Watch: Samantha Bee Exposes How the ‘Pro-Life’ Movement Was Born (And It’s Not What You Think)

The Religious Right Is at the Center of the Anti-Choice, Anti-Abortion Movement, but It Wasn’t Always That Way

Samantha Bee, as only she can, exposes the religious right as frauds who didn’t care about abortion, except as a tool to create a (very lucrative) movement. The comedian explains that in 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade announcing that the right to abortion is constitutionally protected, the Southern Baptist Convention – which today is home to many of the far right’s fanatics, like Mike Huckabee, for starters – released a statement applauding the decision. 

Bee explains that it wasn’t until televangelist Jerry Falwell, who later founded Liberty University, held a conference call trying to decide what issue he could use to mobilize his Moral Majority movement, that abortion was chosen as the topic.

“Several people suggested possible issues,” Dartmouth professor Randall Balmer says in a clip Bee shows. “Finally a voice on the end of one of the lines asked, ‘How about abortion?'”

“Were they founding a movement, or deciding what toppings to get on their pizza?” Bee mocked.

Vox notes Bee “also interviewed Frank Schaeffer, a filmmaker who says he helped start the modern pro-life movement — which he now calls ‘the single greatest regret of my life.'”

“Schaeffer helped his father Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop make films and book series, including Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, and shop them around to evangelical churches to try to convince congregations that abortion was evil.”

So remember, Roe v. Wade, as Vox notes, “was decided 7-2 by mostly Republican-appointed justices. So at the time, nobody would have imagined that evangelicals would mobilize in a backlash against Roe, form the modern religious right, and flock to the Republican party.”

And also remember, these same anti-choice lunatics are the ones who joined together to deprive LGBT people, and others, of their civil rights, for decades, and got rich doing so.

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Images: Screenshot via Full Frontal with Samantha Bee/YouTube