the changing status quo – political shifts in the abortion debate
There was a fascinating short article in the latest BBC History Magazine (as well as a really helpful pull out section on the anniversary of slavery’s abolition) about some recent research into the history of the abortion debate. It is worth quoting in full:
“Going to War Over Abortion”
The current debate over abortion in the USA is polarized, with pro-choice opinion coalescing around the political Left and pro-lifers being associated with the Right. yet, as Richard Hughes of Illinois State University reveals in Burning Birth Certificates and Atomic Tupperware Parties: Creating the Antiabortion Movement in the Shadow of the Vietnam War (The Historian, vol 68, no 3), when the anti-abortion movement took off int he 1970s it had much more in common with the radical anti-war movement.
As the Vietnam War drew to a close in the early 1970s, former activists became instrumental in the pro-life movement, (more…)