Why do Republicans care about abortion?
Doesn’t it collide with personal freedoms?
Question: Why are abortions a Republican Party issue?
Answer: Because they win more when voters focus on moral rather than economic issues.
Welcome to Costs Matter, a series that asks different questions all of which have the same answer: to better manage costs. The costs are usually economic though not always. The series focuses narrowly on the impact of costs. It does not claim these costs are the sole cause. To read more in the series, visit https://medium.com/galileo-onwards/costs/home.
Surprising as it may sound, once upon a time, the Republican Party used to be the party of abortions. As Governor of California, before becoming President, Hollywood star Ronald Reagan “signed the California Therapeutic Abortion Act, one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country, in 1967, legalizing abortion for women whose mental or physical health would be impaired by pregnancy,” points out Sue Halpern, NYRB, 2018. She continues, that in “the same year, the Republican strongholds of North Carolina and Colorado made it easier for women to obtain abortions.”
Their reason then, as this post’s subtitle says, was that abortion was a matter of personal freedom, individual choice, and a private matter; not the State’s business.
The change in the Republican Party’s stance is largely attributed to one man, a strategist named Paul Weyrich. Weyrich wanted to bring evangelical christians into the Republican fold because they’d form a single voting bloc helping win elections.
Over the 70s Paul Weyrich tried several strategies to unite voters. He tried to rally voters against pornography, women’s rights, school prayers in public schools none of which worked at the time (see Emily Clark, 2022, Australian Broadcast Corporation).
That Weyrich finally settled on abortions is somewhat of an accident. It’s more that he was looking for some issue that would unite voters in favor of the Republican Party. In his own words, “The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country… When political power is achieved, [conservatives] will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation”.
Radical Republicans reshaped regular Americans around modern made-up morals masking democracy dampening designs by distracting voters. Their vision was to win votes via votaries voluntarily working together.
