E arlier this month, the Republican Party adopted a platform with a decidedly weakened anti-abortion plan: 90 words devoted to life issues, compared with nearly 800 in the 2016 platform; arguments for the protection of human life narrowed to opposing “Late Term Abortion”; and a nod to states’ abilities to pass laws in defense of “Life or Liberty,” citing the 14th Amendment.
Whether the change amounts to prudential politics or moral cowardice, it is a recognition of the current reality. The pro-life cause is not politically viable in many places right now. In significant swaths of the country, legal change is probably decades if not generations away. Consequently, the most important arena of social change right now is the public sphere writ large. And, quite possibly, the most important places to focus pro-life energy and spend pro-life funds are the nonpolitical and nonlegal institutions of everyday life.
The pro-life movement finds itself in a position similar to that of antebellum social reformers who relied on “moral suasion” to accomplish their goals. They saw problems, including slavery, alcoholism, and women’s subjugation, as moral issues. These issues were centered on individual lives. Solutions to them would arise from personal conversions. Consequently, activists took to the stage and the pen, lecturing widely, publishing their own newspapers, and arguing from the pulpit to forge public opinion by changing minds and opening hearts.
Following the abolition of slavery through instruments of law, social movements began seeking legal solutions to problems, as historian Lori Ginzberg has argued. Politics and policy proved more efficacious tools for effecting change than moral argumentation and persuasion. This seems to be, in part, the story of the pro-life movement in recent decades (though the history of the anti-abortion movement in the United States over the last century and a half is more complicated).
The first March for Life was held a year to the day after the Roe v. Wade decision, and for many years beginning in the 1980s, National Right to Life Committee ran its Abortion Stops a Beating Heart campaign. But in the intervening years, the major pro-life organizations in this country became laser-focused on political and legal means of restricting access to and decreasing the incidence of abortion in this country. Arguing that the law is a teacher and would eventually, when changed, do its work, they were devoted to judicial and legislative victories. They did so despite the similarly educative experience of 50 years of the wide availability of abortion. The result has been that every pro-life ballot measure since Dobbs has failed.
Chapter organizations such as National Right to Life and Students for Life offer significant resources to their members, and pro-life groups across the country coordinate walks for life and prayers outside abortion clinics, diaper drives, and other fundraisers for crisis-pregnancy centers, and a plethora of other efforts. They have kept the topic of abortion in the public square, provided at-times heroic witness to the value of life, and supported countless vulnerable women and children. Yet polling data have shown a steady increase in the number of American adults supporting legalized abortion over the last decade. A Pew survey conducted in 2014 found that a majority of adults in 32 states believed that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and that nationwide 55 percent did. By this April, that number had risen to 63 percent, including 76 percent of adults 18–29. And in May, a Gallup poll found that 35 percent, the highest recorded since 1975, agreed that abortion should be legal under any circumstances.
Even for those with a focus on law as a means of social change, public opinion on the subject of abortion poses a significant problem: It is difficult to put laws on the books and retain them there if the electorate disapproves of them. Consequently, the pro-life organizations in this country — and other organizations that have a stake in the abortion question, particularly religious ones — should double down on efforts to educate the general public about the physical and moral reality of abortion and to empower new and existing grassroots efforts to do the same.
The pro-life movement should renew its willingness to call a spade a spade — to identify abortion publicly as a moral evil, as murder — as the early women’s-rights activists themselves did without compunction. As the myriad women who have received care at crisis-pregnancy centers and through Project Rachel have found, that honesty enables genuine mercy and compassion. Building on that well-constructed foundation, large and small pro-life organizations should devote more creative energy to finding ways to change public opinion on abortion at the local, regional, and national levels.
The early social movements’ efforts at moral suasion were effective: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin led to a major shift in public opinion about slavery in the 1850s. And into the 1860s and 1870s, the women’s-rights movement used newspapers and the lecture circuit to drum up enthusiasm for its causes, widen its circles, and maintain interest in the subject until it was resolved in the law in the early-20th century.
Whether culture is downstream from law or upstream from politics, it now seems to be the pro-life movement’s widest area of opportunity. Taking a cue from the 19th-century social reformers and undertaking a serious, creative, thoughtful, and coordinated effort to “educate public sentiment” might be the most effective thing it could do at this moment.