Only One Party Has Become More Radical on Abortion

T here’s a popular talking point in progressive circles, echoed repeatedly by top-ranking Democrats since the leaked Roe opinion, that the Republican Party has somehow become more “extreme” on abortion in recent years. “The party of Lincoln and Eisenhower has now completely devolved into the party of Trump,” Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer wrote in a joint statement on the heels of the leak. “Every Republican Senator who supported Senator McConnell and voted for Trump Justices pretending that this day would never come will now have to explain themselves to the American people.” Two days later, President Biden reiterated the sentiment, suggesting that an overturning of Roe could be followed by state laws “saying that children who are LGBTQ can’t be in classrooms with other children” and calling the “MAGA crowd” the “most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history” (he then helpfully clarified he was referring to “recent” history).

But what, specifically, about the GOP’s line on abortion has become more extreme? Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden didn’t care to say. In fact, Republicans have been remarkably consistent on the issue for just shy of a half century. Throughout all of the various iterations of Republican politics since the passage of Roe, the party’s stated commitment to life has remained steady. Were Democrats not paying attention? Or did they just not think the millions of pro-lifers were serious when they said that overturning Roe, and eventually ending the moral abomination of abortion nationwide, was the goal of their movement? Shockingly, when pro-lifers said they were pro-life, they actually meant it. It’s not their fault that their partisan opponents didn’t take them at their word.

It’s true that, in the years leading up to Roe, it was not at all clear that the GOP was going to be the pro-life party. While Roe overturned abortion restrictions in almost every state in the country, the one notable exception was New York, whose liberal Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller, signed what then–Planned Parenthood president Dr. Alan Guttmacher approvingly described as “the most liberal abortion law in the world.” Even Ronald Reagan signed an abortion-liberalization law when he was governor of California. At the same time, Catholics were a heavily Democratic constituency, and their opposition to abortion was reflected in the views of Democratic elites. As John Murdock wrote in a 2020 essay for National Affairs:

In 1972, the early frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination was Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, a Catholic who spoke of the “sanctity” of unborn life. Even though Muskie would lose the nomination to the socially liberal George McGovern, the vice-presidential nod went to a Catholic pro-lifer, Sargent Shriver. Further, an effort from the party’s feminist wing to insert an abortion-rights plank into the 1972 platform was soundly defeated, with 59% of the delegates voting against it.

But things changed quickly after the passage of Roe. The Supreme Court’s nationwide legalization of abortion — as well as school prayer, the mainstreaming of homosexuality, the campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment, and a number of other issues — motivated the previously politics-averse religious Right to begin organizing, lobbying, and campaigning for ideologically aligned candidates. At the same time, the growing influence of feminists in the Democratic coalition marginalized the party’s social conservatives. Jimmy Carter, the privately pro-life Evangelical who was endorsed by many leaders of the Religious Right in 1976, often found himself at odds with this new political faction: In 1978, the president pushed for the resignation of his special assistant for women’s affairs after she publicly challenged his opposition to federal funding for abortions, writing in a memo that his public position on the issue was “actually more liberal than I feel personally.”

At the same time, the GOP was refashioning itself as the political vehicle for social conservatism. In an effort to appeal to the religious Right, Ford dropped Rockefeller from the vice-presidential spot on the 1976 GOP ticket. That year’s Republican platform noted a range of opinion on abortion in the party and called for “a continuance of the public dialogue on abortion” but added, for the first time, that the party “supports the efforts of those who seek enactment of a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children.” (The same year, Reagan told a news conference that the abortion bill he signed was a “mistake.”) The 1980 GOP platform recognized “differing views on this question,” but affirmed “our support of a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children.” By 1984, the language was unambiguous: “The unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We therefore reaffirm our support for a human life amendment to the Constitution, and we endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children,” the platform said, adding that the party supported “the appointment of judges at all levels of the judiciary who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.”

The GOP’s commitment to the right to life, then, has been public and clear for decades — well before it became “the party of Trump” or the “MAGA crowd,” to use the language of Democrats this week. In fact, the potential overturn of Roe at the hands of Republican-appointed justices falls short of the party’s stated ambitions, which have called for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion nationwide since 1976. Where, precisely, has the party’s stance on abortion become more “extreme”?

We hear a lot from the Left about the GOP being guilty of “projection.” The Bulwark pens articles titled “The Republican Party’s Partisan Projection Problem”; in Salon, journalist Kirk Swearingen accuses Republicans of “a psychological projection of their own desire to bring the American experiment as a democratic republic to an end”; “the right are truly masters of projection,” Yale historian Joanne Freeman declares on Twitter. But on this issue, at least, only one side is guilty of projection — and it ain’t the Grand Old Party.

Whereas the GOP’s position on abortion has remained relatively steady since 1976, the Democratic Party’s line on the issue has continued to slide to the left. The party that nominated a pro-life vice-presidential candidate in 1972 quickly moved to embrace Bill Clinton’s famous “safe, legal and rare” adage by the 1990s; but that, too, was only a momentary waypoint. By 2020, the suggestion that abortion should be “rare” was seen as unacceptably outmoded. Despite the fact that Andrew Yang supported legal abortion up until the point of birth, the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate was slammed by activists and politicians in his party for suggesting that Democrats “have to get back to the point where no one is suggesting that we be celebrating an abortion at any point in the pregnancy.”

At the same time, House Democrats pass legislation legalizing elective abortion up until the point of birth, and their counterparts in state legislatures push laws legalizing elective abortion up to and even after the point of birth. In 2019, Ralph Northam, then the Democratic governor of Virginia, infamously defended a late-term-abortion law introduced by his colleagues in the state by suggesting that, if a baby was delivered amid an attempted abortion while the mother was in labor, “a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother” about whether the child would be “resuscitated.” In March, Maryland Democrats introduced a law that effectively decriminalized letting a baby die due to neglect through the first 28 days after birth. Just a few weeks later, a bill was introduced in the California legislature legalizing death-by-neglect for babies up to six weeks after birth.

Democrats today hold the most unequivocally, unapologetically, and grotesquely radical line on abortion of any major political party in the Western world. So, President Biden, tell us again — and speak slowly, so we can understand: Who, exactly, is “the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history”?