Pro-life Voters Are Politically Homeless

The backlash to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision led to a rise in public support for abortion rights, yet four in 10 U.S. Americans still identify as pro-life. Of the voters who claim that abortion is their most important issue (12 percent of all voters), the health-care nonprofit KFF found that 34 percent think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.

But we’re a constituency without a political home. As a pro-life academic and activist who has worked on these issues for three decades, I find neither major-party candidate in this presidential election acceptable. The Republican Party has rejected our point of view. Democrats are running a candidate who has made abortion rights a centerpiece of her campaign, and whose stance on the issue would make most of the rest of the world blush. Pro-lifers—those who believe that protecting vulnerable and unborn life should be a primary policy priority—now do not fit in either major political party. And this is good, actually.

Former President Donald Trump no longer has a convincing case for why pro-lifers should vote for him. Roe has fallen. What else could pro-life voters gain by continuing to support the GOP? This time around, we’ve been given no list of friendly judges to be nominated, no support from the Republican convention, only a platform process (apparently led by Trump himself) that marginalized pro-lifers and rammed through language that did not condemn the overwhelming majority of abortions. Trump also recently posted on Truth Social that his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights” and said that he does not support the six-week abortion ban in his home state of Florida.

[From the December 2019 issue: The dishonesty of the abortion debate]

This is bad enough to cause a huge rift, but most pro-lifers do not care about abortion alone. Many have views on nonviolence and protection of the vulnerable that lead them to also care about, for instance, issues such as physician-assisted suicide. The 2016 GOP platform said, “We oppose euthanasia and assisted suicide,” yet the 2024 GOP platform does not. Recent reporting on Trump’s views on these matters may shed some light on the change: In a new book, his nephew claims Trump suggested that disabled people (including his nephew’s son) should be euthanized. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die,” he reportedly said.  

Does it follow that pro-lifers should vote for Democrats? A Kamala Harris–led party will almost certainly push for good things such as increased resources for child care, paid family leave, and long-term care for older adults and people with disabilities.

Speaking as a former board member of Democrats for Life, I can say there was a time when this approach would have made sense. Gallup polls suggest that, until 2012, a solid third of Democrats identified as pro-life, and those voters put many pro-life Democrats into office. Some of them were prominent: For instance, the Casey in the famous 1992 Supreme Court abortion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey was Governor Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, a strong pro-life Democrat.   

But today, Democrats are so antagonistic toward pro-lifers that they will work hard to keep us out of the party. A paltry 12 percent of Democrats identify as pro-life, and when Joe Manchin switched his party affiliation to independent, the Senate lost its last pro-life Democrat (and hardly any are left in the House). If current party leadership took a moderate position, supporting, say, European-style abortion restrictions (somewhere in the 12-to-16-week range), they could shift U.S. political structures in ways that would give them generational power. But so beholden is the current Democratic Party to the orthodoxy enforcers that it prioritizes the excommunication of dissenters over creating a winning coalition that could bring in millions of pro-life votes.  

But the dominant position of the party, as articulated by Harris (especially in her strong support for the Women’s Health Protection Act), is that abortion is no different from any other kind of medical procedure, and that legal limitations on it should have so many loopholes and exceptions as to be effectively nonexistent. Indeed, full-throated support for abortion could be Harris’s signature political issue. When Senator Elizabeth Warren was asked about Harris’s biggest accomplishment as vice president, for instance, she said it was Harris’s response to the Dobbs decision, including being the first vice president to visit an abortion clinic. Harris’s selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who supported and signed some of the most extreme abortion-rights legislation in the country, further demonstrates her commitment. The recently concluded Democratic National Convention featured several speakers championing abortion rights, and in Harris’s speech accepting the nomination, she said she would “proudly sign” a bill that restores “reproductive freedom.”

[Read: Kamala Harris’s biggest advantage]

So as a pro-life voter, I cannot support either major candidate. But I see this moment as an opportunity, and so could those who share my beliefs. For decades, we have made common cause with a GOP that has compromised our values again and again, which in turn has led many of our fellow citizens to distrust us and reject our movement, even in red states such as Kansas and Ohio.

Pro-lifers ought therefore to return to our foundation and fundamentals, going back to the movement’s approach before Roe v. Wade, but updated for the current moment. Pro-life 3.0 must welcome people from multiple political and policy perspectives, work for both prenatal justice and social support for women and families, and focus in particular on the hard, decades-long cultural work that will be necessary to shift the consumerist West from a culture that prioritizes wealth generation and individual happiness over collective health and safety toward one that embraces nonviolence and welcomes and protects the vulnerable.

For those who don’t have the patience for this kind of work, and instead prefer to jump right to public policy, there is some low-hanging fruit: working for child tax credits and flexible work hours, addressing intimate-partner violence and coerced abortion, and stopping abortion from being pushed on disabled populations. Each of these policy goals could get significant buy-in from those who disagree with us about abortion overall.

But we must not let passing laws, as important as this may be, pull us away from the foundational goals that have animated us for more than six decades. Staying grounded in nonviolence, protecting and caring for the most vulnerable, and welcoming those who are at risk of being thrown away will be essential if we have any hope of winning the culture.