There's a straight line from US racial segregation to the antiabortion movement | Randall Balmer

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

50% : Only in the early 1980s did opposition to abortion finally become an evangelical battle cry.
47% : The beauty of the religious right's embrace of abortion as a political issue is that it allowed leaders to camouflage the real origins of their movement: the defense of racial segregation in evangelical institutions.
46% : So how did evangelicals become interested in abortion?
45% : Nothing caught their attention, he insisted - school prayer, pornography, equal rights for women, abortion - until the IRS began to challenge the tax exemption of Bob Jones University and other whites-only segregation academies.
42% : Even James Dobson, who later became an implacable foe of abortion, acknowledged after the Roe decision that the Bible was silent on the matter and that it was plausible for an evangelical to hold that "a developing embryo or fetus was not regarded as a full human being".
41% : Indeed, in 1971 the Southern Baptist Convention had passed a resolution calling to legalize abortion.
41% : Although he later - 14 years later - claimed that opposition to abortion was the catalyst for his political activism, Jerry Falwell did not preach his first anti-abortion sermon until February 1978, more than five years after Roe.
41% : Still, it took some time for opposition to abortion to take hold among evangelicals.
40% : He was emphatic that abortion had nothing whatsoever to do with the genesis of the religious right.
39% : He said nothing whatsoever about abortion.
37% : Evangelicals considered abortion a "Catholic issue" through most of the 1970s, and there is little in the history of evangelicalism to suggest that abortion would become a point of interest.
37% : Several suggestions followed, and then a voice on the line said, "How about abortion?"

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