ABSTRACT
President Ronald Reagan is the American president to make opposition to abortion a prime tenet of his political program, and he is the first to invoke both official and unofficial strategies to accomplish his goal. The antipathy toward abortion goes far beyond any particular individual's moral outrage or philosophic difference. The drive for political power by antiabortion groups, and the drive to impose a specific view of women and to restrict women's rights, suggests that some previous occurrence in political history compelled this reaction. Anthropologist George Devereaux described the practice of abortion in some 300 traditional societies around the world. Joseph Scheidler's statement exposes the real objectives of the antiabortion movement. Opposition to reproductive freedom in general and to abortion in particular appears to reflect profound antipathy toward the changing roles of women in our society. Abortion is the most obvious, vulnerable, and dramatic example of the new freedom for women.
