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AHC and WI: Abortion Remains a Catholic Issue

Milo

George Brown Apologist
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Abortion was historically just a Catholic Issue and it was only after Roe vs Wade that Evangelical Protestants got more involved or at least what's I've read. Indeed these Protestants as a notable voting block seemed to show up first appear in 1976 when they voted for Carter then later for the GOP. So is there a way for Roe vs Wade to be enforced while Abortion opposition remains just a Catholic Issue.
 
Abortion was historically just a Catholic Issue and it was only after Roe vs Wade that Evangelical Protestants got more involved or at least what's I've read. Indeed these Protestants as a notable voting block seemed to show up first appear in 1976 when they voted for Carter then later for the GOP. So is there a way for Roe vs Wade to be enforced while Abortion opposition remains just a Catholic Issue.
If the champion of the right in the 80s isn't a divorcè as Reagan was, perhaps conservative evangelical-Catholic alliances stay more focused on divorce as an issue? Though that's probably harder to get wider appeal on.
 
Abortion was historically just a Catholic Issue and it was only after Roe vs Wade that Evangelical Protestants got more involved or at least what's I've read. Indeed these Protestants as a notable voting block seemed to show up first appear in 1976 when they voted for Carter then later for the GOP. So is there a way for Roe vs Wade to be enforced while Abortion opposition remains just a Catholic Issue.

Evangelical Protestants as a voting bloc had already been a thing for some time and abortion was already becoming an issue that cut across religious lines; Roe v. Wade came about as a challenge to Texan abortion laws.
 
Evangelical Protestants as a voting bloc had already been a thing for some time and abortion was already becoming an issue that cut across religious lines; Roe v. Wade came about as a challenge to Texan abortion laws.
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."-
 
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."-

But people often do start believing what they say after they have been saying it a lot for a few years.

So an interesting historic-political fact and "gotcha" but abortion, school prayer, or the ERA all certainly had independent and self-sustaining relevance by no later than the mid to late 80s.
 
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."-
I meant Paul Weyrich.
 
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.​
 
If somehow racial segregation is largely maintained or is at least an issue that so-called “polite society” can make contentious then I have a hard time not seeing that be the primary issue championed by (white) southern Baptists and evangelical Protestants. Guys like Falwell and Robertson got their start campaigning against integration after all, even a guy like Billy Graham was only marginally more progressive than them on that issue.
 
But people often do start believing what they say after they have been saying it a lot for a few years.

So an interesting historic-political fact and "gotcha" but abortion, school prayer, or the ERA all certainly had independent and self-sustaining relevance by no later than the mid to late 80s.
And this is particularly the case for younger generations of a group
 
Everybody blames Roe, but from what I can tell it wasn't until the cases after Roe that people started freaking out. Roe merely struck down very extreme laws, but over time you had minors getting access to abortions without parental consent or notice, minors getting a legal right to purchase contraceptives without parental oversight, states being barred from , states not being allowed to regulate what sort of methods of abortion could be used, the state not being allowed to have doctors present literature about alternatives (such as child support schemes and public programs) containing true-yet-not-morally-neutral information, etc. It amounted to Lochner for doctors; thou shalt not intrude upon the sanctity of the medical profession.

Pre-Casey, it really had gone beyond a women's right to choose to depriving the public of a right to persuade or express an opinion.

If you put somebody on in 1975 other than John Paul Stevens - somebody just a wee bit more conservative but not chumming around with White and Rehnquist - you probably narrow Roe to the core issue the Court faced (the chilling effect upon the medical profession by arbitrary prosecution when laws governing medicine are inherently vague and judgement-dependent). It was a right of medical privacy initially and not merely abortion, just as Griswold was marital privacy and not merely contraception. It seems like it wasn't until Douglas was off the Court that Substantive Due Process took center stage as the rationale.
 
Everybody blames Roe, but from what I can tell it wasn't until the cases after Roe that people started freaking out. Roe merely struck down very extreme laws, but over time you had minors getting access to abortions without parental consent or notice, minors getting a legal right to purchase contraceptives without parental oversight, states being barred from , states not being allowed to regulate what sort of methods of abortion could be used, the state not being allowed to have doctors present literature about alternatives (such as child support schemes and public programs) containing true-yet-not-morally-neutral information, etc. It amounted to Lochner for doctors; thou shalt not intrude upon the sanctity of the medical profession.

I feel like this says more about evangelical/southern baptist doctrine on sexual morality or patriarchy then. If they're going to be outraged over minors purchasing contraceptives then perhaps broader conservative christian outrage to abortion/sexual healthcare is inevitable?
 
I feel like this says more about evangelical/southern baptist doctrine on sexual morality or patriarchy then. If they're going to be outraged over minors purchasing contraceptives then perhaps broader conservative christian outrage to abortion/sexual healthcare is inevitable?
Some argue it may have been inevitable that social conservatives would turn against abortion because of its relation to the sexual revolution.
 
I can't see a change if post-Roe is more restrictive on who can get abortions and how than OTL, as the state laws against abortion and the arguments against abortion focus on it happening at all. A state law saying "you can't have it after week 6 of pregnancy no matter the circumstance" doesn't seem like the people passing it would be mollified if minors couldn't get it without permission.
 
I feel like this says more about evangelical/southern baptist doctrine on sexual morality or patriarchy then. If they're going to be outraged over minors purchasing contraceptives then perhaps broader conservative christian outrage to abortion/sexual healthcare is inevitable?
I think this is true, yes. A lot of the anti-abortion movement is IMO based less in anything related to the rights of the fetus than in the idea that, to put it bluntly, the risk of pregnancy ought to be a deterrent to sex outside the bounds of wedlock/'traditional' relationships. Access to abortion inherently, I think, makes casual sex safer - and as long as people have an emotional reaction of disgust to the idea of people having casual sex, they will try to limit the things that enable it, and for various reasons this reaction seems to be concentrated among evangelical Christians.

That said, it's very much possible that other moral panics will be more salient than abortion - but I suspect that abortion being an issue among evangelical Protestants is and was overdetermined.
 
the religious right got so mad about gay people not having a deterrent to sex they synthesized AIDS out of goats blood so i believe it
 
I feel like this says more about evangelical/southern baptist doctrine on sexual morality or patriarchy then. If they're going to be outraged over minors purchasing contraceptives then perhaps broader conservative christian outrage to abortion/sexual healthcare is inevitable?

It's one thing to be bothered about what other people do. It's another thing to be bothered about not being able to tell your own kids what to do.

It's the difference between mind your business and keep out of my business.

For what it's worth, there's old videos of Bill Douglas - the architect of privacy - saying more or less the same thing.




Roe v Wade and abortion is one of those weird issues where a lot of different movements and complaints converged on a single court case.
 
It's one thing to be bothered about what other people do. It's another thing to be bothered about not being able to tell your own kids what to do.

It's the difference between mind your business and keep out of my business.

For what it's worth, there's old videos of Bill Douglas - the architect of privacy - saying more or less the same thing.
Well people’s children have their own individual rights too.
 
It's one thing to be bothered about what other people do. It's another thing to be bothered about not being able to tell your own kids what to do.

It's the difference between mind your business and keep out of my business.
I mean, I think taking that sort of proprietary attitude, for lack of a better word, out of the law books was an intentional and to some extent explicit part of the same 'rights revolution' as Roe. As long as parents were able to exert that sort of power over their children against those children's will, there was going to be a reaction against that (both on general principle and to prevent specific uses of that power), and that reaction was going to use legal proceedings as one of its tools in order to give young people more autonomy. And conversely, as long as there was any social movement that threatened that sense of authority, those parents with those 'traditional' attitudes were going to respond to that with their own movements, movements that would also use legal methods.
 
let’s be honest every single modern social conservative movement has been about gaining more control over one’s children from jesus freaks

don’t want your kids to be gay, trans, make their own decisions about their bodies, be in interracial relationships, arguably Qanon, etc…

after WWII children began to gain more freedom, and that more than anything caused the base for these conservative movements. these freaks want to control their children forever and convince hysterical mothers who watch too much tv to do the same so their kid doesn’t end up in a hip hop style drug violence gang
 
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