The American public paid for just four abortions over seven years in Kansas, all because the pregnancies resulted from rape or incest or threatened the life of the mother.

But that was four too many for some of the midwestern state’s leading Republicans who are blocking expansion of free medical coverage to about 130,000 low-income people on the grounds that some funds might pay for abortions.

At the forefront of this standoff is Susan Wagle, Republican president of the Kansas senate who, not coincidentally, is running for the US Senate later this year. Even some of Wagle’s own Republican party colleagues said she had been “disrespectful to blatantly disrupt the legislative process and threaten fellow legislators for personal political gain”. But making a stand against abortion is smart politics in this part of the US, both in fighting a Republican primary and against Democrats in a general election.

More than half a century of mobilization by social conservatives against abortion has changed the Republican party, driven American politics and shaped the US supreme court as it hears on Wednesday what could prove to be a decisive case in the continuing war of attrition in state legislatures against access to terminations.

That campaign produced politicians like Wagle.

“The thing that’s remarkable is that the Republican party was the party that was actually driving for the liberalization of abortion laws before Roe,” said Joshua Wilson, a political scientist at the University of Denver and author of The New States of Abortion Politics. “Now opposition to abortion is the touchstone that a lot of voters judge Republicans by.”

The abortion narrative becomes part of how white evangelicals get mobilized as a political constituency Joshua Wilson

The push against the liberalizing of abortion laws was initially led by a group of Catholic bishops who formed the National Right to Life Committee after Colorado legalized terminations in 1967, rapidly followed by other states, from California to New York. But it was not until the supreme court’s Roe v Wade decision legalizing abortion across the US in 1973 that opposition galvanized nationally. One early victory was the passing of the Hyde Amendment by Congress, which prevented federal funding of most abortions.

But it was the rise of the Christian evangelical opposition in the 1980s, led by groups such as the fundamentalist Focus on the Family, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s religious empire – from churches to television stations – that pushed the issue to the heart of Republican party politics.

“The involvement of white evangelicals comes to eclipse Catholics within the anti-abortion movement,” said Wilson. “Evangelicals, particularly white evangelicals, had to be taught to care about abortion because this was viewed as a Catholic issue for so long and white evangelical identity in various ways was in opposition to Catholic identity. The abortion narrative becomes part of how white evangelicals get mobilized as a political constituency.”

An anti-abortion activist demonstrates with her family outside the supreme court in Washington DC, on 27 June 2016. Photograph: Pete Marovich/Getty Images

Radical evangelical groups such as Operation Rescue, which pioneered the blockading of abortion clinics, were effective at drawing attention to their cause with the spectacle of civil disobedience and mass arrests. Others went further by using violence.

But Jennifer Holland, a historian at the University of Oklahoma and author of Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement, said the real impact had been led by less overtly confrontational organisations.

“Operation Rescue is incredibly important in the same way that a lot of radical movements are in that they draw a lot of attention. But that wasn’t changing people’s minds, and the feminist movement in conjunction with the federal government eventually ended that through the enforcement of criminal convictions,” she said.

“On the other hand, Right to Life and the many, many organizations that they birthed are doing the hard work in states, working on these incremental laws and making these biological and civil rights arguments. That this is a genocide. They’ve borrowed from human rights discourse, especially related to the Jewish Holocaust.”

Holland said the cause appealed to many white conservatives as a means of “redeeming the right” after its promotion of anti-communist witch-hunts in the 1950s and resistance to racial integration in the 60s.

“The anti-abortion movements gives morality back to the right in a lot of ways. You allow white conservatives to assume the position of abolitionists, which is an incredibly powerful thing,” she said.

In 1992, the US supreme court provided the opening that shifted the front line of the political battle to state legislatures with a landmark ruling that requirements for an abortion, such as a waiting period and notifying a spouse, were constitutional provided they did not impose an “undue burden” on women seeking a termination. Wilson said that set in motion a cycle of activists pushing for laws to test the boundaries of undue burden.

“Then you get a court ruling that sets out the parameters that it looks like you can act within. States start acting and activists start pushing those limits, which results in another court case, which then resets those parameters and then resets the cycle,” he said.

As the legal challenges to abortion access ratcheted up, the justification evolved to claim new laws were designed to protect not only the fetus but the mother.

These bills often hinge on this idea that abortion, or some aspect of it, is infringing on women’s rights Jennifer Holland

“These bills often hinge on this idea that abortion, or some aspect of it, is infringing on women’s rights. They have names like ‘women’s right to know bills’ or ‘Susan B Anthony bills’. Like with civil rights and genocide, it’s a co-option of liberal rhetoric, of feminist rhetoric, in a lot of ways,” said Holland.

As access to abortion grew harder in some states, particularly for poorer women in rural areas, activists moved in to offer free testing, ultrasounds and other prenatal services, sometimes alongside wider medical care, meshed with pressure not to have a termination and to give unwanted children up for adoption.



The past decade or so has also seen a new determination on the part of activists as they demand more action from Republican politicians, particularly in the state legislatures.

The result was a new wave of laws in Republican-controlled state legislatures designed to tie up clinics in regulation that greatly increased costs and imposed ever more stringent requirements on women seeking terminations.

Last year, six states enacted laws to limit abortions to before a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can be in as little as six weeks. Alabama passed a law banning almost all abortions and making it a criminal offense for doctors to perform them, with long prison sentences.

“A lot of these laws are just trying to throw anything against the wall, anything that could limit women’s access, and and see what sticks,” said Holland.

The relentless legislative blows against Roe v Wade may pay off in the supreme court this week.

The evangelicals who were instrumental in putting Donald Trump into the White House were rewarded with his appointment of not one but two new supreme court justices hostile to abortion.

With the balance of the court shifted to the right, opponents of abortion are optimistic that they will find in favor of Louisiana’s right to impose even tighter restrictions. If that happens, the push for more anti-abortion legislation is only likely to get more aggressive.