Please, don't misunderstand @Smokin Joe ... I don't disagree with the fight; I disagree with the battle plan that was followed. The plan not only failed to save the babies, it left behind unimaginable cultural carnage.
Conservatives lost sight of the women, young and old ---- their humanity, their fears and their needs. Conservatives chose marches and speeches to change the government and condemnation to change the women. But, programs to change the woman's mind and heart is what the "issue" demanded. Pro-choice could have meant full choice --- including the life of the baby.
Women --- the mentors of our young, the guardians of the county's legacy and future left the Republican party out of fear and now make their home among evil.
Conservatives should have fought to keep them in their political tent. It's not too late to try.
I remember women abdicating the role of mother and shaper of the next generation, willy-nilly, sacrificed their birthright on the altar of a second income (optional for many at first, but with inflation it became more commonly a necessity--inflation partially induced by all those extra incomes), and on the altar of "free love" sex with neither comittment nor consequence, which is where the Pill and abortion factored in; the former for those who could count to seven three times a month, and the other for those who thought motherhood didn't count.
You can blame the shift in our culture on a lot of things, but the Democrats and the communists were at the fore front, and there, ever present, was the media... ridiculing tradition, making a mockery of those roles which had raised a thousand successful generations of humans.
You can't lay that at the doorstep of Conservatives, it was the Left, specifically, The New Left, that pushed the socially destructive policies, and did so with the full help of the Mass Media. When Cronkite said Vietnam could not be won, in the middle of the destruction of the Vietcong forces that had attacked every provincial capital during Tet, he did more to secure the Communist victory than Ho Chi Minh, because, in full gravitas he told America we were losing in the midst of the most significant military victory of the war.
The thing is, when it's "cool" to get stoned and screw like minks in heat, to 'Turn on, tune in and drop out' (Timothy Leary), and even to
Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman, people "Do it!" (Jerry Rubin) just to go with the flow.
Without those societal norms that the hippies were rebelling against, things degenerated quickly across most social fronts. Like all else, it was a choice, but the media packaged the counterculture and sold it on TV next to the dish soap.
And then, come the '80s, they got greedy.
