The irony of the OP title...
The position of the right on abortion was driven
BY politics, not morality, ethics or the concern for the unborn. Conservatives show no concern for the crawling or the walking, why would anyone believe they care about an egg or embryo.
In a 7-2 decision by a conservative leaning Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade really was about abortion, nothing more or less. To read the
actual opinion, as almost no one ever does, is to understand that the seven middle-aged to elderly men in the majority certainly didn’t think they were making a statement about women’s rights: women and their voices are nearly absent from the opinion.
It’s a case about the rights of doctors – fellow professionals, after all – who faced criminal prosecution in states across the country for acting in what they considered to be the best interests of their patients. In
“Before Roe v. Wade: Voices That Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling,” a book collecting pre-Roe documents that Reva B. Siegel and I published, we reprint an account by Dr. Jane E. Hodgson, a Mayo Clinic-trained obstetrician/gynecologist, of her arrest in St. Paul in 1970 for performing a first-trimester abortion for a patient who had contracted German measles in the fourth week of pregnancy. (In those days before immunization eradicated the threat posed to pregnant women by German measles, the disease commonly caused serious birth defects.) Justice Harry A. Blackmun, formerly the Mayo Clinic’s lawyer, knew Dr. Hodgson’s story; I had found her account, published in the clinic’s alumni magazine, in the justice’s files at the Library of Congress.
In decriminalizing abortion, the justices were reflecting a rapid sea change in public opinion that moved over the course of a decade from the elites of the public health and legal professions to ordinary people who viewed the issue as one of policy rather than, as many later would, personal identity.
A Gallup poll in the summer of 1972 found 64 percent of Americans agreeing with the statement that “The decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician.” A majority of all identified groups, including Catholics, agreed with that statement. There was almost no difference between men and women. The group expressing the strongest agreement – 68 percent – was made up of Republicans. George Gallup’s syndicated column discussing the poll results, “Abortion Seen Up to Woman, Doctor,” which we reprint in the book, was also in Justice Blackmun’s files.
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All of PC's ridicule of Liberals and progressives applies to Republicans before the Evangelical right politicized abortion when the IRS sought to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University in 1975 because the school's regulations forbade interracial dating; African Americans, in fact, had been denied admission altogether until 1971, and it took another four years before unmarried African Americans were allowed to enroll.
Paul M. Weyrich, a longtime conservative activist, saw the evangelical discontent over the Bob Jones case as the opening he was looking for to start a new conservative movement using evangelicals as foot soldiers.
During the meeting in Washington, D.C., Weyrich went on to characterize the leaders of the Religious Right as reluctant to take up the abortion cause even close to a decade after the
Roe ruling. "I had discussions with all the leading lights of the movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s, post–
Roe v. Wade," he said, "and they were all arguing that that decision was one more reason why Christians had to isolate themselves from the rest of the world."
"What caused the movement to surface," Weyrich reiterated,"was the federal government's moves against Christian schools." The IRS threat against segregated schools, he said, "enraged the Christian community." That, not abortion, according to Weyrich, was what galvanized politically conservative evangelicals into the Religious Right and goaded them into action. "It was not the other things," he said.
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