"How have we moved from a world in which Republicans led the way in the decriminalization of abortion to one in which Republicans call for the recriminalization of abortion? The backlash narrative conventionally identifies the Supreme Court’s decision as the cause of polarizing conflict and imagines backlash as arising in response to the Court repressing politics. In contrast to this Court-centered account of backlash, the history that we examine shows how conflict over abortion escalated through the interaction of other institutions before the Court ruled. There is now a small but growing body of scholarship questioning whether abortion backlash has been provoked primarily by adjudication. Gene Burns, David Garrow, Scott Lemieux, and Laurence Tribe show that, in the decade before Roe, the enactment of laws liberalizing access to abortion provoked energetic opposition by the Catholic Church. We offer fresh evidence to substantiate these claims, as well as new evidence about conflict before Roe that points to an alternative institutional basis for the political polarization around abortion—the national party system."