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ABORTION

Abortion as a Political Issue

The issue of relaxing laws restricting medical abortions was one of the many reforms raised in the seething climate of the 1960s. For some years efforts had been made to ease the restraint on abortion so that women would have access to safe medical termination of their pregnancies. Sexual reformers were joined during the decade by other groups, among them the new women's advocacy groups, such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), which advocated the repeal of abortion laws at its second annual convention in November 1967. These groups demanded modification if not repeal of the various states' laws prohibiting the termination of pregnancy in order to increase women's freedom. Other groups concerned with the world's exploding population, such as Zero Population Growth, saw access to abortion a part of their larger goals. By 1969 there was sufficient interest to create a national organization, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL).

Local Emphasis

People associated with NARAL assumed they would have to achieve their goals at the state level and quickly made progress by drawing on the support of religious liberals, both individuals and denominations. In 1970 both the Lutheran Church in America and the American Lutheran church gave qualified approval to abortion, and the United Methodist Board of Church and Society was particularly active in the push for reform. By organizing local activists, abortion reformers had eased access to legal, medical abortions in four states, including New York, and campaigns were active in other states, despite vigorous resistance.

Roe v. Wade

The reformers seemed to have achieved an unexpected, complete victory when on 22 January 1973 the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, ruled that an inherent right to privacy exists within the Constitution and that this right prohibited the states' interference in the medical relation between a woman and her physician in the first trimester of her pregnancy. States could regulate abortion in the later stages of pregnancy, as the fetus became viable outside the womb.

Catholic Reaction

The Roe decision sent shock waves through some religious groups. The Roman Catholic church, which had been working against relaxing anti-abortion laws, found the ruling abhorrent. The National Council of Catholic Bishops quickly issued a pastoral warning that those people either undergoing or performing abortion would place themselves in a state of excommunication. The bishops charged the Roe decision was "wrong and contrary to the fundamental principles of morality.… The Supreme Court has certainly over-stepped itself in making law rather than interpreting it." The National Council of Catholic Bishops then turned the National Right to Life Committee into a membership organization which became the largest and most visible of the antiabortion groups, with over eighteen hundred affiliates and an estimated eleven million members by the end of the decade.

Conservative Opposition

Not all its members were Catholics, of course. Conservative Protestants also had reservations about the end of legal restraints on abortion. The evangelical Christianity Today charged that the "majority of the Supreme Court has explicitly rejected Christian moral teaching" and "clearly decided for paganism, and against Christianity." Religious conservatives formed organizations that sought to overturn or modify the Roe decision, which seemed a part of the growing secularization of American society and its rejection of traditional moral and biblical values.

Life versus Choice

The antiabortion movement referred to itself as pro-life, attempting to target its opponents as advocates of death. Those who supported women's right to abortion insisted that they were not necessarily in favor of abortion but of the right of a woman to choose for herself whether she would bear a child. These advocates called themselves pro-choice.

The Hyde Amendment

The struggle between the groups was intense. In spite of general support for the right to an abortion, the antiabortion movement was able to target its energies at legislative bodies and achieved a significant success in 1976 when Congress adopted the so-called Hyde amendment to the Medicaid appropriation, which forbade using federal funds to pay for abortion except when the mother's life was in danger. Abortion foes pressured individual states to take similar steps to refuse to pay for abortions except for therapeutic reasons. In 1980 the Supreme Court upheld the Hyde amendment.

Moral Values of the Nation

The antiabortion movement brought together a variety of attitudes besides the belief that human life was engendered at the moment of conception. Social conservatives saw abortion as more evidence of the collapse of the nation's moral values in that it offered women an additional way to ignore their sexual responsibility. This seemed another manifestation of the feminist movement. These conservatives linked abortion, gay rights, and feminism as part of a general effort to overturn the natural, God-given order of sexual relations.

The New Religious Right

These intensifying conservative concerns about social and cultural issues led to the political coalition of the late 1970s called the New Religious Right. Its most famous organization, Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, was organized in 1979. While the New Religious Right drew its original energy from conservative Protestants, its leaders hoped to bring Roman Catholics into alignment in time.