Anti-Choice Religious Bloc Began With Tax Battle

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Searching for Another Battle "We had motivated and spurred a lot of Christians to involvement, so we had a small army and needed another battle to fight," Martin quotes Richard Billings, one of the early activists, in his book. The group's first effort to rally the troops around abortion, didn't work. The people in the pews considered abortion a personal issue. But then the activists figured out a way to galvanize their followers: They started talking about the misuse of tax dollars to pay for abortions for "welfare queens," a code phrase that invoked erroneous images of black, unmarried mothers who cleverly cheated the government. These social and fiscal conservatives were already unhappy about the Great Society social welfare programs that had been enacted under President Lyndon Johnson. Some of their leaders attacked welfare as encouraging out-of-wedlock births. They also said the high taxes needed to pay for welfare were burdening household budgets and forcing women to leave the home and enter the workplace. A nerve was hit and the abortion issue was born. It was about saving tax dollars and keeping white women at home, not the immorality of abortion itself. The Catholic Church, meanwhile, had opposed abortion since the mid-1800s. For a while historical tensions kept the Catholics and the religious right apart, but by the early 1980s the religious right was happy to welcome Catholics (who were primarily Democrats) into the Republican anti-abortion ranks. End Result: Mass Attack Now we see the end result: a mass attack on abortion rights in state legislatures and by Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives. At the same time, legislators who express such devotion to the rights of the "unborn" are doing all they can, in the name of fiscal austerity, to propose cuts that would be detrimental to children who have already been born. The first spending bill that House Republicans sent to the Senate--and which got rejected along with the Democrats' version--would have slashed the budget for the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant that supports prenatal care programs and services for children with special needs. That bill would also have severely cut money for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC, which provides supplemental foods to pregnant women and children up to age 5. Nationally, almost half of all children under age 6 live in poverty and qualify for WIC. The religious right's continued, obsessive "moral" objection to abortion needs to be confronted. Why save embryos in utero and then discard children who have exited the birth canal? What is clearly immoral is denying health care, nutrition and support to poor women and children.