True colours

How abortion focused white evangelical anger

- Jessica Glenza

Public opinion on abortion in the US has changed little since 1973, when the supreme court in effect legalised the procedure nationally in its ruling on the case Roe v Wade. According to Gallup, which has the longest -running poll on the issue, about four in five Americans believe abortion should be legal, at least in some circumstances.

Yet the politics of abortion have opened deep divisions in the last five decades. In 2021, state legislators have passed dozens of restrictions to abortion access, making it the most hostile year to abortion rights on record.

The religious right in the US has been laying the foundations of this decisive challenge to abortion rights for years. According to historians and researchers, it has taken decades of political machinations for the campaign to reach this zenith. The movement has intersected with nearly every major issue in American politics, from segregation to campaign finance.

The conservative anti-abortion movement “was a kind of historical accident ”, said Randall Balmer, a professor of American religious history at Dartmouth University and author of Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right.

It wasn’t until Republican strategists sought to “deflect attention away from the real narrative ”, which Balmer argues was racial integration, “and to advocate on behalf of the foetus ”, that largely apolitical evangelical Christians and Catholics would be united within the Republican party. Balmer argues that advocacy was nascent in 1969.

Although the supreme court decision in Brown v Board of Education called for an end to racial segregation in schools in 1954, many schools continued de facto segregation 14 years later.