A lot of Republicans (including a number of presidential candidates) have been campaigning hard to defund Planned Parenthood lately, to lots of public outcry. But it wasn't always this way. Actually, the GOP were the ones who initially backed Planned Parenthood's mission and worked to secure their federal funding. So what happened?

In her history of the "love affair" between the GOP and Planned parenthood, Salon writer Patricia Miller laid it all out in awesome detail. Here's the TL;DR version:

Once Upon A Time, Birth Control Was Illegal

It wasn't even that long ago, actually. All forms of contraception were technically illegal in the U.S. until the Supreme Court ruled to legalize it in their historic Griswold v. Connecticut decision in 1965.

Before that, in most states, you could be fined if you were caught using "any drug, medicinal article, or instrument for the purposes of preventing conception" (that quote is from Connecticut's law), and any doctor caught aiding someone in getting birth control could also be prosecuted. This meant that even married couples had no ability to control the size of their families unless they abstained from sex entirely.

The biggest opponent of birth control was the Catholic Church, and their opposition was so intense that according to Miller, "In 1921, New York Archbishop Patrick Hayes got the police to raid the first public meeting of the American Birth Control League on the grounds that it was indecent."

But Then Katharine Hepburn's Mom Got Involved

Kit Houghton Hepburn, mother of actress Katharine Hepburn, was one of the early Republican activists who worked to legalize access to birth control and raise money to make it widely available. Even though it was still considered scandalous to even talk about birth control at the time, in the early 1920's she helped start the Connecticut Birth Control League, a local chapter of the American Birth Control League, which was founded by Margaret Sanger and eventually became Planned Parenthood.

"I felt that women would always be hopelessly handicapped if they did not have control of how many children they produced," Kit Hepburn said.

Hepburn and her fellow activists -- many of whom were upper-class Republicans -- helped fight the Catholic Church by insistently advocating for the legalization of birth control. They got a major win when the Episcopalian Church approved it in 1930. Once the Supreme Court legalized contraception in 1965, activists like Hepburn started working toward getting federal funding for family planning.

George H.W. Bush Loved Planned Parenthood So Much He Got Nicknamed 'Rubbers'

Former president George H.W. Bush's dad (and former president George W's granddad), Senator Prescott Bush, was such an active supporter of Planned Parenthood in the 1940s that he served as the treasurer of the American Birth Control League's first fundraising campaign -- a move that lost him a term in the Senate after a newspaper exposed the connection.

This had a big influence on the young George H.W. Bush. In 1970, he wrote about the incident in the foreward to a book about how important contraceptives are in the developing world.

He also wrote that he was so "impressed by the sensible approach" the president of Planned Parenthood took to making birth control publicly available that he "took the lead in Congress in providing money and urging -- in fact, even requiring -- that in the United States family planning services be available for every woman, not just the private patient with her own gynecologist."

Bush gave such impassioned speeches in Congress about the importance of making birth control freely available to all women in the U.S. that he was playfully nicknamed "Rubbers," and according to Miller, in 1967 Bush "secured the first federal funding for birth control, and by extension Planned Parenthood, as the decision was made to provide grants to existing providers rather than create a public network of birth control clinics."

Republican President Richard Nixon was on board, too -- after taking office in 1969, he and Bush teamed up to help create the Title X Family Planning Program, which provides, according to Miller, "sexual and reproductive health services to low-income individuals, and is still a major source of funding for Planned Parenthood."

But Then The GOP Basically Said, 'It's Us, Not You'

It isn't that Planned Parenthood stopped living up to the GOP's original hopes for it -- only 3% of all their services go toward abortions; the rest goes toward reproductive health and family planning. Instead, the GOP changed their minds about Planned Parenthood -- mostly because they were threatened with losing votes.

Even though the issue of abortion was starting to cause a ruckus in the 70's and 80's, support for Planned Parenthood continued to come from both Democrats and Republicans. But that all changed in 1994 when Republicans took control of Congress. That's when, according to Miller, "the Christian Coalition, the U.S. Catholic Conference and the National Right to Life Committee began strategizing about how to limit access to abortion," despite the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973.

Miller explains that one of these strategies was to convince the GOP that instead of helping to prevent abortion by reducing the numbers of unwanted pregnancies -- logic they'd always previously been on board with -- family planning somehow "contributed to abortion rather than preventing it."

These organizations then issued "Voter scorecards," which ranked political candidates on religious issues that were important to their members, including abortion. They started to rank all family planning funding as if it only meant abortion, docking politicians' scores if they supported funding organizations like Planned Parenthood. This had a huge impact with voters at the polls.

We Are Never Getting Back Together

As a result of all this, Republican support for Planned Parenthood dwindled dramatically in the years that followed. Miller wrote that this, combined with a long series of political attacks against the organization, eventually came to mean that "pro-family planning Republicans became an endangered species."

By 2011, the breakup was really final. When the GOP tried to defund Planned Parenthood that time (yes, we've done this before), only six Republicans voted not to. Miller wrote that she thinks the GOP is betraying their own history and roots now.

"Republicans are willing to sacrifice women’s health because they’re looking to cripple the nation’s best-known provider of abortion services and silence one of the most important political voices in favor of reproductive choice," she concluded. "And to do that, they’re willing to destroy everything Kit Hepburn and generations of Republicans built."