The Southern Baptist Convention’s president at the time of the Roe ruling, Dallas First Baptist Church preacher W. A. Criswell, celebrated the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling by taking the time to write that he was pleased. “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

To be fair, at the time of the Roe decision there were a few, very few, evangelical extremists who only mildly criticized the ruling. For the most part “the overwhelming response was silence, even approval.” In particular, evangelical fundamentalists “applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, and between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior.” W. Barry Garrett wrote in the Baptist Press that, “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.”

During a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and the so-called “flagship magazine” of the entire evangelical movement, Christianity Today “refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility as adequate justifications for ending a pregnancy.”

It took a full six years (1979) for the religious right leadership to abandon its pro-choice position and summarily obey the Vatican, the Heritage Foundation and its so-called “Moral Majority” founder Paul Weyrich. The religious right extremist Weyrich convinced evangelical clergy to “seize on abortion as a Republican cause célèbre and rallying cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term.”

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/6/8/1863445/-When-the-religious-right-was-pro-choice-evangelicals-applauded-Roe-v-Wade