Abortion and the Catholic Church: Politics and Identity in 1970s America

Since the early 1980s, conservative Republicans and evangelical Protestants has become so influential to abortion politics that it is easy to forget how closely Americans associated abortion with Catholicism in the 1960s-1970s. Politicians, journalists, and activists danced around the religious issue in ways that reflected their own opinions and biases—but whether in subtext or headline, Catholics were at the heart of the debate. Most scholarship on abortion during this period has understandably focused on the role of feminism as the spark that ignited the political firestorm over abortion. Yet feminist activism and changes in gender roles cannot fully explain the rise of such a wide-ranging issue, nor the contours of the national partisan politics around abortion. In the 1970s abortion provided one of the most visible public contests over Roman Catholics’ place in American culture and politics. The heated public debate encompassed long-standing anti-Catholic concerns about foreign values systems being imposed on the majority via undemocratic political means as well as anxieties about belonging among a sizeable religious subgroup that was extending beyond its traditional social “ghetto” and assimilating into postwar American society. In line with the conference theme of “difficult conversations,” and using archival organizational records, political documents, and journalistic accounts from both the mainstream and Catholic press, this paper explores a few specific examples of moments in the 1970s public debate in which the abortion debate highlighted Catholics women and men’s religious and cultural differences, as well as their attractiveness to both parties as a political bloc.