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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.
The luxury shopping center in Pacific Palisades will reopen next month after more than $100 million in renovations forced by the January 2025 wildfire that devastated the Los Angeles neighborhood.
Palisades Village will reopen Aug. 15, owner Rick Caruso announced Wednesday. The outdoor center survived the blaze that destroyed homes and other businesses but needed refurbishment to eliminate contaminants that the fire could have spread.
Crews are putting finishing touches on mall buildings after tearing them down to the studs, treating the wood and rebuilding the walls, Caruso said.
“Everybody’s working, and stores are moving their products in,” he said. “It’s a really cool feeling that people have really locked arms and are working together.”
An electrician installs lighting for a restaurant at Rick Caruso’s Palisades Village on Thursday. The shopping center is scheduled to reopen mid-August.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Pacific Palisades resident Allison Polhill, who is rebuilding the home of 30 years that her family lost in the blaze, said she is “thrilled” at the prospect of returning to the mall she used to frequent. Its comeback is a boost for the community, she said.
“Every single step that we make to reopen our commercial corridors is going to bring more people back into the Palisades,” said Polhill, who expects to move back into her home at the end of August.
A total of 6,822 structures were destroyed in the Palisades fire, including more than 5,500 residences and 100 commercial businesses, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Caruso previously attributed the mall’s survival to the hard work of private firefighters and the fire-resistant materials used in the mall’s construction.
The $200-million shopping and dining center opened in 2018 with a movie theater and a roster of upmarket tenants, including Erewhon, which may be the only grocer in the heart of the fire-ravaged neighborhood when it opens.
Caruso’s company was able to fill the mall with tenants despite the long shutdown.
Palisades Village is 99% leased, with the majority of tenants returning, said Jackie Levy, chief financial and revenue officer. Nearly one-third of the shops and restaurants are new to the property.
A firefighter carries a hose back to his rig while walking through a destroyed home from the Palisades fire in Pacific Palisades on Jan. 7, 2025.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Last year, Pacific Palisades-based fashion designer Elyse Walker said she would reopen her eponymous store in Palisades Village after losing her 25-year flagship location on Antioch Street to the inferno.
Other neighborhood shops destroyed in the fire that are reopening at the mall include K Bakery and Loomey’s Toys, which caters to children up to age 12 and used to be across the street from Palisades Elementary Charter School.
“It’s been a journey and I’m excited because I wasn’t sure that there was going to be a place to come back to,” said toy store owner Amanda Rastegar. “Hopefully we can bring some of that magic back.”
Rastegar’s home in the Palisades survived but was damaged by the fire. The family returned about eight weeks ago. Her last memory of the fire was a burning supermarket.
“I just couldn’t wrap my brain around what was happening,” she said. “By the time I left, Gelson’s was on fire.”
Among the returning tenants is Angelini Ristorante & Bar. Well-known Los Angeles chef Gino Angelini said he will be in the kitchen next month for a return of the Italian restaurant.
“We won’t do a big celebrity open,” he said. “We want to have a very soft opening and see our customers come back.”
Construction takes place at Rick Caruso’s Palisades Village on Thursday. The shopping center is scheduled to reopen mid-August.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
An elaborate celebration would not feel “correct for me,” Angelini said, because the devastation has been “very sad” for so many.
Other new tenants include local chef Nancy Silverton, who has agreed to move in with a new Italian steakhouse called Spacca Tutto. Women’s activewear retailer LESET will open its first West Coast location.
Caruso said he is optimistic that customers will return to the center, even though many Pacific Palisades residents are still dispersed. One tracking system estimated that about 30% of the Village’s customer base was impacted by the fire, he said.
“That means 70% did not get impacted, so there’s a lot of customers still left out there,” Caruso said. Historically, the center drew customers from as far away as Beverly Hills and Calabasas, as well as Malibu, Brentwood and Santa Monica.
He also hopes many will be inspired to visit the revived mall.
“I believe in the goodness of people and I believe that people are going to want to support the Palisades,” he said. “They’re going to want to be there and support the businesses that have had the courage and the heart to reopen.”
Walmart is rapidly expanding its network of electric vehicle chargers designed for customers to use while they shop.
The network could help fill gaps in EV infrastructure in states with greater need for chargers. Walmart, which has more than 5,000 locations in the U.S. and hundreds in California, says more than 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of one of its stores.
The chargers also offer an incentive for customers to choose Walmart — Walmart Plus members will receive a 10% discount off an average price of $0.46 per kilowatt-hour of energy at the company’s chargers.
Walmart chargers are already available at more than 75 locations in 17 states, with Texas boasting the most charging stations, followed by Florida and Arizona.
Matthew Nelson, Walmart’s director of energy policy, said last week on LinkedIn that the network will soon reach 29 states, including California.
“We are delivering on the promise of affordable, reliable and convenient charging,” Nelson said in his post.
According to Walmart’s website, six charging stations are coming to California soon, though the company did not offer a specific timeline.
The chargers will be installed at stores in Antelope, Brea, Fresno, Stockton, Suisun City and Vallejo.
Most charging sites in California will include eight to 16 fast-charging stalls, said Walmart spokesperson Kelsey Bohl.
The company first announced plans in April 2023 to install its own EV chargers at Walmart and Sam’s Club stores, with a goal of installing thousands of chargers by 2030. Partnering with ABB E-Mobility and Alpitronic, it added 25 new charging sites this past May and six more in June.
“Walmart is building a leading retail-integrated EV fast-charging network, focused on delivering an affordable, reliable and convenient charging experience where customers already shop,” Bohl said in an emailed statement. “Customers can charge while they shop, access stations through the Walmart app they already use, and benefit from affordable pricing.”
The charging stations already available include 612 individual charging stalls using 400-kilowatt chargers. Each stall has a dual charging cord with both Combined Charging System and North American Charging Standard connectors. The standard connectors, designed by Tesla, are smaller and lighter than the combined systems.
The primary way to pay for the chargers is through the Walmart app, but the company is also experimenting with built-in credit card readers to allow those without the app to use the stations.
Customers can check charger availability on the Walmart app. The company said the chargers will be available 24 hours a day.
Robotaxis could be turning into robocops.
A self-driving Waymo reported two teens to San Mateo, Calif., police on Monday after they were found drinking alcohol and shooting toy guns in the back of the vehicle.
According to a social media post from the San Mateo Police Department, officers detained two 15-year-olds after the Waymo they were riding in contacted the department and stopped in a parking lot until law enforcement arrived.
“Parents do you know where your teens are?” the San Mateo Police Department wrote on Facebook following the incident. “Waymo does!”
Officers removed both teens from the vehicle and determined they were using toy guns to shoot Orbeez out the windows. Orbeez are small, water-absorbing beads sold at toy stores.
“Toy guns, water guns, and BB guns all pose real dangers, especially to an untrained eye,” the Police Department said. “The simple handling of them can cause fear in [passersby].” “
A video posted on Facebook shows at least five officers and a police dog responding to the scene and approaching the Waymo with their weapons raised.
Waymo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Waymo vehicles have internal cameras and microphones that may be used in an emergency or to “promote safety and security,” according to Waymo’s online support page.
The cameras are also used to ensure the vehicles are clean and to help find lost items, according to the support page.
The company said it does not use facial recognition or other biometric identification technologies to identify individuals.
“In more urgent circumstances, support may access live video during a trip,” the Waymo page said.
The San Mateo Police Department’s Facebook post has garnered nearly 60 comments, with one user accusing Waymo of “snitching.”
“At least they got a designated driver?!” one user commented.
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