders of the movement.

But some abortion opponents are already realizing the limits of a strategy that focuses narrowly on fighting abortion through legal restrictions alone. They call for increased efforts to ensure family leave policies and economic support for low-income pregnant women.

While some abortion opponents are focusing on this goal now that Roe v. Wade has been knocked down, it won’t be a new approach for the movement. Rather, it will be a revival of the original ethos that the founders of the movement proposed over half a century ago, even before Roe v. Wade is published.

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