A few days ago, TheWashington Post ran an article detailing the curtailment of abortion rights in states since the 2010 elections, when many states fell under right-wing Republican control. Thirty-three states have enacted abortion restrictions since then, while just 17, plus the District of Columbia, have not.
What interested me about those two lists was the degree to which they didn't align with the share of Roman Catholics in the states. The eight most heavily Catholic states—in order, Rhode Island (42 percent Catholic), Massachusetts (34 percent), New Jersey (34 percent), New Mexico (34 percent), Connecticut (33 percent), New York (31 percent), California (28 percent) and Illinois (28 percent)—were among the 17 that had not passed legislation curtailing abortion rights. Conversely, the 13 states with the lowest percentage of Catholics—in order, Mississippi (4 percent), Utah (5 percent), West Virginia (6 percent), Tennessee (6 percent), Alabama (7 percent), North Carolina (9 percent), Georgia (9 percent), South Carolina (10 percent), Kentucky (10 percent), Idaho (10 percent) and Virginia (12 percent)—were among the 33 states that have curtailed access to abortions since 2010.
In sum, the relationship between the number of Catholics in a state and the intensity of the state's anti-abortion policies is completely inverse.
Now, there are a host of other variables at play here, too. The share of secular residents in those heavily Catholic states doubtless exceeds their share in the least Catholic states; the same surely goes for feminists. But what these lists confirm, to the surprise of no one who's been following the politics of abortion over recent decades, is that the anti-abortion cause has political heft not in places where Catholics live, but in states that are home to evangelical Protestants. The promptings of Catholic clerics in the John Paul and Benedict mode notwithstanding, the culture-war politics of their parishioners are nowhere near so fierce and misogynistic—or at least, as politically effective—as those of the evangelicals. And, of course, many of their parishioners are engaged in the culture wars (if they're engaged at all) on other side—in this case, the pro-choice side—of the barricades.
