(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-11-28 15:18

"I lean Republican but I won't vote for Rudy," said Vickie Adams, a born-again Southern Baptist who is in charge of fundraising for the center.

In past elections, the Republican Party has used opposition to abortion to get this base to the polls, and it may find it must now stick to this tune if it is to rely on them in 2008.

"I think the Republican Party will want to be very careful. The pro-life movement has been the centerpiece of the Republican coalition that has won most of the presidential elections over the past 30 years," said Matthew Wilson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University.

Focus on the Family founder and influential conservative James Dobson has said he will vote for a third party candidate rather than a Republican who supports abortion rights, although he has said such a route would be a last resort.

All of the other Republican presidential hopefuls have taken anti-abortion positions - underscoring how divisive the issue could prove if Giuliani wins the nominiation.

Compared to slavery

Raising the stakes, many religious conservatives cast the abortion debate in terms of the anti-slavery movement of the 18th and 19th centuries, saying abortion is the great moral question of today.

"We realized the errors of our ways on slavery and there is great hope that the nation will do the same for abortion," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a conservative lobby group with strong evangelical ties.

This is a cry taken up in particular by another Republican contender for the White House, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.

Like the anti-slavers, the anti-abortion movement is in for the long haul, focusing on the White House in a bid to put enough conservatives on the Supreme Court to overturn the 1973 decision that granted women the right to an abortion.

Conservative Christians compare Roe vs. Wade to the Dred Scott decision in 1857, which ruled that no black person, free or slave, could become a US citizen. Both decisions revolve around how a person is defined, and for conservative Christians, life begins at conception.

Critics of conservative Christians contend that their opposition to abortion is less about life and more about a broader backlash against women's rights. And they note the support some conservative Christians gave for segregation.

Wilson, an expert on conservatives and the religious right, notes that the Republican Party itself owes its birth to the anti-slavery movement, coming together as a broad coalition in the 1850s to oppose the expansion of slavery.

"That's one of the reasons why much of the anti-abortion rank and file want the Republican Party to speak forcefully to what they regard as the most compelling moral issue of our time, which is abortion," Wilson said.

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