The GOP isn’t the ‘pro-life party’ anymore

If you spend much time with people who passionately oppose abortion, you’ve probably heard this argument before: Legal abortion is an issue of the deepest import that concerns the death of defenseless children. Therefore, we must always vote for candidates who oppose abortion, regardless of any other factor, since nothing can outweigh the moral gravity of this issue.
Many Americans believe this to be true, and have acted accordingly at the ballot box for decades.
It’s thus been very disorienting for these people to hear the Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump say last month that he is not on their team, with a social media post that said, “My administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.” This should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. To me, Trump always seemed insincere in his pronouncements on abortion, and he previously gutted the 40-year-old plank of the GOP’s platform. More recently, he has weighed in on in vitro fertilization treatments, guaranteeing access despite the fact that IVF has always been divisive among abortion opponents.
There is no intellectually honest way to read these events other than an abject defeat for the anti-abortion movement. As a political entity, it has been reduced to being a largely ineffective apparatus within the Republican Party. People who have made principled stances not to support pro-abortion-rights politicians are left with nowhere to go. Sure, Trump proceeded to dance around whether he, as a Florida resident, would support ending Florida’s six-week abortion ban. But that’s just muddying the waters. There is no “pro-life party” as anyone would have recognized it even four years ago.
Ironically, there are two people who want to ignore this fact: Trump, who needs to placate the more moderate members of the electorate, but also needs the votes of people who oppose abortion to win, and Vice President Kamala Harris, who desperately wants to run on the issue and capture a supermajority of voters who support abortion rights.
So how did we get here? And what is next?
The short answer to the first question is that the anti-abortion movement walked into a cul-de-sac. Facing both political and legal obstacles due to the Supreme Court taking abortion off the table in Roe v. Wade, they focused on the legal side. There was a convergence of abortion opponents and originalist legal practitioners who believed that Roe was a constitutional abomination (even Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought that), and who favored appointing judges that would overturn it. The focus on overturning Roe gave the anti-abortion movement a hammerlock on the Republican Party, rather than making real inroads politically, since both parts of the coalition were on the right. There have been token efforts to prop up a dwindling number of anti-abortion Democrats, but never a concerted effort to create a Democratic foothold.
But with the Supreme Court finally overturning Roe in the Dobbs decision, they were the dog that caught the car. Public opinion, while always mixed, now features a roughly 3-1 ratio of those who think abortion should always be legal versus those who think it should always be illegal, and repeated ballot initiatives show those in the middle lean strongly on the abortion-rights side, even in very red states. The fact that the anti-abortion community functionally partnered with a president who openly bragged about living the kind of libertine lifestyle they opposed couldn’t have helped. To some people, this confirmed the worst stereotypes about pro-lifers and Christians more generally. The New Evangelicals, a left-leaning Christian group, recently said on X that “Christian nationalists have spent years telling us you can’t vote for a pro-choice candidate and be a Christian. They’re about to prove they don’t actually believe that.”
That was an uncharitable and intentionally divisive statement. Most abortion opponents aren’t Christian nationalists, some will blank their ballots, and while some may be suspicious of Christians who support abortion rights, questioning their faith is rarely explicit. But it reflects the challenge to the mindset that has long survived in the anti-abortion community. To make real progress, the movement has to reform and get used to making compromises they are not used to making. And, this is not an original idea, but the pro-life movement should look to the Civil Rights Movement.
The Oxford Encyclopedia states that the American Civil Rights Movement was “a religious movement, sustained by the religious power unlocked within southern black churches.” Indeed, the Rev. Derwin Gray, a prominent Black pastor, Deseret contributor and BYU grad, and a strong advocate for multiethnic churches, has encouraged people to see the Civil Rights Movement as a religious revival.
But the Civil Rights Movement was first a social movement and only later became a political movement. It was not absolutist in its thinking. Nor was it anywhere near as partisan as the anti-abortion movement has become. Indeed, as a movement, it worked hard to have a foothold in both parties. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. openly supported Democrat Lyndon Johnson, but previously had a close relationship with Republican Richard Nixon. Malcolm X, for his part, supported Republican Barry Goldwater. Johnson got the Civil Rights Act through Congress, but Republicans gave a greater percentage of their votes (80%) to the act than the Democrats (61%) did.
To truly win on an issue, you need to win with many different constituencies.
Making the pro-life cause a bipartisan social movement will not be easy. But the pieces are there. African American Christians, such as Justin Giboney and Chris Butler of the AND Campaign (an organization aimed at improving Christian civic engagement), are already doing some of that hard work. Giboney and Butler probably disagree with many abortion opponents on economic and foreign policy issues, but they have repeatedly and loudly made the case that Christians of all stripes should oppose abortion. Chris Butler ran for Congress as a Democrat with a pro-life platform. He lost, but the fact that he ran matters.
Abortion opponents should give people like Butler support, and remember that they are predominately a social movement, not a political arm of any party. The alternative is the extinction of their cause as a major force in American public life.
Cliff Smith is a lawyer and a former congressional staffer. He lives in Washington, D.C., where he works on national security-related issues. His views are his own.