My nomination for greatest enemy of reproductive freedom is --
Ronald Reagan, because to cosy up to the Vatican he defunded international family planning programs and was a major actor in beginning the GOP's shift toward exploiting abortion as a wedge issue.
I was a student at University of California when he was Governor of California, and I saw him ruthlessly exploit public sentiment against the University and public support for tax cuts through cutting the university budget.
My verdict on Reagan is that he had great personal charm, was a brilliant persuader, and was a superb but amoral political tactician willing to do almost anything no matter how unfair or immoral or dangerous to further the interests of the Republican party.
His military buildup made the Soviets very nervous and it can be argued that hewas a klutz who nearly precipitated a third world war. Republicans trumpet his negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev concerning reductions in nuclear arms. But the real fact was that he was preaching to the converted, that Gorbachev needed no persuasion. Would be interesting to know whether Gorbachev is the one who initiated the proposal on arms limitation.
I was a guest for 10 days at an ambassador's house in Moscow in 1981 while Brezhnev was still in power. The ambassador was a pretty smart cookie and one night at dinner made a prediction about Russian politics. He said something like "The old people are very grateful to the Communist system for giving them heat in winter and job security and full employment and bread on the table, and they put up with the secret police and the poor choice of goods at the grocery and the department store. The young generation, on the other hand, is not grateful and wishes to see radical change and likes Western music and Western jeans and Western goods."
Note the timing of this prediction, 1981, before Ronald Reagan became president.
The Republic party totally misrepresents history in crediting Reagan for the end of the Evil Empire. Read the brilliant article on Mikhail Gorbachev on Wikipedia. It is oh so clear that Gorbachev was a wonderful idealist and political incompetent and that it is he, single handed, who destroyed the Soviet empire, and Russia's position as a superpower, which is why so many Russians detest Gorby.
So --- to credit Reagan with destroying the Soviet Union through grandstanding like "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall", and through massive military spending intended to frighten the Russians, is a total outrageous and Orwellian rewriting of history. But then Orwellian mangling of the truth is a specialty of the new Republican party. Prior to the election of Reagan, the Republicans were a bit too conservative for my taste, and I loved LBJ (apart from the Vietnam war that tore him into little bitty pieces).
But the Republicans after the election of Mr. Reagan became increasingly malign and corrosive and dishonest, with malefactors like Newt Gingrich who helped turn Congress from a relatively collegial place into the dysfunctional mess that it is today.