With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and with the sidelining of anti-abortion policies by the GOP in favor of expanding child tax credits and other such economic interventions, one might be wondering what on earth has happened to the pro-life movement? Ever since the 1980 election and the Reagan movement, over four decades of political relevance, they have never been sidelined by the GOP until now. The usual pro-lifers—conservative and moderate pastors, their churchgoers, political commentators, national conservatives, and so on—have been speculating that Trump can just count on the pro-life vote and ignore their demands, which have become electorally unpopular. Some more radical breakaways from the coalition have advocated voting for various third parties. Others have entirely rejected the pro-life label, which they think to be synonymous with traitors and grifters, preferring instead to be called abolitionists.
While there are certain truths to each analysis, I think a major element of the history of the pro-life movement has been overlooked. The character of the GOP has irreversibly changed. The former ruling coalition, the National Review Right and the Neoconservatives, have either died off, become irrelevant, or even switched sides. Their last concerted action was to firmly position themselves as the enemies of President Trump, who has since completely dominated the GOP and marginalized them. I would argue that the pro-life movement, having thrown their lot in with this now-dead Neoconservative coalition, is being sidelined with the Neoconservatives.
Pro-Lifers and the GOP
The question of being “pro-life” is relatively recent in United States political history, only becoming an issue between the 1950s and the year 1970—beforehand, abortion was fully banned in each state. Being as the pro-life movement was a response to the liberalizing of abortion laws, exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s national liberalization of all state laws, the movement is young. At the time of its inception, and after the Carter campaign, most of its leaders decided to latch onto the GOP, just in time for the immensely successful Reagan campaign.
Allying with the Reagan Republicans sealed the character of the pro-life movement. It became inseparable from Buckley’s National Review and Falwell’s Moral Majority. This connection further intertwined the pro-life support base with Neoconservative policies, like rabid philosemitic interventionism. While one might object to this view of late 20th century American politics on minute details (the original Neoconservatives, for instance, didn’t seem too perturbed by abortion), it is undeniable that the pro-life movement amalgamated with these other organs and movements within the Republican party. Understanding this is key to understanding the present.
This political alliance was wildly successful for the pro-life movement in terms of obtaining political power. Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and, after a brief eight-year interlude, George W. Bush all centered their campaigns and rhetoric around the sanctity of life and family values. From these three presidents came three of the supreme court justices who would later overturn Roe v. Wade and decentralize the question of abortion restrictions.
The Trump Campaign and Presidency
After the long reign of the National Review right and the Neoconservatives within the GOP, carrying the pro-lifers along with them, an upset occurred: Trump ran to their right and broke the coalition. The National Review and the Neoconservatives tried everything against him, from running the heir to the Bush dynasty to calling Trump a racist to calling him a closeted Leftist “90s Democrat” in an attempt to position Trump to their left. Nothing worked.
Trump’s presidency was bad news for the pro-life movement on every issue except abortion, in which Trump appointed the other three justices responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade. The Neoconservatives, National Review right, and along with them various pro-life leaders, were ousted from power within the GOP, and it looks like they may not return (certainly no John McCain or Ronald Reagan figure will be legitimately nominated again). This marginalization continued even after Trump’s ousting from the executive branch in 2020, most notably when Trump swept the GOP primaries four years later while ignoring the debates and when his daughter-in-law was elected unanimously as the co-chair of the RNC. The old guard and their favorites were displaced.
The pro-life movement, particularly the leadership, was irreversibly entangled in this now-ousted coalition. Whether such opposition to Trump came from genuine commitment to the pro-life cause or out of loyalties to their political coalition is impossible to tell, but these political alliances help explain the sudden pivot of the GOP under Trump away from explicit pro-life politics towards something new. The pro-life movement threw their lot in with the increasingly unpopular Neoconservatives and the National Review right, Trump’s enemies, and they have been ousted right along with them.
The Political Machine Stops
With the old coalition fractured, the pro-life movement lost its steam. As has become popular to say, it seems that much of its infrastructure was not meant to accomplish an overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the movement seems to have ground to a halt. A sizable contingent of disillusioned constituents has speculated that the old coalition between pro-lifers and Neoconservatives was merely a ploy for political power, perpetually riding on outrage against an issue that was never to be solved. This reading fits well with the above analysis, as it seems many pro-life leaders, themselves usually Neoconservatives of some stripe, had more loyalty to the Neoconservatives than to the cause of ending abortion. If this was not the case, why have most prominent pro-life leaders and social conservatives opposed the president responsible for half the supreme court appointments who overturned Roe v. Wade? Why do they still continue to bitterly oppose him? Why wasn’t their movement prepared for a decentralized fight upon Roe v. Wade’s overturning?
Abolitionists, the radical wing of the movement, have realized this and have begun distancing themselves from their former label of “pro-life,” which they now find to be synonymous with grifting (this is colloquially different from the dictionary definition, as here it means to continually fundraise for a cause without any intention of solving that cause’s problem). They seem to have learned little from the pro-life movement’s decline, however. While they have not yet made any rash political alliances, they have been calling for a national abortion ban, an entirely unelectable plan taken directly from the old GOP establishment—quite the irony for a group condemning others for organizing around goals which are net meant to be achieved.
Given these historical errors, it seems clear that the path forward for the pro-lifers is to avoid and disentangle from the clearly poisonous Neoconservative and National Review influence that so shaped and destroyed their movement; put simply, they should get real and plan around the fact that the new, unrespectable populist movement is now the dominant force on the right. Once the insidious anchor of Neoconservatism is disposed, the movement should refocus on enacting achievable policies to their benefit, like political decentralization.
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