Unfortunately google results are an AI summary of a reddit thread from 2019 about men’s rights. /s
*not really I hope, I’m just feeling cynical about google and the trust people have in search results that are basically paid slots.
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It’s an obsession because it was deliberately manufactured as a wedge issue by cynical Republican political operatives after Roe v Wade. Before then, conservative Catholics cared about it but it wasn’t the priority it is now for the much larger contingent of evangelicals and other right-wing Protestants. By the 1980s and time of Reagan and the “Moral Majority”, one’s position on abortion was already entrenched as political shibboleth (and linked deeply with one’s general views on women’s rights).
In that way it’s similar to the American obsession with the right to bear arms. Before the NRA was taken over by a racist murderer in an internal coup in 1977, the organisation was about sport shooting, hunting, and firearms safety. Since then, it’s gradually become an industry lobbying outfit and de facto arm of the GOP, pushing a twisted interpretation of the Second Amendment and using it as a political purity test.
As to why these platform were created, it’s because the bigotry that American conservatism long relied upon to split voters was at the time no longer acceptable to be aired out in the open. Per Lee Atwater, they had to come up with some alternatives.
tldr: abortion wasn’t always an obsession in America; it was made into one to serve Republican politicians.
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