Roe Died

[Indy Texas]

Honestly, I tend to think she was taken advantage of by Sarah Weddington, who was basically just out to make a name for herself. And I say that as someone whose views would generally be regarded as pro-choice.

If the abortion rights movement had simply been content to let abortion slowly become legalized state-by-state, it would have been much harder for a cohesive pro-life movement to metastasize onto the Christian Right and create such a major backlash.

[Indy Texas]

Honestly, I tend to think she was taken advantage of by Sarah Weddington, who was basically just out to make a name for herself. And I say that as someone whose views would generally be regarded as pro-choice.

If the abortion rights movement had simply been content to let abortion slowly become legalized state-by-state, it would have been much harder for a cohesive pro-life movement to metastasize onto the Christian Right and create such a major backlash.

Was abortion even much of a political issue before Roe v. Wade?

 Red-  Illegal.
 Purple- Legal in cases of rape.
 Blue-  Legal in cases of danger to woman's health.
 Green-  Legal in cases of danger to woman's health, rape or incest, or likely damaged fetus.
 Yellow-  Legal upon request.

WTF New Jersey? Granted I guess you could just go to New York so it wasn't that big of a deal, but still weird. Also how is the South more progressive than most of the country?

The current "battle lines" on abortion did not exist in the early 1970s.

At that time, you still had a lot of Catholics in the Northeast who had a traditionalist stance on abortion (or rather, they didn't really think too much about abortion specifically, but they deferred to the Church, which opposed it). An example of this was Prescott Bush (Episcopalian Republican) getting defeated for reelection to the Senate in Connecticut in 1962 because Catholics (already Democratic-leaning) regarded him as too pro-choice/pro-birth control.

Mainline Protestants were okay with abortion and birth control, and conservative Protestants simply didn't address it (they weren't out agitating to support it, but they weren't actively opposing it). The Southern Baptist Convention didn't even take an official position on abortion until the late 1970s in response to the Roe decision.

The relatively permissive regulations in the South make sense when you consider how completely neurotic these people were about miscegenation and family honor. If their daughter was raped by a black man, they wanted to know they had the ability to "take care of the matter." Note the illegality in Catholic Louisiana, and in Tennessee and Texas with their relatively small black populations.