Criss-Cross: Democrats, Republicans, and Abortion

Human Life Review, Summer 2006 by McKenna, George

Suppose this: suppose a politically savvy Rip Van Winkle in say, 1965, perceiving that a movement to legalize abortion was gaining strength in the country, were asked, "Which of the two major political parties will eventually identify with that movement?" What would he answer? I think he would mull it over in his head for awhile and then say: "the Republicans, probably." Why? "Well, in the first place, it fits pretty well into the Republicans' private-property philosophy. 'Let's keep government out of a woman's most personal property.' secondly, consider the demographics. The Republicans draw heavily from the upper-middle class WASPs, where the drive for population control has always come from. Abortion fits very well into the old eugenics mythology-the belief that you can improve the health of the 'race' by limiting the breeding of 'undesirables.' You can still hear echoes of that in the conversations of bicoastal Republicans. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the Republican Party came out with a plank saying 'We support abortion, in certain cases, for the nation's overall health and well-being.' Finally, consider the Republicans' emphasis on the need for law and order and their conservative approach to welfare. The Republicans may not say this out loud but it slots right into their conservative ideology: abortion is good because, by holding down illegitimate births, it will cut down on crime and welfare costs."

What about the Democrats? "Well," Rip would say, "let's start again with demographics. Consider the heavy concentration of Roman Catholics in the Democratic party. The Church hierarchy would go bananas if any prominent Catholic Democrat-or any Democrat at all-came out in favor of abortion. The Church has consistently held that abortion is one of the gravest moral offenses because it involves the direct killing of an innocent human being. No way is a Catholic Democrat, or any Democrat who wants Catholic support (and what Democrat doesn't?), going to support abortion. It might even be smart politics for the Democrats to pick a fight with the Republicans on the abortion issue. Democrats like to boast that they protect the weak and the vulnerable. You remember Vice President Hubert Humphrey's characterization of his party as the advocate of those "who are in the dawn of life; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped." All they have to do is insert "unborn children" into that list and they can beat up Republicans every time on the abortion issue. I can hear them now: 'Let the Republicans pick on the weak and vulnerable, killing children in the womb to cut welfare costs. We Democrats are the party of compassion, the party that sticks up for the little guy, including the littlest guy of all, the child in the womb. (Applause)"'

Having delivered himself of this well-considered prophecy in 1965, Rip Van Winkle goes down for his nap. When he wakes up and we tell him how the abortion issue finally sorted itself out between our two major parties, Rip says, "Huh? How could that have happened?"

So how could it? I will take a stab at this thorny issue. It will be an essay, which literally means "a try." To try, to "essay," is not necessarily to succeed. But the hazard is worth it, because we really need to understand what happened during a critical period in American party politics.

Let's start with an all-too-easy answer to Rip's question. It goes like this: abortion ended up in the Democratic Party because feminists piggybacked it onto the Democrats' civil rights agenda. By 1965 the Democrats, despite the remaining segregationists in their own ranks, had begun to claim ownership of the civil rights agenda. The defining event was the Republicans' nomination of Barry Goldwater for President in 1964. When Goldwater publicly opposed passage of the Civil Rights Act of that year, Northern Democrats gleefully hung an "anti-civil rights" sign around the necks of the Republicans and, fairly or not, they've been doing it ever since. The term "civil rights" acquired an almost religious aura. Everyone is for it, so just about everyone claims it. There are Latino civil rights, Native American civil rights, gay civil rights, civil rights for women, civil rights for stout people, and so on. But the feminists were among the first and-so the argument goes-they dragged abortion with them.

This explanation sounds plausible at first, but it begs some critical questions. First, it assumes that the Democrats in the 1960s were prepared to take their marching orders from pro-abortion feminists. This is the fallacy of presentism-reading the present into the past. Democrats today are in thrall to the feminists but they weren't then. Democratic conventions in those days were dominated by hard-boiled union leaders and city bosses who didn't care a whit about feminist causes. If we go back historically we see that American feminism was always more popular with Republicans than with Democrats. The Republicans were the first party to support a gender-based Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which they did as early as 1940. Feminism was an upper-middle class phenomenon, one of the many "civic" movements championed by Republican women, while the Democratic agenda tilted more toward the desires of the party's working-class base, like minimum wage laws and the protection of unions. Even the McGovern-stacked presidential convention in 1972 shied away from an abortion plank. McGovern favored it-his own daughter had had one, a family secret at that time-but he knew it was political poison, so he and other party leaders killed off attempts to put it in the platform. Ted Kennedy, then as now the lion of progressive Democrats in the Senate, wrote to a constituent in 1971 that "the legalization of abortion on demand is not in accordance with the value which our civilization places on human life. . . . When history looks back on this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception." Even in 1976, three years after Roe v. Wade, Kennedy insisted that "abortion is morally wrong. It is not a legitimate or acceptable response to any problem of society. And if our country wishes to remain true to its basic moral strength, then unwanted as well as wanted children must be unfailingly protected."