Between 1976 and 1980, the emergence of the Christian Right — a largely southern phenomenon and a vehicle for the region’s conservative values and priorities — as an influential GOP voting bloc acted to further cement a national abortion ban as a key element of the Republican Party’s agenda. The anti-abortion campaign, previously led by Catholic groups and hampered by disputes and disagreements, quickly came to be directed by Christian Right organizations that were both politically astute and media savvy.
The rising importance of the movement’s leaders meant that Reagan needed their support in his bid for the 1980 presidential nomination, and he artfully deployed moralistic and evangelical rhetoric to win them over. In August 1980, Reagan addressed Christian Right leaders at the National Affairs Briefing and allied himself with their cause by declaring “I know that you can’t endorse me, but… I want you to know that I endorse you.” Yet, crucially, Reagan maintained a marked distance from the Christian Right’s anti-abortion demands — his speech did not mention the topic once.
It set the tone for a presidency in which Reagan’s Administration showed little interest in the abortion issue. While Helms repeatedly attempted to pass anti-abortion legislation in the Senate — with vociferous backing from the Christian Right — Reagan offered nothing more than occasional supportive rhetoric, preferring instead to focus on pursuing his economic priorities. Behind the scenes, Reagan aides expressed relief that they were able to avoid becoming entangled in controversial social issues and had limited themselves to providing only “passive support.”
But anger was steadily rising among southern conservatives and Christian Right leaders. In a furious letter to the White House in 1981, Moral Majority vice president Cal Thomas mocked Reagan’s famous “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” question from the 1980 campaign. If the administration continued “allowing the slaughter of one and one-half million unborn babies a year,” he argued, “I will not be able to say that we are better off at all.”
With almost no support coming from the White House, efforts to ban abortion ultimately made no substantial progress during the Reagan Administration. But that obscures the role Reagan played in making the anti-abortion rights cause central to the GOP’s agenda and, ultimately, in rolling back abortion rights.