Paul Weyrich's choice of abortion as the first political litmus test in the '70s was calculated to unify conservative Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants as a voting block. "Choose new life" over existing life, admonished Weyrich: Women have had an opportunity to live and should step aside to "make way for new life." It is a mark of the reactionary resistance to women's equality that Fourteenth Amendment equal protection is demanded for fetuses, and denounced for women as "reading feminism into the Constitution." As a nurse in pre-Roe America, I saw women die of pregnancies contraindicated due to preexisting health conditions. Among the greatest conceits of the political right is the denial that pregnancy is a women's health issue, and that women's lives merit protection.

Abortion was legal in America until 1869, when the nascent medical society lobbied to criminalize abortion except as a doctor's decision--in part, to eliminate competition from midwives, who provided most reproductive health care at the time. The Catholic Church accepted abortion until "quickening," and also reversed its position in 1869, motivated partly by demographic concerns about declining church numbers at a time of increasing knowledge and practice of birth control. Call it "original intent"--the Ninth Amendment, alone, guarantees retention of the right to abortion that existed at the time the Constitution was drafted--a time when eighteenth century cookbooks commonly contained recipes for abortifacients.

Also largely forgotten history, is the extensive adoption black market in pre-Roe America that saw white babies stolen, bought and sold like a commodity. Black women attempting to place less coveted babies for adoption risked charges of 'abandonment.' Indian babies abducted from reservations were adopted with falsified birth certificates identifying them as 'caucasian.' Since Roe, black market adoption has moved out of the country, to places like Central America and Russia.

Fundamentalists like Chuck Colson have called Roe v. Wade an infringement of states' rights to legislate "traditional religious morality." Colson believes Christians are deprived of democratic participation because they are "not free to force their...religious convictions" on others.

The most recent challenge to the right of women (and others) to access health care, is the so-called 'right of refusal' of pharmacists to fill contraceptive (or other) prescriptions based on their personal religious beliefs. Clearly, the broader agenda of the political right is a more sweeping application of their religious beliefs to all health care, including contraception. "Contraception is murder because it prevents the sperm from meeting the egg," declared right-to-lifer Nellie Gray in the '70s. Ultraconservatives' rewrite of the Constitution ultimately seeks reversal of the right to privacy defined in the 1965 Griswold decision. It is a right "made up of judicial whole cloth" and "I want to see it abolished," said Pat Robertson. His is just one more effort by the political right to rewrite history and the Constitution.

Distilled from book Democracy Under Assault: TheoPolitics, Incivility and Violence on the Right TheoPolitics.com

About the Author

A former nurse who researches and writes about the history of women's health care and fundamentalist and gun-centered ideologies. Author of Democracy Under Assault: TheoPolitics, Incivility and Violence on the Right