--- title: How Abortion Took Over the Republican Party description: Ronald Reagan proved instrumental to Southerners bringing their cultural conservatism to center stage for the Republican Party. canonical: https://time.com/6966056/republican-abortion-arizona-reagan/ author: TIME article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2024-04-12T13:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:42:55.102Z article:section: History og:title: How Abortion Took Over the Republican Party og:description: Ronald Reagan proved instrumental to Southerners bringing their cultural conservatism to center stage for the Republican Party. og:url: https://time.com/6966056/republican-abortion-arizona-reagan/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte954f06d8e6e03f6/698a559fb3fce363810cd09b/reagan.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: Ronald Reagan Campaigns in Houston Ahead of the Republican Convention og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How Abortion Took Over the Republican Party twitter:description: Ronald Reagan proved instrumental to Southerners bringing their cultural conservatism to center stage for the Republican Party. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte954f06d8e6e03f6/698a559fb3fce363810cd09b/reagan.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # How Ronald Reagan Helped Abortion Take Over the Republican Agenda > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-sub-2026q3/newsletters?i=301f878c-c391-4168-86ba-c923db9671f8&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) * TIME Subscriptions: [time.com/subscribe-agent](/c/time-sub-2026q3/subscribe?i=301f878c-c391-4168-86ba-c923db9671f8&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Supreme Court Seems Concerned About Whether Abortion Opponents Have Right to Sue Over Mifepristone [Watch (HLS stream): Supreme Court Seems Concerned About Whether Abortion Opponents Have Right to Sue Over Mifepristone](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/OhIasZKP.m3u8) (6:45)  _Published 2024-03-26. The Supreme Court on Tuesday seemed likely to preserve access to a medication that was used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. last year, in the court’s first abortion case since conservative justices overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago._ by [Jonathan Bartho / Made by History](https://time.com/author/made-by-history/) ## Jonathan Bartho / Made by History Apr 12, 2024 1:00 PM UTC  Ronald Reagan campaigns in Houston ahead of the Republican Convention in 1976. Ronald Reagan campaigns in Houston ahead of the Republican Convention in 1976. Tony Korody—Sygma via Getty Images by [Jonathan Bartho / Made by History](https://time.com/author/made-by-history/) ## Jonathan Bartho / Made by History Apr 12, 2024 1:00 PM UTC Abortion is dominating the news once again, illustrating the political peril Republicans face on the issue. On April 1, the Florida supreme court upheld a state abortion ban, which in turn triggered an even stricter ban that begins on May 1\. Then, on April 8, Donald Trump reversed course and announced he would not support a federal abortion ban and that the matter should be left to the states. Yet Trump’s [strategic flip](https://time.com/6965211/donald-trump-abortion-religious-conservatives-politics/) on the issue did not signal that the GOP is abandoning its quest to ban abortion. That became clear within 48 hours when — after the Arizona supreme court found that the state’s almost total 1864 abortion ban was [still the law of the land](https://time.com/6965338/arizona-supreme-court-abortion-ban/) — Republicans in the state legislature thwarted an attempt to repeal it despite a national outcry. These recent events have emphasized how a zealous desire to restrict abortion rights has become a defining characteristic of the modern Republican Party. Yet, that [wasn’t always the case](https://time.com/4154084/anti-abortion-pre-roe/). Even as late as the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s GOP prioritized cutting taxes, reducing the size of government, and winning the Cold War, devoting little energy to fighting cultural battles. But despite this lack of enthusiasm, Reagan was instrumental in empowering a cultural and social conservatism with roots in the white South. This cultural conservatism now dominates the Republican Party and drives the war against abortion rights in 2024\. Historically, the GOP was the more liberal party on abortion — especially given the Democratic Party’s strong appeal to [Catholics](https://time.com/4758285/clergy-consultation-abortion/) across the North. That began to change in the early 1970s, as various states loosened their abortion restrictions. At the national level, a Republican shift on abortion first became evident during Reagan’s [dramatic](https://time.com/3955771/seventies-carter-ronald-reagan/) 1976 primary challenge against President Gerald Ford. **_Read More:_** [Republicans' Lessons from Ohio](https://time.com/6303738/republicans-lessons-ohio-abortion-issue-1/) After losing the first five presidential primaries, North Carolina became a must win for Reagan. He entrusted his campaign in the Tar Heel State to the North Carolina Congressional Club — the political machine of Senator Jesse Helms. A former Democrat, Helms had only joined the GOP six years earlier. He and his lieutenants devised a campaign centered on social and cultural issues, and Reagan stunned the incumbent president by six points. The victory rescued Reagan's campaign, and demonstrated his popularity with southern conservative voters, donors, and strategists — many, like Helms, recently converted Democrats — who relished Reagan’s anti-statist rhetoric and despised Ford as an establishment moderate. As his campaign struggled to break through in the North, it was southern support that propelled Reagan all the way to the party convention in Kansas City. His Southern success gave Reagan’s backers significant influence as the GOP met to select a nominee and draft a platform. At a pre-convention meeting, Helms and his allies formulated a range of right-wing policy positions that they wanted to force into the GOP platform. Alongside opposition to gun control and [school busing](https://time.com/5616709/joe-biden-busing-democratic-debate/) to achieve racial integration, these southern Republicans demanded that their new party explicitly oppose legal abortion. Reagan, though far more focused on economic issues and foreign policy, owed so much of his success to Helms and his political machine that he reluctantly green-lighted their platform challenges. In platform committee meetings, Ford’s team objected to the planks that the Helms forces were pushing. But wary of risking a delegate revolt that could cost the president the nomination, they too grudgingly acquiesced. Those strategic calculations resulted in a party in which most leaders, convention delegates, and voters were pro-abortion rights running on [a platform](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1976) that demanded a constitutional amendment banning abortion. Though Reagan lost the nomination, Helms was delighted that he and his allies “were able to project the conservative message to millions of Americans” and make the Republican platform “the most conservative in recent memory.” But he couldn’t have imagined just how profound their impact would be. From that point on, opposition to abortion became a non-negotiable tenet of Republican orthodoxy. Between 1976 and 1980, the emergence of the Christian Right — a largely southern phenomenon and a vehicle for the region’s conservative values and priorities — as an influential GOP voting bloc acted to further cement a national abortion ban as a key element of the Republican Party’s agenda. The anti-abortion campaign, previously led by Catholic groups and hampered by disputes and disagreements, quickly came to be directed by Christian Right organizations that were both politically astute and media savvy. The rising importance of the movement’s leaders meant that Reagan needed their support in his bid for the 1980 presidential nomination, and he artfully deployed moralistic and evangelical rhetoric to win them over. In August 1980, Reagan addressed Christian Right leaders at the National Affairs Briefing and allied himself with their cause by declaring “I know that you can’t endorse me, but… I want you to know that I endorse you.” Yet, crucially, Reagan maintained a marked distance from the Christian Right’s anti-abortion demands — his speech did not mention the topic once. It set the tone for a presidency in which Reagan’s Administration showed little interest in the abortion issue. While Helms repeatedly attempted to pass anti-abortion legislation in the Senate — with vociferous backing from the Christian Right — Reagan offered nothing more than occasional supportive rhetoric, preferring instead to focus on pursuing his economic priorities. Behind the scenes, Reagan aides expressed relief that they were able to avoid becoming entangled in controversial social issues and had limited themselves to providing only “passive support.” But anger was steadily rising among southern conservatives and Christian Right leaders. In a furious letter to the White House in 1981, Moral Majority vice president Cal Thomas mocked Reagan’s famous “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” question from the 1980 campaign. If the administration continued “allowing the slaughter of one and one-half million unborn babies a year,” he argued, “I will not be able to say that we are better off at all.” With almost no support coming from the White House, efforts to ban abortion ultimately made no substantial progress during the Reagan Administration. But that obscures the role Reagan played in making the anti-abortion rights cause central to the GOP’s agenda and, ultimately, in rolling back abortion rights. **_Read More:_** [What to Know About the Arizona Supreme Court Abortion Ban Ruling](https://time.com/6965338/arizona-supreme-court-abortion-ban/) The Christian Right took an important lesson from the failures of the 1980s. Anti-abortion crusaders needed to shift their focus from Congress to the Supreme Court and the appointment of conservative justices to overturn [_Roe_ _v._ _Wade_](https://time.com/6248419/roe-v-wade-anniversary-reproductive-justice/). Here, Reagan’s record drew plaudits from both southern conservatives and Christian Right leaders. While two of his three appointees to the Court — Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy — proved to be moderate conservatives, his third, Justice Antonin Scalia, became a powerful judicial ally for opponents of abortion and an influential force in pushing the Court to the right on social issues. More broadly, Reagan reshaped the federal judiciary, working to appoint younger, more conservative judges, and ultimately appointing almost half of all federal judges during his eight years in office. Alongside the appointment of Scalia, shifting the previously liberal federal judiciary dramatically rightward was, in the eyes of Moral Majority president Jerry Falwell, Reagan’s “chief legacy.” It was this conservative revolution in the judiciary that eventually provided the avenue for opponents of abortion to achieve their aims. Reagan’s public embrace of the Christian Right brought the movement political credibility, firmly anchoring them in the Republican Party and moving the social and cultural values of the white South to the forefront of American political debate. Likewise, his deliberate appeals to disaffected southern Democrats in 1976 and 1980 — including newspaper advertisements targeting George Wallace supporters in Texas and appearances with Mississippi’s former Democratic governor John Bell Williams — were vital in convincing conservative white southerners that the GOP was a viable political home after generations of their region being a Democratic stronghold. With Reagan in the White House, conservative southerners regained a status of acceptance and prominence in Washington that they had not enjoyed since the early 1960s. Simply by paying lip service to the southern conservative agenda, Reagan helped the anti-abortion push to garner strength and influence within the GOP.  Yet as the Republican Party’s electoral grip on the white South tightened, and without the charismatic leadership of Reagan to unite the party, the divide between Reaganite fiscal conservatives and southern cultural conservatives deepened from the 1990s onwards. As southern conservatives increasingly became the dominant force in the party, the Republican leadership lost their ability to control an ever-more confrontational and demanding base. The result is that anti-abortion rights forces dominate the GOP in 2024\. By allying with southern conservatives, Ronald Reagan helped to empower a cultural conservatism in the GOP that eventually overwhelmed his own political agenda. And when Jesse Helms and his southern conservative allies forced opposition to abortion into the GOP platform in 1976, it proved to be a crucial early step in transforming the identity of the Republican Party. ### More from TIME _Jonathan Bartho is an independent scholar and researcher and the author of_ [Whistling Dixie: Ronald Reagan, the White South, and the Transformation of the Republican Party](https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700636495/). _Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians._ [_Learn more about Made by History at TIME here_](https://time.com/6317798/introducing-made-by-history-for-time/)_. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors_. ## Transcript We will hear argument this morning in case 23 to 35 the Food and Drug Administration versus Alliance for Hippocratic medicine and the Consolidated case and may it please the court FDA approved method for stone based on the agency scientific judgment that the drug is safe and effective. It's maintained that judgment across five presidential Administration and millions of Americans have use Mitha Prestone to safely in their pregnancies respondents may not agree with that choice, but that doesn't give them article freestanding or legal basis to up in the regulatory scheme happy out that respondents lack standing they now can see if they can't rely on his physical theory of injury. Like the lower Court's did and said they have to identify a specific Doctor Who faces imminent harm, but their theories rest on a long chain of remote contingencies only an exceptionally small number of women suffer the kind of serious complications that could trigger any need for emergency treatment is secular. Any of those women with seat care from the two specific doctors who asserted conscience injuries and even if that happened Federal conscience protections would guard against the injury the doctor's face and there's no basis to conclude that any of that would be traceable to the incremental changes that FDA made in 2016 and 2021 as opposed to the availability of mifeprex stone in general responds. Theories are to attenuated as a man. I don't lock the court should say so and put it into this case. The releaf center the low with severely disrupt the federal system for developing and improving drugs calling the agency and the pharmaceutical industry. It would also inflict great harm on women Across the Nation rolling back at the exchanges would unnecessarily restrict access to Method christone with no safety justification. Some woman could be forced to undergo more invasive surgical abortions others might not be able to access the drug at all. And all of this would happen at the request of plaintiffs who have no certain injury of their own the court should reject that profoundly inequitable results. If we agree with you on standing could you give us an example of who would have standing to channel to challenge these Dia actions as a general matter? We've seen lawsuits in the past that are brought by for example, prescribing Physicians or patients who want greater access to a drug on sometimes we've seen theories. Competitor standing where a competing drug manufacturer might Sue and claimed that the eighth approval of a drug-free. It's a competitive harm or and or injury in that sense. You know, Justin Thomas. I think that if the question is whether there would be individuals who generally oppose abortion who would have standing and want to challenge at the eighth actions the answer to that is no but the reason is because those people aren't regulated in any relevant way under at the eight deficiency. Are we all do we have to comply with it? But your argument here is that even if the FDA acted unlawfully, nobody can challenge that in court and that's basically the argument you made last week right in the Murphy case. We shouldn't get to the question whether the White House and others violated the right to freedom of speech. We should just say well these plaintiffs can't bring suit we are looking at the specific respondents in this case and their theories of standing we don't think they come within a hundred miles. Have the kind of circumstances this court has previously identified of non-speculative harm that can create the kind of cognisable injury for forward-looking belief or argument is that the fda's actions and approving the Kristen. Is it between 2016 and 2021 in it? If you're looking at that which was an incremental change is so far Upstream of the downstream assertion of harm or distress that the respondents her a certain that there is just as a matter of Law and attenuated link here that came out 25 for article 3 jurisdiction problem with all drugs, who's there are complications in virtually all of them at what level the cost-benefit analysis tells you to stop prescribing. Something is a very difficult question, isn't it? And that's a question. I entrusted to FDA here whatever the statistical increase was FDA determined under the room standards that it wasn't sufficient. To create a risk that counterbalance the need for Access correct way of sources of data to conclude that on balance be burdens were suggested that it was not necessary to keep this restriction in place to ensure safe use the snatch in this case between the claimed injury and the remedy that's being soft and that that might or should matter for standing purposes. I don't know that our doctrines capture this but I guess I see it that the injuries that the respondents allege as you've articulated them our conscience and injury that they are being forced to participate in a medical procedure that they object to and so the obvious Common Sense remedy would be to provide them with an exemption that they Have to participate in this procedure and you say and he said here several times that federal law already gives them that so I guess then what they're asking for in this lawsuit is is more than they're saying because we object to having to be forced to participate in this procedure. We're seeking an order preventing anyone from having access to these drugs at all. And I guess I'm just trying to understand how they could possibly be entitled to that given the injury that they have alleged. I agree Justice Jackson and I do think it's relevant to standings. There's a profound mismatched here between the claim injury and the remedy they were seeking and even you can almost think of this as a type of zone of Interest kind of analysis, you know, if the doctor is have a conscience injury, there's a specific that you designed to deal with it to specifically TaylorMade guard against the risk of that is reoccurring and instead they're reaching out and seeking to invoke rights under a different statue at the fdca that doesn't regulate them at all. It doesn't make them do or not do anything and the beliefs that they're seeking would dramatically alter the approved conditions of used for mythical Stone and affect women all around the nation simply because of this concentrate. It's already directly addressed by other protected if it wasn't if it wasn't addressed and we would see this lawsuit and the remedy would be to exempt them. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6966056/republican-abortion-arizona-reagan/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6966056/republican-abortion-arizona-reagan/"},"headline":"How Ronald Reagan Helped Abortion Take Over the Republican Agenda","datePublished":"2024-04-12T13:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:42:55.102Z","description":"Ronald Reagan proved instrumental to Southerners bringing their cultural conservatism to center stage for the Republican Party.","url":"https://time.com/6966056/republican-abortion-arizona-reagan/","keywords":["Made by History","freelance"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte954f06d8e6e03f6/698a559fb3fce363810cd09b/reagan.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Jonathan Bartho / Made by History"}],"articleSection":"History","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte954f06d8e6e03f6/698a559fb3fce363810cd09b/reagan.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Ronald Reagan Campaigns in Houston Ahead of the Republican Convention","caption":"Ronald Reagan Campaigns in Houston Ahead of the Republican Convention","creditText":"Tony Korody—Sygma via Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/history/","name":"History"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/made-by-history/","name":"Made by History"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/6966056/republican-abortion-arizona-reagan/","name":"How Ronald Reagan Helped Abortion Take Over the Republican Agenda"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Supreme Court Seems Concerned About Whether Abortion Opponents Have Right to Sue Over Mifepristone","description":"The Supreme Court on Tuesday seemed likely to preserve access to a medication that was used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. last year, in the court’s first abortion case since conservative justices overturned Roe v. 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