Pro-lifers can recover some of their political power within the Republican coalition if they prevail on this issue.
There’s no good case for Republicans to reach a deal that increases Obamacare subsidies and lets them be used for policies that cover abortion, just as the editors argue today. Here I want to make an additional point about the political health of the pro-life movement.
That movement has had some great successes in recent years. Our government no longer pretends that the Constitution requires unborn children to be treated as unpersons with no rights; several states have granted them legal protections. The political backlash against these successes, as the editors also note, has been weaker than is generally appreciated.
But there’s no denying that the movement has less sway within the Republican Party than it used to have. In part that’s because a lot of Republican politicians have absorbed the conventional wisdom that exaggerates the power of that backlash. To some degree, I think pro-lifers ourselves — voters and activists — have absorbed that view and let it affect how hard we push the politicians. I believe, for example, that pro-life groups could and should have at least gotten stronger commitments from the administration about regulating abortion pills before accepting a pro-choice secretary of health and human services.
That’s water under the bridge. A problem now, though, is that Republican politicians are increasingly under the impression that they can take pro-lifers for granted — and the perception of declining pro-life political power has to affect the behavior even of politicians who are favorably disposed toward the pro-life cause.
That context makes it even more important to say no to taxpayer funding of abortion via Obamacare subsidies. Pro-lifers can recover some of their political power within the Republican coalition if they prevail on this issue, even though it puts them at odds with the party leader. And they ought to be able to prevail: Speaker Mike Johnson has been admirably firm in his opposition to abortion subsidies, without as yet suffering any noticeable blowback. Pro-life groups that generally support the president are bucking him on this one, too.
But if pro-lifers lose on this issue — where the Republican Party has previously had a solid track record, and polls suggest they have public support — their decline will deepen. Those Republican congressmen who care about the future of the pro-life movement should keep that in mind.