“My point was that the shift happened in the culture before the law. Roe V Wade was met with a whimper according to some of the older Pro Life people I have met with (I was born in 75 so I don't remember).”
This is mostly not true. I'm a little older than you, and I can tell you, Roe was already a big, stinkin' deal by the time you were born.
At the time of Roe, change in the law through legislative means had pretty much petered out. A few liberal states had permitted abortion under limited circumstances. Liberal scum had “interpreted” those laws, especially in California, to permit widely-available abortion, but even in those states, they had to maintain the fiction that abortion was only for “therapeutic” reasons, and not abortion on demand.
In New York, where one of the more liberal abortion laws was passed while folks weren't paying as much attention, the backlash was so very great, that the very next year, the legislature REPEALED their new liberal abortion law, only to have the repeal vetoed by the demonic Nelson Rockefeller, who, if there are human souls in Hell, is probably among their number.
The very reason for Roe was that once ordinary folks were awakened to what was being done, they shook off their slumber and began organizing and becoming active, and were SUCCEEDING legislatively, and the death-lovers realized that abortion would not become widely available unless they got the judiciary to take up their cause.
It is true that during the 1960s, folks slept while the forces of Satan gathered strength to make their assault on abortion laws, but the population was never widely pro-abort. Many people were in favor of abortion in the “exception cases,” but nearly no one accepted a general “right” to abortion.
But then, folks woke up, and even BEFORE Roe, pro-life movements were underway in those states with the greatest legislative threats to the rights of unborn children.
That was the very motive behind Roe - the increasing opposition to legislative change.
Of course, in the early years AFTER Roe, pretty much nearly every ecclesial community collapsed and gave its approval to Roe, even the Southern Baptists. The seal of the Supreme Court was like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Law shaped culture. And conscience.
The Catholic Church stood nearly alone in formal opposition to the abomination. It took a few years before the others wiped the demonic scales from their eyes and began to see “abortion rights” for what it is: child sacrifice to idols.
Even within the Catholic Church, although our prelates and hierarchs denounced Roe from the start, this has been a movement of the laity, as too many clerics then, and now, still fail to grasp that the Democrat Party is the Party of Satan, of Death, of Hatred, of Hell, of Murder. So we wind up with part-time Catholics/full-time Democrats like Dolan, O’Malley and Donna Wuerl.
But even to this day! Even to this day, roughly three out of five Americans is more pro-life than pro-abortion, in that roughly that percentage would ban abortion except in the “exception cases” that comprise less than 4% of all surgical abortions. Even to this day, some 40+ years after Roe!
Nonetheless, the law has “taught” 40% of our people to be bloodthirsty baby-murderers. May God have mercy on them.
sitetest
Please read this (good book)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Christianity-Religious-Centuries/dp/0060677015
The Early Church grew, and then took over, a society that viewed life much cheaper than we do today. One of the main reason Christianity grew is that they did something the prevailing culture did not do. They kept their little girls alive.
The law was such that it encouraged the killing of babies, and girls more than most. Yet the Church flourished.
Eventually, the law changed (though it took the germanic barbarians coming in to do it).
That is why I don’t see the change in the law as the whole issue. It isn’t even the main reason. The Church isn’t under the same persecution as it was in the bad old days, yet if you look at the abortion stats many “Christian” people are pro abortion.
We went from a religion that valued life, to one that values money. Why? What changed? It wasn’t just the law. The culture inside the church changed.