The recent disinformation campaign against New York's new abortion law reflects the takeover of the GOP by radical Movement Conservatives in the 1970s. It's a story not about principle, but about power.

Let's take a look at the modern political history of abortion, shall we? /1
States began to criminalize abortion in the 1870s (a process itself about politics that I will tell someday). By 1960, an observer estimated between 200K and 1.2 million illegal US abortions a year, endangering women, primarily poor ones who could not afford a workaround. /2
To stem this public health crisis, doctors wanted to decriminalize abortion and keep it between a woman and her doctor. In the 1960s, states began to decriminalize abortion on this medical model, and support for abortion rights grew. /3
At the same time, the rising women's movement wanted women to have control over their lives, and came to see reproductive rights as key to that. In 1969, activist Betty Friedan told a medical abortion meeting: /4
In 1971, even the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention agreed that abortion should be legal in some cases, and vowed to work for modernization. /5
By 1972, Gallup pollsters reported that 64% of Americans agreed that abortion was between a woman and her doctor. 68% of Republicans, who had always liked family planning, agreed; 59% of Democrats (who had more Catholics) agreed. /6
In 1973, the Supreme Court, under Republican Chief Justice Warren Burger, in a decision written by Republican Lewis Blackmun, decided Roe v. Wade, legalizing first-trimester abortion. (This is a brilliant obituary of Norma McCorvey, AKA Jane Roe.): /7 latimes.com/local/obituari…
Wait. Republicans liked Roe v. Wade?

What happened?!

The common story is that Roe sparked a backlash. But legal scholars Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel found something interesting. (The statistics so far have been from their 2011 article in the Yale Law Journal.) /8
Remember that fewer Democrats than Republicans supported abortion rights in 1972? There was something else going on in that year. Nixon was up for reelection, and he and his people were paranoid that he would lose. /9
Nixon's handler Pat Buchanan was a Goldwater man who wanted to destroy the popular New Deal state that regulated the economy and protected social welfare and civil rights. To that end, he believed Ds and traditional Rs must be kept from power and Nixon must win reelection. /10
Catholics, who opposed abortion and believed that "the right of innocent human beings to life is sacred," tended to vote for Democratic candidates. Buchanan (himself Catholic), urged Nixon to woo Catholic Democrats before the 1972 election over the issue of abortion. /11
In 1970, Nixon had directed US military hospitals to perform abortions regardless of state law; in 1971, he reversed course to split the Democrats, citing his personal belief "in the sanctity of human life- including the life of the yet unborn" (note the Catholic language). /12
Although Nixon and Democratic nominee George McGovern had similar stances on abortion, Nixon and Buchanan framed McGovern as the candidate of "Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion," a radical framing designed to alienate traditionalists. (McGovern had a PhD in History, btw.) /13
As Nixon split the US in two to rally voters, his supporters used abortion to stand in for women's rights in general. Railing against the Equal Rights Amendment, in her first statement on abortion in 1972, activist Phyllis Schlafly did not talk about fetuses; she said /14
Traditional GOP supported an activist government that regulated business and promoted social welfare, but Movement Conservatives wanted to kill the active government. They attacked anyone who supported such a government as immoral. Abortion turned women's rights into murder. /15
Movement Conservatives harped on traditional roles, and in 1974, the TV show Little House on the Prairie started its 9 year run and helped, showing white women as wives and mothers in the West protected by their menfolk. /16 pictorial.jezebel.com/the-settler-fa…
This image was the female side of the cowboy individualism personified by Ronald Reagan. A man should control his own destiny, take care of his family, unencumbered by government. Tax cuts meant a man ran his own life. (This encouraged the rise of evangelicism, too, btw.) /16
In 1984, sociologist Kristin Luker discovered that "pro-life" activists believed that selfish "pro-choice" women were denigrating the roles of wife and mother. They wanted an active government to give them rights they didn't need or deserve. (Such laws cost tax dollars.) /16
By 1988, Rush Limbaugh, the voice of Movement Conservatism, who was virulently opposed to taxation and active government, demonized women's rights advocates as "Femi-nazis," for whom "the most important thing in life is ensuring that as many abortions as possible occur." /17
In 2016, GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina said that Democrats endorsed the murder of live babies for the sale of their body parts. That is: those who believe government should defend equal rights also commit infanticide. (Is it any wonder folks believed Pizzagate?) /18
This recent image of a group of young men agitating over an issue that, on its face, doesn't affect them, highlights how Movement Conservatives turned abortion into a political weapon in the 1970s, and how that militarization echoes today. /END

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More from @HC_Richardson

Oct 24, 2020
Writer's Block.

A thread for @alixabeth and others. This is not about writing problems in general: procrastination, frustration, stress eating, pain, and so on. It's for when you cannot remember how to write- like there is a gap in your brain- and the whole world goes gray. 1/
You might well be a prolific writer, but it starts to dry up. It's honestly like you can't remember how to do it. Upset, you tell friends, who joke about it, because OF COURSE you can write. But you can't, and you can't convince anyone you have a big problem. So you wither. /2
The harder you try to meet that deadline, or outline that book, the more elusive it gets. It is like you have lost a piece of yourself, and you are terrified you will never get it back. But no one understands. So you try harder to write, and it gets worse. /3
Read 13 tweets
Oct 25, 2019
Re: Barr's now apparently criminal inquiry into the origins of the Russia investigation. FWIW, Trump's GOP has made disinformation surrounding investigations a key part of their political strategy. /1
There was Clinton's emails, of course, which last week's report showed was completely fabricated. There was not a crime. The investigation was, itself, the story that would change votes. It seems that Giuliani was vital to the strategy of keeping investigation leaks coming. /2
Giuliani and Trump turned to pressure Ukraine's leaders for dirt on Biden after the 2018 midterms showed they were in trouble, but William Taylor's statement and texts made it clear they didn't care about the dirt so much as for Zelensky to say he was opening an investigation. /3
Read 5 tweets
Oct 1, 2019
Although it has been a lifetime since this morning when Trump threatened civil war, he was onto something. Not a war now- which Russian trolls have been pushing and right wingers have echoed for over a year- but how the present looks like the years before the real Civil War. /1
In the 1830s, wealthy slaveowners began to defend slavery as good for white men. But when Indian Removal in 1830s pushed native people off rich cotton lands, land prices skyrocketed and forced many whites into poverty (see @rothmanistan's Flush Times and Fever Dreams). /2
As poor folks started to turn against the rich slaveowners who made up less than 1% of the population, elites undercut their opponents by increasingly denigrating enslaved black people and urging racial solidarity. Opponents, they said, wanted to make slaves equal to whites. /3
Read 15 tweets
Jul 22, 2019
But majority of US- a "liberal consensus"- liked active gov't. The GI Bill gave educations to 7.8 million soldiers, letting them climb to middle class, and from 1945-1960, GNP jumped 250%, from $200 bn to $500 bn, baby boom meant families and consumers. Why go back? /40
In 1951, young Taft believer William F. Buckley Jr. wrote God and Man at Yale, saying that Enlightenment idea of making fact-based arguments must be wrong because voters kept choosing active gov't, which was bad by definition. /41
Stop trying to convince people with facts: "free enterprise" and God are not optional! In 1954, Buckley and BIL write a book saying McCarthy is right, and US is under siege by "Liberals," meaning everyone, D and GOP, who likes active government. "Conservatives" must prevail! /42
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Jul 19, 2019
Cherry-picked versions of GOP history argue that the party has been unchanging in its support for black rights and ordinary Americans, but that's just not right. The long history of the GOP has been both glorious- as they argue- and sordid.

Let's have a look, shall we? /1
The GOP organized in the 1850s. White northern man had long worried that rich southern slaveholders were taking over the government. In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act opening the West, which had been free under the Missouri Compromise, to slavery. /2
They would create new slave states, overpowering free states. Soon rich men would own Congress. Poor white men would become serfs. The day after the K-N Act passed, N Reps from all parties joined to stand against the Slave Power, and ordinary men protested the new law. /3
Read 40 tweets
Jul 5, 2019
@Cernovich @MaraGay Douglass was indeed a Republican, a member of the party that organized to stand against a cabal of wealthy men who controlled the US government and used it to establish an oligarchy. Their wealth came from enslaved labor, so Republicans sought to stop the spread of slavery. /1
@Cernovich @MaraGay It was a proud party, one that believed the economy grew from the bottom up, and so the government should protect equality of opportunity for all individuals (men, but that was expected in that era). /2
@Cernovich @MaraGay So it established public college, and gave away land to farmers, and invested in railroads, and taxed all American incomes to pay for national development. The early GOP gave us our first activist state... and the economy boomed. /3
Read 5 tweets

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