Interesting article.
Most Southern states actually had more liberal abortion laws than the New England states except for Massachusetts, though, see the map at
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_US_abortion_laws_pre-1973.svg. In addition, Paul Watson said at
https://books.google.com/books?id=Tzi7bIDP3aMC&pg=PA173: "What galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed. What changed their minds was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."-
Randall Balmer is the source of the claim, not Paul Weyrich, and it's important to note Balmer states the claim is upon his recollection of an event in 1990; to my knowledge, it's never been supported by others in attendance or any transcripts/audio recordings.
I think there's other compelling evidence against it too:
Most importantly, this simplified history of abortion ignores the vast and decades-long, Catholic-led antiabortion movement and the coincident politicization of White evangelicals for nearly two decades before the 1978 midterm elections. Understanding this history is vital for making sense of the nearly 60-year interfaith movement that has led to this moment.
Catholic leaders had long opposed abortion, becoming especially vocal in the 1930s when the Great Depression led to an uptick in women seeking the procedure. By the early 1960s, some evangelicals were beginning to view abortion as murder and a source of growing social and political concern. Twelve years before the Roe decision, a young woman wrote to the leading U.S. evangelist, the Rev. Billy Graham, with the following question: “Through a young and foolish sin, I had an abortion. I now feel guilty of murder. How can I ever know forgiveness?” Graham, whose syndicated newspaper column “My Answer” reached millions of Americans, replied: “Abortion is as violent a sin against God, nature, and one’s self as one can commit.” Graham telegraphed evangelicals’ unease with abortion, which would become increasingly political in the coming years.
As state legislatures across the country contemplated legalizing abortion in the mid-1960s — buoyed by support from members of the medical and legal communities, as well as certain more liberal religious groups and, in particular, from the growing women’s liberation movement — evangelical antiabortion voices also emerged in the debate. At the time, there was growing awareness, but also a lot of confusion and ambivalence about abortion among these Christians. An article in a 1967 issue of the evangelical magazine Eternity captured this shifting terrain. It noted that the Bible was “strangely silent” on the question of whether the “unborn fetus” — not, tellingly, the “unborn child” — was a “living person with all the rights of life.” To combat that silence, a smattering of evangelical ministers began participating in Catholic-led “Right to Life Sundays.”
But a real turning point occurred when a statewide referendum on abortion took place in Michigan in 1972. Catholics there led the charge to oppose legalizing abortion. Crucially, they did so in a loose coalition with evangelical denominations, including Missouri Synod Lutherans, Dutch Reformed churches and Southern Baptist Convention churches. These groups managed to get 60 percent of voting Michiganders to oppose abortion law reform by emphasizing that abortion was murder. The campaign codified a visual iconography that is now rote, with mutilated fetuses and endangered White babies at its center. The victory also marked the beginning of an important political coalition in the making between evangelicals and Catholics who opposed abortion.
This type of religious cooperation was now possible because the meaning of abortion had changed for many evangelicals. Initially, most states proposed legalizing abortion only in “extreme cases”: to save the life of the expectant woman and in cases of rape, incest and fetal deformity. The Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution in 1971 calling on Southern Baptists to “work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions.”
Yet, in the wake of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which (like the state of New York before it) allowed women to elect to have a legal abortion for any reason through the second trimester of pregnancy — before the point at which the fetus could viably live outside the mother’s body — evangelicals came to see abortion differently. A statement from the National Association of Evangelicals immediately responding to Roe lamented that the decision “made it legal to terminate a pregnancy for no other reason than personal convenience or sociological considerations.” That idea grew in evangelical circles as the number of legal abortions increased soon after. By 1975, 3.5 million women, or 1 in 14 women of reproductive age, had had an abortion.
That same year, a prominent group of Protestants, including J.A.O. Preus II, president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod; Harold Lindsell, the editor of Christianity Today; and Ruth Graham, wife of the Rev. Billy Graham, founded the Christian Action Council to remind “non-Roman Catholic Christians that virtually all Christians have been against abortion from the beginning and for the protection of human life.” Quickly, evangelical denominations and institutions adopted across-the-board opposition to abortion.