The Way Forward for Life in a Post-Roe America (Free Reprint)
Abortion wasn't to blame for the GOP's 2022 midterm debacle, but the pro-life cause isn't gaining the ground it should.
The following is a tweaked reprint of a commentary I previously published on ConservativeStandards.com, free for non-subscribers.
Almost a year after the fall 2022 midterms, politicians and politicos are still wringing their hands over the electoral ramifications of opposing abortion now that Roe v. Wade no longer insulates the butchery from the democratic process. The loudest voices insist that the midterms vindicated claims that the country fears a world without “choice” so much that it guarantees Republicans are doomed if they stick with what has been the party’s official stance since Ronald Reagan.
Closer examination reveals that the truth isn’t nearly that dire...but the situation is still complicated enough that pro-lifers need to think carefully about their next steps.
It’s not hard to see why people are getting cold feet. Despite polls suggesting that voters cared far more about inflation than abortion, or that Democrats’ abysmal stewardship of the economy was driving independents into Republicans’ arms, the much-anticipated “red wave” turned out to be merely a drizzle. But how much of that can be blamed on abortion?
Post-midterm exit polls were frustratingly inconsistent. The National Election Pool found that abortion was a shockingly close runner-up to inflation in voters’ priorities (27% to 31%), but also that female abortion supporters didn’t turn out more heavily than in past elections. By contrast, AP VoteCast found that a paltry 9% said abortion was their biggest issue, compared to 47% who prioritized economic concerns. Despite their other discrepancies, both sets of polling found that keeping abortion legal in all or most circumstances was more popular than making it either completely illegal or illegal with exceptions for situations like rape or incest.
The actual election results were similarly mixed. Five abortion-related ballot initiatives all yielded pro-abortion outcomes, and while three of those were in liberal states (California, Michigan, and Vermont) that don’t represent national trends, the defeat of the other two extremely modest measures (one to ensure the Kentucky Constitution left the issue to voters, another to require basic medical care for newborns who survived abortions in Montana) ought to alarm us.
On the other hand, no state that enacted a near-total abortion ban ousted the governor or legislature responsible last year, so there was clearly no widespread “pro-choice” backlash. To the extent that any consistent bias could be gleaned from November’s results, it was in favor of incumbency, regardless of party or abortion position—94% of existing officeholders kept their seats.
Between the above and various other factors at work (among them uninspiring Republican messaging, Democrats’ superior harvesting of mail ballots and encouragement of early voting, and a certain former president’s elevation of weak primary candidates he happened to personally like), it’s clear that whatever pro-abortion turnout boost may have occurred was neither massive nor insurmountable. But that’s not to say pro-lifers should merely stay the course.
While Americans soundly reject the extremes of pro-abortion dogma, Gallup, Pew, and Marist polls agree that overall, “choice” has outpaced life for several years—and with Roe’s overturn dropping a megaton bomb on the status quo, the public’s intuitions cannot help but be shaken. For nearly half a century, debating whether or not we should ban abortion was largely theoretical. The fact that it couldn’t actually happen diluted the perceived urgency of settling on an answer, and meant that neither side’s claims about prohibition’s real-world consequences could be conclusively demonstrated.
That’s all changed, and any cultural shift this massive requires an adjustment period. With abortion, that means giving Americans time to live with the newly-enforceable pro-life laws that are already on the books, and watch for themselves as the Left’s fearmongering lies about women dying, going to jail, losing jobs, and being forced to drop out of college en masse fail to materialize.
(This makes referendums a particularly poor tool for pro-lifers; proposals that haven’t been implemented yet are easy to scaremonger with misinformation. It’s much more feasible to implement changes through the usual legislative process, then see whether the public deems those changes acceptable in the next election.)
In the near term, pro-lifers should focus on recruiting and training principled, savvy candidates who can parry the abortion lobby’s demagoguery by tossing their extremism back in their face, and keep the focus on voters’ most immediate concerns during campaign season, but will be reliably pro-life when the time comes to pass whatever preborn protections a state is ready to accept in the off years.
Over the long term comes the more difficult work. For decades, the pro-life movement has toiled on college campuses, in pregnancy centers, and outside abortion mills to convert hearts and minds and show women in crisis that they and their babies have options. These ground-level efforts are nothing short of heroic, but individual engagement simply cannot match the scale at which educational institutions, popular culture, and major media condition large segments of entire generations to accept abortion as intrinsic to women’s health and freedom.
Overcoming these forces and instilling in the public a more widespread, durable respect for the preborn will require pro-lifers to adopt better and more widespread messaging on multiple fronts. The most potent would be a campaign to mandate accurate fetal development information in public science education, modeled after the successful work currently underway in several states to replace critical race theory curricula with more classical civics material. Making clear that “individual human life begins at conception” is a settled biological fact, rather than primarily or exclusively a theological belief, would make abortion unthinkable to millions of otherwise-apolitical students before they ever heard a single abortion argument.
The 2022 midterms were not the disaster for life that Donald Trump and others insist (many driven by their own social liberalism rather than earnest prudential calculations), but the hard fact remains that our cause is not gaining the ground it should. Unless the pro-life movement learns to pair conventional political activism and personal apologetics with strategies to uproot and replace the forces working against it on the institutional level, it should expect pro-life prospects at the ballot box to keep getting worse.