Roy White Quotes
The only reason we have a pro-life movement in this country is because of the Catholic people and the Catholic Church.
Roy White, *, Executive Director, National Right to Life Committee, 1975
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This quotation is very surprising to most people who are not familiar with the history of the struggle regarding abortion in America. In the early days of the family planning movement and when abortion rights were first advocated in America, the proponents were almost all Republicans. At the time, the Republican Party consisted of economic conservatives and social liberals—“Rockefeller Republicans they would later be called. At the same time the Democratic Party was aligned very differently. The Southern Conservatives and fundamentalist Protestants of the Bible Belt were all Democrats. Most Roman Catholics were Democrats. Intellectuals at the time tended to side with the Democrats on economic issues and with the Republicans on social issues. In the 1960s the Republicans went after the racist resentment in the South over the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Southern Democrats of the Solid South switched to the Republican Party, and many liberal republicans, reacting to their party now being the party of the the anti equality racists, became Republicans. The Southern Democrats then pushed out the moderate Republicans who were the social liberals.
John Ashcroft was then the Attorney General and a foe of abortion.
Churches are political organizations too and are subject to the forces of their membership. In the case of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1971 they passed resolutions to assure the right of a woman to have an abortion to protect her health. The position on abortion changed steadily thereafter to even pass Constitutional amendments to ban abortions except to save the life of the mother. See {614356},54122, {614358}, {614359}, {614360}, {614361} for the dynamic history of the change.
Reactionary Southerners like Helms have always attributed any calls for change in their states to “outsiders” who were “invading.”
In most parts of the country, if the legislators did not carve out the exceptions for rape incest and danger to the life of the mother, they would lose the majority of their support as most Americans who oppose the freedom of abortion that existed after Roe v. Wade, but really do not view abortion in the early trimester as murder. They just think that the regulation should be greater than it is.
Roy Hilton White is an American former professional baseball player and coach. He played his entire career in Major League Baseball as an outfielder for the New York Yankees between 1965 and 1979. With the Yankees, he won two championships in 1977 and '78, both over his hometown Los Angeles Dodgers.
