In early June, news came of the death of former Oregon Senator Bob Packwood at the age of 93 in Rancho Mirage, California. For most readers, the era of Packwood’s prominent role in Congress is ancient history or perhaps off the radar screen altogether. Packwood, however, was a key figure in the national drama over abortion and an exemplar of the fact that support for striking down the nation’s law protecting the unborn was as much or more a Republican than a Democratic Party exercise.

Set the scene in the late 1960s. Thanks to lobbying efforts by Planned Parenthood and feminist groups like the National Organization for Women, founded in 1966, and helped by the formal adoption of a model liberalization bill by the American Law Institute in 1962, a number of states spent that turbulent decade relaxing their 19th century abortion limitations. Read by today’s Wild West standards, the ALI measure can be read as relatively moderate. Its major provisions decriminalized abortion in three primary situations: “(1) when the pregnant woman’s physical or mental health is gravely impaired; (2) when the child is likely to be born with grave physical or mental defects; or (3) when the pregnancy is the result of rape, intercourse with an underage female, or incest.” Even so, the ALI bill was widely disputed by opponents of making abortion more available, and the pace of change in state legislatures was slow.

The ALI model law gave elite leadership gloss to the political movement forming around legal abortion. In 1967, Colorado became the first state to adopt a liberal law along the ALI line, but included provisions to regulate the practice, such as a limit of 16 weeks’ gestational age, a requirement for approval by three physicians, and certification of mental health grounds for the abortion by a licensed psychiatrist. California in 1967 and 11 other states, including New York in 1970, soon followed. But this early momentum for the legislative permission of abortion rapidly began to wane as other states resisted changes to their laws, a pro-life resistance (largely led by women) formed, and the reality of states like New York becoming abortion destinations began to affect the public mind.

In 1972, the New York General Assembly repealed the 1970 law. That law allowed abortion up to a then-astonishing 24 weeks of pregnancy, and it had no residency law, spawning abortion tourism. Even Dr. Alan F. Guttmacher, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and namesake of the leading U.S. abortion research group, expressed amazement that New York “suddenly had the most liberal abortion law in the world.” Regrettably, the repeal effort in 1972 failed when then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a leading Republican officeholder and future vice president 1974-77 under Gerald Ford, vetoed the repeal, saying, “I do not believe it right for one group to impose its vision of morality on an entire society.”

By the end of the decade, then, competing definitions of morality and medicine were beginning to produce a deadlock in the fight. The situation in the Congress was not appreciably different, and this is where another leading Republican, Bob Packwood, entered stage right. In 1970, Packwood, in his second year of service in the U.S. Senate, introduced the first abortion legalization bill in the U.S. Congress. His measure would have allowed abortion in the District of Columbia, a federal enclave whose laws were set by Congress, as well as struck down any state laws that interfered with a woman’s decision to seek an abortion from a physician. The wide-open Packwood statute garnered media and academic attention but went nowhere, dying in committee. It did make Packwood a darling of the era’s feminists, a great irony considering later developments.

In the early 1970s, therefore, abortion and the right to life were engaged in a much closer conflict — until, of course, the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade brought down every abortion law across the United States. It is hard now to fully appreciate the shock the ruling administered to the American, and indeed the world’s, legal system. Once again during this period, Republican forces fortified abortion advocates, but this time on the basis of an issue that had nothing to do with feminism but that had motivated abortion advocates from Margaret Sanger and Guttmacher to General William Draper, the Rockefeller family, Paul Ehrlich, Bob Packwood, and dozens of other financial elites: population control.

The most significant intellectual contribution to this drive for control came not from Ehrlich, who had published “The Population Bomb” in 1968, but from the Rockefeller Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. Created by Congress in 1970 at the request of Richard Nixon and headed by John D. Rockefeller, the commission came back in 1972 with a revolutionary report on the use of government power to control population. The commission endorsed legal abortion, creation and expansion of government-run contraception programs, sex education projects in the nation’s schools, and caps on legal immigration. Its most sweeping recommendation read:

“Recognizing that our population cannot grow indefinitely, and appreciating the advantages of moving now toward the stabilization of population, the Commission recommends that the nation welcome and plan for a stabilized population.”

In short, the commission recommended a massive shift in the federal role in American governance. Its agencies and influences would be deployed to help drive the United States to zero population growth (and, as it turned out, to drive the global population in the same direction). In 1970, Nixon had also spurred the passage of Title X of the Public Health Service Act, legislation that went on, with occasional funding setbacks, to promote Planned Parenthood projects, including marketing of the agency’s offerings to adolescents. The Title X authorization was, like the Rockefeller Commission, a bipartisan project, led by Democrats Rep. James Scheuer of New York and Senator Joseph Tydings of Maryland, and Republican George H.W. Bush of Texas. A range of intentions informed these sponsors, without doubt, but the delivery of this funding, and the much larger funding made available via Medicaid, ensured that communities all over the nation would have lavishly funded offices that promote abortion, the revaluation of traditional values, and — ultimately — the administration of cross-sex hormones to minors.

Which brings us back to the late Senator Packwood. While he did not generally succeed in passing legislation, he was a key force within the GOP in blocking progress on life. In 1982, the Reagan administration endorsed a measure called the Human Life Bill, which, less than a decade after Roe v. Wade, would have made clear that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution applied to all human beings from conception, freeing the states and, by implication, the federal government to protect human life from abortion. Packwood joined fellow Republican Millicent Fenwick of New Jersey and many Democrats in opposing the HLB, as it was dubbed. The Senate failed to break a filibuster against the bill, and it was ultimately tabled. A constitutional amendment designed to reverse the Roe v. Wade decision was later defeated by a vote of 49-50, well short of the two-thirds majority needed for passage.

Meanwhile, Packwood continued on his personal odyssey to place the national government firmly on the side of fewer and fewer children. A May 1972 paper published by the Hastings Law Center at the University of California, San Francisco, detailed the Packwood plan, his proposal to deny personal income tax exemptions to any third- or higher-order child in a family. The bill excited champions of population control to a degree, but it went nowhere. The author suggested what he regarded as a better alternative, denying personal income tax exemptions to any child. As he wrote of Packwood’s modest proposal, “In effect, the bill provides that a taxpayer would be entitled to exemptions for his first two children but for no others. This measure is unsound because at best it discourages only third, or later children.” The author did note how the Packwood plan would have a disparate financial impact on the poor.

Obituaries last month on Packwood seem to have spent little time on his views on abortion, children, and population. This is regrettable because if anything has become clear in the last half century, it is that birth rates worldwide are in steep decline, and policy pundits are wrestling with everything from the spread of cell phones and voting rights for women as alleged contributors to the decline. Seldom is another possibility mentioned, which is that an animadversion to family formation and childbearing generally, sustained by a materialistic view of sexuality and fortified with trillions in public and private spending, has made having a child something of an anti-social act. Fear about the future is the preoccupation of the population control movement, and fear about population collapse reinforces just that. The message is that whatever the future is going to be, it’s just got to be awful.

Instead of Packwood’s anti-life legacy, accounts of his passing focused mostly on his political downfall, which flowed from his history of sexually harassing women who worked for him or his committees or for feminist organizations. With the exception of an excellent account by Timothy Carney at the American Enterprise Institute, Packwood’s trajectory in public life was depicted as a contradiction: how could a man of his progressive views on women’s equality and ecology have engaged in such behavior around a slew of women who were, in one way or another, under his authority?

The sad truth, of course, is that he was not alone in exploiting such contradictions. As each of us exits the stage of life, what will be said of us is often the last or worst impression we made. Bob Packwood cannot change those impressions now, but the rest of us can. Embracing life, loving children, and honoring the true dignity and equality of women are a good start.