Former President Donald Trump has apparently softened his approach after a first term that saw him appoint the judges who overturned Roe v. Wade. Last week, Trump announced that his next administration would fund IVF treatments and hinted at his support for Florida’s “right to abortion” amendment, causing a virtual panic among pro-life diehards. Though Trump has since retracted his support for the Florida measure, his change of course has created considerable confusion among pro-lifers about how to vote. Should we punish the Republican Party and Trump for becoming less pro-life in their policy goals in hopes of maintaining their influence as an “interest group” within the party? Or should we vote for Trump because a Harris administration is likely to be the most pro-abortion administration in American history?
I find these arguments particularly interesting because eight years ago, I was one of a small number of writers who argued that people shouldn’t vote for Trump because they were pro-life. By pro-life, I mean that I believe abortion is morally extremely wrong and that Americans should radically restrict access to abortion through both policy and law. My careful pro-life argument against Trump took two forms. First, I argued that Trump’s promise to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe was not credible, that is, that his judgment was spectacularly wrong. (I’ve never been more pleased to be wrong about something than I was the day Dobbs was formally released.) As I noted in Dispatch Faith a few weeks ago, evangelicals and the pro-life movement have always been outsiders to the Republican mainstream, much like Donald Trump was in 2016. I suspected that once Trump no longer needed the pro-life movement to get votes, he would abandon it. Maybe I was wrong, or maybe I was too early, and I’ve spent the last eight years in the wilderness, refraining from commenting on politics as an atonement.
The second argument against Trump at the time was that he would ultimately weaken the pro-life movement, either by liberalizing it or by undermining its credibility. As I wrote at the time, “The true cost of Trump’s flirtation will not be known until 2020 or beyond,” but “it would be naive to think that pro-lifers won’t pay a cost.” While the political backlash to the ouster of Roe would have happened for any president who appointed the justices who overturned it, it is impossible for Americans to separate Dobbs from Trump. And as Ross Douthat has pointed out, the general liberalization of abortion in American society began not with the ouster of Dobbs, but around 2016, when Donald Trump became president.
I have no interest in any sort of “victory lap.” And not just because I was way off on the judge’s case. Frankly, I would have preferred to have been wrong on everything. The pro-life movement would have been in a better position if I had been wrong. And one of the lessons I learned eight years ago is that big-time histrionics rarely (or never) lead to the kind of public deliberation the pro-life movement needs. As the Victorian author Wilkie Collins sarcastically puts it in a novel, “Noble indignation…is sometimes very cheap indignation.” The stakes are too high for the pro-life movement to repeat the chain of accusations it experienced eight years ago, a chain in which I was part and in which more than a few pro-life Trump supporters told me I was helping “kill babies.”
If 2016 was the pro-life movement’s best chance yet to get a justice to overturn Roe, 2024 is our best chance yet to fundamentally rethink our politics. The first question pro-lifers should be thinking about is not who they’ll vote for in November, but how they’ll navigate an electorate that’s increasingly skeptical of pro-life aspirations.
The post-Dobbs electorate.
The immediate cause of the pro-life crisis is not Trump, but the movement’s failure to adapt to the post-Dobbs political environment. Since Roe was struck down, abortion has been on state ballots seven times. Pro-lifers lost each time. Polling on abortion restrictions had already begun to shift at this point, and there is evidence that American voters are biased toward the status quo, which makes them more likely to defend existing political rights when they are threatened. Despite these headwinds, major pro-life organizations drew a “red line” in this year’s presidential primary in support of a 15-week federal abortion ban.
But for pro-lifers, the clearest lesson from 2016 is to trust Trump’s political instincts. The first sign that Trump was no longer in line with the movement was when he announced his intention to leave abortion regulation up to the states. The “red lines” were quickly redrawn, and redrawn again when the Republican Party changed its platform. Trump learned the limits of what the pro-life movement can tolerate with his possible support for the Fourth Amendment in Florida, but his decision sets the bar very low for what a president must promise to win the pro-life vote. There is a big gulf between supporting a federal ban on abortion and voting “no” on a constitutional amendment protecting abortion for birth.
All of this could have easily been avoided: Trump carved out a politically palatable platform that the pro-life movement could have eagerly embraced as the next step in the long road to eliminating abortion providers in the U.S. Instead, pro-life leaders tried to shoehorn their candidate into policy positions that were impossible to achieve in the post-Dobbs environment.
The pro-life movement’s failure to understand the political environment creates a no-win situation. Threatening to withhold their vote for Trump because they are pro-life is a risky gamble. If pro-lifers abstain or vote third party and Trump wins, they will expose their own political irrelevance (trust me, I know). If they push Trump into an unpopular position and he loses, the Republican Party will likely conclude that the movement is responsible for the defeat and continue on its liberal course. And if they support Trump and he wins, they are unlikely to gain the kind of merit or political capital they claimed in 2016, because Trump has dragged them into a policy stance they resisted every step of the way.
If anything, the pro-life movement has sold a narrative of political power that exaggerates its influence in national elections. However popular pro-life sentiment may be, its role in voting is unclear. Republican voters certainly prefer pro-life politicians, but it is entirely possible that they vote for them simply because the issue is tied to other, more important concerns.
In 2016, abortion was ranked last in a Pew Research Center survey of topics debate viewers wanted to hear about. While the failure of Roe appears to have persuaded voters to side with pro-abortion positions and galvanized voters to vote, the number of pro-life voters who care enough about abortion to not vote because Trump is only slightly or superficially “pro-life” is very small. In an August Siena/New York Times poll of battleground states, 31% of Democrats listed abortion as their top priority, compared with only 3% of Republicans. Gallup showed a similar asymmetry, suggesting that only 8% of voters want their candidate to be pro-life. In this situation, if Trump could be even slightly more pro-life than his opponent, he would be sure to secure the votes of the pro-life movement. In the end, the comparison to Kamala Harris is the only thing even the most principled pro-life voters can rely on when casting their ballot.
In a close election, what happens on the political fringes matters disproportionately. After all, the presidential race may hinge on low turnout or enthusiasm in a few battleground states. But Trump stands to gain just as much, if not more, by giving infrequent, low-attention, and vaguely pro-life voters a reason to vote for him (and taking away a reason to vote against him). And he stands to gain just as much, if not more, by appeasing the institutional voices that make up the “pro-life movement.” Some pro-life writers have derided Trump’s attempts to ingratiate himself with suburban women as hopelessly unrealistic, but Trump doesn’t need to win over all of them, no matter how many pro-life voters he replaces. Trump has performed well with them before, and his new “pro-life” stance is perfectly suited to assuaging conservative concerns. Pro-life leaders have grumbled about President Trump’s announcement to fund IVF treatments, but few suburban (white) parents, including those who are openly “pro-life,” seriously oppose it.
Debates among pro-lifers about how to vote are important in the same sense that debates among online leftists are important: they reveal what a small elite group of people think, even if they are far removed from the reality of the voters they claim to represent. They may shape the debate and help Trump identify where pro-lifers’ “red lines” actually are, but their real political importance in terms of the votes they generate is likely to be (in the end) little to no.
Pro-life voters will vote in droves for Donald Trump as long as he offers to maintain the status quo by vetoing federal bills that would protect abortion access, even as he says he would veto federal abortion bans. Pro-life organizations and leaders will have no choice but to comply if they want to maintain any pretense of steering the pro-life vote and maintain what little political influence remains in the Republican Party. And perhaps they should.
It’s not 2016 anymore.
Donald Trump’s demonstrated moderate stance on abortion and willingness to broker a “deal” despite public concerns from pro-lifers is good news for the pro-life movement.
Trump’s political instincts made it clear to pro-lifers what our task is, if we have the energy and perseverance to carry it out. The repeal of Roe was not a “Pyrrhic victory” as author Rod Dreyer has argued. It dismantled the dominant framework of our reproductive politics. It was essential to broaden Americans’ imaginations about what it would take to put the abortion pill and abortion providers out of business. A judicially-minded political movement (like the pro-life movement since Roe) can take individual cases and leverage the intuition and judgment that individual human beings have rights from the moment of conception. But democratically decided policies to restrict access to “services” need to make arguments that intersect with and leverage other concerns.
At the same time, Trump’s moderate stance on abortion likely decisively closed the door on the radical “abolitionist” sector of the pro-life world. The surprise of Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016 and the subsequent radicalization of the Democratic Party led conservatives to believe that suddenly anything imaginable might be possible. The political opportunity this upheaval presented is also a factor in the fierce debates on the right about “Christian nationalism” and “post-liberalism.” The rise of “abolitionist” pro-lifers who want to punish women who seek abortions is consistent with this effort to rethink conservative politics in the wake of Trump’s victory. These minority efforts will likely continue to be relevant in heavily Republican states like Oklahoma and Alabama, but they clearly lack a national base and, if they take hold, will only intensify the backlash against the pro-life movement that was already underway. Incrementalism is suddenly back in fashion, and it’s the right stance to take — even if pro-lifers have rediscovered it for the wrong reasons.
Maybe the political wilderness isn’t so bad after all. If the pro-life movement continues to be marginalized, so be it. The fundamental question this time is not who to vote for, but what to learn from a mess that is partly of our own making: not by supporting Donald Trump, but by failing to anticipate and prepare for the fundamental shift in the electorate and the backlash that Dobbs provoked. Whatever happens in November, the pro-life movement needs to reset its political calculus and reach a level of maturity it has yet to reach. The wilderness is, after all, a place of exile and testing, but also of growth.