The End of Roe : Before the Fall

 

"By the late 1970s, as I have written in these pages,* Falwell was concerned that Democrats were about to rescind the tax-exempt status of the all-white academies—including his own, in Lynchburg, Virginia—that evangelicals, among others, had established across the South in the 1960s and 1970s in response to federally mandated desegregation. As Balmer has argued, Weyrich knew that Republicans would need to appeal to something more socially acceptable than racism. The ginned-up rhetoric around killing babies became a cynical ploy to lure voters and perpetuate racial discrimination. 

Before this alliance, on the whole Republicans were not opposed to abortion. In 1967, as governor, Reagan had signed off on the California Therapeutic Abortion Act, then one of the country's most liberal abortion laws. Five years later, a Gallup poll found that nearly 70 percent of Republicans said that only a woman and her doctor, not the government, should be involved in the decision to terminate a pregnancy. But once Weyrich brought evangelicals into the tent, Republican voters—along with prominent Republican politicians like Reagan and George H.W. Bush—became vocal anti-abortion advocates. They traded women's bodies for political power. "

read article by SUE HALPERN