A 49-year crusade: Inside the movement to overturn Roe v. Wade

Antiabortion activists and their Republican allies are on the cusp of reaching a goal they have sought for decades in tossing out the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion.

By Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey, Caroline Kitchener and Rachel Roubein, Washington Post
May 7, 2022

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell still remembers the shock he felt when Donald Trump won the 2016 election. He also recalls what happened next.

“The first thing that came to my mind was the Supreme Court,” McConnell said in an interview this past week, remembering his reaction that night as he watched results from a basement office at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He soon called Donald McGahn, campaign counsel to the president-elect, who was slated to become the top White House lawyer.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/07/abortion-movement-roe-wade/

USA – ‘Historical accident’: how abortion came to focus white, evangelical anger

A short history of the Roe decision’s emergence as a signature cause for the right

Jessica Glenza
Sun 5 Dec 2021

Public opinion on abortion in the US has changed little since 1973, when the supreme court in effect legalized 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, which have only grown more profound in recent years of polarization. In 2021, state legislators have passed dozens of restrictions to abortion access, making it the most hostile year to abortion rights on record.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/05/abortion-opposition-focus-white-evangelical-anger

USA – Abortion Has Never Been Just About Abortion

Sept. 15, 2021
By Thomas B. Edsall

As recently as 1984, abortion was not a deeply partisan issue.

“The difference in support for the pro-choice position was a mere six percentage points,” Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, told me by email. “40 percent of Democratic identifiers were pro-life, while 39 percent were pro-choice. Among Republican identifiers, 33 percent were pro-choice, 45 percent were pro-life and 22 percent were in the middle.”

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/opinion/abortion-evangelicals-conservatives.html

USA – How the debate over the ERA became a fight over abortion

How the debate over the ERA became a fight over abortion
Because only women can have abortions, conservatives argue restrictions on the procedure could be found unconstitutional under the Equal Rights Amendment.

By ELEANOR MUELLER and ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN
02/11/2020

Conservative activists waged a successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment decades ago by warning it would force women into combat, legalize gay marriage and erode gender roles.

But in 2020, opponents are zeroing in on one line of attack: a claim that ERA would require taxpayer-funded abortions.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/11/abortion-equal-rights-amendment-113505