The Abortion Issue Was Never About Protecting Life. It wasn’t Even Originally about Abortion. It was about Preserving Segregation.

America Rises, Post #8: September 9th, 2023

If there’s one thing the Republican Party has consistently excelled at over the past century, it’s their ability to rewrite history in ways that serve to obscure and lend legitimacy to their most toxic and indefensibly prejudiced positions. The account they provide about how abortion first emerged as a policy they took issue with is a quintessential example. The story goes something like this: After being politically indolent for decades, evangelicals were SO morally outraged by Roe v. Wade (1973)—the landmark Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the United States—that the religious right (the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists) rose up and vowed to organize to overturn it at any cost.

And the Dobbs decision last year, which unconstitutionally overturned Roe and ended the court’s legitimacy as an institution of government, was simply the culmination of their decades-long campaign to “protect life” and “save the unborn” that they had finally won. Sounds plausible enough, right? And yet, it is complete fiction that is refuted by every single piece of the historical and legal record. For one, both before and several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to abortion, which they collectively regarded as a “Catholic issue.” For example, in 1968, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today—the most prominent magazine of evangelicalism—refused to classify abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as suitable justifications for ending a pregnancy.