President Donald Trump might go down in history as the best thing that ever happened to legal abortion in the United States.
That’s because Trump, by muzzling pro-life leaders and championing states’ rights on abortion following his efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade, cultivated a political environment in which the practice of legal abortion has flourished. Two-and-a-half years following the fall of Roe, abortion rights have never been more protected in all but a handful of states, and public support for legal abortion has never been stronger.
Meanwhile, the political influence of the pro-life movement is at an all-time low. Its leaders have been cowed by a popular president who frequently thumbs his nose at pro-life orthodoxy, and its political strategy has lacked the savvy necessary to succeed in post-Roe America. Even within the Republican Party, through which it derives its broader power, the movement’s influence is greatly diminished.
And while there is technically time remaining to keep abortion rights from achieving irreversible legal protection nationwide, the same way a football team down three touchdowns in the fourth quarter technically has a shot to rally and win, the pro-life movement must employ a radically different strategy and recruit a radically different set of leaders to win over a deeply skeptical public.
The truth
To its great credit, the pro-life movement has always been bold in speaking the truth about the sanctity of unborn life. Since forming in the late 1960s to oppose efforts to liberalize state abortion laws, the movement has trumpeted the truth at every conceivable venue: on the sidewalks, in the streets, in state legislatures and in the U.S. Capitol, on bumpers and on television news programs (when they were allowed to participate), in internet comment boxes, and beyond.
The problem, of course, has always been the stubborn cap on the percentage of people who are persuaded by the truth about unborn life. Since 1973, the belief that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, which is the default position of the pro-life movement, has never been held by even a quarter of people.
The high-water mark came in 2009, when Gallup found that 23% held this view. As of May 2024, that number has plummeted to 12%.
Yet, despite the movement’s low ceiling of support, it has, for decades, managed to wield great influence in Republican Party politics. Through mobilization and sheer passion, the pro-life base of the GOP became the indispensable bloc for candidates hoping to win primaries. For GOP hopefuls at every level of government, successfully courting the pro-life movement was a major boon. Crossing it, on the other hand, came at a great price.
Waning influence
However, the movement’s era of influence within the GOP has passed. In addition to the staggering losses absorbed in most state ballot initiatives since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization returned the issue of abortion to the people, including in ruby-red states such as Montana, Kansas, and Missouri, the movement’s cache has evaporated within Trump’s GOP.
Acrimony between the president and the pro-life movement broke into public view during the election as both sides haggled over the language in the abortion plank of the GOP platform.
In July 2024, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, issued a warning to Trump about weakening the language, calling the move a “miscalculation” that would cause the alliance between the GOP and pro-life activists to be “severely weakened.”
In the end, Trump cut the most cherished goals of pro-life activists from the platform, including the call for a constitutional amendment to grant personhood protections for the unborn. Trump, eager to deemphasize his commitment to an unpopular cause, got everything he wanted out of the “negotiations,” and the pro-life community got nothing.
Not only were there no consequences for Trump, but Dannenfelser even released a statement that seemingly praised the final version: “The Republican Party remains strongly pro-life at the national level.”
The episode was a precursor to a campaign filled with pro-life heresies by Trump and his allies, for which the Trump campaign suffered no repercussions. Vance, on CBS’s Face the Nation, promised it wouldn’t use the Food and Drug Administration to block access to mifepristone and that Trump would veto any national law to protect unborn life. Trump posted on Truth Social that his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.”
Trump even needed to be coaxed into personally voting against Florida’s Amendment 4, which sought to overturn the state’s six-week abortion ban. In August 2024, Trump announced that he was “against” Florida’s abortion law, saying, “I think the six-week (ban) is too short — it has to be more time. I told them I want more weeks.” He eventually voted to uphold the six-week ban, citing the Democrats’ “radical” position as his reason — not his belief in the sanctity of life.
For all these infractions and more, Trump suffered no political consequences and behaved as though he didn’t fear them to begin with.
Road to recovery
The political fortunes of the pro-life movement will not change until it adapts to the political realities of the post-Roe era. To become a viable force in American politics once again, the movement must recognize that the primary venue of this battle is no longer in the courts but at the polls. This means placing an emphasis on attracting people to the cause, which requires more than the brute force of a true argument.
Of course, the truth about the sanctity of life must never watered down. But there’s more to winning a political battle than simply being “correct.” Often, the best arguments don’t win elections — many times they lose.
Indeed, advancing the cause of life in post-Roe America is not primarily a matter of winning a debate but about winning a popularity contest. Pro-lifers must make their position not only convincing but also appealing.
One place the movement might look for inspiration on how best to win converts is by studying successful Christian evangelists.
Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, and founder of Word on Fire, a Catholic ministry dedicated to evangelization that has been highly successful at drawing converts, often stresses the need to evangelize through beauty.
Barron often urges his followers to consider how they might evangelize on behalf of baseball. To infect someone with the love of baseball, he often remarks, bringing them to the ballpark where they can view the majestic green of the field and hear the crack of the bat is a better strategy than handing them a rule book.
“You don’t begin with the infield fly rule,” he said in an NPR interview. “You begin with the beauty of the game. Watch the people play. Look at the rhythm. Look at that curveball, what a beautiful pitch that was. … Only then are they going to want to know about it.”
As luck would have it, the cause of life has no shortage of beauty through which to win over the public imagination: images of beautiful babies and their parents, inspiring stories of mothers who gained infinitely more than they lost by choosing life, the joyful witness of large families whose lives overflow with abundance and love.
To make a strategic shift, the pro-life movement must collectively acknowledge that it is losing the struggle to convert a majority of Americans to its cause. Some will resist this acknowledgment, pointing to a few victories notched in state ballot initiatives in November 2024.
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But even these “victories” deserve an asterisk. In Florida, for instance, where the ballot measure challenging the state’s six-week ban failed, 57% of people voted against the pro-life position. The state’s threshold to amend the constitution through ballot amendments is 60%.
Clearly, what’s being done isn’t working. The pro-life movement must adapt before abortion rights are codified in state constitutions across America. The clock is ticking.