Before the 1972 presidential election, Republicans backed abortion rights.
Really.
After last week’s leak of a draft opinion from the Supreme Court’s conservative majority — setting up an end to the nationwide right to terminate a pregnancy — it is hard to recall that conservatives once encouraged families to limit births, to be sure they had time and money to care for every child.
Today’s Trump-led Republicans rebuke that brand of “compassionate conservatism.”
They want everyone to forget that Republicans “promoted global and national population control through family planning, including contraception, sterilization, and abortion,” according to the 2007 book “The Conservative Ascendancy — How the Republican Right Rose to Power in Modern America” by Donald Critchlow.
But when President Nixon was fighting for reelection in 1972, his strategists persuaded him to oppose abortion. They wanted a “wedge to lure Roman Catholics and Evangelical Protestants away from their Democratic loyalties,” wrote Critchlow, a professor of history at Arizona State University.
Nixon saw political gold in opposing Roe v. Wade, which was originally a 1970 Texas lawsuit filed to protect pregnant women who “want to consider all options.” Stirring up the religious right by damning abortion played a minor role in Nixon’s landslide win for a second term.
But abortion rights won big at the Supreme Court in January 1973 when a 7-2 majority, including several conservative justices, ruled abortion was protected under privacy rights guaranteed to all citizens in the 14th Amendment.
In 1976, Nixon’s cynical stand against abortion was picked up by Ronald Reagan.
While incumbent Gerald Ford downplayed the issue, Reagan revived abortion as a wedge issue. He lost the 1976 presidential primary but returned to the issue in 1980, winning the nomination and the White House. That year, the GOP platform included a pledge to appoint judges who would “honor the sanctity of innocent unborn life.”
“Nothing like it has separated our society since the days of slavery,” Dr. C. Everett Koop, later a surgeon general, told Time magazine during Reagan’s first year in office, 1981.
Even with abortion at the center of all culture wars since then, the Supreme Court’s approval of abortion rights has remained fixed for nearly 50 years. That will change if last week’s leaked draft becomes reality.
“This MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in recent American history,” President Biden said, reacting to the draft ruling on abortion.
Trump recognized the political power of abortion when he ran in 2016. For most of his life, he supported abortion rights — even declining to support a ban on so-called ‘partial birth’ abortion — and gave money to Democrats who backed abortion.
As a presidential candidate, he used anti-abortion rhetoric to stir up voters, accusing Democrats of wanting to “rip” babies from their mothers’ wombs to “execute” them.
Last week, The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page dismissed concern that the court’s attack on abortion would lead to the loss of other rights. The editors said there is wide acceptance of gay marriage and birth control, unlike abortion.
But there is wide acceptance of abortion.
Last week, a Fox News poll indicated that 63 percent of Americans, including most Republicans, say “let it stand,” referring to the current abortion law.
The Fox poll is not an outlier. Many polls show Americans backing Roe by a margin of roughly two-to-one.
And Republicans are attacking other currently protected rights.
In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is seeking to gin up his right-wing base voters ahead of his re-election bid in November by signing a law to halt discussion of “sexual orientation or gender identity” in schools through Grade Three — or at any later point that is not deemed “age appropriate.”
He is raising money and winning media attention by feuding with the Walt Disney Corporation over its opposition to the law.
When Michigan statehouse Republicans proposed their own version of the Florida law, a GOP state senator lashed out at one Democrat by accusing her of wanting to “groom and sexualize kindergarteners.”
State Senator Mallory McMorrow’s (D) impassioned response went viral. She gave a speech in which she wondered why she was being attacked before concluding that she is “the biggest threat to your hollow, hateful scheme” as a parent willing to stand up to that rhetoric.
“Call me whatever you want,” McMorrow said. “I hope you brought in a few dollars. I hope it made you sleep good last night. I know who I am. I know what faith and service means — and what it calls for in this moment. We will not let hate win.”
Until now, Democrats generally avoided arguments over gay rights and abortion rights for fear of offending voters by raising difficult, personal topics known to politically benefit the far right.
But when moderate white moms, like McMorrow, feel the need to respond there is incentive for all Democrats to join the fight.
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) who is running for the U.S. Senate, took note of the excitement generated by McMorrow’s speech: “I think you absolutely need to have that kind of tone, that kind of attitude on these issues. These guys are punching down. … I think you’ve got to hit back. You’ve got to hit back hard.”
If there is a silver lining to the dark cloud over the Supreme Court, it is that half a century later Democrats will finally stand up to Nixon’s ugly politics on abortion.
Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.