Heather Cox Richardson explains how opposition to abortion became a mainstay of the Republican Party platform after Roe v. Wade was decided before the 1972 election.
“President Richard Nixon was up for reelection in that year, and with his popularity dropping, his advisor Pat Buchanan urged Nixon to woo Catholic Democrats over the issue of abortion.
In 1970, Nixon had directed U.S. military hospitals to perform abortions regardless of state law, but in 1971, using Catholic language, he reversed course to split the Democrats, citing his personal belief ‘in the sanctity of human life—including the life of the yet unborn.'”“As Nixon split the U.S. in two to rally voters, his supporters used abortion to stand in for women’s rights in general. Railing against the Equal Rights Amendment, in her first statement on abortion in 1972, activist Phyllis Schlafly did not talk about fetuses but instead spoke about ‘women’s lib’—the women’s liberation movement—which she claimed was ‘a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as the basic unit of society.'”