Perspective: What everyone gets wrong about evangelicals and abortion

[mahatmakanejeeves]

There’s a myth in some liberal circles that the anti-abortion movement was launched by segregationist diehards looking for a new cause, but this great piece by ⁦
@1gillianfrank1
⁩ and ⁦
@NeilJYoung17
⁩ shows how wrong that is.

washingtonpost.com
Perspective | What everyone gets wrong about evangelicals and abortion
Evangelicals started speaking out against legal abortion long before the late 1970s.

Link to tweet

[hedda_foil]

1. This is the missing piece. Thanks!

[keithbvadu2]

2. 1+

[Grins]

3. It "shows how wrong that is"? Disagree.

It adds information but doesn’t disprove what the “people in the room” reported - abortion was a means to other (and more important) ends.

[keep_left]

5. That's correct. The article is somewhat revisionist, although accurate to a large degree.

There was a long-standing opposition to abortion among some very conservative Protestant denominations (the article mentions the LCMS, but I'm sure that the even nuttier WELS--home to Michele Bachmann--was also rabidly anti-abortion). But the elephant in the room was Catholicism. Protestant denominations have often been quite anti-Catholic and they don't want to work with them. So most of the anti-abortion groups had Protestant leadership (and still do). The Catholics eventually founded their own groups, because they discovered there was a glass ceiling in the Protestant organizations that made it impossible to break into leadership. The Catholics of course really resented that because they were fanatically committed to the cause and were marginalized in the Protestant groups.

The late Paul Weyrich liked to take credit for creating the Protestant-Catholic alliance against abortion--"co-belliigence"--getting the two sides to put aside animosities, but that's very likely Weyrich's own self-promotion. Randall Balmer in Thy Kingdom Come said:

...the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got us going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.

So the issues are complicated. But the Catholics deserve a lot more credit for the rise of the modern anti-abortion movement than anyone else.

[Solly Mack]

4. ...

The campaign codified a visual iconography that is now rote, with mutilated fetuses and endangered White babies at its center. (from 1972)