page_952 < previous page page_952 next page > Page 952 tory. "Roe" was Norma McGorvey, who was denied the right under Texas law to abort a fetus she did not want to bear. She sued the state, and the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court had turned increasingly conservative after the retirement of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the deaths of liberal Hugo Black and moderate John Marshall Harlan II, and President Richard M. Nixon's appointments of Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justices Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, and William Rehnquist. Nonetheless, the Court ruled 72 that women had an unrestricted right to abort a fetus during the first trimester of pregnancy, but that the state had an interest in protecting the fetus after that, when it became "viable" or able to live outside the womb. The opinion extended the "right to privacy" enunciated in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), in which the Court ruled that a state could not prohibit married couples from using contraceptives; this right to privacy was implied in the First Amendment guarantee of free speech, the Ninth Amendment's reference to "certain rights," and the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of due process of law. Blackmun wrote the majority opinion, with Rehnquist and Justice Byron White dissenting. The ruling continues to cause controversy. Early in the 1980s, the "right-to-life" movement, with help from politicians such as President Ronald Reagan, pushed for a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or a threat to the mother's life. Although antiabortionists were unable to pass the amendment, they did secure a ban on federal and, in many cases, state financing of abortions. The Roman Catholic church and many Protestant fundamentalist groups strongly opposed abortion. In response, women's groups such as the National Organization for Women stepped up their efforts to elect prochoice candidates. The abortion issue had evolved into a "litmus test" for both liberals and conservatives and had become a trying issue for many political candidates and judicial appointees. See also Abortion. Roman Catholic Church With some 50 million members, the Roman Catholic church is much the largest religious organization in America. Yet at the time of the American Revolution, there were only a few American Catholics: mostly people from Spanish and French colonies, along with a handful of English-speaking Catholics who lived mainly in the Middle Colonies, especially Maryland. Neither Catholic Europe nor the overwhelmingly Protestant United States anticipated then that the new nation would prove hospitable to the emergence of a strong American Catholicism. For one thing, the church was proudly Roman, and the new nation was manifestly committed to developing American institutions  in religion as well as in politics and economics. Throughout the nineteenth century, furthermore, the church became increasingly ultramontane, concentrating ever more authority in Rome and skeptical of adaptations to national folkways. The Vatican Council of 18691870 endowed the popes with ordinary jurisdiction in every Catholic diocese. Second, American religious culture, almost from the start, was pluralistic; even in those few colonies that attempted to establish the one true religion, dissenting faiths soon were granted considerable freedoms. The First Amendment to the Constitution stipulated that there would be no established religion in the new nation, and no state tried for very long to maintain an establishment. In fact, Protestants quickly came to acknowledge that most other religious groups were legitimate "denominations" of the true church. In contrast, Catholics were obliged by their faith to insist that theirs was the one true church. Catholics could accept the separation of church and state only as an unfortunate necessity in a culture where so many erroneous churches flourished. Finally, American culture, in religion as in politics and economics, was deeply individualistic, antihierarchical, and anti-authoritarian. Lay-people, speaking for themselves or in concert with a congregation, were accustomed to judge the clergy as functionaries expected to give a moving sermon, preach up a revival, or meet  < previous page page_952 next page >

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