particularly by uniting Catholics and Evangelicals who previously didn’t really get along.
The birth of abortion as a wedge issue is a particularly strange one. It started with a wannabe Hollywood filmmaker, Frank Schaeffer, who made a video for Evangelicals with his father, which included a scene on abortion. For his next movie/series, he made it solely about abortions, and Evangelicals were like “That’s a Catholic issue, we’re not Catholic.” and didn’t come to see it. Then, the New York Post made an article on this weird avant garde anti-abortion movie, and radical feminists started protesting outside his movies - previously, they had been held in stadiums but were almost completely empty. The Evangelicals basically went “Well, if they’re against it, we should be for it!” and started filling out the stadiums and adopting an anti-abortion stance.
Frank Schaeffer has since regretted his decision. At the time he was a new father, having accidently gotten his girlfriend/wife pregnant, and that was the source of his anti-abortion sentiment. These days he speaks out against the anti-abortion movement and the religious far-right.
There’s a really good BBC podcast/radio show that goes through all of it, and even interviews Schaeffer himself. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0011cpq
Weirdly, Frank Schaeffer’s Wikipedia page doesn’t even really cover the anti-abortion video or the influence it had, it just casually mentions that he met with Reagan and others, as well as helping write one of Reagan’s books.