Was pro-life campus activity protected by 1st Amendment?

What explains the alignment of antiabortion positions within the Republican party? I explore this development among voters, activists, and elites before 1980. By 1970, antiabortion attitudes among ordinary voters correlated with conservative views on a range of noneconomic issues including civil rights, Vietnam, feminism and, by 1972, with Republican presidential vote choice. These attitudes predated the parties taking divergent abortion positions. I argue that because racial conservatives and military hawks entered the Republican coalition before abortion became politically activated, issue overlap among ordinary voters incentivized Republicans to oppose abortion rights once the issue gained salience. Likewise, because proabortion voters generally supported civil rights, once the GOP adopted a Southern strategy, this predisposed pro-choice groups to align with the Democratic party. A core argument is that preexisting public opinion enabled activist leaders to embed the anti (pro) abortion movement in a web of conservative (liberal) causes. A key finding is that the white evangelical laity’s support for conservative abortion policies preceded the political mobilization of evangelical leaders into the pro-life movement. I contend the pro-life movement’s alignment with conservatism and the Republican party was less contingent on elite bargaining, and more rooted in the mass public, than existing scholarship suggests.

Download Full-text

Pro-Life, Pro-Woman? Frame Extension in the American Antiabortion Movement

Journal of Women Politics & Policy ◽

10.1080/1554477x.2011.537565 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 32 (1) ◽

pp. 1-27 ◽

Cited By ~ 25

Author(s):

Melody Rose

Keyword(s):

Pro Life

Download Full-text

“It’s a fraught subject”: Listening to Evangelical Doctors Talk about Abortion

Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religion ◽

10.18792/jbasr.v22i0.49 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 22 ◽

pp. 89

Author(s):

Jennifer Riley

Keyword(s):

Social Media ◽

News Coverage ◽

Experiential Knowledge ◽

Lived Religion ◽

Multiple Sources ◽

Complex Picture ◽

Pro Life

News coverage, social media and protests alike tend to polarise people’s stances on abortion. Moreover, these also often reveal category slippage between ‘pro-life’ and ‘Christian’ or ‘religious,’ perpetuating the impression that to be religious is to reject abortion. Contrary to both tendencies, this article engages with abortion from a lived religion perspective. It listens to evangelical healthcare practitioners as they talk about their attitudes towards abortion. This reveals a complex picture, their ethical engagement variously taking the form of resistance, neutrality, uncertainty, compartmentalisation, change and situational negotiation, while drawing upon multiple sources of ethical authority, including their own ‘experiential knowledge.’ Having presented these complexities, the article concludes by exploring their implications. First, it considers the value of foregrounding emotion when engaging in lived religion research around ethics and controversial topics. Secondly, it suggests that combining social bioethics with emotional narratives might represent a means of communicating this complexity.

Download Full-text

Pro-Life or Pro-Choice? Humanistic Buddhists’ Voices Surrounding Abortion in Contemporary Taiwan

International Journal of Religion ◽

10.33182/ijor.v2i1.1107 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 2 (1) ◽

pp. 61-80

Author(s):

Grace Cheng-Ying Lin

Keyword(s):

Wide Spectrum ◽

Life Forms ◽

Buddhist Philosophy ◽

Reproductive Politics ◽

Discursive Analysis ◽

The People ◽

The Law ◽

Humanistic Buddhism ◽

Pro Life ◽

Pro Choice

In Taiwan, abortion was legalized in 1984. This paper examines the voices surrounding abortion expressed by monasteries in Humanistic Buddhism, a prominent Buddhist philosophy practiced in modern Taiwan. Humanistic Buddhism emphasizes that it is a “religion of the people.” However, in addition to the law of karma and causality, the value of all life forms is prioritized based on the ethics of “non-harming (ahimsā).” When some monasteries insist that abortion is killing, resulting in karmic retribution, some express sympathy with a woman’s decision to abort. When some monasteries promote a newly popularized ritual to appease aborted fetuses, some are keenly critical of the exploitation of women and manipulation of scriptures. Through a discursive analysis, this paper demonstrates the wide spectrum of Buddhist narratives in response to reproductive politics embedded in the conflicts between modernity and tradition, as well as locality and globality.

Download Full-text