"By examining the conflict in the period before the Court ruled, we can see how the abortion conflict changed in meaning, structure, and intensity as it was joined by a successive array of advocates—not only social movements8 and the Catholic Church but also strategists for the Republican Party seeking to attract traditionally Democratic voters in the 1972 presidential campaign. The evidence that we uncover of abortion’s entanglement in party realignment before the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe demonstrates that the competition of political parties for voters supplies an independent institutional basis for conflict over abortion. Where proponents of a Court-centered account of backlash offer reasons that adjudication distinctively causes political conflict, the history that we analyze identifies forms of political conflict that could engulf adjudication."