We would like to think that some Republicans in D.C. are just having fun with the press. Surely no one would be so idiotic, so self-parodying an example of the consultant mentality, to propose that Republicans address their political challenges on abortion by replacing the term “pro-life” with something else. Yet NBC has a headline to that effect, even if the reporting below it doesn’t quite justify it.

The label has become less popular during the last few years, and the story quotes Republicans who think voters now associate it with inflexibility and extremism: an insistence on banning all abortions, at all stages and with no exceptions. It’s true that Republicans cannot prosper if voters have that impression. That many of them do is a consequence of how Republicans have handled abortion policy and rhetoric, not of their use of the label. It’s not the term that’s dragging down Republicans. It’s Republicans who are dragging down the term. Note that Democrats to this day do not use the term themselves. When they want to assail Republicans over abortion, they call them “anti-choice” or “forced-birthers” or any number of other epithets instead.

There are quite a few things that Republicans can and should do to press the pro-life case in an advantageous way. None of them involve either inventing new terminology or the usual Republican tactic of running away from the issue. Governors, attorneys general, and state legislators can clarify relentlessly that no pro-life laws on the books anywhere forbid doctors from acting immediately to help women in genuinely life-threatening situations. They can offer additional support to babies born and unborn, and their families. They can specify what legislation they have in mind, acknowledging public disagreement and the need for a democratically sustainable consensus. And they can hit the extremism of the Democrats. Every Republican needs to be prepared to explain, over and against a hostile media, how the Democratic Party has stealthily adopted a policy of abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy — and they want to impose it on the entire nation. That includes pressing Democrats who deny this to state when they would accept limits on abortion. (To their credit, some of the Republicans in the NBC story make some of these points.)

Finally, Republicans would do well to maintain some perspective. The evidence that pro-life views have hurt Republican politicians during the last year is not especially robust. Every governor who signed pro-life legislation and ran for reelection in 2022 won, some of them by landslides. The Republicans who lost races in 2022 that should have been winnable generally had serious liabilities other than abortion — notably, obsessive kookery about the 2020 election. To the extent abortion was a factor in those races, it mostly worked against those candidates who ran on a no-exceptions position.

Republicans are and will remain a pro-life party. As such they should be especially averse to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.