Michael Hout Abortion Politics in the United States, 1972-1994: From Single Issue to Ideology 1 Abstract: The political debates about legal abortion in the United States have intensified the ideological content of the issue. At the time that Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nation-wide, conservatives were divided on the issue, as were liberals. By the late 1990s, conservatives had moved toward a pro-life stance while liberals reached consensus on supporting choice. Women began the politicization, beginning to split along ideological lines in the late 1970s; men followed in the 1980s. Attitudes toward women's roles and sexual morality are strongly correlated with opinions about abortion, and they explain about one-third of the recent ideo- logical gap on abortion. They do not account for the trend toward politicization, however. Abortion became the preeminent political issue for many Americans in the 1970s. Following the Supreme Court's decision in the case of Roe v. Wade, many voters chose to vote for or against candidates based on their stand regarding abor- tion laws (Miller and Shanks, 1988). At first only the "pro-life" side practiced this kind of single-issue politics, putting candidates who supported "choice" on the defensive. For example, in the 1980 Presidential election, Mr. Reagan emphasized his support for more restrictive federal laws on abortion while Mr. Carter hedged his opposition to laws that would specify conditions under which abortion could not be legal with statements about his own personal objection to abortion. By 1990, pro-choice had become a credible counter issue, so, for example, both Mr. Wilson Michael Hout is professor of sociology and director of the Survey Research Center the University of California, Berkeley. This article arose as a tangent to his recent project on class voting in the United States. Most of his work is in the areas of social inequality and social mobility. His most recent book (with five Berkeley co-authors) is Inequality by De- sign: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (Princeton University Press, 1996).