Around what time did abortion become THE issue?

I wasn't born then, but I have an inkling that the Roe v. Wade decision wasn't exactly front-page screaming headlines.

...politicians needed a distraction from the real topics of the day.

as soon as women started fighting for equal rights. Curious, huh?

I mean, it's always been an issue, but in the sixties they
had to change it to defuse the feminist revolt.

They like it now because they don't have to talk about money
and health care and the general fecklessness of our government.
Same deal with gay rights and all the other horseshit they feed
us all day long. Anything but who is stealing us blind and what a
bunch of incompetent boobs the ruling class is composed of.

Decided January 22, 1973.

MR. JUSTICE REHNQUIST, dissenting. MR. JUSTICE STEWART, concurring. ... A pregnant single woman (Roe) brought a class action challenging the constitutionality of the Texas criminal abortion ...

www.tourolaw.edu/patch/Roe

culturally.. Reagan Fine-tuned it, and even though he was not a religious person, he was rarely seen without the bible, and was always spouting verses..

The religious people have been CONNED.. but they have been conned willingly..

In my half-century+ I have noticed that the "holier-than-thou" superiority feelings can be heady stuff, and these religious folks LOVE the attention they get,,

I honestly don't know what it will take to cram that genie back in the bottle, but I hope it happens.. Stuff that beast back in, and let them take the guns with them..:) Everyone would be a lot happier..and safer :)

I mean, not in any way to diminish the importance of the issue of abortion, but there are other issues out there. Health care, education -- equal pay, violence against women, etc, etc. I think the deal is that abortion is a hot-button topic and a divisive one. They can use it to draw a wedge between women (and men, too). And the Republicans in general know that they can count on some people to vote with them just because of that issue, even when they disagree with the Repubs about everything else.

Up to that point, the right had its way, so no need to push it. After the decision, the Repugs immediately began to organize around it. Alliances with natural soulmates--southern evangelists--began to coagulate around abortion, just as they had been gelling around race since LBJ signed the voting rights act in 1965.

So the whole period from 1965-75 was one of enormous political realignment in the US.

Abortion is an enormous burden for us to bear. We may have to start looking at ways to make some concessions if we don't start winning on the national level. However that should be obviated with JK's victory tomorrow.

I can understand why you think abortion is a burden. It's not your problem.

very consistent in context of respect-individual-liberties.

I can understand both sides now, have come a long way in last 2 years from Cath upbringing.

If compassion is what motivates you, the most defining variables are 1) how you view the fetus (is it a human being? is it conscious?) and 2) how well you understand the broad realities of pregnancy and the broad realities of diverse lives of women (not only back-alley tragedies, but also social variables and oppressive emotional/financial traps that some women face)....

Compassion CAN bring you to a position on either side of the equation.

Interesting that in many months of Cath indoctrination -- most of which inculcated a sacred and beautiful respect for the value of an individual human being -- we were never exposed to the actual text of Roe-v-Wade. We need an education campaign for the masses (via all forms of media) to counter the one-sided doctrine many have been exposed to.

We need a better way to knit the position into a compassionate Democratic platform. And we need to be able to talk about it without getting shutdown by people on either side who wish that the whole world would just magically switch to their point of view.

"Compassion and liberty" could be central unifying themes of the entire Dem platform, but right now, our stated position on this issue is dissonant to a significant portion of the public.

That is not the purpose of our party. Our purpose is to govern the nation. In America, governing requires the consent of the governed. If the governed consistently fail to grant their consent to a party, it will eventually die and another will take its place that is responsive.

If women do not begin -- separately and apart from the Democratic party -- to make a strong move to reverse the tide flowing in our culture against choice, then it will become an issue that will have to be jettisoned in order for our party to remain viable.

A classic example of a party that fades into irrelevancy was the Whig party, which was replaced by the Republican party because of the rising tide against slavery.

It is up to the women's movement to sell their position. As far as I can see, the women's movement has been stuck in a smugness and arrogance that utterly refuses to wrestle with the issue, and that is incapable of stopping the moralistic tide rising against it. Some of the comments to me in this thread are classic examples. Smart, insolent digs rather than honest debate are a sure indicator of blindness to reality.

Hopefully Kerry will win and the reckoning can be further delayed. But eventually either the right wing's rise on the basis of morality focused almost exclusively on abortion will be halted by creative appeals from women or be some kind of accommodation, or else the Democratic party will have no choice but to soften its current support for this position. Better half a loaf than none at all.

It's a matter of political survival. I for one refuse to live for decades under Republican rule simply because we are carrying this enormous burden on our party's back.

I'd heard that Emily's List is one of the largest PACs..

Personally, I think I'd prefer that the Democratic Party as a whole was neutral on the issue of abortion, and left it up to the individual candidates rather than a hard plank in the platform.

and will never really face this issue :eyes:

at an early age. Because we're Democrats, we'll even propose it be government paid. Then everybody can quit worrying about the whole thing.

then I would gladly support imprisonment and/or stringent financial penalties for men who sire children out of wedlock then fly the coop.

The point is that something nust be done. It is obvious the right wing is growing in it's grip on the social conscience almost exclusively on the strength of this issue--even among women who ought to know better.

It is not up to our party to reverse this trend. It is up to the women's movement to do so. And right now, the women's movement is sitting smugly on its hands.

I was helping a student in our library to use microfilm to locate articles the day after the decision -- RvW was the above-the-fold feature in the New York Times.

It could be the perpetually carrot they dangle in front of religious conservatives for votes.

I think it became a political issue when Republican women who discovered they were sterile couldn't adopt a white baby boy lickety-split.

Flame away. I promise to be open-minded.

I think that issue does have a role to play.

but people got them one way or another. It wasn't a big issue that was talked about publicly, until the Sherri Finkbine case in 1962. She'd unwittingly taken Thalidomide and was denied an abortion in Arizona. She ended up traveling to Sweden where her pregnancy was aborted and it was confirmed the baby would have been deformed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/26/newsid_3039000/3039322.stm

Then it subsided again until after Roe vs Wade, reaching a crescendo when Reagan was elected.

Once RR made it part of his campaign, it became permanently part of the GOP agenda.

Nixon didn't use it as a campaign issue. Ford and Carter didn't campaign on abortion, either. GHW Bush was pro-choice in the 1980 primaries, and switched his opinion upon joining the ticket as the VP candidate. Ever since, it's been an issue at more than just the presidential level, also at state level elections.

regan passed the most liberal abortion laws (first 20 weeks ok)

I don't recall much squawking about it in the 1970s.

I read an article in New Yorker magazine 10 years ago or so that explained it. The article was about television evangelism. Sorry that I can't provide a link or any documentation, I am just going on memory here.

The article talked about televison evangelists testing out different messages to find out which ones resulted in the biggest donations coming back to them. When they preached about abortion or gays, the donations poured in, and they have been hammering on these themes ever since. As the TV preachers moved towards Dominionism - the seizing of secular offices to remake society and prepare the way for the return of Christ - and organized politically, this doctrine (actually a marketing trick) was injected into the Republican party.

Money and power and manipulation of the public. Nothing to do with Christianity or morality.


on edit - added a word that was missing

began to marginalize women in poor neighborhoods who practiced folk medicine in their small communities. The women provided information on birth control and provided methods to abort unwanted pregnancies to women who were forced into multiple pregnancies by primarily, religious and societal doctrine; whether their health, family situation or economics supported large families. These same women also provided services as midwives, delivering babies and providing pre-peri and post-natal instruction and "concoctions."

The politicization of abortion came gradually as the American doctors tried to put these women "out of business" by using arguments of morality and appealing to churches. The irony is that now many doctors want the churches to stay our of medicine.

It's a long complex-ish history hard to fit in one post.

edited for spelling.

Reproduction, Regulation, and Body Politics;
Vostral, Sharra L.. Journal of Women's History. Bloomington: Summer 2003.Vol.15, Iss. 2; pg. 197

Go to your public library's Web site -- select one of the magazine databases available -- and use the search terms abortion AND history AND politics.

how when Roe v. Wade was decided that almost every institution in our society though "Well, that issue is resolved", with the exception being the Roman Catholic Church. And that the Southern Baptists applauded the decision as a bold step in showing Rome that it cannot meddle in US affairs. According to this priest, Catholics were at the forefront of protesting abortion and gradually won over and made alliances with other denominations.

It became the issue that the Moral Majority used to separate the wheat from the chaff (good from evil). I has been used successfully ever since. Many people are voting on the basis of that single issue.