Whither Pro-Lifers?
If the movement wishes to advance its goals, it must start thinking in terms of votes.
If you abjure special pleading, President Donald Trump’s executive order boosting in vitro fertilization is a concrete (if symbolic) blow to the traditional anti-abortion core of the pro-life movement from the commanding heights of its longtime political home. The president’s gesture—the upshot of the actual order is “policy recommendations”—is a friendly signal to the tech right, which for various reasons is highly invested in IVF and related technologies. But actually existing IVF entails the creation and discarding of multiple embryos. For all intents and purposes, abortion is an integral part of IVF.
Without a doubt, the Republican administration is better for pro-lifers than its Democratic alternative. The pardon of FACE Act prisoners, the usual change-of-party two-step on the Mexico City policy, and the like are certainly victories. Yet pro-lifers are stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea. While pushing pro-life policies via the Democratic Party is a non-starter, the GOP is beginning to look stifling. The party has made IVF one of its messaging planks—mobilizing at record speed after a Tennessee court found the practice unlawful under the state’s existing legislation—and leadership has been hostile to the more vigorous state-level abortion bans, both legislative (as in Florida) and judicial (as in Arizona).
The nub of it is that the pro-life movement’s positions are not widely popular; nor do they seem to be getting more so. (“You are the pro-life generation,” it turns out, was just as much a lie as it seemed when they shouted it to the busloads of us at rallies lo! these many years ago.) The modal American’s attitudes roughly correspond to moderate European attitudes—a squeamishness about late-term abortion, a preference for birth control and abortifacients over surgical abortion, a sense that the government shouldn’t be encouraging “non-medical” abortions, and, at least on the center-right, a disinclination to impose a uniform federal regulatory regime.
What courses remain? The answers are unsatisfactory. The antidemocratic line of tactics has been a loser. There are still politically possible gains to be made by pro-lifers, thanks in large part to the radicalism of existing abortion law in much of the country, but, in the short term, anything more restrictive than a 15-week ban is off the table almost everywhere. It seems worth emphasizing that IVF involves a rather more cavalier attitude toward human life than widely understood, and to push for more stringent regulation of the industry. Public messaging is a must, of course, but if 50 years of it failed to sway the public, a radical change of rhetoric seems to be in order. In particular, the collapse of churchgoing in America has devastated the usual base of anti-abortion sentiment; the country is less receptive to the message today than it was in 1972.
It is also worth reconsidering the terms of the pro-life movement’s pact with the GOP. Pro-lifers should see themselves for what they are: a minority partner in a largely indifferent or hostile coalition. How do other such groups work? The “Make America Healthy Again” strain of the Trump coalition has carved out its power base, although banning Red 3 is not high on most Americans’ list of concerns. To take a negative example, black interests continue to keep affirmative action on the Democratic menu, despite that policy’s enduring and widespread unpopularity. These interest groups get their slice of the pie by offering votes, or, implicitly, by threatening to withhold them. The pro-life movement should consider more aggressive organizing activity in primaries and at the state level, more electioneering, to use the dirty word, than it has hitherto done. It is astonishing that it needs saying, but, in a notional democracy, the best way to advance your interests is by bloc voting.
Abortion isn’t the only issue on which pro-lifers are about to learn this hard lesson. The movement is about to face a mass assault on a different issue: assisted suicide, or “medical assistance in death” to use the preferred Orwellism. A large number of states are considering MAID legislation, and the movement seems woefully unprepared to oppose it. Victorious opposition in the courts, which has been the method of choice for pro-lifers these five decades, seems to be far from assured.
There are plenty of tactical debates about whether to avoid making the perfect the enemy of the good (or the tolerable), about which issues to pressure politicians on, and all the other hurly-burly of democratic statesmanship. (Applying a litmus test in line with the principles of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops or the Mennonite Church USA seems like a good way to lose elections.) Yet, so long as the pro-life movement adheres to the normal approach of working within the American political framework, wrangling votes is the sine qua non. America, as it exists, runs on abortion—which, if you are a pro-lifer, is a judgment on America. That makes canny political work more important, not less.
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