When Republicans Wanted Abortion Rights
On the Media | Aug 1, 2017
In 1972, a Gallop poll showed that Americans were united in their opinion about abortion: 68% of Republicans and 59% of Democrats agreed that “the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician.” But less than a year later, when the Supreme Court released their landmark Roe v. Wade decision, it unleashed a toxic – and eventually partisan – reaction those pollsters didn’t predict. Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion in Roe, said he got 70,000 letters about that one decision, many of them “abusive.”
So what happened? Historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore says a few key figures – President Richard Nixon, his aide Pat Buchanan, and political activist Phyllis Schlafly – made decisions that resulted in the seemingly intractable political battle that rages on today. And she tells Brooke that the way the Roe decision was made – as a matter of privacy, not equal rights – has molded the way we talk about abortion 45 years later.
