When the Supreme Court’s Samuel Alito tried to justify his opposition to the right to abortion earlier this year, he wrote that the founding fathers never mentioned abortion.
Nor is there anything about the abortion ban in the US Constitution, from 1787, when it was not a political issue discussed by the founding fathers.
The central role of abortion law in the American Cultural War is relatively new.
Like almost all major conflicts in modern American politics, it is rooted in the cultural changes of the 1960s.
In stories about the United States at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, we perhaps think mainly of the demonstrations against the Vietnam War and a new radical left that was organized for feminism and anti-racism.
But at the same time, a parallel, right-wing radical movement was growing in the US conservative states.
It did not get as much attention then, but it would be at least as influential.
Cultural changes of the 1960s had caused concern in many conservative parts of the United States.
The number of American women in the labor market had increased dramatically, at the same time as factory jobs in the United States began to disappear. It made many American men feel that they were losing their authority in the home. For many Christian men, abortion resistance became a way to maintain the old balance of power, writes historian Bethany Moreton in the book “To Serve God and Wal-Mart”, about the birth of the Christian right.
A number of new Christian right-wing organizations were formed in the late 1970s in a direct reaction to contemporary cultural shifts. They were joined by right-wing radical activists who often used militant methods.
On June 6, 1970, conservative activist Brent Bozell, former editor of the conservative magazine National Review, staged one of the first demonstrations against abortion law in the US capital.
Bozell gathered 200 anti-abortion activists for a demonstration at George Washington University, where they shouted angry slogans, waved banners with violent messages and started quarrels with police and security guards. They smashed windows, attacked police with wooden clubs and Bozell himself used a homemade, two-meter-high wooden cross to smash the doors of the university building.
Bozell had a background as a right-wing radical debater and had written several texts in which he paid tribute to the Spanish dictator Franco. He saw in front of him a new American right that combined Christian messages with a militant nationalism.
They expressed themselves as radically as the left of the 1960s, but took their ideas from fascism.
“They were not inspired by Mao’s China but by Franco’s Spain,” writes historian Geoffrey Kabaservice.
After traveling to Spain, Bozell founded an international, Christian nationalist movement called Los Hijos de Tormenta (Sons of the Storm). It was the United States’ first militant movement against abortion, which encouraged violence and crime for political purposes. Bozell’s violent radicalism was inherited. His grandson Brent Bozell IV participated in the storming of Congress last year.
There is a common thread from the first demonstration in Washington in 1970 and the storming of Congress. With the abortion issue, Bozell had found an area that aroused extremely strong feelings among the right-wing grassroots and mobilized militant activists.
Following the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1974, abortions could no longer be banned in the United States, but the ruling was not the definitive success of abortion law as often portrayed.
The verdict was based on the fact that a woman can not be prevented from having an abortion, rather than that she is entitled to an abortion. It opened up a legal gray area where conservatives could make it virtually impossible for women to get to an abortion clinic.
Conservative Republicans have since frantically tried to find legal loopholes to make it virtually impossible for women to get to an abortion clinic. Since 1974, Republicans have succeeded in enacting more than 1,000 new laws that regulate or prevent abortion rights at the state level.
“Roe v. Wade was an important symbol of women’s constitutional right to abortion, but because it does not guarantee the right, the anti-abortion movement has been able to erode that right,” writes historian Andrew Hartman.
Among Republicans were it was not until the 1980s that the party rallied in united opposition to the right to abortion.
Relatively moderate Republicans, such as George HW Bush, had been attacked by the Christian right because he was behind abortion rights and contraception. But during Ronald Reagan’s tenure as president, the party rallied behind abortion opposition. In 1984, Republicans wrote in their party platform that they want to do everything they can to stop abortions from taking place in the United States. Among other things, they made a promise to appoint judges to the Supreme Court who “defend the sanctity of every human life”, a euphemism for banning abortion.
The Christian right’s offensive against the right to abortion gained new momentum in 2010, when a historic wave of right-wing radical Republicans was voted into state governments during the so-called Tea party wave.
Despite Barack Obama As president, Republicans soon controlled 31 of the United States’ 50 states, paving the way for 288 new abortion rights restrictions in the coming years.
In conservative states such as Texas and Mississippi, more than 75 percent of abortion clinics were forced to close due to new restrictions.
Political violence against abortion clinics and doctors also escalated.
In 1982, the first bomb attack on an abortion clinic in the United States took place. Five years later, another 77 bombings had taken place. During the 1990s, eight abortion doctors were murdered in the United States.
Since Roe v. Wade was clubbed through in 1973, American abortion clinics have been vandalized on more than 1,500 occasions and invaded more than 500 times. More than 175 abortion clinics were exposed to arson between 1974 and 2016, while 41 bombings of abortion clinics took place during the same period. Another 619 clinics were bombed. 2057 times, anti-abortion activists have reported to the police for demonstrating outside a clinic without a permit. 383 doctors who perform abortions have been threatened with death.
In a report from 2015, more than half of the abortion clinics in the USA said that they are regularly exposed to threats.
Then the violence against Abortion clinics began in the 1980s, the number of abortion doctors across the United States has decreased by 38 percent, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
The threats against abortion clinics have also meant that many clinics are forced to spend large parts of their budgets on security, from investments in security guards and bulletproof glasses to bulletproof vests for doctors, armor protection on cars and, in some cases, high concrete walls around clinics.
When the UN sent three delegates from Poland, Costa Rica and the United Kingdom in the autumn of 2015 to investigate gender equality in the United States, it was found that the conditions for women here are among the worst of the 38 OECD countries. The worst condition was at the abortion clinics, according to the evaluation. At one point, delegates visited an abortion clinic in Alabama and were met with violent threats from abortion opponents. “This is a kind of terrorism. For us, it was a shock, “said Polish delegate Eleonora Zielinska.
The decisive progress for abortion opponents took place in the summer of 2016, at a hotel in New York.
Donald Trump was on his way to becoming the Republican presidential candidate, but some leaders on the Christian right were skeptical of Trump. Was he really one of them?
They met at the Marriott Marquis, a large hotel in Manhattan’s Central Park, where Trump assured a dozen influential Christian right-wing leaders that he would be their vote in the White House if they gave him wholehearted support in the run-up to the election. Among other things, he promised to have them recommend appointments to federal judges and nominations to the Supreme Court.
The deal helped Trump win the election.
As president, Trump then had to appoint three judges to the HD, all of whom had strong support from the Christian right and were opposed to the right to abortion.
On June 24, they voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, in a ruling that could mean abortion is banned in half of US states.
Under Donald Trumps During the first election campaign, I visited Austin, Texas, to conduct interviews with both opponents of abortion and the activists who worked to protect abortion rights.
There I met Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who so successfully argued for abortion law during the interrogations of Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court.
After the historic victory in 1974, she has continued to be active in abortion law and gender equality for half a century.
I asked her what she learned from this period.
– That it is unprofitable to try to convince the other side. I have been trying to convince them for 50 years and there is no argument that bites them. The only way to bring about change is to vote for candidates on our side.
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