The Pro-Life movement as of 2022 has a distinct composition, consisting mainly of religious Christians and social conservatives. In the American political arena, opinions on abortion rights are similarly definitive and starkly partisan: the Republican Party and its constituents uphold the Pro-Life platform, while the Democratic Party and its constituents identify as Pro-Choice. And, like many political issues in this country, there is little room for inter-party straddling. Yet, the power of the Pro-Life movement and its alignment with the Republican Party developed fairly recently. So recent, in fact, that it did not exist even in the years immediately preceding Roe v. Wade. So how did the current construction of the Pro-Life movement come to be?
At the dawn of the twentieth century, abortion was criminalized across the nation. This criminalization existed with little opposition in the first few decades of the century. With World War I occupying the minds of the American public, abortion policies were the least of anyone’s concerns. However, this began to shift during the Great Depression. Nationwide economic turmoil in the 1930s caused increasing numbers of Americans to seek birth control to reduce personal and family expenses.1 While the birth control movement led by Margaret Sanger had a strong anti-abortion platform and advocated solely for contraception, an increasing number of physicians also started to advocate for looser abortion restrictions to reduce the crippling expenses associated with frequent, unwanted births.
The rumbles of pro-abortion sentiment among physicians, and later legislators, sparked concern in the Catholic community. However, contrary to their current predominant political stance, in the 1930s, American Catholics were a largely liberal population. Specifically, they were openly supportive of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. The New Deal’s support of the American poor through the expansion of welfare programs aligned with Catholic values of charity and social responsibility. Pro-abortion sentiment, to the Catholic eye, was an attack on the American poor and a shirking of political responsibility for the downtrodden and their children.2 The Catholic resistance to growing pro-abortion sentiment was further intensified by World War II and the post-war discussions on human rights. Catholics extended these discussions into the womb, caused by a growing concern for the rights of the fetus. In fact, the National Catholic Welfare Conference called upon the United Nations to include the rights of the unborn child in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And while the United Nations did not heed those calls in 1948, they were later addressed and supported in its Declaration of the Rights of the Child which was published in 1959.3
Still, throughout the 1940s and 50s, the concern with fetal rights remained an issue largely confined to members of the Catholic church. This began to shift in the 1960s, when growing anti-Vietnam war sentiment pushed human rights, specifically the right to life, further into the limelight. Concern with the right to life mobilized many Catholics, specifically young Catholics, to join the anti-war movement. Contrary to its political affiliations today, slowly the Pro-Life movement became associated with the American left, as increasing numbers of liberal politicians joined in resisting both war and abortion. However, this confluence did not last. While the 1960s were defined by anti-war sentiment, the era was similarly defined by other powerful social movements. As the Democratic Party aligned itself with second-wave feminism, it distanced itself from the Catholic fringe Pro-Life movement.4 Thus, the movement was thrust back into political limbo, and when Roe v. Wade passed in 1973, it seemed as if this fringe group of Americans would be silenced once and for all.
However, at the end of the 60s and into the early 1970s, evangelical Protestants grew increasingly disillusioned with the American government. Evangelicals believed that the moral purity of the nation was slowly disintegrating, evidenced by the country’s sexual revolution, the growing socialist population, and the abolition of segregation. While desegregation was slow to roll out in the American South, in 1971 Green v. Connally ruled that segregated academies created by evangelicals in Holmes County, Mississippi could not receive tax-exempt status, a decision that struck a particularly painful blow with the white-supremacist evangelical community.5 Still, as the Pro-Choice movement gained public and political traction, evangelicals, despite their disapproval of abortion on the grounds of religious scripture, considered the issue merely a symptom of the larger illness of impure secularism plaguing the country. In fact, the 1971 Southern Baptist Convention even made the concession that abortion was morally permissable in the event of rape, incest, danger to the life of the mother, or fetal deformity. However, the passing of Roe v. Wade signaled yet another affront to evangelicalism and its concern with the increasingly secular state, causing widespread anger in the community. In his widely circulated books How Should We Then Live? (1976), Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (1979), and A Christian Manifesto (1981), prominent evangelical author Francis Schaeffer harnessed the dissent of his community and lashed out against the nation’s lack of moral purity and its rejection of religion. At the same time as evangelical anger grew, the Republican Party was looking to soften the blow of repeated losses at the polls. In an ultimately successful bid to grow the base of the Republican Party, Republican politician Paul Weyrich teamed up with evangelical leader Jerry Falwell to bring evangelicals into the party. The selling point? Disgust with Roe v. Wade and a powerful anti-abortion rhetoric6. Thus, the leadership of the Pro-Life movement shifted from previously liberal Catholics, who were also becoming an increasingly conservative community, to evangelical Christians and the Republican Party.
With powerful political backing providing both a platform and a sense of unity, the Pro-Life movement grew from a small group of socially conscious Catholics to an activist juggernaut inextricable from the Republican party platform. Roe v Wade, while intending to settle the abortion debate once and for all, in fact only gave fuel to the the Pro-Life fire, causing the movement to grow in size while also becoming more extreme in its views. Furthermore, as science and technology developed into the twenty-first century, the all-important dividing line of fetal viability moved earlier in pregnancy, further emboldening the Pro-Life narrative. As we arrive in 2022, at a crucial moment in the history of abortion in the United States, it is clear that the Pro-Life movement, build on a historical framework that evolved over the course of the twentieth century, is unprecedented in its power and pervasiveness.
Endnotes
1. Reagan, L. J. (2022). When abortion was a crime: Women, medicine, and law in the United States, 1867-1973, with a new... preface. UNIV OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
2. Ward, A. (2021, June 12). The History of the Pro-Life Movement. ERLC. Retrieved May 11, 2022, from https://erlc.com/resource-library/spotlight-articles/the-history-of-the-pro-life-movement/
3. Williams, D. K. (2015). The Partisan Trajectory of the American Pro-Life Movement: How a Liberal Catholic Campaign Became a Conservative Evangelical Cause. Religions. Retrieved from https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/6/2/451.
4. Ibid.
5. Abdelfatah, R. (2019, June 20). </i>'Throughline' Traces Evangelicals' History On The Abortion Issue</i>. NPR. Retrieved May 11, 2022, from https://www.npr.org/2019/06/20/734303135/throughline-traces-evangelicals-history-on-the-abortion-issue
6. Supra note 3.