The Racist Roots of the Anti-Abortion Movement
Even pro-lifers don't believe their own claims.
1With abortion functionally outlawed in Texas (at least for the time being), abortion rights advocates are gearing up for the potential reversal of Roe v. Wade, while abortion opponents are scrambling to bring Texas-style abortion bounty laws to red states across America (and, I would imagine, to conservative nations outside of America’s borders). That makes it an important time to assess how abortion became the contentious political issue it is, and how it became such a uniting force for the right — including the get-off-my-lawn libertarians who claim to value individual freedoms above all else, but don’t qualify pregnant women as individuals.
Thomas Edsall touches on some of that history in the Times this week. The first thing to know is that abortion was chosen to be a partisan political issue by conservative activists, and has not always been nearly this divisive. When the oldest Millennials were being born, pollsters were finding significant opposition to and support of abortion rights in both the Democratic and Republican parties. That changed in part because of waning support (particularly among liberals) for unvarnished racism and segregation. As public opposition to the civil rights movement softened — as racism persisted, but as it became less socially acceptable to be pro-segregation, and as racist dogwhistles took the place of George Wallace’s bullhorn — conservatives needed a new issue that would prove just as politically useful and just as energizing to their white base as racial integration had long been.
Abortion was it.
Abortion rights were central to the feminist movement, which engendered significant religious and right-wing outrage. Abortion was central to women’s abilities to go to school, enter the workforce, and have basic life independence, all of which threatened the (largely) male monopoly on working for pay and the attendant financial freedom and personal power. And conservative activists saw the potential for Evangelicals, some of whom had previously been fine with abortion but were very upset about racial integration and women’s growing power, to connect with anti-abortion Catholics and form a religious coalition centered on forcing women to stay pregnant and give birth against their will.
Even in the 1980s, this was all relatively new. As Edsall points out, just two years before the Supreme Court decided Roe in 1973, the Southern Baptist Convention resolved “to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”
A few decades later — just last year — they were sounding a very different tune: “We affirm that the murder of preborn children is a crime against humanity that must be punished equally under the law,” a 2020 Southern Baptist resolution said. Read that again: abortion is a crime against humanity that must be punished equally under the law.
The Southern Baptists went from advocating for allowing safe abortion for rape survivors or a threat to the pregnant woman’s health to advocating that women who end their pregnancies be put in jail — or be put to death. Those are, after all, the punishments under law doled out to murderers and those who commit crimes against humanity.
That total reversal suggests that opposition to abortion isn’t simply about age-old moral codes, or even the word of the Bible and scripture. It’s about conservative strategy.
In the late 1970s, some right-wing activists tried to gin up renewed outrage over the federal government opposing segregated schools. One flashpoint was the Evangelical Bob Jones University, which until 2000 expelled any student for dating outside of their racial group, and had other racially discriminatory rules on campus. In the 1970s, the IRS sought to rescind the university’s tax-exempt status, given that they were breaking federal anti-discrimination laws. It was that — not Roe v. Wade, not abortion — that galvanized the religious right.
According to Randall Balmer, a professor of religion, he was at a 1990 meeting with a smattering of religious-right leaders, including Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation. By Balmer’s telling, Weyrich told him that “abortion had nothing whatsoever to do with the genesis of the religious right. He added that he’d been trying since the Goldwater campaign in 1964 to interest evangelicals in politics. Nothing caught their attention, he insisted – school prayer, pornography, equal rights for women, abortion – until the IRS began to challenge the tax exemption of Bob Jones University and other whites-only segregation academies.”
But the religious right also needed a more respectable issue to hang their advocacy on. Yes, their most fervent adherents were angry about Black students mixing with white ones and getting to attend white schools, but as the 1970s and 80s chugged on, that was an increasingly unpopular position to take publicly.
“So how did evangelicals become interested in abortion?” Balmer writes. “As nearly as I can tell from my conversation with Weyrich, during a conference call with Falwell and other evangelicals strategizing about how to retain their tax exemptions, someone suggested that they might have the makings of a political movement and wondered what other issues would work for them. Several suggestions followed, and then a voice on the line said, ‘How about abortion?’”
Evangelicals were still angry they couldn’t racially segregate their institutions and still get tax breaks. But “the right to segregate” no longer had the wide appeal it once did. “The right to life,” though — that was a winner.
That racism animated the transition of the anti-abortion movement squarely into the Republican Party (in tandem with the Republican Party going through a radical realignment post-1964, becoming a Southern-heavy party of white racists angry about the Civil Rights Act). And it continues to animate the Republican Party today. Here’s Emory University professor Alan Abramowitz, via Edsall:
Whites who score high on measures of racial resentment and racial grievance are far more likely to support strict limits on abortion than whites who score low on these measures. This is part of a larger picture in which racial attitudes are increasingly linked with opinions on a wide range of disparate issues including social welfare issues, gun control, immigration and even climate change. The fact that opinions on all of these issues are now closely interconnected and connected with racial attitudes is a key factor in the deep polarization within the electorate that contributes to high levels of straight ticket voting and a declining proportion of swing voters.
But… don’t abortion opponents actually oppose abortion, too?
Yes, they do. And many — especially those who don’t give the issue much thought, or who haven’t been willing to sort through their own hypocrisies and inconsistencies — truly believe that they believe life begins at conception, and anything that ends that life is tantamount to murder.
If you dig a little bit, though, you’ll see that virtually no one actually believes that a fertilized egg, an embryo, or a pre-viability fetus is the moral equivalent of a human being. Virtually no one actually believes that abortion is murder. Virtually no one pro-life side actually defends life, as they claim, “from the moment of conception until natural death.”
We know that more than half of fertilized eggs — people, according to abortion opponents — fail to implant in the uterine lining; they are flushed out naturally, before many women even know they’re pregnant. If these are indeed unique individual people, where’s the concern about this mass death?
The response from abortion opponents is that these deaths are natural; it’s the difference between dying of old age and dying of murder. But it’s hard to imagine we would accept mass child deaths just because it happened “naturally.” And in fact, we don’t accept mass child deaths, even though, naturally, a whole lot of children die if left to their own (and nature’s) devices. It’s why we have vaccinations, treatments for pediatric cancer, neonatal ICUs, and robust research budgets for childhood diseases. All around the world, people go to great lengths to make sure that fewer children die, and in the past two centuries we’ve been remarkably successful at keeping more small children alive, and keeping more people alive for longer periods of time — it’s no longer normal, in wealthy and developed countries, to lose multiple children in infancy; it’s increasingly normal to live into your 80s or 90s, or even past 100.
If abortion opponents really and truly believe that all of those fertilized eggs are basically the same thing as a five-year-old, where’s the demand to save their lives? Where is even one bill that asks for research funding? The hypocrisies of abortion opponents are well-known — that they are “pro-life until birth,” professing their deep concern about fetuses only to abandon those babies by refusing to help support their mothers as soon as the baby is born — but I have to think that if something was killing more than half of kindergartners, they’d agree to budget a few million bucks to look into it.
They don’t. What does that tell you?
It’s also the case that most abortion opponents say they don’t want to put women in jail for having abortions. That strikes me as dishonest — in many countries, women do indeed go to jail if they’re suspected of ending a pregnancy — but many abortion opponents surely mean it. Women who end pregnancies are victims, the line goes; the real criminal is the abortion provider, and that’s who they want to put in jail (or put to death).
If you truly believe abortion is murder, though, none of that makes sense.
And then, of course, there is IVF and other fertility treatments. The Catholic Church continues to oppose many fertility treatments, and some countries have curtailed them. But largely, fertility treatments are available even in places where abortion is outlawed, and a great many “pro-life” Evangelicals and Catholics (and others) who claim life begins at conception and should be protected until natural death are more than happy to avail themselves of medical care that does not exactly align with those values. And you rarely hear about protesters screaming “baby killer” women walking into fertility clinics — even though, in many IVF procedures, embryos are created and then discarded, or never implanted so that they might grow.
All of which is to say: Scratch the surface and you’ll see that most pro-lifers don’t believe their own claims. But abortion has become a definitional issue for the right, one of the clearest partisan dividing lines. It’s not really about abortion. It’s that abortion is an issue that serves as a stand-in for a whole series of other interests — including, chief among them, keeping women’s lives small and stymying racial equality.
xx Jill
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Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash
A Catholic priest who was advisor to my Catholic youth group gave me the money for my first abortion when I was 16 years old in 1970. I recommend reading or connecting with Frank Schaeffer, who was in the meetings when the Religious Right was created by right-wing political consultants. I think the abortion rights movement (and I was part of it) made a mistake in relying on legal strategies instead of changing hearts and minds (cultural strategies). It is now expected to say "abortion is a difficult choice, but it should be legal." I celebrate my abortions as the medical interventions that saved my life and allowed me to be the fulfilled, productive, happy community member that I am today. I told this to my two sons since their childhoods: "you are alive today because I had access to legal abortion."
It totally frustrated me that the left abdicated the word pro-life to the anti-abortionist right because many were and still are afraid of the word abortion. I am pro-life and for abortion rights and unlike many on the anti-abortion right have actually saved lives through my career as a pediatrician. Also frustrating was the reliance on choice as the defining feature for reproductive rights. The right has always been very good as framing their anti-abortion stance in the framework of morality in ways the left in many ways still refuses to do.