The Differentiation of America's Pro-Life Movement

[Trivia: can you name tennis’ 4 major singles open tournaments?]

I’ve had a lot more thoughts about last week’s elections, too many to be useful. But one angle that merits addressing is the pro-life one.

The Story So Far

Quick recap: in 1973, the Supreme Court of the US discovered a hitherto unnoticed “right to abortion” in the Constitution, which meant that legislatures (Congress or state-level legislatures) were forbidden from banning abortion. This was the infamous “Roe v. Wade” decision. It wasn’t just evil, its reasoning sucked, as I’ve written more about in the past. But this past June, the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision correcting that outrageous error and overturning Roe. State legislatures now have the ability to ban abortion.

This has electoral implications. We got an inkling of this in August, when voters across Kansas voted on a statewide referendum and opted in favor of the “pro-choice” position. (There are details, which I wrote about at the time, but basically, the Supreme Court of Kansas had discovered a right to an abortion for the first trimester or so; the referendum would have permitted the legislature, which had already banned abortions after that line in the sand, to ban them altogether.) Turns out that Kansas voters didn’t want them totally illegal, and the measure failed roughly 60% to 40%.

Last week, in addition to candidates, there were lots of ballot measures about abortion. I’m not sure if any of them went the way that pro-lifers had hoped. Morning Wire (November 10) recapped, “Michigan, Vermont and California all enshrined abortion as a right in their state constitutions. And in Kentucky, voters rejected a measure that would have denied a constitutional right to abortion.” But the worst was Montana, which voted on a measure that would have “raised the prospect of criminal charges for health care providers unless they take ‘all medically appropriate and reasonable actions to preserve the life’ of an infant born alive, including after an attempted abortion.” The measure failed 52-47.

Candidate Implications

I want to address something off the bat. Did the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe play a role in the anomaly of poor Republican results last week?

. . . maybe?

Nathaniel Rakich of 538 thought so. He deems it “obvious” that “The Dobbs decision will go down in history as a midterm-altering event, alongside the war on terror in 2002 and the Clinton impeachment in 1998.”

But it’s also clear that this wasn’t that straightforward a package deal. As a different 538 article pointed out, Kentucky didn’t approve their amendment even though they re-elected US Senator Rand Paul with 62% of the vote. This was, generally, an election where people showed a lot of propensity to “ticket-split,” where they voted for different parties’ candidates for different offices.

I showed this table recently but I want to show it again. It’s so striking; also I think any holistic commentary of these elections need to almost begin by addressing this story the data are shouting at us.

So, I think it played a role. It didn’t doom Republicans (case in point, Rand Paul), but it was galvanizing enough an issue that I’m sure it affected turnout somewhat—and with as many races as close as they were, that matters.

But if the knee-jerk takeaway is to regret that decision happening, I think that’s the wrong perspective. I’ve been seeing people make this point (I can’t now find them to cite/quote them) that Roe was an abomination that we spent 50 years trying to get rid of. If the political price is a few more years of a 50-50 or 51-49 unfavorable Senate, that sounds like an adequate price. Even factoring in, as Ben Shapiro pointed out, what these missed opportunities does to near-term prospects of being able to reach the 60-seat majority to really dictate legislation, I still think that’s worth it. I especially think that given that that’s how Democrats operate, and they’ve been successfully transforming the country according to their gameplan for years. Plenty of them figured that signing Obamacare into law was giving themselves their own pink slip, but they also understood that it’s for such landmarks that we build political capital in the first place.

I want to say that in case anyone feels queasy about the overturning of Roe. It probably was a thumb on the electoral scale; it definitely seems a viable price to pay.

Nationalization

But now for the point that I really wanted to get to.

For as long as Roe was a part of our national legal landscape, the American pro-life movement had a very clear vision. We had ideals that tugged at the heartstrings that we wanted to make a reality: overturn a SCOTUS-crafted policy that permitted the slaughter of the unborn. And I think I’m not alone when I say that I, for one, hadn’t been holding my breath on that actually happening.

And then it did. Awesome! But suddenly there isn’t a national program anymore for the pro-life movement.

Formerly, everyone, from Mississippi to Maryland, rallied for the repeal of Roe, and fundraised, and helped provide for incipient mothers through the constellation of literally thousands of volunteer-driven crisis pregnancy centers (the same ones that have been vandalized and trashed with impunity, and vilified by people like Senator Elizabeth Warren). The fundraising and the charity to provide for distressed and indigent mothers are going to remain necessary. But there isn’t a single national program for making pro-life ideals real policy.

I say real policy because, for example, you’ve got Wisconsin, where the state’s law protecting the right of the unborn to life dates back to 1849. (Why that year? Because it’s the year after Wisconsin became a state, and the legislature was busy making the essential laws.)

Behold, the year. We’re not the only state flag with a year, but I think we’re the most Microsoft-Paint-y about it.

But that law’s enforcement comes down to the executive branch—the governor and the attorney general. Both of whom are Democrats and fiercely opposed to it! As 538 noted,

[Governor] Evers and [AG] Kaul filed a lawsuit over the summer challenging the ban, which is moving forward in the courts. Wisconsin Republicans also failed to win a legislative supermajority that would have allowed them to override Evers’s veto and pass a newer abortion ban with a better chance of surviving a court challenge. Evers’s victory is still not a guarantee that abortion will become legal in Wisconsin again — but it’s a live possibility, which would not be the case if he had lost.

The lawsuit’s reasoning is bogus, by the way. But all you can hope is that the state Supreme Court recognizes it for that rather than letting their own policies govern—oh, look, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has an election for a swing seat coming up in five months, which will assuredly dictate the fate of this statute. Brilliant.

I’m mentioning all of this because all of these are moving parts—state legislatures passing laws, executives enforcing them, courts upholding them, and electorates installing all relevant people. You need lawmakers to put these laws on the books. The executives need to not sit idly by and refuse to enforce them. You don’t want judges who will discover a “right” to abortion in language like “Equal rights. All men are possessed of equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” (That line was the basis for the Kansas Supreme Court’s right to abortion. Really.) All of these need to hang together for a pro-life regime to begin to take shape. “No man rules alone,” as the old adage goes.

And that’s got to look very different from one state to the next. I think that incrementalism is the only way forward—I think I was more idealistic at the beginning of the summer, and I would still call myself “idealistic” in the visionary sense of the word, but the elections in Kansas and also everywhere else have made it clear that in the immediate future, with these our citizens, having the beliefs that they have, we can have incrementalism or nothing at all, and saving X many innocent lives is better than saving zero.

Anyway, I haven’t seen people try to reckon with this de-nationalization so much. Or maybe you could call it a “differentiation,” the way that in biology cells change into more specific cells, looking more different, and becoming suited for different functions. Part of the same organism, pursuing the same end goal, but doing different jobs in different places.

Thinking about this from the ground up, I think that the public-policy/politics dimension of the pro-life movement needs to address individual states’ electorates where they are.

And I think that there are going to be tough questions about honesty and credibility, like, for elected politicians, how to root what you’re saying in the biological reality of innocent unborn human life while also promising voters that you’d only sign into law a 14-or-so-week ban, the kind they’d broadly find acceptable? At the extreme end of the spectrum, I think that, to the extent that the national GOP weighs in on state contests, people need to be at peace with the idea that candidates in Nevada aren’t going to be fighting this fight particularly vocally. (But on the other end of the spectrum, Louisiana’s Democratic governor signed into law a heartbeat bill. So, there’s that.) It’ll also be tough within the movement, because there will be temptations to seek out heretics and squishes even though some people might genuinely be doing the best we can.

There are still, to be sure, some national angles to everything. I think of the unconscionable vandalism and threats agains the crisis pregnancy clinic, or the fighting back against cookie-cutter disinformation, straw men, and slanders. (All of the bluster, with zero evidence, of GOP threats to women suffering miscarriages comes to mind.) But I think that the future for the pro-life movement looks a lot more specialized in some important, public ways. The path forward lies there, even if it’s not particularly glamorous or heroic or pure. But I think that the pro-life movement needs to strategize in that direction sooner rather than later.

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The Australian Open (which is played on a “hard court,” in Melbourne), the French Open (which is played on red clay in Paris), Wimbledon (which is played on grass in London), and the US Open (which is also played on a hard court, in NYC).