Carole Joffe: Betty Ford and the Change in Our Political Culture

Carole Joffe is a professor at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, and is the author of Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us (Beacon).

How much I appreciated your gracious letter telling of plans for the Western Regional Conference on Abortion and inviting me to attend.

Although my upcoming personal and official commitments will not permit me to be with you, I am grateful for this opportunity to convey my warmest greetings to all attending and my hopes for the success of the Conference.

So wrote Betty Ford, in February 1976, to the organizers of one of the first medical conferences on abortion to take place in the United States after the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Sending such a message would have been inconceivable for any of the Republican first ladies that followed her. What Betty Ford said publicly about abortion, and what subsequent Republican women in that role could not, speaks both to the spirited and independent character of the former, who died on July 8 at age ninety-three, and to the sea change in American politics that was to come with the rise of the religious Right and the use of abortion as that movement’s leading wedge issue.

But even in 1976, a newly emerged right-to-life movement was making clear that presidential candidates would be accountable for their positions on abortion, which had been legalized in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade decision. President Gerald Ford, running for his first election to the office (after taking over from the disgraced Richard Nixon in 1974), was under attack from anti-abortion forces for his “waffling” views on the subject: he argued that Roe v. Wade went too far, and that the abortion issue should be left to individual states. In contrast, his wife reaffirmed her full support of Roe, stating in a television interview that the decision took the issue “out of the backwoods and put [it] in the hospital where it belongs.”...