I did a text search of “abortion” in my book on the history of the religious right, We Gather Together. I used the word 705 times. But this might be the passage I’d point journalists to right now: “in 1973, most religious conservatives did not oppose abortion.” 
Religious opposition was not a given nor inherent. It was historically produced, and it varied greatly across religious groups, even conservative ones. An evangelical consensus opposing abortion, for example, took at least a decade to build.
Developing a theological opposition took time since, as the evangelical publication Christianity Today noted, “the Bible does not comment directly on abortion.”
More passages here from leading evangelical publications around the time commenting on the “paucity of biblical references” on the topic.
Check out the results of a 1970 poll of Southern Baptist pastors. 70 percent abortion in cases of health of woman or rape/incest.
A lot of Southern Baptist hesitancy on opposing abortion was straight up anti-Catholicism, still a powerful aspect of SB culture in 1970s. Here’s what WA Criswell, the pastor of First Baptist Dallas, said about abortion and Catholics:
This is all just the tip of the iceberg of a long & complicated history. But it’s vitally important to resist easy, pat generalizations, to recognize the range of historical actors at work here - & especially to appreciate that none of it was inevitable, but always contingent.
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