The Pro-Life Movement Today

Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers cut an abortion ad in the final stretch, responding to attacks from his opponent. I wrote about it earlier; Ramesh Ponnuru concurred dubitante. Since then various pro-life groups have come out of the woodwork to . . . well, not to oppose Rogers exactly, but rather to express regret and to prophesy that Rogers’s embrace of pro-choice language may cost him his seat.

They’re obviously sincere as to the substance of Rogers’s ad, but one wonders if the prediction game isn’t laying down a marker to later take credit for the scalp (perhaps having seen the NYT and Atlas polls). If the GOP is truly careening to a Watergate-style annihilation, blaming Rogers’s loss on abortion is like blaming the lives lost in the tragic Palm Beach jet crash on the passengers not wearing their seat belts. It won’t work.

Stepping back, though, this dynamic demonstrates a fundamental misreading of pro-life politics at present. For 50 years the pro-life movement was a mass movement, enjoying popular support and suffering elite opposition (from Republicans as well as liberals). Post-Dobbs, that has inverted. The pro-life movement needs to come to terms with this change if it wants to succeed.

Recent elections and fairly consistent polling have shown that much of that popular support was — at best — soft. This makes some sense intuitively: Due to the Roe-Casey regime, pro-life legislation was kept to the margins where it’s relatively popular. Saying you were “pro-life” was more of an aspiration than a policy platform with real consequences for real women (who then go on TV). Once it became a live-fire exercise and “no abortions” meant “no abortions,” the politics shifted. As a result the pro-life position fails in red-state referenda, grisly extremism flourishes in blue states, and Democrats wield federal “abortion bans” as a cudgel against congressional Republicans.

It’s a jarring change and one that the movement has been slow to recognize and slower still to fix. But perhaps more important is how the mass movement relates to the elite.

Most pro-life leaders came up in a time when the pro-life position was popular among the people but very unpopular among the elite. That’s to be expected among the academic, legal, media, and financial elite. But what really confounded pro-lifers for decades was the hostility they encountered among the Republican elite. The donor class, the consultant class, congressional leadership, senior executive and congressional staff, cabinet officials, elite lawyers, judges . . . the sense was always that they, at best, tolerated pro-lifers as uncouth but necessary members of the political coalition. As such life was not a priority but merely a box to check before moving on to tax cuts, deregulation, and international affairs.

The movement responded to this by keeping their feet to the fire. “Don’t take us for granted. You need us. And this is what we demand.” It generally worked because the Republican elite understood that this mass movement was a key part of the electoral coalition and it should be placated and not crossed. (I wrote some about the grassroots role of pro-life suburban women in GOP politics in the decades following Roe.)

The big change over the last 20 years is that the Republican elite are now broadly pro-life. When many current pro-life leaders cut their teeth they were dealing with Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Al Gonzales, Bill Frist, and Denny Hastert. Now it’s JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Will Scharf, John Thune, and Mike Johnson. Abortion cases that were decided by Sandra Day O’Connor are now decided by Amy Coney Barrett. The Senate Judiciary Committee has gone from Arlen Specter and Orrin Hatch to Lindsey Graham, Chuck Grassley, and Mike Lee. In my decade in senior positions in the Senate and Justice Department, I don’t think I could count on one hand the number of pro-choice colleagues I had. The same is more or less true for the lower-court judges we appointed. The top levels of Republican political power in all three branches in Washington are almost entirely pro-life now.

Why this is the case is an interesting question, and there may not be an obvious answer. Part of it is surely the dominance of Roman Catholicism in legal-conservative circles. Part of it may be that everyone with authority today came up in Republican politics during the heyday of the pro-life mass movement, so it’s what they know. Whatever the reason, the views of the Republican elite on abortion are as different from those of 20 or 30 years ago as night and day.

That’s the problem with the movement’s current approach. It’s no longer the case that you need to hold their feet to the fire to get pro-life things done. They want to do pro-life things. The Katie Britts, Tom Cottons, and Brandon Gills of the world want to advance the pro-life cause; they don’t need threats. The issue is that they also want to get reelected, and — unlike 20 or 30 years ago — it not only doesn’t help them do that, but it might hurt them.

This is why a strategy based on the old dynamics of “punishing” defection doesn’t work. They’re not being pro-life because they’re afraid of the consequences. They’re being pro-life despite the consequences.

The pro-life movement needs to recognize and embrace this. Instead of assuming that betrayal waits around every corner and preparing threatened retaliations, assume that the people who are pro-life want to act pro-life. Support them as they advance that (unfortunately) unpopular cause at personal cost, and give them space to make up the balance politically when necessary. Find new ways for them to do so without triggering electoral consequences rather than threatening them with different (illusory) electoral consequences for failing to adhere to the old ways. All the while, focus on fixing the electoral problems so that the political costs are minimized and they can follow their principles freely without worrying about November.

Does this cover everything? No. The current functionally pro-choice president is a lurking and important factor in all of this. One wonders, too, what the kids coming up now (the future elite) will think about the issue, with the party line having shifted and Roe being old news. But you can’t solve every problem.

If the pro-life movement continues to approach the issue as it did 30 years ago, with the strategy and tactics of that age, it will continue to flounder politically. The more it flounders politically, the less their natural allies in the Republican elite will be willing to stick their necks out for it. The current opportunity, such as it is, will be squandered.

Dobbs was a turning point. The pro-life movement needs to assess the new political realities with fresh eyes.