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Column: A reminder that the GOP used to be the pro-abortion party, and Democrats the anti party
American political memories are notoriously short, so it’s unsurprising that our perception of abortion politics dates back only to 1973.
That’s the year, of course, that the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Roe vs. Wade, which safeguarded abortion rights in the U.S. for 49 years until a right-wing majority on the Court overturned it in 2022. Everything before 1973 is consigned to the mists of prehistory.
That’s a shame, because a longer perspective would tell us much about politics in America and explain how the abortion issue was drafted into a partisan culture war — indeed, became the chief weapon against social equality in the hands of conservative politicians and their evangelical Christian partners.
This really is about women’s status in society, controlling women’s behavior and the limits of that behavior.
— Former Planned Parenthood President Faye Wattleton
“Abortion was not a partisan issue at that time,” according to the journalist and historian Linda Greenhouse. “It was a medical problem, it was a social problem.”
Greenhouse’s words are taken from “Reversing Roe,” a 2018 documentary on the prehistory and aftermath of the Supreme Court decision, available on Netflix.
“Other issues have been as divisive—civil rights comes to mind,” author Sue Halpern observed in her review of the documentary for the New York Review of Books — “but none has been as definitional.”
So it will help to take a quick journey over the pre-Roe landscape. Here are the landmarks:
In the decades prior to Roe vs. Wade, abortion was broadly illegal in the U.S. Women seeking abortions for their physical and psychological health — these were known as “therapeutic abortions” — often had to appear before hospital committees of physicians, mostly male, to get permission. Sometimes it was granted on the condition that the patient agree to permanent sterilization after the procedure.
The situation underscored the severe racial and economic divides in America of that era. White women in general could muster the wherewithal to obtain safe abortions, sometimes by traveling as far as Sweden for the purpose.
Black women typically had no such options. They and others without access to willing doctors perished at a horrifying rate from self-abortions or operations performed in “dark, dingy apartments,” the documentary reports,
But whatever the process chosen, anti-abortion laws were regularly flouted, broken on average a million times a year.
In the 1960s and up to 1973, “Republicans were behind efforts to liberalize and even decriminalize abortion,” Halpern wrote. They preached personal freedom and choice; the Democrats, by contrast, strived to keep faith with their large base of Catholics who hewed to the church’s strictures on abortion.
It’s largely forgotten today that the most liberal abortion rights law in the country, the California Therapeutic Abortion Act, was passed in 1967 and signed by none other than Gov. Ronald Reagan. The law legalized abortions up to the 21st week of pregnancy when the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest or endangered the physical or mental health of the mother. After its enactment, the documentary reports, one flight left Dallas every day carrying women heading for California for abortions.
In 1970, New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, a Republican, signed an even more liberal law, allowing abortion on demand, for any reason, up through the first 24 weeks of pregnancy or to save the life of the mother. The law had been passed by a legislature under full GOP control.
A 1972 Gallup poll found that 68% of Republicans favored keeping abortion a private decision between a woman, her family and her doctors.
The Roe vs. Wade decision was drafted by Justice Harry Blackmun, a Nixon appointee. But as Greenhouse remarked, as long as abortion was seen as a medical and social issue and the question at hand one of individual privacy rights, the debate over and drafting of the decision lacked any partisan coloration.
As a Congressman in the 1970s, George H.W. Bush was a strong supporter of family planning; running in the Republican primary for president in 1980, he told an interviewer that he would not support a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion.
But the ground was shifting under Republican feet. Richard Nixon and his advisors noticed the change early on, and began a program of luring Catholics from the Democratic party, as Halpern reported; Gerald Ford engineered the addition of a pro-life plank into the GOP president platform in 1976.
Among the flash points driving Christians into Republican arms were federal court rulings supporting and IRS policy to deny tax exemptions to segregationist schools.
Many of these were secular institutions established in reaction to the Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka. By the 1970s, however, Christian private schools outnumbered the nonsectarian ones, which inspired political activism among Christian evangelists who had shown little political interest previously. (The Supreme Court would uphold the denial of tax exemption in a 1983 decision involving Bob Jones University of Greenville, S.C.)
Right-wing political activists saw an opportunity to bring evangelical voters together with Republicans, but they needed a different issue from racial segregation to make the affiliation more palatable. Abortion filled that vacuum.
Pressed by politically active evangelists such as Jerry Falwell and conservative organizers such as Paul Weyrich, George H.W. Bush and Reagan reversed themselves to favor abortion restrictions in the course of the 1980 campaign. “Religious America is awakening, perhaps just in time for our country’s sake,” Reagan told a teeming crowd of evangelical voters in August 1980.
Weyrich oversaw a remaking of the Republican Party by yoking abortion to other conservative social issues, such as the spread of pornography and the Equal Rights Amendment, as Tanya Melich, a former GOP delegate, observed in her 1998 book “The Republican War Against Women.”
Support of abortion bans as a litmus test for GOP politicians took some time to reach its full flowering. When Reagan nominated Sandra Day O’Connor as the first female Supreme Court justice, he expected her to vote in favor of a developing effort to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
The opportunity arose in 1992 with the arrival of Planned Parenthood vs. Casey on the court’s docket. Surprising her patron, O’Connor voted to uphold Roe in most of its particulars — indeed, co-drafted the majority 5-4 opinion with two other Republican-appointed justices, Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, and David H. Souter, an appointee of George H.W. Bush.
The opinion preserved the essence of Roe, but somewhat narrowed its terms to allow certain restrictions on abortion access unless they imposed an “undue burden.”
By 2009, Gallup found that only 26% of Republican voters were still pro-choice. Their convictions were strengthened by the activities of anti-abortion activists who blocked clinics, provided graphic photos of ostensibly aborted babies for legislative hearings and heightened tensions over the practice with provocative vocabulary — describing abortion as “murder” and calling abortion doctors “killers.”
They labeled abortions in the third trimester “partial birth abortions,” even though only about 0.9% of abortions occur after 21 weeks, and then almost invariably because the pregnancy has experienced a catastrophic crisis. But the term evokes the wholly inaccurate image of a live baby being deprived of life.
As it happens, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe vs. Wade may have been the culmination of the anti-abortion movement, but may also mark its apogee.
The consequences of stripping an established constitutional right from women via a patchwork of extreme restrictions on women’s healthcare become clearer every day, giving Democrats an opening to remake the debate over abortion into a campaign for basic human liberties, claiming for themselves what had been a Republican principle.
“This really is about women’s status in society, controlling women’s behavior and the limits of that behavior,” Faye Wattleton, who served as president of Planned Parenthood from 1978 to 1992, says in an interview in “Reversing Roe.”
As increasingly harsh restrictions on women get enacted in red states — bounty laws allowing any interested person to sue women for having abortions, restrictions on travel from anti-abortion states to obtain abortions, the threat of prosecutions of women who experienced miscarriages, and more — her words seem increasingly prescient.
Abortion became the instrument for the redirection of American politics toward the right; abortion rights may be the instrument to redress what became an imbalance.
Residents of Monterey Park voted overwhelmingly to ban data centers on election day, making the San Gabriel Valley city the first in the nation to do so by public vote.
As of Wednesday, 86% of votes were in favor of Measure NDC, the city ban, according to the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk.
Other cities and towns have passed moratoriums on data centers, as a wave of opposition sweeps the country. But the Monterey Park vote can only be overturned by another ballot measure, making it the most permanent data center ban in a jurisdiction.
Monterey Park’s City Council had already banned data centers by ordinance, after a proposed 247,000-square-foot data center met an outpouring of public anger and concern. The developer withdrew that plan.
That facility would have been less than 500 feet away from the nearest home, and would have used three times the electricity of the entire 60,000-person city. Residents said it would have caused noise and air pollution and driven up electricity rates.
“This ensures long-lasting protections for current and future generations,” Amy Wong, co-founder of the group San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action, said of the vote. “It means that future city councils cannot overturn a data center ban, even if data center developers wanted to spend money to fund pro-data center candidates.”
The measure had no formal opposition. The developer of the proposed facility, investment firm HMC StratCap, said it wouldn’t engage in the ballot fight when it withdrew in March.
The Data Center Coalition, an industry trade group, expressed disappointment in the vote.
“It sends a signal that the area is closed for business, both for data centers and for other significant economic development projects,” state policy director Khara Boender said.
“It deprives local residents of the opportunity to compete for jobs and investment, while also causing the area to relinquish substantial long-term economic investment, high-wage jobs, and critical tax revenue to neighboring areas or other states.”
SGV Progressive Action worked with hyperlocal groups including No Data Center Monterey Park to rally support for the measure.
The group is now focused on stopping data center proposals in the City of Industry and fighting a move by City of Industry, Santa Fe Springs, Vernon and City of Commerce to welcome data centers and other industry with fast-tracked permitting and tax incentives.
City of Industry, in the San Gabriel Valley, and Vernon, south of downtown L.A., are primarily industrial areas, each with around 300 permanent residents. They are employment centers, and tens of thousands of workers commute in daily.
There has been little vocal opposition to data centers among the few residents of these cities. Wong said the protest is primarily coming from the surrounding neighborhoods.
“If a data center gets built in City of Industry, residents across the region would bear the brunt of pollution and increased utility costs,” Wong said, noting that it is surrounded by 16 other cities and unincorporated communities.
Data center proposals have been limited in California compared to Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois and Arizona, which sit at the center of a recent boom in hyperscaler facilities to power artificial intelligence.
California has the third-most data centers in the country, with 300, but high electricity rates, expensive land and regulatory hurdles mean that fewer, and smaller, facilities are currently planned than in other hotspots.
That doesn’t mean opposition hasn’t been fierce. In Coachella and Imperial County, residents are showing up in droves to protest local proposals.
In the San Gabriel Valley, Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park have all enacted temporary moratoriums, and Alhambra recently banned data centers as part of a zoning code update.
Wong said she hoped the ballot measure vote would galvanize the opposition. “The vote is a testament to the people power of our region,” she said. “Our region is worth protecting, and we won’t let data centers determine our future.”
A rule intended to prevent rent gouging in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires has lapsed in Los Angeles County, possibly exposing some renters to hikes.
The executive order that blocked rent increases was issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom amid the devastating wildfires last year. Under the order, landlords couldn’t increase rents by more than 10% above their prefire levels.
The rule, which was supposed to be temporary and was repeatedly extended, ended Friday after a vote to extend it again failed to garner enough votes. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, sounded the alarm in a motion to extend price protections that failed to pass at the Board of Supervisors’ May 19 meeting.
“These price gouging protections continue to be necessary as construction and rebuilding continue, and as thousands of people remain displaced,” the motion said. “Families which signed short-term leases could face drastic price increases of 50% or more without further price gouging protection.”
Los Angeles County is home to more than 1 million rental properties, though not all of them needed protection from the new rule. There are already stricter rent increase caps for many residences, depending on the location, type and age of the building. Despite the rent control in the region, the people of Los Angeles pay among the highest rents in the country.
It is uncertain whether renters will face rapidly rising rents now that the protection has lapsed. But some real estate experts and policymakers said there was no need for the temporary rule that was part of the governor’s state of emergency.
Supervisors Kathryn Barger, Janice Hahn and Holly Mitchell abstained from voting on the motion to extend the protection, while Supervisors Hilda Solis and Horvath supported it.
“I abstained because I did not see sufficient evidence to justify extending this emergency ordinance, nor did I see evidence to eliminate it entirely,” Hahn said.
Barger’s office said she supported allowing the protections to sunset while waiting to see whether new information emerged.
“Market data already shows countywide rents are only about 2% above pre-emergency levels and rental inventory has grown,” Barger representative Helen E. Chavez Garcia said. “The Supervisor is also mindful of the burden these ongoing protections place on small property owners throughout the county.”
Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There haven’t been steep rent hikes in neighborhoods within three miles of the Palisades fire, according to a Times analysis of data from Zillow, the property listing company.
In ZIP Codes within three miles of the Palisades fire, rent increased 4.8% from December 2024 to April 2025. In areas around the Eaton fire, which destroyed swaths of Altadena, rent jumped 5.2% in the same period.
In L.A. County, ZIP Codes farther from the fires saw only about a 2% increase.
A landlords representative, Jesus Rojas of the Apartment Owners Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, told the supervisors during public comment at the meeting that the county’s rent-gouging rules have “long outlived the emergency they were intended to address” and are now being “wrongfully used to harm thousands of rental housing providers throughout the county.”
“There is no proof that multifamily rental housing providers are hugely increasing rents for impacted homeowners,” Rojas said.
Indeed, there are strong signs that the property market in the Los Angeles area has at last begun to cool.
L.A. metro-area rent prices recently fell to a four-year low, with the median rent slipping to $2,167 in December.
Meanwhile, condominium sales had their slowest start of the year in decades. Condo sales in Los Angeles have plummeted to a 20-year low, with fewer than 2,000 units sold in January and February — the worst start to the year since 2005.
Newsom defended the price-gouging protections shortly after they went into effect.
“In the days following the Los Angeles firestorms, we worked quickly to protect Los Angeles survivors from any form of exploitation,” he said in February 2025. “The state has the tools in place to not only block price gouging during this emergency, but also to prosecute bad actors.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs said it received more than 2,000 complaints after the fires, alleging that retailers and landlords were taking advantage of people put in hardship by their losses, and sent out more than 2,000 cease-and-desist letters to businesses and landlords for alleged price gouging, said Morine Merritt, who oversees department investigations into consumer and real estate fraud.
“Close to 90% of the complaints that we received involved allegations of rent increases,” Merritt said in an interview. Now that the fire-related protections have expired, existing laws and “regular market conditions determine price increases for goods and services, including rents,” she said.
Crackdowns on fire-related rent gouging have been rare, said Chelsea Kirk of the activist organization the Rent Brigade, which analyzed L.A. County’s rental market in the year after the fires. It reported 18,360 potential examples of price gouging in listings but said that few lawsuits had been filed by authorities so far.
Last week, Rent Brigade announced what it said was the first private civil lawsuit brought by a family that claimed to be rent-gouged in the aftermath of the wildfires. Plaintiffs Randall and Candy Renick, whose Altadena home was damaged, said they were charged nearly three times the maximum permitted rate for nearly 10 months. They seek restitution of $96,000 plus civil penalties and attorneys’ fees.
The rental market has probably stabilized since the fires, Kirk said, but other families may still be “locked into illegal rents” that they agreed to pay when they were in a rush to find housing after they were displaced.
Dear Mr. Pelley:
I meant what I said in my letter last week to the 60 Minutes team: joining 60 Minutes is the honor of my career and I am grateful to be working alongside the people who have contributed to the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced. While I’m new to 60 Minutes, I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal.
Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.
Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. (“CBS”) to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately. Enclosed is your formal termination letter.
Sincerely,
Nick Bilton
Executive Producer, 60 Minutes
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