Donald Trump’s political advisers don’t want to talk about abortion, but pro-lifers need to speak up.
Donald Trump’s political advisers don’t want to talk about abortion, but pro-lifers need to speak up.
T ensions between the Trump administration and the pro-life movement have been largely dormant, but they’re starting to come back in full force. Marjorie Dannenfelser, the head of pro-life political advocacy organization Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, recently called on President Donald Trump to fire FDA Commissioner Marty Makary for his failure to act swiftly on his promised review of the abortion pill, mifepristone. Lila Rose of Live Action has joined in. Just days ago, former Vice President Mike Pence reiterated his call to fire Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over mifepristone. Simultaneously, Trump’s inner circle is lashing out against Missouri Senator Josh Hawley for new pro-life messaging efforts that he and his wife, Erin, an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom, are promoting.
The current rash of ill feeling between Trump and pro-lifers has at its core an unresolved tension over why Republicans were unsuccessful in the 2022 midterms. Trump’s political team blames abortion, and he has de-emphasized the issue ever since. But to survive as a movement, pro-life organizations and leaders must push back on Trumpworld’s instincts toward silence and inaction.
Josh and Erin Hawley are launching the Love Life Initiative, an entity promoting more positive messaging on the abortion issue. The idea is to present the pro-life cause as focused on alleviating the needs of women facing challenging pregnancies, with commercial campaigns and other messaging strategies. This effort makes sense. As I have written, the challenge pro-lifers face is to convince people that abortion is not the compassionate answer to problems of poverty, lack of health care, and lack of family assistance. Women and children in these situations need genuine and tangible forms of support: material, medical, and moral.
But the Trump camp seemingly doesn’t want to touch the abortion issue before the 2026 elections. A “close Trump adviser” gave a revelatory quote in an Axios story about the question: “Clearly, Senator Hawley and his political team learned nothing from the 2022 elections, when the SCOTUS abortion ruling [overturning Roe v. Wade] resuscitated the Democrats in the midterms.”
This is a clear overstatement that reveals a touchiness about 2022 within Trump’s political team. Abortion’s electoral impact post-Dobbs varied state by state, and it is a massive stretch to claim that it singlehandedly “resuscitated” the Democrats. The environment Trump created, supporting lackluster candidates while relitigating the 2020 election, could just as easily be blamed for the GOP’s underperformance.
Of course, Trump and his political inner circle refuse to take any such blame. They needed a scapegoat, and they calculated that pro-life voters would not stray even if Trump de-emphasized the issue. As a result, from 2022 onward, the Trump team has engaged in a concerted effort to downplay abortion, condemn it as a political non-issue, and voice support for “access” to mifepristone.
Republicans managed to extract commitments from Kennedy and Makary for a safety review of mifepristone during their confirmation hearings. Hawley and other pro-lifers understood how mifepristone is the main driver of American abortion, whose deregulation led to annual American abortions increasing from 900,000 to a million during the Biden presidency. A commitment to action on this topic was of critical importance for Makary and Kennedy’s confirmations.
At first, pro-lifers were satisfied with the prospect of restrictions following an orderly review. However, it took until this past September for the review to even begin, and it is unclear when or if it will end. Reports from Bloomberg indicate that the review is being deliberately slow-walked until after the midterms. Hawley has also pointed out Makary’s evasiveness over whether this is a de novo, independent review process (what he and other pro-lifers were expecting), or simply a routine assessment following existing FDA regulations.
This isn’t to say Trump has done nothing on abortion in his second term, but everything he has done has been relatively safe. Though he went along with Republican congressional efforts to defund Planned Parenthood for a year in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, it was far from the most politically delicate aspect of the measure. Medicaid cuts present him and the GOP with the greatest electoral risk, but mifepristone remains the elephant in the room of abortion-related issues.
While unsatisfied pro-lifers may call for Kennedy’s or Makary’s ouster, it only makes sense to fire them if they are failing to do what their boss wants. Unfortunately, HHS and FDA’s inaction seems perfectly consistent with the abortion-downplaying posture Trump has maintained since the 2022 elections. The Trump camp’s leaked critiques of Hawley only further confirm it. In short, Makary and Kennedy aren’t the problem: Most likely, it’s Trump.
The influence pro-life organizations are trying to preserve, and the balancing act between criticizing the administration and maintaining relationships, is important. Without these groups’ heroic behind-the-scenes work, the Trump IVF executive action would have been far worse than it was. It was risky and courageous for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (among others) to call out Makary as explicitly as it did.
More hardball might be necessary over time, given the troubling logic that Trumpworld’s hostility to Hawley’s Love Life Initiative effort evinces. If merely talking about abortion — even if just to improve the party’s messaging on the topic — is an unacceptable political risk, then it could effectively require the GOP to abandon the issue. It cedes the rhetorical field to pro-abortion forces. And if we cannot talk about it during election years — or even non-election years, given that this argument is occurring in 2025 — then when can we talk about it?
More importantly, when can we act on it? Those who would avoid restricting mifepristone in 2025 for fear of elections in 2026 could also avoid mifepristone in 2027 for fear of elections in 2028, with the cycle of fear and silence continuing ad infinitum.
A post-Trump world is emerging, in one way or another. Pro-life groups might need to adopt a different, tougher approach to this administration in order to break its cycle of silence and inaction. If they don’t, the pro-life cause might lose its place in the GOP agenda.