The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

In 1967, three states had passed laws allowing abortion in the case of a permanent threat to the mother’s health. Two were heavily Republican—Colorado and California, where the new governor, Ronald Reagan, signed the furthest-reaching liberalization of abortion in American history. But North Carolina, which had voted Democratic in the last nine presidential elections, passed similar laws. A presidential task force urged the repeal of abortion laws in 1968. New York, where Republicans controlled the governorship and both state chambers, legalized abortion in 1970; its legislature voted two years later to repeal the law, though the repeal was vetoed by Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller. Notably, there was also a belt of conservative Democratic states with brand-new laws permitting abortion under certain circumstances. They were all in the newly desegregated South. In the 1960s, every coastal Southern state from Alabama to Virginia legislated some kind of right to abortion, starting with a Mississippi law permitting abortion in the case of rape. By the time of Roe, half of the states with at least some abortion rights were south of the Mason-Dixon Line.