The Church and the Abortion Capital
How Catholicism's decline increased partisan polarization on abortion.
By Ross Douthat Opinion Columnist
In a sense it’s not surprising that a renewed debate about abortion would begin in New York State, which passed a law last week — since imitated, to more controversy, by Virginia Democrats — ratifying the right to kill human beings in utero in the third trimester.
Almost 50 years ago, in 1970, New York passed the nation’s most liberal abortion law, a template for the Roe v. Wade decision two years later. And the state has a justifiable reputation as (to quote a 2005 New York magazine story) “the abortion capital of America†— with a strong pro-choice consensus and high abortion rates.
But there is a forgotten chapter to this story. In 1972, New York’s Assembly and Senate both voted narrowly to repeal the two-year-old abortion law. The only thing preventing repeal was the veto of the Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller — and, of course, the intervention of the Supreme Court the following January.
Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/opinion/sunday/new-york-abortion-catholicism.html
Rockefeller vetoed the repeal of the abortion law back in '72, that's pretty bad. Rockefeller Republicans. New history to me.
