How Pelosi’s Speakership Helped Bring About the Extinction of Pro-Life Democrats
Both parties have become more and more polarized on the issue over the years, but Nancy Pelosi did her part to speed up that process.
Both parties have become more and more polarized on the issue over the years, but Pelosi did her part to speed up that process.
S peaker Nancy Pelosi, who announced earlier this month that she will step down from Democratic leadership as her party returns to the minority in the House, has many legacies. Perhaps the most significant legislative accomplishment was Obamacare — a big-government program Pelosi willed to final passage in the House even after the bill cost Democrats the Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy. That legislative triumph for the Left is intertwined with another Pelosi legacy: the extinction of pro-life Democrats.
True, Pelosi did not cause the extinction. Both parties have become more and more polarized on the issue over the years, but Pelosi did her part to speed up that process.
“The Affordable Care Act was a big inflection point,” says Dan Lipinski, a pro-life Democratic congressman from 2005 to 2021. In the fall of 2009, when it became apparent that Pelosi couldn’t get the health-care bill out of the House without the support of pro-life Democrats, she allowed a vote to attach the Hyde amendment to it, and 64 House Democrats backed the pro-life measure. But the bill that came out of the Senate in December 2009 allowed federal funding of elective abortion: Each state health-care exchange was required to provide a plan that covered elective abortions unless the state passed a law banning such coverage. After Democrats lost the January 2010 special election in Massachusetts — and the ability to overcome a legislative filibuster — Pelosi was determined to see the Senate bill enacted. She did just that.
The only House Democrat who voted for Obamacare when it had the Hyde amendment attached to it and voted against it when it didn’t was Lipinski. The passage of Obamacare badly damaged the credibility of the pro-life Democrats who voted for it and helped sink some who didn’t. A House of 257 Democrats and 178 Republicans flipped after November 2010 to a House of 242 Republicans and 193 Democrats. In 2011, when Lipinski cosponsored the “No Taxpayer-Funding for Abortion Act,” only 16 House Democrats voted for it — a big drop from the 64 who backed the Hyde amendment in 2009.
As a party boss, Pelosi once saw the utility of pro-life Democrats. Following the Democrats’ defeat in 2016, she actually blamed the loss on the party’s alienating religious and socially conservative Americans. “You know what? That’s why Donald Trump is president of the United States — the evangelicals and the Catholics, anti-marriage equality, anti-choice. That’s how he got to be president,” she said. “Everything was trumped, literally and figuratively, by that.”
“Bob Casey — you know Bob Casey — would you like him not to be in our party?” she said in the same interview of the Pennsylvania senator, who described himself as a pro-life Democrat at the time but fully abandoned his pro-life position in 2022.
Yet, Pelosi made it very difficult for pro-life Democrats to survive in the party. She rallied Democrats to oppose even modest limits on late-term abortion. In 2013, when Republicans introduced a federal limit on most abortions later than 20 weeks after conception, I asked Pelosi at a press conference what the moral difference was between an elective abortion at 23 or 26 weeks of pregnancy and the infanticides for which Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell had just been convicted of murder. Pelosi was unable to explain the difference and said: “As a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this. I don’t think it should have anything to do with politics.”
Opposition to late-term limits on abortion helped sink Democratic senators in Arkansas, Louisiana, and North Dakota. Retirements, redistricting, and primaries made the number of moderate and pro-life Democrats dwindle further. Lipinski faced two tough primary challenges over his pro-life stance — narrowly prevailing in 2018 and narrowly losing in 2020. Pelosi, honoring the policy of backing incumbents, offered tepid support to Lipinski.
After Lipinski’s loss in 2020, Pelosi brought an appropriations bill to the floor for the first time since the 1970s that allowed unlimited taxpayer funding of abortion. The bill passed with unanimous support of House Democrats in July 2021 but was bottled up in the Senate. In September 2021, for the first time in history, Pelosi held a vote on an extreme abortion bill that would have wiped away almost all state limits on abortion and effectively required all 50 states to allow abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. Only one House Democrat, Henry Cuellar of Texas, voted against it.
“I don’t want to say it’s not possible for pro-life Democrats to reemerge, but at this point I’m not sure how that happens,” Lipinski tells me. He believes the GOP’s modest gains in the House and failure to take back the Senate will only make “Democrats more convinced they need to keep pushing forward with this extreme agenda.”