Pro-lifers must hold whatever modest ground they can. And they have reasons to hope.
Pro-lifers must hold whatever modest ground they can. And they have reasons to hope.
P ro-lifers talk about building “a culture of life,” by which they mean a culture that supports more mothers conceiving and delivering their children and that makes abortion more and more unthinkable. I sometimes used to worry that when politicians were using this phrase, they did so as an excuse for not doing their part of the work.
For the past two decades, I’ve been part of a subculture that is a culture of life. It’s among the traditionalist Catholics who are devoted to the Latin Mass. We know about a half dozen couples who come to church with a small army of children: six, seven, or even ten kids. And for many of these families, the youngest of the children has a disability. And among our peers at our parish, we know three mothers who were pressured by their doctors to abort their children because of the adverse results of one scan or test. They were variously told that the children’s conditions were “incompatible with life.” One dear friend was basically told by her ob-gyn while she still had the ultrasound jelly on her abdomen. He had found telltale signs of trisomy 16. At her first hesitation to schedule an abortion, he invoked not just the futility of the condition that her child supposedly had, but the astronomical costs of NICU treatment. She was going to waste millions of dollars — her own or someone else’s — and it would still be futile. Told again that abortion wasn’t an option, he harrumphed, “What are you, religious?”
All three of those women not only delivered their children, but those children were healthy and developmentally normal. The doctors were either wrong, or merely half-right. In the third case, it turned out that trisomy 16 affected only the placenta, not the child. She had to deliver early and had post-birth medical trauma herself, meaning that at one point, the newborn child was in a NICU in one hospital while the mother was being treated in a separate hospital, with a harried father spending all his day commuting between them. Our entire community rallied to them and enfolded that family in its care, providing meal trains, house-cleaning, and babysitting for their three other children until the two parents could recover and catch a breath.
Why did these homemakers resist the expert doctors? It wasn’t just the sociology — that having an abortion could lead to judgment or shame in their community of friends. It wasn’t even just their faith in the church’s teaching on abortion. It was something their faith puts even deeper into them, the conviction that the good, the true, and the beautiful go together. Believing that the Creator of the universe is not only good, but always rational, they had the marrow-deep conviction that they would never find themselves in this universe in a position where their own good required them to do something deliberately ugly or evil. It’s this conviction, backed up by familial and community action, that makes a culture welcoming to life. And this conviction is mostly absent outside the most conservative churches in the country.
After the repeal of Roe v. Wade by the Dobbs decision, pro-lifers are now finding out what the small-d democratic politics of abortion are like. And they are not favorable.
Pro-lifers used to comfort themselves that most Americans polled said that late-term abortion was disgusting. On various issues — such as sex-selective abortion — pro-lifers could squint and see a mandate for advancing some restrictions. And yet, state legislatures that modestly restrict abortion are often overwhelmed by ballot-referendum campaigns that re-create or expand on Roe at the state level. We can see why the pro-life position is so strongly correlated with religiosity. Most Americans, even most self-professed Christians, do not have the adamantine certainty that those three ladies in my parish have, that the universe is ordered in such a way that they are never compelled to do something evil. Without it, they lack any intuitive basis to stand up to an ob-gyn’s counsel, and they lack the faith in God’s providence to endure the suffering that difficult pregnancies, or children with difficulties, may bring. They may believe various abortions are wrong or disgusting. But they believe them to be necessary evils. And, therefore, that they should at least be legal.
On reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization, the question becomes even more clouded for many voters, who don’t consider the human embryo in itself but judge the act only by the moral intention to form a family.
Feeling the political heat, Donald Trump has abandoned almost any pretense of pro-life sentiment. Although he says he is committed to states’ rights, he has criticized those states that do put serious restrictions on abortion. His running mate, J. D. Vance, notable for having a top pro-life rating from the Susan B. Anthony List, has defended the ticket and said he is in favor of the availability of the abortion drug mifepristone. Compared with 1980s-era Republican platforms that committed the party to passing a Human Life Amendment, the current platform looks like capitulation.
Pro-lifers have responded with a fratricidal conflict and not a little scapegoating for their current predicament. I’d like to propose peace, restraint, and realism.
First, although Trump is surely more inclined to ditch pro-lifers than are many Republicans, I think it’s wrong to consider Trump and Vance as backsliding all the way from Reagan’s commitment to a Human Life Amendment. Simply put, when the Republican Party made those promises, they did so knowing Roe v. Wade permitted hardly any state-level restrictions on the practice and that they were politically a million miles away from such an outcome. Only after Roe did such vows even seem politically plausible to those making the promises, and to voters.
We have to contend with the actual sentiments, and the way of life of our people as it is. I spoke with the very pro-life father mentioned above — the one who spent days commuting between two hospitals to see his newborn son and his suffering wife. He thought that Florida governor Ron DeSantis had made a mistake in signaling that he was open to signing a six-week ban to replace his state’s 15-week ban on abortion. In other words, he took the very position that Donald Trump undermined recently. And yet, I agreed with him. The act may have been morally right in our view, and it burnished DeSantis’s pro-life credentials ahead of a presidential run. But in light of public opinion, we believed it imprudent. It made it more likely for the most pro-choice red state in the country to rebuild Roe at the state level by popular referendum.
Since the fall of Roe at the federal level, Senator Lindsey Graham has pushed for the idea of a 15-week abortion ban, with generously interpreted exceptions. Think of what that means, practically speaking, for the pro-life cause. It’s less than meets the eye. Over 50 percent of abortions are now done using pills in the first days and weeks of pregnancy. Ninety-three percent of abortions occur in the first trimester (before 13 weeks of pregnancy). And it’s likely that the vast majority of the remaining 7 percent of later abortions would qualify under the law, given the generous way that exceptions have been treated in the law and in the courts.
Yet Graham’s 15-week ban is considered a hard lift, and the number of abortions it would stop may be statistically negligible. The electorates in solid red states such as Ohio and Florida would rather re-create or expand upon Roe, even if the voters find some of the implications morally problematic and even disgusting. It is from this modest position, not the notional 1984 platform, that Trump and other Republicans are navigating.
And so in this dire context, where only a handful of states can restrict abortion in even modestly substantial ways, pro-lifers must be innocent as doves and wise as serpents. If only our selectest champions at the federal level would attempt to trim down abortion by 1–2 percent with legislation, we should probably not cast among the damned those politicians who would only hold the pro-life line at federal funding, or whose judicial appointments would not re-create Roe. There will be a profound desire among many elected Republicans to see the issue disappear from elective politics, as it largely has in European countries. Pro-lifers must hold whatever modest ground they can.
We have reasons to hope. We can work with those pro-natalists, like Elon Musk, who are not yet fully pro-life. We can build on their true conviction that children are a social good with the truth that the natural family is good for children. We can also share and hopefully spread the virtues that are being developed in our pro-life subcultures to the culture at large. All it requires is offering to your neighbors what you would offer to your fellow parishioners.
And we have the advantage that the culture we want to repair has all but acknowledged its brokenness. It has none of the spiritual self-confidence it had even 60 years ago. It survives mostly insofar as it is numbed by drugs and other depressants to survive. This is a society that will shortly be scrambling through its own subcultures for sources of renewal and new life. We’re here to be found, and it is only becoming more evident that our way of life is not just more welcoming for children, but more meaningful for the middle-aged, and less lonely for the elderly.
Editor’s note: This article has been edited since its original publication.