Democrats and abortion rights advocates say the efforts are evidence that Republican lawmakers and abortion opponents are trying to undercut democratic processes meant to give voters a direct role in forming state laws.
“They’re scared of the people and their voices, so their response is to prevent their voices from being heard,” said Laurie Bertram Roberts, executive director of Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund. “There’s nothing democratic about that, and it’s the same blueprint we’ve seen in Ohio and all these other states, again and again.”
Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, voters in seven states have either protected abortion rights or defeated attempts to curtail them in statewide votes. Democrats have pledged to make the issue a central campaign topic this year for races up and down the ballot.
The birth of abortion as a wedge issue is a particularly strange one. It started with a wannabe Hollywood filmmaker, Frank Schaeffer, who made a video for Evangelicals with his father, which included a scene on abortion. For his next movie/series, he made it solely about abortions, and Evangelicals were like “That’s a Catholic issue, we’re not Catholic.” and didn’t come to see it. Then, the New York Post made an article on this weird avant garde anti-abortion movie, and radical feminists started protesting outside his movies - previously, they had been held in stadiums but were almost completely empty. The Evangelicals basically went “Well, if they’re against it, we should be for it!” and started filling out the stadiums and adopting an anti-abortion stance.
Frank Schaeffer has since regretted his decision. At the time he was a new father, having accidently gotten his girlfriend/wife pregnant, and that was the source of his anti-abortion sentiment. These days he speaks out against the anti-abortion movement and the religious far-right.
There’s a really good BBC podcast/radio show that goes through all of it, and even interviews Schaeffer himself. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0011cpq
Weirdly, Frank Schaeffer’s Wikipedia page doesn’t even really cover the anti-abortion video or the influence it had, it just casually mentions that he met with Reagan and others, as well as helping write one of Reagan’s books.
There’s so many little vignettes like this in the rise to prominence of the antichoice movement. Schaeffer is one of my favorites, but there’s some other really weird little corners.
Another fun one was all these religious/evangelical schools that, in the post-Brown era, were facing down a future where they may have to start paying taxes if they wanted to maintain segregation. These institutions saw that their strictly racist policies were becoming politically unpalatable, so they sought out a way better issue to get that power. Still happening today, by the way, where explicitly religious schools are actively campaigning to get your tax dollars while continuing to teach bigotry and nonsense. Be VERY wary any time you hear a politician mention “school choice”.
I also enjoy that Norma McCorvey (AKA Roe) was later turned into and paraded a bout as a pro life campaigner, saying she regretted the abortion and lawsuit and all that. Only to reveal later in her life that they paid her HANDSOMELY to do so and the beliefs and words were totally insincere, she just needed the money. I think that tells you a lot about the underlying moral fiber of these religious whackos.