Susan Cullman, a cigar heiress, philanthropist, and pro-choice activist, joined the Republican Party in the nineteen-seventies, when support for abortion rights was widely seen as consistent with conservative ideology. Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for President in 1964, was himself pro-choice, and his wife, Peggy, had helped to found an Arizona chapter of Planned Parenthood. “The conservative view at the time when Goldwater was around was that you don’t want the government in your life,” Cullman said. “The government isn’t supposed to enter your home, never mind your body.”
In 1981, Cullman moved from New York City to Washington, D.C., as a consummate Republican insider: her former husband, Larry Kudlow, advised President Ronald Reagan on economic policy, and Cullman joined the President’s task force on private-sector initiatives. By that time, after a decade of courting Catholic voters and amid new efforts to sway evangelical Christians, the G.O.P. had become less hospitable to pro-choice views. Reagan and Bush had both turned against abortion rights, and the 1980 Republican Party platform supported a constitutional amendment that would overturn Roe v. Wade. “I would say, ‘Larry, I just got a thing in the mail from Planned Parenthood—I think I’m going to send some money,’ ” Cullman recalled. “And he would say, ‘Well, don’t tell anybody.’ ” (A spokesperson for Kudlow denied that these exchanges ever took place.)
In 1991, Cullman, by then divorced from Kudlow (who is now director of the National Economic Council), joined a nascent advocacy organization and political-action committee founded by Mary Dent Crisp, the former co-chair of the R.N.C., called the National Republican Coalition for Choice. “I discovered that I joined an Administration that was starting to reduce women’s ability to manage their own life,” Cullman said. “So I was going to fight them, and I wanted to fight them on the inside.”
The group, renamed the Republican Majority for Choice (R.M.C.) in the early two-thousands, shut down operations two years ago, but many former R.M.C. members remain close. It was these women, all of them white and well-connected, to whom Cullman turned on the evening of Friday, September 18th. She had just sat down to dinner with her stepson and his wife in her home in Stamford, Connecticut, when her stepson’s phone dinged. “Ginsburg died,” he said.
“I felt horror in my bones, just horror,” Cullman said. She left the dinner table, turned on MSNBC, and started e-mailing her “old gang” from the R.M.C. These women had spent decades arguing to G.O.P. leadership that the Party’s increasingly narrow outlook on abortion, as reflected in its platform, candidates, and judges, did not reflect the views of a majority of Republican voters. The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal feminist icon, would give President Trump his third Supreme Court appointment, cementing the rightward turn of the court for a generation or more, and placing the future of Roe v. Wade in doubt.
The e-mail thread began in despair and moved to possible action. The group would need to convince a handful of Republican senators to delay a vote on Ginsburg’s replacement. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, the last two pro-choice Republicans remaining in the Senate, confirmed that weekend that they would not support a vote on a Supreme Court nominee before the election. (Murkowski reversed her position on October 24th.) The group tried to think of other, relatively moderate Republicans who might be swayed to delay confirmation: Rob Portman, of Ohio; Shelley Moore Capito, of West Virginia; Mitt Romney, of Utah. But none of the women had any current connections to Portman or Capito. And, back in 2007, ahead of the Presidential primaries, the R.M.C. had run ads in Iowa and New Hampshire that called out Romney for his “flip-flops” on reproductive rights.
“We realized,” Cullman said, “that we really didn’t have much of a leg to stand on.” The eventual nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, is a devout Catholic; as a professor at Notre Dame Law School, she was a member of University Faculty for Life, and she once signed her name to an ad calling Roe v. Wade “barbaric.” Barrett was confirmed to the Supreme Court on October 26th, with Collins as the lone Senate Republican voting against her.
At the end of 2016, the National Institute for Reproductive Health (N.I.R.H.) conducted focus groups in Ohio and North Carolina that tried to deduce if Trump’s electoral success in those states indicated an over-all drop-off in support for reproductive rights. “These voters thought, He says lots of things, but maybe he doesn’t believe them all,” Andrea Miller, the president of the N.I.R.H., told me. “They didn’t believe that this”—rolling back abortion rights—“was truly the agenda.”
Historically, Miller said, “the Republican Party had the ability to have their cake and eat it, too—to speak to the base with a wedge issue and still maintain the support of white suburban women.”
Decades ago, Republican lawmakers could claim credit for many advances in reproductive rights. In 1967, as governor of California, Ronald Reagan liberalized the state’s abortion law. Three years later, another Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller, signed a bill, co-authored by the Republican assemblywoman Constance Cook, that made New York the first state in the country to legalize abortion without a residency requirement. George H. W. Bush—a son of Prescott Bush, who was an early treasurer of Planned Parenthood—earned the nickname “Rubbers” for his support for contraceptive access. As a freshman member of the House Ways and Means Committee, Bush co-sponsored legislation that created Title X, the domestic family-planning program that the Trump Administration is now dismantling.
Yet, in the late nineteen-sixties, Republican strategists were beginning to identify blue-collar social conservatives as an untapped voter base. These potential converts to the G.O.P. cause included Southern whites and Catholic Democrats—the latter mostly Irish, Polish, and Italian immigrants, who were historically bound to Democrats through urban machines. “Men showed a strong anti-Democrat trend between 1960 and 1968; women showed considerably less change,” the strategist Kevin Phillips wrote in the book “The Emerging Republican Majority,” from 1969. “The new popular majority is white and conservative.” Some of the Republican strategists of the time, such as Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, were Catholic themselves, and sought to align themselves with an increasingly vocal Catholic leadership.
Weyrich identified abortion as a key wedge issue, “perhaps the most effective” of all the single-issue groups, as Michele McKeegan, the former executive director of California’s Six Rivers Planned Parenthood, wrote in her book “Abortion Politics,” from 1992. Donald Devine, another strategist, suggested wrapping traditional Republican priorities, such as lower taxes and smaller government, in a blanket of opposition to abortion rights, sexual freedom, and women’s liberation. This approach, Devine argued, would heighten the Party’s appeal to a group of voters—twelve per cent of Americans, by his calculations—who didn’t vote Republican but held socially conservative values. Phyllis Schlafly, the telegenic conservative who helped defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, rallied women to the G.O.P. in the name of family values.
By 1970, Republican registrars stood outside of Catholic churches across California, ready to enlist voters who were frustrated by the state Democratic Party’s support for legal abortion. Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, tightened this alliance. Toward the end of the seventies, evangelical Christian leaders—such as Jerry Falwell, of the Moral Majority; James Dobson, of Focus on the Family; and Pat Robertson, the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network—sensed an opportunity to align themselves with powerful political forces.
The emerging Christian right’s enthusiasm for the issue, however, was not reflected among the rest of the Republican Party’s voting base. In 1972, a Gallup poll showed that sixty-eight per cent of Republicans believed that “the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician.” These numbers remained steady, even rising at times, for the next two decades.
Even today, although polling indicates that clear majorities of Republican voters oppose abortion access and support anti-abortion candidates, their stated views can shift significantly depending on how a question is posed. In May and June of this year, when the N.I.R.H. Action Fund polled voters in Arizona and Pennsylvania, sixty-one and sixty-five per cent of Republicans, respectively, agreed with the statement “I can hold my own moral views about abortion and still trust a woman to make this decision for herself.” Similar proportions of Republicans agreed that “these decisions are best left to women, their families, and their doctors/healthcare providers.”
In the nineteen-nineties, the R.M.C. (then still the National Republican Coalition for Choice), had chapters in nearly twenty states, an annual budget of a million dollars, and eight people working in its D.C. office. Its political-action committee helped elect many pro-choice, moderate Republicans: Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska; Lincoln Chafee, of Rhode Island; Susan Molinari, of New York; Christine Todd Whitman, of New Jersey; Jodi Rell, of Connecticut; Bill Weld, of Massachusetts; and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, of Maine. But even candidates who shared the organization’s views felt increasingly compelled to hide them. “They would say, ‘I agree with you, but I gotta get elected first,’ ” Cullman said.
Of the many Republican turnarounds on abortion, one of the most striking was Romney’s. In 2002, as a candidate for governor of Massachusetts, “he called me personally—he said, ‘I need your endorsement to win,’ ” Jennifer Stockman, the co-chair of the R.M.C. from 2000 to 2010, said. In his candidate questionnaire, Romney pledged to uphold abortion rights and support Medicaid funding to cover abortions for low-income women. “Within twenty-four hours, he sent it back, checked basically all the ‘Yes’ boxes, a hundred per cent pro-choice,” Stockman said. In 2005, as his Presidential ambitions crystallized, Romney executed a full reversal. As governor, he vetoed a bill requiring hospitals in Massachusetts to provide emergency contraception to rape victims, and used the occasion to publish an op-ed in the Boston Globe affirming his opposition to abortion. “I understand that my views on laws governing abortion set me in the minority in our Commonwealth. I am prolife,” he wrote. “I believe that abortion is the wrong choice except in cases of incest, rape, and to save the life of the mother.”
“We were so angry at what he did to reverse his opinion, just for political reasons, because he was running for President,” Stockman said. “Mitt Romney totally manipulated us.” (A spokesperson for Romney did not respond to a request for comment.)
Like Cullman, Stockman was a Republican insider partly by marriage—her husband is David Stockman, a former Republican congressman for Michigan and President Reagan’s budget director from 1981 to 1985. “The problem with our side was two things,” Stockman said. “Our supporters would much rather play golf and tennis than go fill out mailers to get the vote out. And they were more interested in their pocketbooks than they were social issues. So they would vote Republican and say, ‘Oh, well, Roe v. Wade won’t be overturned—we’re not worried.’ ”
Tanya Melich, who co-founded the New York State Republican Family Committee, in 1984, thought that the R.M.C. lacked the political chops to play hardball with abortion opponents. Melich had been a Republican since birth: her father was a Utah state senator, and in 1940, as a preschooler, she had handed out pamphlets for the Republican Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie. She later worked on the staff of Governor Rockefeller; her own pro-choice organization was backed by wealthy Manhattan women with last names like Du Pont, Gimbel, and Mosbacher.
In Melich’s view, her national pro-choice counterparts had misplaced faith in George H. W. Bush, whom many of them knew personally. “The pro-choice Republican women supported the Republican establishment, and the establishment played them,” she said. “There was no fight.” Melich stormed out of the 1992 Republican National Convention in disgust, and, in 1996, published the book “The Republican War AgainstWomen.”
In 2010, the Republican Majority for Choice merged with the WISH List, a political-action committee aimed at electing pro-choice Republican women to office, but the organizations’ combined forces had little effect. There were few donors willing to write big checks to an increasingly steep uphill battle, and still fewer candidates who would run as pro-choice in what was becoming a monolithically pro-life party. “Looking back, we missed the state legislatures, the judicial appointments,” Cullman said. “We were focussed on national politics.”
In the time Stockman had been involved with the R.M.C., at least a dozen former members of its board had quit the Republican Party altogether. “The whole thing was dwindling,” she said. “There was nobody there.” When the R.M.C. shut down, in 2018, Cullman and Susan Bevan, both national co-chairs, published an Op-Ed in the Times, titled “Why We Are Leaving the G.O.P.” “We don’t have the space to outline President Trump’s transgressions,” they wrote, “but it is important to understand that his rise is an inevitable result of the hostility to women within the Republican culture.” On reproductive rights alone, Trump has reinstated and expanded the global gag rule, which blocks funding for N.G.O.s that provide abortion services and counselling; blocked patients who use Title X funding from choosing Planned Parenthood clinics; and routed federal dollars toward religious groups that counsel against abortion.
Bevan said that she will still vote for moderate Republicans in Connecticut, where she is based. In the 2016 election, she voted for Hillary Clinton after writing in Michael Bloomberg during previous cycles; this year, she said, she is “proudly supporting Biden.” Stockman told me that she occasionally writes in her husband’s name for President, voted for Carly Fiorina in the 2016 primary, and voted for Biden. Melich registered as a Democrat in 2018. Cullman did the same last month, and plans to vote for Biden.
Among the prominent Republican pro-choice activists of this era, the only one I could find who still strongly identifies with today’s Republican Party was Ann Stone, a communications consultant and direct-marketing entrepreneur. For sixteen years, Stone was the wife of the political consultant Roger Stone, the convicted felon and former adviser to President Trump. She launched the Republicans for Choice PAC in 1990, inspired, she said, by the 1989 Supreme Court decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, which permitted Missouri to put restrictions on abortion care and unleashed a flood of state-level regulations across the country.
In 1992, delegates gathered in Salt Lake City to debate the Republican Party platform, which included a declaration that “the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life” and supported “a human life amendment to the Constitution.” (This language remains largely intact in the current G.O.P. platform.) Ahead of the hearings, Stone bought up billboards along the route from the Salt Lake City airport to the convention center that read, “68% of the Party Can’t Be Wrong: Republicans for Choice.”
Her P.R. flair was also evident at the hearings themselves, where she appeared on a panel on abortion issues. Stone defended abortion rights before the roomful of delegates, expressed her support for sex education and contraception access, and, most provocatively, dared pro-life Republicans to prove the strength of their convictions by becoming adoptive parents. “If you vote for the platform language as is, that would mandate more unwanted children be born, then, to show good faith, back up that commitment with action, and adopt,” Stone told her audience. “I have sample adoption papers here for each of you.” A woman then began distributing the applications to Stone’s fellow panelists, who included Phyllis Schlafly. “She about had a coronary during the hearing,” Stone recalled with a laugh.