Cliff notes for the lazy
Once upon a time, the country was crawling with pro-life liberals and leftists. Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, one of the period's preeminent liberal Democrats, once declared that the right to life begins at "the very moment of conception," a position he held until 1975. Further left, the Black Panther Party fiercely denounced abortion, a procedure it associated with eugenics. When New York liberalized its abortion rules in 1970, the party paper declared the change a "victory for the oppressive ruling class who will use this law to kill off Black and other oppressed people before they are born….How long do you think it will take for voluntary abortion to turn into involuntary abortion to turn into compulsory sterilization?" Like Kennedy, the Panthers didn't reverse themselves on the issue until the mid-'70s.
Feminist readers might object here that the Panther Party was infamously rife with sexism, that Kennedy wasn't exactly known for treating women well either, and that Jackson had a strong socially conservative streak in the 1970s. And that would all be true. But you can't simply reduce the left's old anti-abortion wing to misogyny. From Daniel Berrigan to Nat Hentoff, more than a few progressives sincerely believed that fetuses had human rights. In Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade, historian Daniel Williams demonstrates that many anti-abortion leaders of the day saw their movement as a liberal "effort to extend state protection to the rights of a defenseless minority." This was especially true in the pre-Roe era, when much of the debate focused on whether the law should include a specific exception to allow abortions in cases of fetal deformity.
In that landscape, it was possible for Gov. Ronald Reagan, of all people, to sign California's Therapeutic Abortion Act of 1967, which extended the number of circumstances in which the procedure could be performed legally. The most notable thing here isn't Reagan's role—in Defenders of the Unborn, Williams shows that the future president was ambivalent about the law and reluctant to sign it. (He wanted to ensure abortions were available in the case of rape and when necessary to save the life of the mother, but he still worried, in Williams' words, that the bill "might be too permissive" and that the lack of a residency requirement could make his state an "abortion center." The day the state Senate voted for the legislation, he publicly vacillated about it.) No, the most notable thing here is the background politics. "Many Republicans in the state legislature, including members of the conservative wing of the party, supported [the law]," Williams writes. Meanwhile, "Many of the opponents of the bill were Democrats who would never have supported Reagan under any circumstances. Some of the strongest attacks on the bill in the Assembly came from the liberal Democrat John Vasconcellos, whose impassioned statements against the bill also included a denunciation of the Vietnam War and the death penalty."
It's not that left and right were reversed; it's that they were scrambled. The bill's sponsor was also a liberal Democrat, and the forces pressuring Reagan to veto it included conservative Catholics who had backed his campaign.
Two years later, when Richard Nixon became president, he strained to remain neutral on the issue. In practice, he was making abortion easier in modest ways, not on freedom-of-choice grounds but because he was worried about population. (His vice president, the combative culture warrior Spiro Agnew, wasn't a likely pro-life icon either: As governor of Maryland, he had signed a liberalization bill in 1968.) But the grounds were shifting. When Ed Muskie, running in the Democratic presidential primaries, started stressing his pro-life bona fides, the man in the White House worried that the liberal Maine senator would pick up support among the Catholic voters Nixon needed. So Nixon moved further in an anti-abortion direction as the 1972 race proceeded.
Nixon's eventual opponent, George McGovern, is widely remembered as the party's most left-wing presidential nominee, a man whose foes famously derided him as the candidate of "acid, amnesty, and abortion." But McGovern's running mate, Sargent Shriver, was the last pro-lifer to appear on a national Democratic ticket. Shriver wasn't McGovern's original pick: He replaced the Missouri senator Thomas Eagleton after it came out that Eagleton had received electroshock treatments. But Eagleton was pro-life too. Indeed, that "acid, amnesty, and abortion" slogan was a slightly modified version of a quote that Eagleton himself had said anonymously to a columnist during the primaries. (McGovern's own position was that the question should be left to the states—the same outcome the bulk of the anti-abortion movement is rooting for now. In those pre-Roe days, this was not an innately pro-life stance.)[/b]
Nothings changed with me
