Column: A reminder that the GOP used to be the pro-abortion party, and Democrats the anti party

Vice President Kamala Harris speaking to promote women’s reproductive rights in San Jose in January, before she became the Democratic nominee for president and made those rights a centerpiece of her campaign. Here are the landmarks: In the decades prior to Roe vs. Wade, abortion was broadly illegal in the U.S. Women seeking abortions for their physical and psychological health — these were known as “therapeutic abortions” — often had to appear before hospital committees of physicians, mostly male, to get permission. Their convictions were strengthened by the activities of anti-abortion activists who blocked clinics, provided graphic photos of ostensibly aborted babies for legislative hearings and heightened tensions over the practice with provocative vocabulary — describing abortion as “murder” and calling abortion doctors “killers.” They labeled abortions in the third trimester “partial birth abortions,” even though only about 0.9% of abortions occur after 21 weeks, and then almost invariably because the pregnancy has experienced a catastrophic crisis. As it happens, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe vs. Wade may have been the culmination of the anti-abortion movement, but may also mark its apogee. “This really is about women’s status in society, controlling women’s behavior and the limits of that behavior,” Faye Wattleton, who served as president of Planned Parenthood from 1978 to 1992, says in an interview in “Reversing Roe.” As increasingly harsh restrictions on women get enacted in red states — bounty laws allowing any interested person to sue women for having abortions, restrictions on travel from anti-abortion states to obtain abortions, the threat of prosecutions of women who experienced miscarriages, and more — her words seem increasingly prescient.