(incredible history lesson and perspective. thanks! - promoted by johne)
Abortion serves as surrogate for a spectrum of unspoken issues related to female personhood and male entitlement. The anti-abortion litmus test was introduced over 30 years ago by Paul Weyrich, who dictated that women step aside and "make way for new life." The political standard serves dual purposes - the marginalization of women and the lightning rod around which to mobilize political coalitions, notably, fundamentalist evangelicals and Catholics.
The elevation of fetal life over women's lives coupled with conservative strategist Howard Phillips' goal, euphemistically described as return to "one-family-one-vote," is calculated to marginalize and disenfranchise women, consistent with the ultraright tenet that select white Christian males alone retain the right to vote or hold office.
Consistently overshadowed by the more easily sensationalized issue of abortion, birth control remains a primary target of the political right. On a slippery slope to 19th century status for women, rightists actively promote "conscience clauses" permitting pharmacists and health care providers to refuse filling contraceptive prescriptions or otherwise provide reproductive health care. The right seeks the outlaw of birth control - a primary means to eliminate the need for abortion. Motivated in part by demographic fear of declining Christian numbers, Pat Robertson rejects the privacy right to contraception upheld in Griswold vs. Connecticut (1965): "I want to see it abolished."
The "right-to-life" movement that elevates embryonic life above women's lives is more accurately termed "right-to-prenatal-life." The most recent incarnation of "personhood" amendments seeking to grant fetuses 14th Amendment rights to "life, liberty and due process of law," appears on the 2008 Colorado ballot. Simultaneously, rightists have opposed the same rights for women as "reading feminism into the Constitution."
Rickie Solinger concluded from her historical research of women's health care that women's rights have often been held hostage by politicians and others with "political agendas hostile to female autonomy and racial equality" (Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade, 1992). The criminalization of contraception and abortion, and the widespread U.S. adoption black market that assigned value to babies and punishment to women based on race, were some effects of pre-Roe efforts to control women's reproduction.
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