General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Abortion: what is really the issue? [View all]JHB
(37,160 posts)This is in addition to a number of the points made upthread, and is more about its use as a political tool.
In the 70s and earlier, evangelical protestants weren't particularly organized or vocal about abortion. No matter how they felt personally (and there was the usual "different when it affects me" hypocrisy), being publicly against abortion was seen as a Catholic thing, and those evangelical protestants wouldn't want any of their neighbors thinking they were Catholics, because "Catholics aren't Christian."
But in the 70s conservative operatives like Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, and others started trying to recruit conservative Democratic-voting groups by finding hot-button issues they could use to get those people single-issue voting and split them off, breaking up the Democrats' New Deal coalition. Abortion was one of those issues, used to split Catholic union members away from what their unions endorsed.
But they also found that the abortion issue made a good "face" for more generalized feminist-bashing, framing it as righteous opposition to baby-killing harpies and lesbians and every other prejudice they could throw into the stew of bile. Once they wooed enough televangelists with this framing, it started solidifying as the general evangelical position.
So in addition to theological and psychological points given above, its prominence is also part of a deliberate political strategy by conservatives to get people to vote about this one thing and nothing else, and use the power they gain by being the Party of That One Thing to pass an extreme conservative agenda that pretty much only serves the very wealthy.