In the fall of 1973, horrified by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision earlier that year, a lawyer in the Labor Department organized a meeting of a small group of women in her home. Nellie Gray, a Texan and veteran of the Women’s Army Corps during World War II, worried that the anniversary of the monumental decision would pass by without being remembered. And she had reason to think so. Many considered this the end of the conversation over abortion.
While the Catholic Church was vocally opposed to the practice of abortion, evangelical Christians had a mixed response. Christianity Today condemned the ruling as “counter not merely to the moral teachings of Christianity through the ages but also to the moral sense of the American people” while the largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist convention, was initially ambivalent. A poll taken a few years before Roe found 70 percent of Baptists supported…
