ABSTRACT
As late as ten years before the Supreme Court ruled that abortion was a constitutional right very few Americans, even among those favoring it, expected that abortion would become legal. As late as five years before Roe few legal abortion activists themselves anticipated that all legal restrictions on abortion would be effectively removed. It was and is the common practice of reporters to specify the religious affiliation of abortion opponents who are Catholic while leaving unspecified the affiliations or non-affiliation of all others. Nathanson, a co-founder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, acknowledges that the description of opposition to abortion as financed by the American Catholic bishops was a movement strategy consciously adopted to "personalize" and discredit abortion opposition. Among all major American institutions it was the Catholic Church which first noticed in any systematic fashion the incipient movement to make abortion legal.
