HuffPo | It was, after all, the Catholic bishops who created the
"right-to-life" movement in the first place, back when most American
weren't even paying attention to the abortion issue, as I detail in my
book Good Catholics: The Battle over Abortion in the Catholic Church.
In the mid-1960s, abortion wasn't a major political issue. It was
regulated by the states, most of which banned it except to save a
woman's life. But public health officials, doctors and some legislators
began pushing to make abortion more widely available because some 1
million illegal procedures were being performed every year. The
gynecological wards of many city's hospitals were filled with women
suffering from botched procedures -- some 10,000 in New York City alone
in 1967 -- and only women who were rich or well-connected could get
legal abortions, even in cases of rape or fetal deformity.
But
the Catholic bishops, who considered sexual morality their special
purview, decided to make preventing any liberalization of abortion law
the main cause of their newly formed National Conference of Catholic
Bishops. When California considered a bill to liberalize abortion
access, the Dioceses of Los Angeles hired the same political consulting
firm that got Ronald Reagan elected governor of California to beat back
the bill. The bishops' consulting firm created the first grassroots
"right-to-life" group to lobby against the bill.
After that, the NCCB hired a political consultant to
create right-to-life groups around the country. The bishops provided
the financial and administrative support to get some of the earliest and
most influential anti-abortion groups, including those in New York,
Pennsylvania and Michigan, off the ground to obscure their involvement
in the campaign against abortion, which they feared would reawaken old
fears of the Vatican trying to impose its doctrine on American society.
They created and funded
the National Right to Life Committee, which would go on to be the most
influential anti-abortion organization for 30 years, to coordinate the
activities of the local anti-abortion groups.
Most of these early
groups were heavily Catholic. But as more Evangelical Christians became
interested in the issue, they became concerned that the bishops'
control of the NRLC would dilute the effectiveness of the pro-life
movement because it would be seen as tool of the Catholic Church. At a
heated board meeting just before the Roe v. Wade decision, they wrested
control of the organization from the bishops' conference, obscuring the
Catholic roots of the organization and the anti-abortion movement.
Having
lost their grassroots lobby just when they needed it most, the bishops
tried another tack. In 1975, they released the Pastoral Plan for
Pro-Life Activities, which said abortion was the number one issue for
Catholics, and laid out a plan to organize Catholics politically to
support candidates who backed a constitutional amendment to ban
abortion. The move politicized the issue in a presidential election
cycle in which both Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford thought they needed the
Catholic vote to win. Both candidates went to the bishops seeking their
blessing as the press watched breathlessly.
Not surprisingly, the bishops gave what was widely viewed as their
endorsement to Ford because of his support of an anti-abortion
amendment.
So by the mid-1970s, the bishops had created the
anti-abortion movement out of whole cloth and become the first to
politicize the issue in a presidential election (even though they failed
to throw the election to their preferred candidate). Four years later,
when Republican strategist Paul Weyrich was looking for an issue to
unite socially conservative voters into a new Republican electoral
coalition to replace the fading New Deal coalition, he decided abortion
was the perfect wedge issue, both because it tapped into conservative
dissatisfaction with the new, socially liberal culture and because it
could potentially separate Catholic voters from the Democratic Party.
Weyrich rebranded the bishops' right-to-life movement the "pro-family"
movement, teamed up with direct mail wizard Richard Viguerie and
televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to form the Moral
Majority, and the culture wars were officially born.
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