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Pro-Life Peril and Hope
By: Nathanael Blake, originally published August 8, 2024, The Public Discourse
The GOP has always been an imperfect and unreliable vehicle for pro-life policy, and Trump’s approach will make matters much worse. Pro-lifers must be clear-eyed about the danger our movement is in, wise and unwearied in our political response, and hopeful despite the darkness of our culture.
Pro-lifers gambled at the Devil’s casino and won. Donald Trump—Donald Trump!—appointed the three Supreme Court justices whose votes ensured the end of Roe v. Wade. But, instead of taking their unlikely winnings and leaving, many pro-life voters chose to stick around and double down, helping Trump easily secure another GOP presidential nomination after his 2020 loss.
Now they are paying the price. Trump and his MAGA populism are selling out pro-lifers in ways that the old country club GOP establishment could only dream of. The new GOP platform significantly waters down the party’s pro-life commitments, and as Alexandra DeSanctis recently wrote for National Review, “the Republican presidential nominee has essentially told pro-lifers to take a hike.” The result, according to DeSanctis, is
a disaster for the pro-life movement, which has long fought to retain influence within the GOP to have a political vessel for its effort to protect unborn human life. Now, that work of decades is being reversed by a Trump-induced effort to be rid of the topic for good, premised on the mistaken notion that being meaningfully pro-life is an electoral liability.
The GOP has always been an imperfect and unreliable vehicle for pro-life policy, and Trump’s approach will make matters much worse. Pro-lifers must be clear-eyed about the danger our movement is in, wise and unwearied in our political response, and hopeful despite the darkness of our culture. We must remain confident in the righteousness of our cause: abortion is horrible, and a culture of love and life is better than a culture of selfishness and death.
The immediate political task is dealing with Trump’s perfidy—a problem that was predictable. He was pro-abortion for most of his life, and his pro-life turn—except perhaps for some visceral revulsion at late-term abortion—was obviously insincere and transactional. Thus, it is unsurprising that he has defaulted to his factory settings and is throwing pro-lifers under the bus now that he feels that he no longer needs to conciliate them.
What is surprising is how many pro-lifers are thanking him for it. As DeSanctis notes, “leaders from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, American Principles Project, and Americans United for Life, among others” rushed to laud the new GOP platform remade in Trump’s image. Though they might pretend otherwise, these activists know that pro-lifers have been demoted in the GOP hierarchy. Their determination to put on a happy face is presumably because they know that Trump is petulant and vengeful when criticized, but is sometimes susceptible to flattery. Thus, despite Trump’s clear preference for sidelining the pro-life cause, these leaders still hope to get some scraps from him; they know that they will get nothing from the other side.
There may be a hardheaded realism to this calculation, but realism also demands honesty about the position pro-lifers are in. Unfortunately, the short-term political imperative to try to wheedle some pro-life personnel and policies from Donald Trump via flattery impedes an accurate assessment of the pro-life movement’s peril.
Leadership matters. Politicians shape public opinion and political possibilities, as well as respond to them, and Trump’s abandonment of the pro-life cause is already proving contagious. Ohio Senator JD Vance betrayed the pro-life cause in order to be Trump’s VP pick. Marco Rubio of Florida turned for much less. We should expect many other politicians to follow suit, trimming their support for the pro-life cause or even abandoning it entirely. Thus, fears that taking a strong pro-life position is electoral poison could easily turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Voters respond to political leadership, and Republican leaders’ running from the issue will teach their voters to do the same.
This flight from pro-life principles might end with pro-lifers having no political vehicle for our policy goals. As Patrick Brown recently warned in the New York Times: “Pro-life organizations that insist the G.O.P. remains as pro-life today as it was in the recent past are deluding themselves.” And social conservatives who cheer Trump as their champion “may be signing up for their own political obsolescence. Politics will always require some triangulation and prudence, but too much accommodation is a path to electoral irrelevance.”
Though the pro-life movement is not yet at the nadir of irrelevance, it is in real danger of becoming an electoral afterthought. The ascendant MAGA faction of the Republican Party is eager to sideline pro-lifers, a goal it shares with much of the old GOP establishment. Despite their differences, both factions would prefer to harvest pro-life votes while offering little more than not being as bad as the Democrats, who are more pro-abortion than ever. To avoid this fate, pro-lifers will need to recognize their precarious political position and respond with prudence and diligence.
It is essential to limit the extent to which Republican leaders are running away from the pro-life cause. When it comes to Trump (and Vance), it may be too late, but other figures may not possess the particular indulgence Republican voters, activists, and media have granted Trump—just imagine the firestorm of criticism that would have rained down upon Mitch McConnell had he denigrated pro-life positions the way Trump has. It may be possible, albeit difficult, to keep lesser officials and candidates in line in a way that has become impossible with Trump.
Pro-lifers will also need to refocus on the state level. Unless and until Democrats gain complete control of the federal government, abortion laws will be a state-by-state fight. The pro-abortion side has had success with ballot initiatives since the Dobbs decision, but even if they keep up their winning streak they will eventually run out of states where they can use this tactic, leaving at least some states still protecting developing human persons in their mothers’ wombs. And GOP legislators in red states (e.g., Ohio) that have passed initiatives writing abortion into their constitutions will have to get back to work on regulating abortion by indirect methods, as they did under Roe. It will also be essential to reform state court systems that use a “Missouri Plan” approach that essentially allows the (usually very liberal) plaintiffs’ bar to pick state judges, who then impose state versions of Roe.
The way forward for pro-lifers will also depend on clever regulation and litigation at both the state and federal levels. These efforts will need to be adaptive; defensive litigation against a Harris administration’s pro-abortion radicalism will be very different from pressuring (politically but also in court if needed) a Trump administration. Even a Trump administration should at least dump the various pro-abortion administrative policies Biden has pushed through. Particularly important is reining in the dangerous mail-order chemical abortion drug regime that Biden implemented, which attempts to circumvent state laws restricting and regulating abortion.
Though we can hope for this, pro-lifers need to accept that putting Donald Trump back in the White House may do very little to help us in the long-term fight to provide legal protection to human beings in utero. Indeed, it is possible that his return to power would do as much harm as good. We should, of course, try to get what we can from him—from originalist judges to better Health and Human Services policies—but we must not tie ourselves and our cause tightly to a man who has shown that he disdains us. Indeed, we must provide a cultural narrative that is clearly distinct from Trump and what he represents. Donald Trump has lived as an avatar of post-Sexual Revolution male indulgence and entitlement; the Trump lifestyle is incompatible with a pro-life culture, even if he is a temporary political ally.
To win the culture, pro-lifers must offer a compelling alternative vision to both the pro-abortion Left and the post-Christian MAGA Right. The good news is that this is getting easier because our culture is a mess when it comes to sex, relationships, and family. As one oft-repeated meme has it, married millennials look at Gen Z’s relational landscape and feel like we caught the last chopper out of ’Nam (or the last plane out of Afghanistan).
The sexual revolution required abortion on demand to eliminate the natural result of having sex, but sexual liberation has not delivered on its promises. We are now a few generations in—each more liberated than the last—and the results are that men and women are increasingly lonely, childless, and unhappy. Indeed, our culture doesn’t even know what it means to be a man or a woman anymore, let alone how to provide a reliable template for men and women coming together and forming healthy families. Meanwhile, the abundance of great sex that was supposed to result from breaking down all the old norms has not materialized.
Men and women are increasingly adversarial, with opposing interests, and children are treated as commodities—to be prized, purchased, or discarded as adults desire. The natural asymmetry of human reproduction is treated not as a reason for cooperation and solidarity between the sexes, but rather, as intrinsically given to exploitation, enmity, and violence. To those living in this landscape of unloving and unstable relationships, abortion appears necessary. But amid this cultural wreckage, living in a genuine pro-life way will become one of our most effective means of persuasion because it will stand out for its hope, love, and kindness.
Thus, despite the political challenges confronting pro-lifers after the end of Roe, we should speak confidently to our culture. It is not just that abortion is terrible (though it is), but that the culture sustained and encouraged by abortion is immiserating. Pro-lifers are not called just to defend life, but to proclaim and live a better way of life.
Nathanael Blake is a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.