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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

In The Nation [thenation.com],

The anti-abortion movement in the United States has long been complicit with white supremacy. In recent decades, the movement mainstream has been careful to protect its public image by distancing itself from overt white nationalists in its ranks. Last year, anti-abortion leader Kristen Hatten was ousted from her position as vice president of the anti-choice group New Wave Feminists after identifying as an “ethnonationalist” and sharing white supremacist alt-right content. In 2018, when neo-Nazis from the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP) sought to join the local March for Life rally organized by Tennessee Right to Life, the anti-abortion organization rejected TWP’s involvement. (The organization’s statement, however, engaged in the same false equivalency between left and right that Trump used in the wake of fatal white supremacist violence at Charlottesville. “Our organization’s march has a single agenda to support the rights of mothers and the unborn, and we don’t agree with the violent agenda of white supremacists or Antifa,” the group wrote on its Facebook page.)

Interesting. Very interesting.

But despite the movement’s careful curation of its public image, racism and xenophobia have been woven into it throughout its history. With large families, due to Roman Catholic Church prohibitions on contraception and abortion, Catholic immigration in the mid-1800s through 1900s sparked white Anglo-Saxon Protestant fears of being overtaken demographically that fueled opposition to abortion as a means of increasing birthrates among white Protestant women. At the time, Roman Catholic immigrants from countries like Ireland and Italy who would be considered white today were among the targets of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. As sociologists Nicola Beisel and Tamara Kay wrote with regards to the criminalization of abortion in the late 19th century, “While laws regulating abortion would ultimately affect all women, physicians argued that middle-class, Anglo-Saxon married women were those obtaining abortions, and that their use of abortion to curtail childbearing threatened the Anglo-Saxon race.”

Seems there was a sequence about this [youtube.com] in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

Hostile anti-Catholic sentiment cut both ways when it came to abortion, however. Until the 1970s, “pro-life” activism was firmly associated with Catholics and the pope in the minds of American Protestants. This deterred many Protestants from opposing abortion as a Christian moral issue—not only in the political sphere, but even as a matter of denominational teaching—because of its association with “papists” (a derogatory term for Catholics). Even the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 decriminalizing abortion did not immediately bring conservative Protestants around. As late as 1976, the conservative evangelical Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) passed resolutions affirming abortion rights. “The assumption was that it must not be right if Catholics backed it, so we haven’t,” commented John Wilder, who founded Christians for Life as a Southern Baptist ministry in 1977 as the resistance to the pro-life movement began to dissipate.

This shift occurred in light of the lessening of anti-Catholic prejudice, strategic recruitment of evangelicals by New Right Catholic leaders, and evangelical discomfort with how many abortions took place as women accessed their new reproductive rights.

A very long history, interesting. This is how they will not replace us?

Original Submission