Before my United Methodist Church began its final descent into theological madness, disparate elements were trying to drag it left or right on various issues through the denomination’s messy democratic process. Nowhere was this more apparent than on abortion.
The church was an early adopter of the “prayerfully pro-choice” position before Roe v. Wade, but its teachings were gradually revised in a more pro-life direction over time as the more conservative Methodists organized to fight back against leftward drifts. This included opposition to abortion as a form of birth control, recognition of at least potential fetal personhood, and eventually support for banning partial-birth abortion.
Despite this incremental improvement, the Methodist social principles on abortion even at their best were a bit of a muddled mess. Of course, that is true of public opinion about abortion in general and is what you would expect of compromise language written for people with divergent views.
This brings us to the newly revised GOP platform in which the pro-life plank is, if not quite gutted, the most equivocal it has been since 1976, when it truly was a compromise between Republicans on different sides of the abortion debate, after the convention fight between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. Ford and Jimmy Carter went into the general election with relatively nuanced positions on abortion by today’s standards, with the parties not really sorting on the issue until Reagan won four years later.
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