This weekend is the 50th anniversary of the once (and hopefully future) establishment of a woman’s right to control her own destiny — ie, the right to decide for herself if she should have an abortion. In recognition of that, I thought I would share some things I learned about the early days of the anti-abortion movement while I was researching my latest book, A God of Our Invention.
When Roe v Wade was first handed down, Catholic clergy immediately went into attack mode (Catholic laity, not so much). Evangelical Protestants, however, were initially fairly indifferent to it.
“There is no official Southern Baptist position on abortion, or any other such question,” Barry Garrett, head of the Washington bureau of Baptist Press, wrote in a news analysis dated Jan. 31, 1973. “Among 12 million Southern Baptists, there are probably 12 million different opinions.”
James Wood, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs in the early 1970s, opposed legislative attempts by Congress to overturn the Supreme Court decision, citing “the separation of church and state and free exercise of religion on the part of those who find these medical services completely harmonious with their religious beliefs or moral convictions.” baptistnews.com/…
Even those conservatives who had some qualms about abortion tried to find a middle ground. But then, in 1978, the IRS notified Bob Jones University, a private evangelical college, of its intention to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status because BJU insisted on maintaining its racial segregation policy of no interracial dating. (In 1983, the Supreme Court sided with the IRS, 8-1. BJU apologized in 2000 and allowed interracial dating.)
Evangelicals were furious at what they saw as “government interference, and some of them, led by Paul Weyrich (who had trying to turn evangelicals and fundamentalists into a political force for years), saw in the Bob Jones case an opportunity to mobilize their flocks. However, they also recognized that arguing in defense of segregation was not a winning argument (not in 1978, anyway). Weyrich held a conference call to discuss other ways of getting their people motivated, and someone suggested abortion. That’s how Weyrich recalled it in a 1990 interview with Randall Balmer.
That is how the Protestant anti-abortion movement got started. It was conceived as a project to block government interference in evangelical school policy, and evolved (sic!) into a crusade to demand government interference in women’s intimate lives.