On Saturday, Nov 7, the House of Representatives passed a health-care-reform bill with an amendment sponsored by Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak restricting any of the new government-supported health-care options from covering abortion. Sixty-four Democrats joined Republicans in voting for the amendment.

I spoke to Jon Shields, an assistant professor at Claremont McKenna College and the author of “The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right,” about the history of the organized opposition to abortion and its evolving relationship with American politics.

How did a Congress controlled by a large Democratic majority end up passing a bill with these restrictions on abortion?

The ban on abortion funding extended the logic of the pro-choice case for abortion rights. Pro-choice advocates, after all, have long argued that we need to respect the private moral choices of American citizens. Public funding of abortion, by this logic, would not respect our moral differences because it would force pro-life citizens to subsidize the practice of abortion. A ban on funding, therefore, is consistent with what is essentially a libertarian case for abortion rights. This is partly why many Americans who are otherwise sympathetic to abortion access nonetheless believe the state should not treat abortion as a welfare right. In addition, the success of health-care reform ultimately depends on the coöperation of Democrats from districts with strong Catholic constituencies.

According to the logic of the Stupak compromise, should pacifists not be forced to pay taxes because their money funds the Defense Department?

Well, again, I wanted to underscore the claim that pro-choice laws respect individual differences, including the views of pro-life Americans. We usually don’t make this claim about the military. Instead, the military is defended as a positive, collective good that we all benefit from. Pacifists are dismissed as an irrational and small minority. If the pro-choice movement made this sort of claim—that the point of abortion rights is to advance a public good rather than respect America’s pluralism—then, yes, it would follow that we should all reject the Stupak compromise.

Why, in a rapidly liberalizing culture, has opposition to abortion basically stayed the same? What political steps did the pro-life movement take to shift public sentiment after Roe v. Wade?

The pro-life cause has indeed resonated in a liberal, rights-oriented culture far more than other “culture-war” issues. Even as attitudes toward gay marriage and gender roles have rapidly liberalized, abortion opinion has been remarkably stable since the early nineteen-seventies. The remarkable spread of social liberalism, therefore, has not left our nation any more pro-choice than it was in 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided. There is even some evidence that opinion might now be moving slightly in a pro-life direction. Young Americans, for example, are suddenly less pro-choice than older Americans, even though they strongly favor gay marriage and are less religious.

This development, however, is not as odd as it appears. I think the pro-life cause continues to inspire activists and cannot be dismissed by secular, socially liberal Americans precisely because it appeals to common liberal values that we all share. Few other causes associated with the religious right, whether prayer in school or gay marriage, resonate in the same way.

For more, read here.