THE RISING TIDE OF CONSERVATISM ★^1055Roe v. Wade decision began among Roman Catholics, whose church condemned
abortion under any circumstances. But it soon enlisted evangelical Protestants
and social conservatives more generally. Life, the movement insisted, begins at
conception, and abortion is nothing less than murder. Between this position
and the feminist insistence that a woman’s right to control her body includes
the right to a safe, legal abortion, compromise was impossible. Ironically, both
sides showed how the rights revolution had reshaped the language of politics.
Defenders of abortion exalted “the right to choose” as the essence of freedom.
Opponents called themselves the “right to life” movement and claimed to rep-
resent the rights of the “unborn child.”
The abortion issue drew a bitter, sometimes violent line through Ameri-
can politics. It affected battles over nominees to judicial positions and led to
demonstrations at family- planning and abortion clinics. The anti- abortion
movement won its first victory in 1976 when Congress, over President Ford’s
veto, ended federal funding for abortions for poor women through the Med-
icaid program. By the 1990s, a few fringe anti- abortion activists were placing
bombs at medical clinics and murdering doctors who terminated pregnancies.
Today, most women continue to have the legal right of access to abortion. But
in many areas the procedure became more and more difficult to obtain as hos-
pitals and doctors stopped providing it.
A women’s liberation march in Detroit in 1970 highlights the issue of equal pay for equal
work. At the time, women earned less than men in virtually every category of employment.
What were the roots of the rise of conservatism in the 1970s?