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[quote=Anonymous]Heather Cox Richardson had a great column on the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-21-2024

She noted that, at the time, people largely supported abortion rights. Republicans more than Democrats. Nixon flip flopped from supporting abortion in 1970 to using Catholic language on abortion in an effort to grab Catholic votes away from Democrats.

Then, in the early 70s, the Republicans started using abortion as a stand-in for opposition to the "women's lib" movement.

[quote]Railing against the Equal Rights Amendment, in her first statement on abortion in 1972, activist Phyllis Schlafly did not talk about fetuses but instead spoke about “women’s lib”—the women’s liberation movement—which she claimed was “a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as the basic unit of society.”

A dozen years later, sociologist Kristin Luker discovered that "pro-life" activists believed that selfish “pro-choice” women were denigrating the roles of wife and mother and were demanding rights they didn’t need or deserve.[/quote]

Richardson goes on to note how incredibly popular abortion rights are among the American people. Support for abortion under the Roe v. Wade model (basically the trimester system where it's almost always legal during the first trimester and only legal in extraordinary circumstances during the third trimester). That enjoys 69% support. Only 13% want it illegal in all circumstances.

But then she speculates about parallels to the sudden and intense backlash to the takeover of the Southern Slave Power in the 1850s.

[quote] In the 1850s, elite southern enslavers quietly took over first the Democratic Party, and then the Senate, the White House, and then the Supreme Court. Northerners didn’t pay much attention to the fact that their democracy was slipping away until suddenly, in 1854, Democrats in the House of Representatives caved to pressure from the party’s southern wing and passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. That law overturned the Missouri Compromise, which had kept enslavement out of much of the West, and had stood since 1820, so long that northerners thought it would stand forever.

With the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, human enslavement would become the law of the land, and the elite southern enslavers, with their concentration of wealth and power, would rule everyone else. It appeared that American democracy would die, replaced by an oligarchy.

But when the Kansas-Nebraska bill passed, northerners of all parties came together to stand against those trying to destroy American democracy. As Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln put it: “We rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver,” to fight against the minority trying to impose its will on the majority. Within a decade, they had rededicated themselves to guaranteeing “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”[/quote][/quote]

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