A8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 8 , 2022
supreme courtdaughter Ivanka came in and out
of the room, Leo laid out a road
map for Trump on the federal
court system, potentially trans-
forming the foundational under-
standing of rights in America.
It was a moment antiabortion
activists had been working
toward for decades: The highest
reaches of Republican power fi-
nally focused, in unison, on
achieving the once-implausible
goal of revisiting the jurispru-
dence of the 1960s and 1970s,
including Roe v. Wade, the 1973
ruling that legalized abortion
nationwide.
The leak of a draft Supreme
Court opinion on abortion this
past week showed that a majority
of the court is now poised to do
just that, with three of the five
potential votes for overturning
Roe coming from justices recom-
mended by Leo, appointed by
Trump and confirmed under the
leadership of McConnell.
For the activists who have
fought against enormous odds to
elevate the issues of abortion and
judicial selection, the sudden
turnabout is nearly as shocking
as Trump’s election was for Mc-
Connell. Interviews with more
than two dozen movement lead-
ers, Republican officials and op-
eratives describe a half-century
journey that began to settle only
over the last decade, as the
politics of abortion finally polar-
ized itself as a partisan issue and
emerged as a top-tier Republican
priority.
“I think even until earlier this
week most pro-life leaders were
holding their breath,” said
Charles Donovan, a former Rea-
gan White House aide, who be-
gan working as legislative direc-
tor for National Right to Life in
the late 1970s. “I do think it’s
pretty stunning.”
Abortion rights advocates
have also been stunned by the
transformation, accusing Repub-
licans of hijacking the courts for
partisan and unpopular ends.
“This is exactly what we feared
was coming,” said Amy Hagstrom
Miller, chief executive of Whole
Woman’s Health, a network of
abortion clinics. “Republicans
just do this, and all the gloves are
off.”
With almost no change in
national public opinion over the
past half-century, and as a major-
ity of Americans remain opposed
to overturning Roe, the move-
ment succeeded by mobilizing a
determined minority of Ameri-
cans and adopting the protest
tactics and sometimes the lan-
guage of the left. They trans-
formed religious interpretations
of prenatal life, embraced medi-
cal advancements that gave new
understanding of the fetus and
helped to build an academic legal
movement in the Ivy League
universities that railed against
the evolution of American juris-
prudence.
Most importantly, they nur-
tured a generation of political
and legal leaders who saw in the
setbacks of the 1970s to 1990s a
defining cause. As a young man
in the 1970s, McConnell, 80, had
worked with the late Justice
Antonin Scalia, an avowed oppo-
nent of Roe, in the Justice De-
partment. A photograph of the
two men from that time still
hangs in McConnell’s office.
“If I was looking at ways to
have an impact on the country
that I thought would be good and
positive, this would be the way to
do it,” McConnell said in the
interview this past week at his
office on Capitol Hill.
“Majorities change. Taxes go
up. Taxes go down,” he contin-
ued. “If you prefer America right
of center, which I do, and you’re
looking around at what you can
do to have the longest possible
impact on the kind of America
you want, it seems to me you look
at the courts.”
The beginnings
At the time Roe was handed
down in 1973, political leaders
had no such conception of the
judiciary. Both parties viewed
the law as a practice mostly
astride of politics. Abortion was
an issue without clear political or
religious boundaries beyond the
Catholic Church.
The former president of the
Southern Baptist Convention,
W.A. Criswell, who ran the First
Baptist Church in Dallas, had
argued that a child became an
individual only after birth when
“it had a life separate from its
mother.” In both 1971 and 1974,
Southern Baptists passed resolu-
tions asking evangelicals to work
for legal abortion in cases of
rape, incest and fetal deformity,
as well as cases in which there
was “carefully ascertained evi-
dence of the likelihood of dam-
age to the emotional, mental and
ABORTION FROM A
physical health of the mother.”
That permissiveness among
pastors was about to run head-
long into a cultural rebellion
against the liberal social move-
ments of the 1960s. “Women’s
libbers are promoting free sex
instead of the ‘slavery’ of mar-
riage,” the conservative activist
Phyllis Schlafly wrote in a 1972
essay opposing the Equal Rights
Amendment. “They are promot-
ing abortions instead of fami-
lies.”
A topic once only whispered
about was now openly debated.
“People in the pews were hearing
arguments for abortion explicitly
for the first time and rejecting
those arguments,” said Russell
Moore, the former head of the
Southern Baptist Convention’s
public policy arm. “They did
understand that when they were
pregnant and when they were
expecting their child, it was their
child.”
Republican election strat-
egists had simultaneously identi-
fied the issue as a cleave to peel
away Democratic Catholics and
Southern Whites unsettled by
social change. During the 1972
election, Senate Minority Leader
Hugh Scott (R-Pa.) seized upon
the new culture war message,
denouncing Democratic presi-
dential candidate George
McGovern as the “Triple-A Can-
didate: Acid, Abortion and Am-
nesty.”
So began a three-decade trans-
formation inside the Republican
Party, marked by small victories
and massive disappointments for
the antiabortion cause. At the
1976 Republican convention, the
party endorsed a constitutional
amendment that would “restore
protection of the right to life for
unborn children.” More than two
dozen female convention del-
egates signed a minority report
urging the party not to take an
abortion position.
By 1980, the Republican Party
had become more explicit, prom-
ising in its platform to promote
judges “at all levels” that would
respect “the sanctity of human
life.” But the party, and even
some advisers to the nominee,
California Gov. Ronald Reagan,
were still deeply divided.
Donovan remembers being ap-
proached at the convention by
Marty Anderson, a senior policy
adviser to the Reagan campaign
who dismissively told antiabor-
tion activists in the hallway to
“be happy with what you got.”
“Some people on Reagan’s
team were not pro-life, and there
were many of them that were
unhappy,” Donovan remem-
bered.
Those divisions would surface
a year later with the naming of
Reagan’s first Supreme Court
nominee, Sandra Day O’Connor.
Her friend, Carolyn Gerster, who
founded the Arizona Right to
Life Committee, testified before
the Senate that O’Connor had
repeatedly voted in the state
Senate to protect abortion.
“We are concerned,” John C.
Willke, the head of National
Right to Life, said that same day.O’Connor’s confirmation set a
template that would haunt the
antiabortion movement for dec-
ades. She was followed onto the
court by Reagan appointee An-
thony M. Kennedy and George
H.W. Bush appointee David Sout-
er. Both joined O’Connor in 1992
in endorsing the “essential hold-
ing” of Roe as part of the Planned
Parenthood vs. Casey decision.
On the legislative front, the
antiabortion forces had still not
found a way to power. In June
1983, a Senate vote on a constitu-
tional amendment to ban abor-
tion failed. Fifteen Democrats
voted for the amendment, and
19 Republicans voted against it.
Just two weeks prior, the Su-
preme Court had reaffirmed the
right to an abortion, striking
down a local ordinance imposing
restrictive regulations on abor-
tion providers.
In the wake of defeat, Ameri-
cans United for Life, an antiabor-
tion law firm and advocacy
group, convened a strategic na-
tional conference in March 1984
at the Palmer House Hilton Hotel
in Chicago. The idea behind the
event, titled “Reversing Roe v.
Wade Through the Courts,” was
to devise a coordinated legal
strategy.
“It was a hopeful atmosphere,”
said Edward Grant, a past presi-
dent and executive director of
Americans United for Life and an
attorney.
Another setback came in 1987,
when Reagan’s nomination of
Robert Bork, who publicly criti-
cized the legal rationale that
undergirded Roe, was defeated in
the Senate, forcing yet another
deep internal reckoning and re-
trenchment.
“Initially, it was people going,
‘Oh my God, what just hit us?’”
said Carrie Severino, the presi-
dent of the Judicial Crisis Net-
work. “It took a long time for
people on the right to figure out
what the best response was.”New strategies
The organized response had,
in fact, already begun, spear-
headed by a group of law stu-dents at Yale, Harvard and the
University of Chicago, who began
meeting under the auspices of
the Federalist Society in 1982.
They were united by the idea that
American law had strayed too far
from the original intent of the
nation’s founders.
The group grew in the late
1980s, with chapters and mem-
bers proliferating across the
United States. It soon became an
influential group in Washington
with a sprawling budget and
deep access across Republican
levers of government.
“Abortion was not the motivat-
ing factor,” said Edwin Meese III,
a former Reagan adviser who has
for decades led the fight for
conservative legal reforms, in an
interview last December. “It was
a matter of being honest and
faithful to what the Constitution
actually said.”
These self-described original-
ists came to reject Roe as judicial
activism, and found common
cause with abortion opponents
who could mobilize voters. At the
same time, antiabortion activists
stepped back to reconsider their
approach. They decided after the
Casey decision that the anti-fem-
inist rhetoric of Schlafly and the
Equal Rights Amendment strug-
gles from the 1970s had become
counterproductive.
“We had to convince the public
that we were compassionate to
women,” Willke would later write
about the new strategy. “Accord-
ingly, we test-marketed varia-
tions on this theme.”
The result was a new slogan —
“Love Them Both,” mother and
child — and a sharp rejection of
some of the more aggressive
methods of protest in the 1980s
such as Operation Rescue, which
had harassed women outside
abortion clinics.
“Americans have usually been
pretty unhappy about the idea of
punishing patients,” said visiting
Harvard law professor Mary
Ziegler, who has written exten-
sively on the history of the move-
ment.
After the “Year of the Woman”
swept four new female Demo-cratic senators and Bill Clinton
into office in 1992, abortion op-
ponents founded Susan B. An-
thony List, named for the 19th-
century suffragist, aimed at
electing more “pro-life” women
to office.
But as the movement made
progress rebranding itself with
the public, it found its foothold in
the Republican Party remained
tenuous. The 1996 Republican
presidential nominee, Sen. Bob
Dole of Kansas, asked to modify
his party’s plank to include a
“declaration of tolerance” for
those who did not oppose abor-
tion.
“This is not compromise, it is
civility,” Dole said. A rebellion
ensued, only to be settled by Dole
making clear that he had not
read the antiabortion platform
on which his candidacy was
based.
The tensions within the party
would only grow in the coming
years as the evangelical right,
which had by now fully unified
against abortion, increasingly
made threats against the Repub-
lican Party.
Paul Weyrich, the founder of
the Heritage Foundation who
coined the term “moral majority,”
declared in 1999, “We probably
have lost the culture war.” Lead-
ers like James Dobson, the
founder of Focus on the Family,
began warning that evangelicals
would bolt from the Republican
Party.
“We were both saying to the
party, you can’t play games with
this issue. So it was serious,” said
Gary Bauer, a candidate for presi-
dent in 2000 who worked with
Dobson. “Many people felt that
Republican leaders had to be
educated about where their own
voters were.”
The anger had the effect of
solidifying support. When Presi-
dent George W. Bush nominated
White House counsel Harriet
Miers to the Supreme Court in
2005 , the response was fierce.
She had spoken about “self-de-
termination” guiding abortion
decisions and gave confusing an-
swers on the right to privacy.
“There was a tremendous
backlash,” Bauer said.
Miers withdrew her nomina-
tion within weeks. Her replace-
ment as a nominee, Samuel Alito,
was easily confirmed. He became
the author of the draft opinion
completely overturning Roe that
leaked last week from the Su-
preme Court.A consolidation
The consolidation of the anti-
abortion movement’s political
power would only continue in
the coming years, as the parties
sorted themselves along culture
war lines, even as the nation’s
overall view of abortion re-
mained constant.
According to Gallup, the share
of Americans who do not want
the Supreme Court to overturn
Roe was 58 percent in both 1989
and 2021. In 1975, 22 percent of
Americans wanted “abortion ille-
gal in all circumstances,” com-
pared to 19 percent in 2021.But the share of Democrats
who said abortion should be
legal under “any circumstances”
rose from 19 percent to 50 per-
cent between 1975 and 2021. The
share of Republicans who want
to outlaw all abortion went from
25 percent to 31 percent.
In the Senate today, there are
only three Democrats who op-
pose using federal funds for
abortions. In the House, there is
just one, and he is locked in a
tight primary battle.
The 2010 midterm elections
were a major turning point in the
partisan shift. Antiabortion
Democrats were voted out of
office for having supported the
Affordable Care Act, which al-
lows plans in the insurance mar-
ketplaces to cover abortion, al-
though states are allowed to ban
such coverage. At the same time,
a new generation of Republican
lawmakers who prioritized cul-
tural issues were swept into of-
fice.
The Republican midterm wins
also gave states new powers to
redraw legislative district lines,
further growing the power of
antiabortion forces in Republi-
can-dominated states.
“The pushback to Obama’s
pro-abortion policies was so pro-
nounced at the state level,” said
Family Research Council presi-
dent Tony Perkins, who credits
the former Democratic president
with propelling the antiabortion
cause. “We began to see this wave
of pro-life legislation.”
By the fall of 2011, antiabor-
tion advocates had started push-
ing for bold restrictions with
brash new tactics. When Janet
Porter introduced the first
“heartbeat bill” in the country to
ban abortions after six weeks,
she showed up in the Ohio State-
house with ultrasound videos to
demonstrate the cardiac activity
of a fetus, which she described as
the “youngest person to ever
speak” at the Ohio Statehouse.
Over 200 antiabortion restric-
tions were enacted between 2011
and 2013, more than had taken
effect for the entire previous
decade.
“We sent a signal that being
pro-choice was a disqualifier,”
said Marjorie Dannenfelser,
president of Susan B. Anthony
List. “Having an ‘R’ next to your
name was not enough.”
But even after 2010, when the
vast majority of Republicans
identified publicly as antiabor-
tion, conservative advocates and
lawmakers were bitterly divided
on exactly how far that legisla-
tion should go. The most estab-
lished antiabortion groups ar-
gued that proposed heartbeat
bills went too far and would bait
a liberal Supreme Court to issue a
decision that might expand abor-
tion rights even further.
“It was the right idea at the
wrong time,” said Michael
Gonidakis, the president of Ohio
Right to Life.
The largest antiabortion
groups, including National Right
to Life, whose lawyer testified
against the six-week ban in Ohio,
CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGEAbortion rose from political fog to become a top GOP target
ASSOCIATED PRESSMARCY NIGHSWANDER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
TOP: Thousands of people gather outside the Minnesota Capitol
building to protest the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion
in January 1973. ABOVE: Antiabortion demonstrators, including
Phyllis Schlafly, center, rally outside the Supreme Court in June
1992 following a decision that upheld several provisions of a
restrictive Pennsylvania abortion law. The antiabortion movement
was decades in the making, with a goal of overturning Roe v. Wade.