Ask Lemmy

In part. The other half is that Conservatives started courting Evengelical groups to make voting for them the "correct" thing to do. Abortion legalization was championed by the left but the Catholic Church had some remaining abstention held over by essentially a political decision that had been cannonized as an official spiritual stance on the idea of the soul. Conservatives tend to think like marketing experts and they know abortion and the nature of the soul is a core belief not easily shaken thus they were able to make their platform a matter of "life and death" harnessing the empathy people had for the idea of babies... Very specifically the idea of babies, the soft squishy humans whom we are programmed instinctually to protect.

It also dovetailed nicely into purity doctrine. The idea you are enabling the sexual deviancey of loose women... The idea that a fetus is a souless empty blob as the majority idea was for the first thousand years of Christianity got in the way of the advertising campaign and the Catholic Church wasn't about to roll back the precedent decision it has upheld for centuries. That would make the idea seem kind of arbitrary... and once you start unpicking the history of Catholic control measures it weakens the vwey idea of them as a spiritual authority.