What if the pro-choice movement had been absorbed into the Republican Party and identified with conservative ideology and the pro-life movement into the Democrat Party and identified with liberal ideology?
Let's say the religious Right cited scripture claiming that it meant one gets one's soul only at birth and so was against abortion laws because they recognized a different standard of "life" than their God. Then let's say some biologists said that in fact science shows life as an individual organism begins at conception. Of course in real life most biologists will say "but that's not the same question as personhood" but if the abortion debate had became embedded in religion v. science in that particular way would they have been quick to point that out or would they have just kept asserting how science proves that fetuses and embryos are in fact forms of life?
If it happened that way the pro-life movement would be constantly quoting biologists, and small government conservative atheists and also who want to be pro-choice but don't want to endorse religion over science would likely originate the argument that even though it is technically life that it's still not a person. And then the pro-life biologists and liberals following them would decry this as a dangerous argument and relate it to the Holocaust. People have made similar arguments today but in this context the clash of ideological forces would favor the sides to adopt narratives that lead to liberal pro-life and conservative pro-choice sides.
Anti-abortion rhetoric would be spun into a wider "life agenda" rhetoric encouraging social programs, universal health care, early childcare, opposition to the death penalty. A key part of the identity of being a "liberal" would be the emphasis on human life integrated into a broader concept of social welfare and progress.
The conservative pro-choice side would emphasize that it goes against religious tradition to be pro-life and that the government shouldn't be meddling in such private affairs. Liberal emphasis on abortion-related health problems would lead them not only to rebutting them but calling this "nannystatism".
Imagine yourself in such a reality. Everything else is basically the same. Conservatives are still anti-gay, they want creationism taught in public schools, some even still oppose birth control(which the pro-life liberals would if at all only be against it if it posed a chance of killing it after conception took place) but all are fine with abortion. Abortion has still been legalized and liberals are up in arms(figuratively liberals still tend to be against guns and will often tie that point in with abortion) about it.
Imagine your own development in such an environment and what your opinions on abortion would likely have become. Would it be the same? I am pro-choice and have been pro-choice but I think I would've been pro-life up until now or even up until some time after now, since at this point in my life I've been questioning a lot of what I believe and where it came from.
