In my post last week, I talked about how the pro-life movement has been suffering a string of electoral defeats in the wake of the Dobbs decision. It’s worth noting that the day after that post, Wisconsin held its first round of voting for a seat on the state Supreme Court, and the liberal candidates took nearly 54% of the vote, further showing that the momentum is still very much with the pro-choice movement. The conservative could theoretically still win in April, and these kinds of races have surprised before, but for now, there is no sign that pro-life candidates are improving their electoral prospects.
But today, I want to talk about the measure of success that is harder to quantify: the increasing insularity of the pro-life movement and their most famous spokespersons.
Back in September 2021, when the Supreme Court allowed the Texas abortion ban to go into effect, it gave its strongest hint that it was going to overturn Roe v Wade. At the time, I expressed hope that the pro-life movement would move towards fostering real alternatives to abortion. Defending your position on abortion bans was easy to do when there were no actual policy consequences, but that is no longer the case. Now, our policies would really matter, and therefore, it would behoove the movement to push for these alternatives.
Sadly, that has not happened. Instead, many in the movement have doubled down on very unpopular policy proposals that would be even more unpopular than full abortion bans.
Take birth control. Research shows that the availability of birth control helps to reduce the need for abortions. So one would think that the movement would be pushing for making it more accessible, like Rep. Nancy Mace has done. But back in the fall, prominent pro-life writer for the National Review Alexandra DeSanctis-Marr wrote a tweet diatribe decrying the birth control as a carcinogen which makes women sexually available to men. While she did not call for a ban on birth control (such a ban would be unconstitutional under Griswold v Connecticut, a ruling which no justice not named Clarence Thomas seems inclined to overturn), her tweets give a sense of where the pro-life movement is heading and what they think is politically possible.
Opposing birth control is, of course, a position which the Catholic Church many devout Catholics and other Christians hold in good faith, and this piece is not meant as a mark against that. Rather, it is to point out that if the goal is to reduce and eliminate abortions, it is puzzling to adopt a policy stance against abortion. The same is true with allowing same-sex couples to adopt and foster children: one’s faith may or may not have negative things to say about homosexuality, but as a policy, it seems wise to allow any couple, and even qualified single folk, to adopt children. And yet, the president of the Heritage Foundation has made it clear that conservatives and other pro-life Americans cannot support same sex marriage.
To say that that policy stance is unpopular is an understatement. Recent polls suggest that 67-70% of Americans support same sex marriage and outright opposition only remains in one or two states. It’s easy to see why: most Americans are pretty chill with the idea of their neighbors getting married and starting their own families, and very few people want the government to get involved in peoples’ personal lives. And yet, some politicians are willing to take even more unpopular stances, such as when now-Senator JD Vance suggested he was against legal divorce. Policy stances like these do nothing to grow the movement, and only serve to drive people away from the idea of a post-abortion world.
The insularity of the movement can be sensed in the kinds of arguments that their supporters respond to. A common talking point I hear from writers like Kimberly Ross and others is chiding couples by saying “Don’t have sex if you don’t want to become pregnant.” The implication is that by consenting to sex, you consent to the possibility of becoming pregnant. But this logic, while normally sound, falls apart when you learn that many of these same pro-life writers oppose exceptions for rape and incest. To them, consent to sex is really beside the point and is just a convenient talking point. (For the record, I also don’t support abortion in cases of rape, which is why you don’t hear me using that talking point.) As we can see, arguments like this would easily fall apart under a little bit of scrutiny. But it seems many in the movement think they won’t ever be put under scrutiny.
That leads us to the final problem with the pro-life movement: many of their leaders have said some unethical things. My friend Kay Fellowz runs an organization called Protecting Life through Ethical Accountability (PLEA), which has exposed acts of misconduct by prominent pro-life activists. For example, it was found that Abby Johnson, an activist and writer whose book I bought and read, and her followers and supporters were going after a rape victim online. Besides that, she has made comments justifying racial profiling, suggesting that married women should lose their right to vote, and denouncing the COVID-19 vaccine for supposedly being made from aborted fetuses.
Most recently, PLEA has exposed acts of sexual misconduct by Minister Frank Pavone, someone who, coincidentally, follows me on Twitter. On top of that, he has used the corpses of aborted fetuses in his activism instead of ensuring they are properly and ethically disposed. Both these acts show that he doesn't really care about the victims of abortion, which includes both women and children.
Pavone and Johnson are not the only ones with ethical issues. There are others whom I will not discuss in order not to compromise PLEA’s work.
Between a string of electoral losses which shows little signs of abating, increasingly unpopular policy stances, and activists who are ethically tainted, the pro-life movement risks becoming politically irrelevant, losing the momentum, and potentially seeing the progress made undone. That’s not to say Roe v Wade will be reinstated anytime soon, but it is to say this: the Dobbs decision came about as the result of 50 years of the pro-life movement playing the long game, sustaining their momentum, building a grassroots movement, trying to change the culture, and getting their candidates elected to the highest offices and onto the highest court.
Just imagine if the pro-choice movement sustains their momentum, building their numbers, and continue playing the long game by getting their candidates elected and onto courts. Now imagine a pro-life movement that has turned inward too much, driving too many people away with unpopular policy stances pushed by ethically tainted leaders, to be able to stop this shift. Now imagine that in many years from now, a new Supreme Court adopts a ruling even more radical than Roe, rooting abortion rights into the 13th Amendment’s ban on slavery, effectively ruling that any abortion restriction whatsoever would be unconstitutional.
This is the future that could await us, unless the pro-life movement realizes that the puck is now in the pro-choice movement’s rink and that their leaders and positions are leaving an open net for the other side to score on. For the sake of the children who have, and will be, saved, I hope that the movement looks inward instead of turning inward.