This Really Is a Different Pro-Life Movement

When the Supreme Court issued its landmark abortion-rights decision, , in 1973, the most intransigent opponents of the decision were not the legislatures of southern Bible Belt states such as Mississippi and Oklahoma. Indeed, doctors in many southern states—including Arkansas, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Virginia—had been performing legal hospital abortions for at least a few carefully defined “therapeutic” reasons for years before . The state legislatures that presented the strongest defiance to legalizing abortion were those of the heavily Catholic states of the Northeast. Barely 10 percent of Massachusetts legislators supported legalizing abortion in 1973, according to an archival American Civil Liberties Union document. Instead of permitting the procedure up to the point of viability (about 28 weeks at the time), as the Supreme Court mandated, the Massachusetts state legislature responded to by passing a bill prohibiting abortion after the 20th week of pregnancy. Rhode Island’s statehouse presented even stronger opposition: It kept