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The GOP’s Abortion Strategy: Why Pro-Choice Republicans Became Pro-Life in the 1970s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2011
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- Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2011
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1. Layman, Geoffrey, The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics (New York, 2001)Google Scholar, 124. The terms “pro-choice” and “pro-life” have such heavy political connotations that some scholars refuse to use them. Donald Critchlow uses the terms “antiabortion” and “proabortion,” which were commonly used terms in the early 1970s, in Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America (New York, 1999). In contrast, Leslie Cannold, an advocate of abortion rights, uses the terms “pro-choice” and “anti-choice” in The Abortion Myth: Feminism, Morality, and the Hard Choices Women Make (Hanover, N.H., 2000). Other scholars who have avoided use of the polemical term “anti-choice” have also shied away from the term “pro-life,” preferring to use the term “antiabortion” instead. But I follow the lead of scholars such as Luker, Kristin (author of Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984])Google Scholar, who designate the two sides in this controversy as “pro-choice” and “pro-life,” the terms that each side has generally used as self-monikers. For the sake of consistency, and in order to be fair to both sides in this political debate, I use the terms “antiabortion,” “pro-life,” and “right-to-life” to refer to opponents of abortion who seek to use the law to restrict its availability, and “pro-choice” and “supporters of abortion rights” to refer to the proponents of keeping abortion legal.
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3. For studies of the pro-life movement and the public debate over abortion, see Jacoby, Kerry N., Souls, Bodies, Spirits: The Drive to Abolish Abortion Since 1973 (Westport, Conn., 1998)Google Scholar; Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood; McKeegan, Michele, Abortion Politics: Mutiny in the Ranks of the Right (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; and Risen, James and Thomas, Judy L., Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War (New York, 1998).Google Scholar For political scientists’ analyses of changes in political opinion on abortion, see Adams, Greg D., “Abortion: Evidence of an Issue Evolution,” American Journal of Political Science 41 (1997): 718–37Google Scholar; Jaenicke, Douglas W., “Abortion and Partisanship in the US Congress, 1976–2000: Increasing Partisan Cohesion and Differentiation,” Journal of American Studies 36 (2002): 1–22Google Scholar; and Carmines, Edward G. and Woods, James, “The Role of Party Activists in the Evolution of the Abortion Issue,” Political Behavior 24 (2002): 361–77.Google Scholar For histories of the politics of birth control that include a discussion of abortion, see Caron, Simone M., Who Chooses? American Reproductive History Since 1830 (Gainesville, 2008)Google Scholar; Critchlow, Intended Consequences; Critchlow, Donald T., ed., The Politics of Abortion and Birth Control in Historical Perspective (University Park: Pa., 1996)Google Scholar; Gordon, Linda, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America, 3rd ed. (Urbana, 2002)Google Scholar; and Solinger, Rickie, Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America (New York, 2005).Google Scholar
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