Abortion 'Purity Test' Is New to Republicans

Abortion has become “the purity test for remaining in the GOP’s inner circle,” writes Ellen Goodman in the Boston Globe: The Republican Party is shedding and shunning abortion-rights supporters it once called its own. But it wasn’t always that way—even “Mr. Conservative” Barry Goldwater supported a woman’s right to choose, saying it wasn’t “a conservative issue.”

What if, Goodman asks, the first Supreme Court abortion case had been that of a pregnant Air Force captain told she had to abort her child or resign? If that case had reached the high court, would a GOP concerned with “government power-grabs” have realized that “a government that can force a woman to have an abortion is the same government that can force a woman to continue the pregnancy?” (More abortion stories.)