| Sumario: | This article uses a 1972 statewide referendum on abortion reform in Michigan to examine the links between anti-abortion and anti-bussing politics in the early 1970s and the centrality of child protection rhetoric to both struggles. It spotlights how activists and their ideas about race migrated from anti-bussing to anti-abortion conflicts. In so doing, this study allows for an understanding of the racial politics of abortion debates, as well as the gendered and sexual politics of bussing. More broadly, it illustrates how battles over abortion reform and bussing were central to emergent conservative ‘family values’ politics in which child protection imagery formed the adhesive for an ascendant conservative coalition opposed to racial and sexual liberalism. The deployment of racialised images of foetuses and children, in other words, constructed gendered familial ideals and was crucial to the political repudiation of women’s reproductive rights.
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