A pregnant woman with a photo of an ultrasound
Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

The Republican Party Is No Longer Pro-Life

In 1973, Roe v. Wade made abortion legal across the United States. Over the following years, the Republican Party aligned itself with the pro-life cause. As early as 1976, their party platform stated:

The question of abortion is one of the most difficult and controversial of our time. It is undoubtedly a moral and personal issue but it also involves complex questions relating to medical science and criminal justice. There are those in our Party who favor complete support for the Supreme Court decision which permits abortion on demand. There are others who share sincere convictions that the Supreme Court’s decision must be changed by a constitutional amendment prohibiting all abortions. Others have yet to take a position, or they have assumed a stance somewhere in between polar positions… The Republican Party favors a continuance of the public dialogue on abortion and supports the efforts of those who seek enactment of a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children. (emphasis added)

Almost without fail since then, the Republican Party has consistently opposed abortion.

This is no longer the case: some state and local Republican politicians continue, and the occasional Congressperson may try, but, at the national level, the Republican Party is no longer pro-life.1 It neither works toward legal restrictions on abortions nor reduces the number of abortions nor promotes a culture that opposes abortions.

In 2022, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade, allowing states to enforce abortion restrictions and bans. This kicked off a firestorm of resistance from Democrats and pro-choice voters. Since then, the Republican Party has vigorously backpedaled in its support for the pro-life cause:

In fairness, national Republican leadership has taken some actions against abortion:

This is not nothing, but as a pro-life voter, I cannot help but be disappointed. I can appreciate 23 pro-life protestors being pardoned – but they were pardoned after over 1,500 January 6 defendants (including everyone who assaulted police officers). There are good arguments for the January 2026 decision to further restrict foreign aid toward abortion – but that was only done after drastic cuts to foreign aid across the board. Federal funding toward research involving fetal tissue raises real ethical questions – but that was cut was done only after “gutting” scientific research as a whole. Pardoning political allies, cutting foreign aid, reducing or redirecting science and medicine – how much of that was due to actually prioritizing pro-life, and how much was minor continuations to what they were doing anyway? The Hyde executive order was only one of the 143 executive orders that Trump signed in his first 100 days in office, and (as far as I can tell) it’s the only one of his 290 executive orders that addresses abortion. The administration’s actions in support of IVF alone are roughly equal to its actions in opposition to abortion.

There are defenses and explanations. Vance, for example, explains Republicans’ position as being “realistic”: “We have to accept that people do not want blanket abortion bans.” But statements such as “I think it’s totally reasonable to say that late-term abortions should not happen, with reasonable exceptions” are not the language of someone passionate about a cause and determined to work toward it as much as possible within the constraints of the political process. The most obvious next step, restoring the requirement for an in-person doctor visit to get mifeprestone, is actually supported by 70-71% of Americans. Saying that 1% of abortions arguably shouldn’t happen, with exceptions, while blocking judicial and legislative action to restrict abortion and supporting access for the 70% of abortions that are done chemically, is not a pro-life position. It sounds, to me, slightly more pro-life than Biden (“I’m a practicing Catholic… I’m not big on abortion… Roe v. Wade got it right… The last three months have to be negotiated, because you can’t — unless you are in a position where your physical health is at stake — you can’t do it” – note that Biden is more critical of late-term abortions than Vance), perhaps in the ballpark of Clinton (“We respect the individual conscience of every American on the painful issue of abortion, but believe as a matter of law that this decision should be left to a woman, her conscience, her doctor and her God. But abortion should not only be be safe and legal, it should be rare”), perhaps equal to or a bit less pro-life than Obama (“We can agree on the notion that none of us are pro-abortion and all of us would like to see a reduction in unwanted pregnancies, for example, and we could focus on those issues”).

I find this particularly galling when compared to how vigorously the Republican administration has moved on issues that are important to it: immigration crackdowns, tariffs, military action against Venezuela and Iran.

In terms of actual political effort, it’s arguably tried harder to rename bodies of waterz than to restrict abortion.2

2. The Republican Party is not reducing the number of abortions.

Legally restricting abortion is not sufficient: for example, if all that it does is drive abortions underground, that jeopardizes the lives of women without actually helping the unborn. Our goal is to reduce the number of abortions.

Here is the chart from last week on the number of abortions since Roe v. Wade was legalized in 1973:

Annual abortions in the United States. Download the underlying data (CSV), including source notes and methodology caveats for each series.

Trump is the first president since Reagan to see the number of abortions increase during his term. The reasons for this are unclear: possible factors include the rise of chemical abortions (which, as mentioned, the Republican administration now supports), policy changes within more permissive states, and the Republican administration’s cuts to contraception funding. Uncertainty and pessimism around the state of the country in general and around COVID in particular may have contributed. At any rate, it seems clear that Republicans’ policies and actions didn’t help.

Abortions declined more under Obama than under any other president. The Affordable Care Act’s increased funding for contraception and health care is normally credited for this: alleviating poverty reduces abortion. If we rank how pro-life a president is by how much of a reduction they oversaw in the number of abortions, then Obama is the most pro-life president we’ve had.

Although tangential, there has historically been significant overlap between the pro-life movement and small-government conservatives. The example of the Obama administration suggests, to me, that pro-life conservatives should perhaps reevaluate. If abortion really is a matter of life and death, and if increased spending on social programs can reliably alleviate the temptation toward it, then should we reconsider? From this angle, the current Republican administration’s promises of increased aid for families and children (for example, Trump Accounts for children, increased child tax credits, easier adoption and foster care regulations, and expanded options for fertility benefits beyond IVF) may legitimately be considered pro-life (or at least “pro-baby”3). However, it’s difficult to weigh these against other concerns (the rising pessimism and concerns over cost of living that may drive increased abortion rates, as COVID may have) and other shortcomings (as described above). At any rate, these policies have not yet had a discernible effect on the rates of abortion: abortions continued to rise in 2025, faster than they did in 2024.

3. The Republican Party is not promoting a culture that opposes abortions.

Here’s the trend of opinions on abortion in the US.

General Social Survey: “Please tell me whether or not you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if ... the woman wants it for any reason.” Weighted. Since 2021, the GSS has been partly conducted online, and online respondents say "yes" more often than those interviewed in person. Annual averages; presidential terms shaded. Source; download the underlying data (CSV).

It’s remarkable that pro-life support remained as strong as it did, even as culture shifted dramatically in areas of sexuality and gender and even as religious affiliation started to notably decline.

And then, in the mid-2010s, that changed.

In an April 2024 column, “This Is Probably Not the Deal the Pro-Life Movement Bargained For With Trump,” Ross Douthat explores potential reasons for this change. He presents several possible reasons, including simply what other commentators call the thermostat effect: as the possibility of overturning Roe v. Wade became evident, moderates realized they liked the status quo after all. He argues, however, that although there are several contributing factors, “the shift seems to accelerate right around 2016” with “the rise of Donald Trump.” Douthat writes:

If you set out to champion the rights of the most vulnerable human beings while promising protection and support for women in their most vulnerable state, and your leader is a man famous for his playboy lifestyle who exudes brash sexism and contempt for weakness, people are going to have some legitimate questions about whether they can trust you to make good on your promises of love and care.

With that kind of standard-bearer, the accusations of your opponents — that your cause is organized more around repression than protection, more around hypocrisy than high ideals — are going to carry more weight.

Speaking for myself, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen some left-leaning commentator draw comparisons between the American right and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the dystopian novel-turned-TV show in which the US has become an oppressive theocracy and women are reduced to breeders. Each time I want to say, “No! We’re not trying to oppress women; we’re trying to protect the most vulnerable!” But I look at a country in which a man with at least twenty-eight women who’ve accused him of sexual assault or misconduct and a jury finding of sexual assault and a taped confession of sexual assault can be called the “most pro-life president ever,” a man who seems to denigrate the disabled and gloat over victims of assault and use “She’s not my type” as a defense against allegations of sexual assault and deploy an endless stream of schoolyard insults against his politically weaker opponents, a man who teaches that every deal has a winner and a loser and he always wants to be the winner, who resisted naming his son after him for fear that he might be a loser, who says that the only reason he’s pro-life is because his friends’ unplanned child grew to be a “superstar” and that he’d still be pro-choice if the kid was a “loser,” while the administration protects alleged sex traffickers and talks about paying women to become housewives, and prominent administration-aligned figures advocate for repealing the 19th Amendment – and I start to worry that the Handmaid’s Tale comparisons have more validity than I care to admit.

Douthat concludes, “That’s the price of the bargain abortion opponents made. The deal worked on its own terms: Roe is gone. But now they’re trapped in a world where their image is defined more by the dealmaker’s values than by their own.” If his argument is correct, then it means that the compromises we made to overturn Roe v. Wade, to make it possible to restrict abortion, have left us too weakened to actually restrict abortion.

I know that this last point is the most controversial. I know that Trump is a polarizing figure. I’ve tried to avoid making this piece about him. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that every criticism I just made of him is wrong – distorted, biased, fake news, a victim of Trump Derangement Syndrome, whatever. None of that changes the trend lines in that chart. We oppose abortion, not just because we like babies and want more of them, but because we believe that a just and moral society is one in which those with strength use their power to protect the weak and the vulnerable, rather than using it to win and dominate others, and the unborn are the weakest, most vulnerable among us. Our goal is not just to outlaw abortion – that would merely drive it underground – and it’s not merely to reduce the number of abortions, whether through financial support or the threat of punishment. It’s to make abortion undesirable and unthinkable: to create a culture that values life, that views each human as having intrinsic worth whether they’re a superstar or a loser, that protects the weak and vulnerable. And we are losing in that goal.

I’m angry – angry that a moral cause that was so key to my own political engagement has been neglected, quietly written off and discarded by the Republican Party. And I’m worried that too many pro-life conservatives are simply unaware of this and remain uncritically supportive of the GOP, because it had been pro-life for almost fifty years and they assume it will continue to be. Or, worse, I worry that our pro-life engagement has never been as righteous and morally pure as we thought, that part of it was simply that partisans and political operatives used abortion as a wedge issue, telling us we ought to care, getting us riled up and angry about what’s happening to the unborn, and now that they’re instead telling us we ought to care and be riled up and afraid about something else – biological men in women’s sports, the victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants, the threat of radical Islam, whatever – we nod our heads and uncritically move along.

But illegal immigrants commit crime at lower rates than US citizens, and there are likely less than 100 and maybe less than 10 trans people competing in women’s college sports, and Muslims as a whole are a tiny minority outside of places like Dearborn or EPIC City, and we see over 1.1 million abortions a year, and that number is increasing.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe it isn’t ignorance or shifting stances that cause pro-lifers to continue to vote Republican. Maybe it’s that, for all of the GOP’s failures and outright rejections of the pro-life movement, it still supports abortion less than the Democratic Party. But I don’t think that’s a valid reason either. For much of my life, I was almost a single-issue voter: if abortion costs over 1 million lives a year, then as an issue it outweighs almost anything else. But, in Christianity Today’s “The Bulletin,” Russell Moore, a longtime advocate for the pro-life movement, said, “Once you claim this issue as being that of only one party, and you use it to be able to say your Christian duty is to always support this party, no matter what, you create the conditions to destroy that issue within it.” The logic is inescapable: if this one issue really does trump all others in determining your vote, then a political party doesn’t actually have to oppose it, they just have to be less for it than their opponents. Why should Republicans spend political capital trying to stop 1.1 million abortions a year, if all they have to do to win the pro-life vote is claim they’re opposing policies that would increase it to 1.2 million a year? And so what started as one of the purest moral causes (the defense of the most innocent and most powerless within our society) turned into utilitarianism (which party will reduce that number?) and then into rank political compromise (Douthat’s “world where [our] image is defined more by the dealmaker’s values than by [our] own”), followed by abject failure (a country in which there’s no effective political pro-life advocacy at the national level, in which pro-life support is falling and abortion rates are rising).

The kingdom of God will come. God’s justice will reign. Our hope is in Christ’s return, and we have full confidence in that. The pro-life movement is still doing good work. But right now, things don’t look good.

What’s the answer? I don’t know.

Maybe we vote Republican, but do so clear-eyed, treating Republicans as allies rather than our partisan identity, with an awareness of their failures and reversals, intentionally advocating for them to change even as we continue to give them conditional support.

Maybe we withhold our vote, letting the pain of an electoral loss push politicians to take our concerns more seriously.

Maybe we stop giving our allegiance to any one party, refusing to accept partisan promises and utilitarian calculations and instead honestly evaluate which party, politicians, and policies most holistically promote human flourishing and Christian values.

Maybe we stop placing our hope in partisans and parties and reprioritize loving our neighbor, with our vote as merely one means of doing so.

I don’t know. It’s not my job to tell anyone how to vote. But the first step is to recognize what we’ve lost.

If I’ve made mistakes or inaccuracies, please correct me. If I’ve caused offense or division, please forgive me. God bless.

Footnotes

  1. To keep terminology simple, I’m using “pro-life” here in the traditional and narrow sense of “opposing abortion.” Many Christians will argue that we need to be “holistically pro-life,” promoting a culture of life that seeks to protect and help the vulnerable, regardless of their age. That’s an important topic but outside the scope of this piece. ↩

  2. Republican leaders’ efforts to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario include two executive orders; a promise after the 2024 campaign; a mention during the inauguration speech; an estimated million or so dollars to update documents and maps across FEMA, NOAA, the Department of Transportation, GNIS, etc.; banning the Associated Press over their choice to use “Gulf of Mexico”; an ongoing lawsuit with the Associated Press over that resulting ban; a bill that passed the House; a signing event with visual aids; merchandise; and over one hundred social media posts. ↩

  3. Katelyn Wells Shelton, visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center: “I think a lot of people, including Trump himself, misinterpret being pro-life as being pro-baby. The pro-life movement loves babies, but the pro-life movement is anti-murder.” ↩