“It’s not really been a great week for the pro-life movement,” former Family Research Council Action Vice President Tom McClusky said Wednesday, opening his remarks for the “Beyond Dobbs” panel at the National Conservatism Conference.
McCluskey was lamenting the triple whammy of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) accepting the legality of the abortion drug mifepristone, then Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) endorsing President Donald Trump’s abandonment of a national abortion ban, and then the release of the Republican Party platform, which did remove language calling for a national ban on abortions that had been in earlier platforms.
“Our platform has to reflect our nominee, and our nominee’s position happens to be one grounded in reality,” Rubio explained.
The pro-life losing streak actually goes far beyond Vance, Rubio, and the GOP platform. There have been seven statewide referendums on abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, and the pro-life movement has gone 0 for 7.
Asked later in the panel what the pro-life movement could do to stop its losing streak, McClusky answered, “I wish I had the solution because I would probably not be on this panel, I’d be out making a lot of money right now.”
If the pro-life movement keeps banging its head against the wall, if it keeps pushing for a national ban on abortion, which 80% of voters oppose, it will keep losing, and it will keep losing badly.
Luckily, Trump and like-minded Republicans such as Vance and Rubio know when to stop playing a losing hand. A national ban on abortion need not be the end-all and be-all of the pro-life movement. As McClusky himself admitted during his presentation, “Donald Trump is the most pro-life president we’ve ever had, because of the actions he took.” And there are plenty of actions a Republican president and a Republican-controlled House and Senate can take, short of a national ban, that would reduce the number of abortions.
Again as McClusky noted, “Biden, or at least the coherent people around him,” have spent the last three years turning every government agency into an outpost for Planned Parenthood. “They’ve turned our veterans hospitals into abortuaries,” McClusky said, “They’ve turned our military into abortion travel services. They’ve taken the Department of Justice and gone after people who stand up for life.”
A Trump who doesn’t campaign on a national abortion ban can undo all of those Biden policies. A Trump who loses because a national abortion ban is opposed by 80% of voters, can’t do anything.
Later on the panel, Emma Waters of The Heritage Foundation spoke about the growing pro-natalist movement within the Republican Party and made a strong case that the solution to declining birth rates lay entirely through the revival of the institution of marriage.
After noting that both marriage and fertility are at all-time lows, Waters said, “Marriage is our best predictor of birth rates. Among married couples, the birth rate is actually doing OK. The reason we are having a fertility crisis is because there are fewer and fewer people who are getting married. To solve the fertility crisis we can’t simply focus on creating more children, we must focus on creating more healthy marriages between men and women. That is going to be where we find our solution.
“All policy must be pro-family policy,” Waters continued. “We don’t need a separate policy group focused on family policy, we need those who are working in foreign policy, those who are in education, those who are in welfare and beyond, asking themselves, ‘Does this policy that I’m putting forward help support and encourage the family?’”
Waters is right. And McClusky’s own presentation touched on this theme as well. But with one major blind spot. As mentioned before, McClusky praised Trump as “the most pro-life president we’ve ever had,” but not just for the actions he took on abortion.
“One of the best things Donald Trump did is he overturned Roe v. Wade, and he will always be in my heart for that,” McClusky said, “but one of the other great things that he did as president was get rid of a lot of regulations, that made it easier for businesses to survive. Businesses survive, they hire people, people have jobs, people feel comfortable then in a better position to have babies. That is why if I was running, I would run on a platform of making babies great again.”
In his own indirect way, McClusky seems to be endorsing Waters’s understanding that the best way to promote life, the best way to achieve more births, is to do everything we can to help young people get and stay married.
But while getting rid of regulations that make housing, education, and energy so expensive would help young couples get and stay married, it is not enough. McClusky said the “best thing the federal government can do” to promote the family “is get the hell out of the way.” But getting the government out of the way is impossible. The federal government spends over $1 trillion a year on means-tested safety net programs including Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Affordable Care Act subsidies, the Child Tax Credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Head Start, and many more.
All of these programs are means-tested in a way that punishes young couples for getting married. Unless you want to repeal all of these programs, which would be even more unpopular than a national abortion ban, you are going to have to reform them.
The impulse answer for the conservative movement on every issue for decades has been, as McClusky said, to get the federal government “the hell out of the way.” But that wasn’t even President Ronald Reagan’s answer. As Reagan said in his first inaugural address, “It’s not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work — work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.”
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Just as the solution to the birth dearth is marriage, the path to a culture of life with far fewer abortions also goes through marriage. Approximately 85% of all abortions are to unmarried women. Anyone who wants to drastically reduce the number of abortions in the United States should be focusing like a laser on helping young men and women get and stay married.
No young woman wants to be in a situation where she is considering abortion. The vast majority of them do want to be married someday. Instead of telling women what they can’t do, let’s help women achieve the lives they already want.