At the 1976 Republican National Convention, party leadership came to the table with an objective: shifting the support of traditionally Democratic Catholics to the GOP.
Their solution? Temporarily adopt a pro-life stance and promise an anti-abortion constitutional amendment.
At that time, the majority of the party was pro-choice, with fewer than 40% of delegates at that time considering themselves pro-life.* The shift was not a values based platform. It was a vote grab.
Ironically, Mary Louise Smith – a lifelong defender of abortion rights up until her death in 1997 – served as the chair of the RNC at that time, the first woman to ever to hold that post.
The argument has already been made ad infinitum, that if men were to get pregnant, abortions would be available on every street corner. The hypocrisy of pro-lifers – who would fight for a child’s right to birth, but not a right to safe living conditions, affordable housing, and adequate education – has also been talked to death. (Both these stances sound more like facts than arguments to me.)
I am an unaffiliated voter. I have never had an abortion. I am also an adopted child.
I’ve been told more than once that because I was given up for adoption, I should be pro-life. But here’s what else is true:
I have never gotten pregnant until I was married. My choice to have a child was an easy one.
The choice my mother made not to terminate her pregnancy was not an easy one. Nor was her decision to give me up for adoption. For her or for me. To this day, I am still unraveling the lasting impact of not having an attachment bond in the first months of my life.
If I had an unwanted pregnancy, it would probably be very hard for me choose my next step. I imagine it’s also very hard to choose when to divorce, which treatment to choose when diagnosed with cancer, whether to take an antidepressant, or whether to have a DNR clause in a living will. But until today, I always assumed that I lived in a country that would allow me to make all of those choices for myself.
It is imperative that those who make the law, be subject to the law. And by its very nature, men are not subject to this law. Nor is there a single health care decision denied to men. Regardless of your stance or belief as it relates to abortion, this is the constitutional destruction that occurred today in the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
They have eliminated a protection for women and women only. A freedom has been stripped from us. Restrictions will be put on one group of people and not another. The overturning of Roe v. Wade flies in the face of the 14thamendment. What else are they going to take away from women? And who’s next after that?
Ultimately, the same party that cavalierly adopted the issue as a vote grab likely just gave away their hand, cementing a massive platform for every democrat running for their state legislature.
NOW IS THE TIME TO VOTE.
*Rymph, Catherine E., Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage Through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill, 2006), 205 Google Scholar; Melich, Tanya, The Republican War Against Women: An Insider’s Report from Behind the Lines (New York, 1996), 53Google Scholar; UPI, “Betty Ford Would Accept ‘An Affair’ by Daughter,” New York Times, 11 August 1975; “Gallup Poll Shows More ‘Pro-Life’ Backing,” Washington Times, 16 May 2009.
Bravo, spot-on!!