Rep. Henry Hyde became an anti-abortion icon by accident.
He was serving as a member of the Illinois House in the late 1960s when a Democratic colleague, Lee Rayson, sought him out to co-sponsor a bill that would decriminalize abortion. “I had never really thought about the subject,” Hyde said.
Hyde read a book written by a University of Notre Dame professor and abortion foe and came away thinking that not only could he not co-sponsor Rayson’s bill, he had to actively oppose it.
In 1976, when Hyde was a junior member of Congress, a fellow Republican lawmaker who opposed abortion, Rep. Robert Bauman of Maryland, approached him. He told Hyde that there was $50 million in the federal budget to pay for abortions for Medicaid recipients. Bauman asked Hyde to write an amendment opposing the funding. Hyde wrote the amendment in longhand on a legal pad, and “the next thing you know I am on the floor debating abortion.”
While the debate over the Hyde Amendment wasn’t the first heated public discussion on the subject, it remains one of the most important. Its passage helped to spawn an activist movement, primarily by evangelical Christians, that flourished during the 1980s and became an important component of the Republican Party.
A dividing line ever since
And abortion, once a topic discussed only in private, became one of the most stark and public dividing lines in American politics, and it remains so even 30 years after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide in Roe vs. Wade.
It has come to remake the two major political parties, with anti-abortion forces one of the most powerful blocs in the Republican Party and abortion-rights advocates their counterpart in the Democratic Party. As contentious as abortion has been as a political issue, it also has been clarifying. The norm is now for a Republican to oppose abortion rights and for a Democrat to favor them.
“You can either be for it or against it,” said William Martin, a professor of sociology at Rice University and expert on the religious right. “It lends itself to a litmus test quite well.”
Most analysts believe that no Republican could support abortion rights and win the party’s presidential nomination. Similarly, no Democrat could oppose abortion rights and win. Views on abortion can affect the choice of a running mate as well, and of judicial nominees.
Republican presidential candidates tend to not address the subject when speaking to moderate suburban audiences, and Democrats avoid it when speaking to Roman Catholics. No candidate has been able to bridge the philosophical differences.
Far from fading over time as a political issue, the debate over abortion rights is as heated as ever. As one measure of that, all six Democrats who have announced intentions to run for president in 2004 will attend a dinner Tuesday night in Washington to talk of their support for a woman’s right to choose.
If there were a vacancy on the Supreme Court before the next presidential election, abortion clearly would be a primary focus on the nominee’s confirmation hearing, with clear repercussions for the campaign.
A Gallup Poll released Monday indicated that more Americans, by a margin of 53 percent to 30 percent, have a positive rather than a negative reaction when they think of Roe vs. Wade. The poll also indicated that 24 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal under any circumstance, 14 percent believe it should be legal in most circumstances, 42 percent believe it should be legal only in a few circumstances and 18 percent believe it should be illegal in all circumstances.
Overall, public opinion on the issue stands about where it did in 1990, the poll found.
“If it is not the most powerful political social attitude, there aren’t many that can challenge it,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the non-partisan Pew Research Center.
The passage of the Hyde Amendment prompted social conservatives to launch efforts to unseat members of Congress almost solely because they favored abortion rights.
Foes devise signature tactic
Abortion opponents had a signature tactic: to leaflet cars on Sunday before the election making claims that lawmakers who supported abortion rights were baby-killers, with images of fetuses discarded in trash cans.
One of the first to exploit the post-Roe politics of abortion was then-Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, who was in a difficult re-election battle in 1974 against a Democrat, Dr. Bill Roy, an obstetrician. Dole supporters flooded church parking lots with fliers on the Sunday before the election that said Roy was a baby-killer, a tactic that left Roy embittered in interviews more than 20 years later.
After the Roe decision, the political allegiances of evangelical Christians, particularly in the South, began to shift. At first, many evangelicals endorsed the campaign of Jimmy Carter in 1976, who was the first major presidential candidate to speak openly about his “born-again” experience. But because Carter would not come out against abortion, they abandoned him.
The allegiance of evangelicals shifted decidedly toward Republicans with the emergence of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and other groups.
Even for Falwell, abortion had not been an all-consuming topic. According to Martin, Falwell did not preach a sermon on abortion until 1978. But Falwell and others clearly saw the potential for a movement that had opposition to abortion as a core principle. Eventually, he and other religious conservatives strongly supported Ronald Reagan, whom they saw as a champion of the fight to overturn Roe, though over time Reagan disappointed them on the issue.
Anti-abortion activists targeted several Democrats running for re-election in 1980 and ended up knocking off popular incumbents such as Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana (by Dan Quayle) with aggressive tactics like those employed by Dole’s supporters. Those victories emboldened abortion foes to demand policy positions from the Republican Party such as its anti-abortion plank in the national party platform.
For some politicians, like Hyde, abortion is a public issue born of a lot of private reflection. Hyde sees no gray; he only grudgingly accepts that some exceptions to abortion should be granted for rape and incest. His only clear exception would be to save the life of the mother.
“It’s a terribly emotional issue,” Hyde said. “How do you compromise somebody else’s life? God knows I wish the issue would go away because it’s heated, it’s difficult, it’s controversial and people get very emotional about it. I don’t see how you can compromise an unborn child. When people come up and criticize me, I always tell them I am glad they were born.”
