THE FAMILY PLAN

The pro-life movement’ new playbook.

- EMMA GREEN

When Donald Trump ran for President in 2016, the pro-life movement helped carry him to victory. He promised to appoint Justices who would overturn the constitutional right to an abortion established in Roe v. Wade. He followed through, and they delivered, with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But the decision was politically toxic for Republicans. After the Party performed poorly in the 2022 midterms, Trump blamed the losses on prolife candidates. According to Gallup, six in ten Americans describe Dobbs as a “bad thing,” and the percentage of people who say they’re pro-choice is the highest it’s been in decades. In order to win the election in 2024, Trump sidelined the pro-life movement.

At the Republican National Convention, Trump’s allies all but removed abortion from the Party’s platform, stating opposition only to abortions late in pregnancy; there was also some muddled language about the Fourteenth Amendment which even conservative legal scholars had trouble parsing. A group of pro-life advocates, led by the former Vice-President Mike Pence’s policy shop, Advancing American Freedom, published a letter saying that “pro-life Americans are rightly outraged and gravely concerned.” Some pro-lifers went so far as to call on voters to withhold their support from Trump. Ultimately, though, the desire to stay in the MAGA fold won out. Other heavyweights in the movement, including Marjorie Dannenfelser, the head of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, called the platform “a set of commonsense promises.” John Shelton, the policy director of Advancing American Freedom, told me, “The pro-life groups got rolled. And then they were asked to praise this thing that they got rolled on.”