The national pro-life movement is upset with Donald Trump and the national GOP. Members of that movement have understandable concerns about Trump relating to the apparent unwillingness of his HHS appointees to regulate abortion drugs and prevent their importation into pro-life states. The broader concern, though, misapprehends the political landscape. According to the Wall Street Journal, one of the main pro-life groups intends to spend $160 million in the midterms and the 2028 primary, but only if candidates commit “to pro-life action at the national level.”
The reason federal Republicans are increasingly reticent when it comes to abortion isn’t because they’re pro-choice; it’s because they’re anti-losing. The pro-life movement is on its back foot politically and has been since Dobbs. It’s not because more senators aren’t sponsoring messaging legislation. It’s quite simply because the pro-life cause keeps losing in conservative states.
If the pro-life movement wants federal Republicans to stick their necks out politically, it needs to show that doing so is politically survivable. This is why pro-life groups should put aside their federal ambitions for the time being and focus on, for example, Georgia’s May 19 judicial election.
Two Georgia supreme court justices, Sarah Warren and Charlie Bethel, are up for reelection. Both are excellent young jurists who interpret the law rather than make it. Democrats, however, have turned this traditionally nonpartisan race into a political circus, largely focusing on abortion. According to accounts from Georgia experts like Erick Erickson, Democrats are galloping in early voting. They are also vastly outspending their competition, I’m told.
Warren’s case, in particular, should be a five-alarm fire for national pro-life groups. She is up against Georgia state senator Jen Jordan, who is best known for her impassioned and mendacious defenses of abortion, including testifying in the U.S. Senate against a 20-week abortion ban. That is, her claim to fame is opposing at the state level the kind of legislation that national pro-life groups insist is a political slam dunk that should be applied federally.
If Warren, who’s a judicial conservative and a young mother, loses as an incumbent in Georgia to a liberal running explicitly on an abortion platform that would be at home in North Korea, how is that going to look to these national Republicans the pro-life activist class is trying to pressure? No amount of favorable issue polling on 20-week bans will be able to counteract that. The polls that matter are elections.
The problem that the pro-life movement faces isn’t a lack of conviction on the part of elected Republicans in Congress; it’s a lack of victories in the states. Victory begets victory and loss begets loss. Grand strategies to replicate the NRA’s tactics from the 1990s are well and good, but if pro-lifers want a seat at the table in Washington, they need to show why they deserve it by not losing in places like Atlanta.
For all I know, pro-life groups are already engaged in Georgia, turning out rural voters and hitting Jordan for the extremist that she is. If so, fantastic. But even if they are, it’s not getting through.
Pro-life groups have two weeks to get the message out that the election in Georgia is between pro-abortion extremists and principled jurists committed to the rule of law. If they don’t, it’ll be yet another mark in the loss column at the state level, and no amount of political hardball will convince pro-life Republicans in Washington that the issue is really a winner.