Why Democrats Can’t Moderate on Abortion

F ollowing Massachusetts’s decision to legalize abortion through childbirth, National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez questioned whether abortion liberalization could ever go too far for its proponents. Princeton’s Robert George plaintively asked if there were any Democrats willing to resist this level of abortion extremism. It called to my mind the following quote:

So let us work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions, let’s reduce unintended pregnancies.  Let’s make adoption more available.  Let’s provide care and support for women who do carry their children to term.  Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded not only in sound science, but also in clear ethics, as well as respect for the equality of women. Those are things we can do.

Barack Obama said this during his 2009 commencement address at the University of Notre Dame. But a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since 2009, and the Democratic Party of today could never produce a presidential nominee willing to speak about abortion like Obama did. Because the pro-abortion movement has rejected the goal of making abortion “safe, legal, and rare” in favor of pursuing universal “access,” there is no room left in the party for moderation.

While pro-life public policy efforts are at something of a stall, the Democrats are charging forward with ever more aggressive expansion of abortion in blue states. Beyond Massachusetts’s demonic promotion of near-infanticide, the state legislature in California is advancing a bill to allow non-doctors (nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants) to perform second- or third-trimester surgical abortions. They are also pushing a bill to mandate the availability of abortion pills within the student health centers at every California community college — Gavin Newsom already signed legislation to provide mifepristone in the student health centers of California’s public four-year universities in 2019.

All these measures aim at one goal: access. It is the guiding normative value that all pro-abortion legislation secures. Any barrier to someone getting an abortion — cost, geography, gestational age restrictions, lack of qualified providers — must be overcome for the sake of making abortion accessible.

The Clintonian formulation of “safe, legal, and rare” formerly justified Democrats like Joe Biden supporting restrictions like the Hyde Amendment, which blocked direct federal funding for abortion. It was part of a broader Democratic posture that viewed abortion as a necessary evil to permit, not a good to promote. Reducing abortions, or the need for abortions, was viewed as a broadly acceptable, bipartisan goal, as Obama’s 2009 comments show. Evangelical and Catholic Obama supporters in 2008 and 2012 rationalized their votes by arguing that Democratic policies could reduce total abortions through more generous social programs.

But by the end of the Obama era, such attitudes had become unacceptable in the Democratic Party. Moderate, pro-life leaning Democrats in Congress saw their ranks decimated in the 2010 and 2014 elections. Hillary Clinton in 2016 became the first Democratic presidential nominee to oppose Hyde, and the 2016 Democratic platform was the first to call for its abolition. Joe Biden completely abandoned his 40-year support for Hyde over the course of a week in 2019.

The Biden FDA’s rules (first introduced in 2021 and made permanent in 2023) permitting telemedicine-prescribed, mail-order abortion changed the entire landscape of abortion provision in America. It meant that anyone with a smartphone and a mailbox could access abortion, regardless of one’s physical proximity to a brick-and-mortar clinic or qualified physician. Further, it helped bypass the restrictions on access posed by new, post-Dobbs state laws banning abortion.

Left-wing medical public policy advocates had been pushing for this new practice for years leading up to the 2020 election. Abortion access was the basis of a 2017 article in the New England Journal of Medicine calling for the abortion drug to be “unburdened” by its FDA restrictions requiring in-person prescription and distribution. Covid-19 was merely the pretext for the FDA’s “temporary” change to permit telemedicine abortion in 2021.

The results of this push for “access” are stomach-churning. Total American abortions have jumped from 900,000 in 2021 (when the FDA mail-order abortion rules first went into effect), to 1.1 million in 2025. This leads to a few sobering conclusions:

• For the duration of the Roe era, abortion numbers didn’t necessarily spike under Democrats or decline under Republicans, and one could put forward at least colorable arguments that Democrats’ more generous social welfare policies reduced abortion numbers more than direct Republican restrictions did. The dramatic spike in abortions under Biden make such arguments laughable today. Whatever impact a more generous welfare state might have, it can’t make up for access policies that make abortion almost as simple as an Amazon Prime order.
• The mere goal of reducing abortion has no home within the Democratic Party anymore. A comparison of the 2008 and 2024 Democratic platforms makes this clear. Reducing the need for abortion was an explicit goal in 2008, but it was nowhere to be found in 2024. Instead, the 2024 platform piled paragraph on top of paragraph pledging to protect access at every possible turn. Democrats have diligently worked to eliminate any “safe, legal, and rare” verbiage from their messaging over the last decade.
• Since it’s now clear that Democratic policies increase abortion numbers, that Democrats don’t care if abortions increase, and that they view any barrier to access as bad, I don’t know what field for moderation could exist. If those are one’s priors, how does one logically oppose any expansion of abortion? Today, they justify third-trimester abortions, letting non-physicians perform surgeries, or sticking abortion pills into student health centers. Tomorrow, they will justify eliminating conscience protections for doctors, breaking the filibuster to reinstate Roe via legislation, and God knows what else.

So, to answer Lopez and Professor George: I think the possibility of Democratic moderation on this topic is extremely remote. God help us all.