turning abortion into a partisan issue had been part of a strategy, crafted by Nixon’s advisers, to reinvent the G.O.P. and get Nixon reëlected—before Roe. “No American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition,” Nixon said in 1969. Anticipating the opponents he would face in his run for reëlection, Nixon began to rethink his positions on contraception and abortion. “If the President should publicly take his stand against abortion, as offensive to his own moral principles,” Patrick Buchanan advised, in a memo dated March 24, 1971, “we can force Muskie to make the choice between his tens of millions of Catholic supporters and his liberal friends at the New York Times and the Washington Post.” A week later, Nixon issued a statement expressing his “personal belief in the sanctity of human life—including the life of the yet unborn.”