I remember reading in Randall Balmer's book, Thy Kingdom Come,(https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/37675220?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1) of a meeting of Evangelicals in 1979, six years after Roe v. Wade, where they were looking for an issue that would help rally their congregations in support of Ronald Reagan. Not being able to use divorce as an issue despite the Bible having a great deal to say about it, they settled on abortion and proceeded to successfully drive a wedge between what became liberals and conservatives. They also creatively hijacked the language of the debate, claiming the moral high-ground by declaring themselves to be pro-life as if anyone in opposition would have to be pro-death. The limp response of liberals was to call themselves pro-choice, a nebulous phrase lacking in any moral quality at all. The result has been overwhelming success on the part of anti-abortion movement and its adoption by the GOP, to the point where even in those states where abortion laws are relatively loose, a clinic where they can be performed is virtually impossible to find.
Ironically, as a recent review of a documentary of the GOP and abortion indicates, the GOP had been the party of privacy and choice during the fifties and sixties, the Democratic Party being dominated by the Catholic Church. Ronald Reagan had even signed one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country in California, as did Nelson Rockefeller in New York."In 1972, a Gallup poll found that 68 percent of Republicans believed abortion to be a private matter between a woman and her doctor. The government, they said, should not be involved."
"As the historian of religion Randall Balmer explains in the film, evangelicals became politically active in the 1970s, when they were thwarted by the courts and the Internal Revenue Service in their efforts to obtain tax-exempt status for “segregation academies” like Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian School and Bob Jones University that heeded what they believed to be a biblical mandate to keep the races separate. Around the same time, Paul Weyrich, a Republican strategist, recognized the potential political power evangelical voters would have if they were to vote as a bloc, and tried to pull them into the fold with issues he thought might appeal to their moralism, such as the proliferation of pornography, the Equal Rights Amendment, and even abortion—which, prior to Roe, they were largely sympathetic toward and considered a Catholic issue." (NYRB, Nov. 11, 2018, "How Republicans Became Anti-Choice")
Liberals remain clueless as to how to respond. May I suggest a drastic strategy. Support overturning Roe v Wade and call for a national referendum on whether it should be legal or not. It would eliminate a dominate rallying cry of the Right, remove a salient issue for many voters. Too many friends of mine, nominal Democrats, voted for the GOP and Trump in particular solely because of their stand on what they consider to be the only issue, a moral one. The immediate effect of overturning Roe v Wade as law of the land would be to return the battle to each state legislature but it would defuse it as a national campaign issue and perhaps we could return to some semblance of reasonable discussion of policy issue with less shouting (not to mention shooting.) Polls seem to indicate a majority of Americans support the right to legal abortion and a national referendum would supposedly reflect that further deflating the sails of the "values" voters. Even if no one could agree on the rules for such a referendum it would defuse the issue, or at least reduce pressure on the Democrats who could then argue, "well, we wanted to overturn Roe, too".
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