politics power and reproductive health. For many people,
the issue gets personal. We don't think about politics
around regulating medical practice otherwise right in
most other situations, unless it somehow intersects
with sex and reproduction and reproductive rights have
divided people for centuries. But they reached a new
political height after the Supreme Court voted to
strike down the landmark roe v wade decision providing
national access to abortion and all be all abortion is
healthcare and your body should not be regulated by the
government. We're ready to meet and we are ready to
create some of the toughest laws that there are. But
the fight over reproductive rights started long before
the abortion debate. It's not just a story about
religion, it's a story about politics and how these two
things intersect together to, you know, create create a
situation that doesn't necessar have to be this way
Kevin Walsten, the co author of the politics of the
pill, tells us back in the late 1800s, abortion wasn't
connected with religion, morali or other themes we
see today, there was actually quite little regulatio
of contraception or abortion in the abortion realm. You
had this idea that women would be able to sort of
determine for themselves when abortions would be
appropriate. Walton added. It was actually the medical
industry that fought to limit access to contraception
and abortions as a way of monopolizing control ove
reproductive services. We have this emerging profession
right of doctors, medical expertise, and they see
themselves being in competition with more tradition
healers with more traditional approaches to midwi
and so forth. There are also concerns over immigrat
as a swell of southern central and eastern eu
migrants who are mostly catholic or jewish arrived in
the U.S. Political science professor josh Wilson says
natural born americans who were often white Protestants
saw these immigrants as a threat. The idea here is
these new immigrants are reproducing at high rates for
X,Y and Z reasons, but they're reproducing at high
rates and so they're going to overwhelm us with their
numbers. These nativists were invested in denying white
protestant women access to contraception and abortion
to keep their birth rates high Enter Margaret Sange
the founder of planned parenthood. She started the
nation's first birth control clinic in 1916 and helped
legalize providing women with information about
contraceptives and sexually transmitted diseases. It
was good news to us all that the Federal Council of
Churches came out openly on the subject of birth
control. By the 1930s, a Gallup poll showed over 60% of
Americans favored the birth control movement. By 1959,
felt information about birth control should be freely
available, but it was strictly regulated until 1965,
when the Supreme Court declared bans on birth control
unconstitutional. Even then, only married couples could
purchase contraceptives until 1972, Janet marina, the
executive director of priests for life says Catholics
were among the early members of the anti abortion
movement. In the late sixties, the church began
challenging contraception. Warn it contradicted the
bible's teachings. We say life is taken from the moment
of conception to natural death. So that's the teachings
of our religion. So it was very natural for the
catholic church to kind of take a step forward And
being there in the very early days. Despite the
Catholic Church's vocal opposition to birth control
Harris poll from 1968 showed only 15% of American
Catholics were against contraception, and a majority
rejected the idea that birth control was immoral or
inappropriate. At the same time, doctors were facing a
public health crisis as more women received illegal
abortions while abortion-relate deaths were dropping.
The Guttmacher Institute says illegal abortions still
accounted for 17% of all pregnancy deaths in 1965, and
many deaths may have gone unreported in the years just
before roe, Doctors like Bernard Nathan johnson lobbied
for states to loosen their abortion laws as a way to
cut down risk and improve safety. He then, with these
other guys said, you have to let women have abortion if
they want to have an abortion. So they set out to make
abortion legal in new york state, Okay, which they
accomplished in 1970 At the same time, Republicans were
also fighting to liberalize abortion regulations
1972 Gallup poll found 68% of Republicans believe the
decision to get an abortion should be made between a
woman and her doctor compared to 59% of Democrats. But
the party's stances shifted after the Supreme Court
handed down its decision on Roe V. Wade in 1973,
abortion rights activists have somewhat of a
mobilization problem because they've won in court.
Right So the idea of being here that is much easier to
mobilize people to fight against something, right
There's something for antiabort activists to try to
achieve. Wilson says this was the perfect moment for
Republicans to expand their electoral base. According
to Wilson at the time, Evangelical Christians we
furious with a decade of federal government
desegregating schools, religious institutions responde
by creating their own private schools for white
Children. But in the 70s, the government stepped in to
break them apart. Republicans were quick to respond to
the evangelicals anger with the government and worked
with Pastor Jerry Falwell to help bring evangelicals
into the Republican Party. They used new ultrasound
technology in movies like the silent screen, which was
narrated by Nathan person, who changed his stance on
abortion after it was legalized. Wilson says, this wa
a strategy to convince people that abortion was an
urgent issue of all matters moral. They had to be
introduced to the idea they had to be taught to invest
in it. The argument there was essentially about
american moral collapse and saying that, you know, we
need to put America back into this kind of idealized
religious conception that they had of the past and
abortion became a way of talking about a lot of changes
that have happened in previous decades. But Miranda
tells us while Falwell and republicans may have played
a role in romancing evangelicals, they saw the abor
fight as a way to help women and bring people into the
church. The main focus for them was bringing people to
jesus. They saw pregnant women who needed help as a
mission field like ah we can, we can bring the gospel
these women by also helping them not to have an
abortion power. And tradition may have also mobilized
voters. In the late sixties and early seventies, mo
women were embracing feminism and sexual liberation and
skirting traditional gender roles, conservatives and
religious leaders like Billy Graham argued for the need
to restore the country to the way it once was by
regulating sexuality. They're expressing themselves and
saying, we want sex freedom. You see, God has built in
your body certain restrictions if you break the law,
you hurt yourself, Walston says, messages like these in
part convinced evangelicals to crowd the polls. Their
turnout helped elect Republican President Ronald Rea
the Republican Party, I think, was first to realize the
potential electoral benefits th could be approved to
them by becoming the party, standing in opposition t
abortion rights. Reagan was staunchly anti abortion.
And throughout the eighties, democrats began to
nominate pro abortion rights candidates to fight
against him, while stan and Miranda agree, that's when
the politicization of reproductive health became clea
This of course, set into effect a series of dynamics
that resulted in the republican Party becoming the
party of the highly religious and therefore those
highly opposed to abortion, the Democratic Party became
the party of pro choice. I don't think there was a
deliberate shift of like oh the democrats and the
republicans going that way. It just different
philosophies as people came into power. Wilson argues
abortion regulation became a key political issue as the
courts took up bigger cases and created more room to
chip away at reproductive right Like in 2016 when the
Supreme Court ruled texas could not place restrictions
on abortion services because it would create an undue
burden on people's constitutional rights. The
ideological makeup of the bench also brought the
politicization of abortion to the forefront after
former president trump appointed three conservative
justices during his four years in office, he was like
an open book, if you like me, here's the list I'll pick
from if I if I get the opportunity to put a certai
quote justice on the court, here's what I'll do. And
yes I will be a pro life president. But now with th
constitutional right to have an abortion overturned,
Walston says other aspects of reproductive health could
be restricted next if it's something that prevents
implantation of a fertilized egg that would classify it
as support of fashion and the right to have access to
that whatever it is, be it an I.U.D.B. It hormonal
birth control. What again, doesn't even matter what it
is. Would then no longer be constitutionally prot
and could be in theory taken away by a state governmen
When asked why politicians are so invested in
reproductive rights. Walston ha this to say this isn't
about a difference of who should be emphasized here
about who should matter more. Should it be the person
that we actually have the american citizen or should it
be the potential life The fetus The one that through
this point of view requires more protection becaus
they are in this vulnerable and fairly unique po
But Miranda says overturning ro V wade is a way to
give the will back to the people. It's taking the
abortion decision out of the judicial branch of
government and putting it back where it belongs in the
legislative branch so that you elect the people in your
area to pass the kind of lords you want to see passing
where you live. There may also be another motivating
factor for both democrats and republicans to politicize
reproductive rights. Both sides of the aisle, so to
speak, wants to pass laws in their interest. There are
powerful incentives for their politicization and with
roe V wade now overturned, legislators will ne
determine how far they want to go to constrict or
liberalize women's reproductive rights, marissa Giorgio
Newsy