Converting abortion into an issue of race

Are opponents of abortion racist?

     In a September 15 article in The New York Times, “Abortion Has Never Been Just About Abortion,” Thomas B. Edsall writes of an association between racial attitudes and views on abortion.  “Whites who score high on measures of racial resentment and racial grievance are far more likely to support strict limits on abortion than whites who score low on these measures.”  He cites a number of authors who write of this association, although there are terminological differences in the racial attitude variable, which in addition to racial resentment and racial grievance, also is expressed as “ethnocracial exclusion,” “racial animosity,” opposition to the civil rights movement, and opposition to racial integration in schools.

      Because of this association, Edsall suggests, abortion opponents are actually closet racists.  He cites Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Dartmouth, to this effect: “Opposition to abortion became a convenient diversion — a godsend, really — to distract fr…