“We are all incrementalists now.” So writes Ryan Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, speaking on behalf of the anti-abortion movement in a new essay for First Things on pro-life politics after Dobbs.
That “all” might be an exaggeration, but Anderson is correct that a series of setbacks for abortion opponents — losing big in red-state referendums, losing ground in the public polling, losing some crucial pro-life language in the Republican platform — are forcing the anti-abortion movement toward gradualism and compromise, and creating a substantial market for what National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty calls pro-life “realism.”
The difficulty is that nobody can yet fully agree on what incrementalism means. Perhaps, as many Donald Trump supporters argue, it requires uncomplainingly accepting Trump’s pro-choice pivot as the price of protecting pro-life interests against an increasingly pro-abortion Democratic Party. Perhaps, as my colleague David French suggests, it means the opposite: Doing whatever it takes to scrub the Trumpian taint off the cause of defending unborn human life, even to the point of voting for Kamala Harris in November.
You can hear me and French debate in last week’s installment of our Matter of Opinion podcast, in which I expressed some strong skepticism that the pro-life cause will gain more than it loses in a Harris-Walz administration.
But disagreeing with my colleague about the implications of a Harris victory doesn’t yield any certainty about alternative modes of incrementalism. Should pro-lifers fight hard to make sure that Trump’s compromising spirit doesn’t take hold among other candidates and officeholders, as Ryan Anderson argues in First Things? Or should they recognize, as Matthew Lee Anderson suggests in The Dispatch, that Trump has sound political instincts and that his leave-it-the-states stance is a “politically palatable” position that the pro-life movement should have “proactively embraced”?
Should pro-lifers make a big effort, as Marvin Olasky argues, to be compromising and understanding in hard cases and more focused on social and economic policies that make it easier to choose life? Or, as Bethel McGrew argues, should they depoliticize in certain respects, placing less faith in the princes of the Republican Party, but maintain their own uncompromising integrity, their commitment to a thou-shalt-not-kill moral absolute?
And recognizing that there is no imaginable pro-life majority absent a big change in the way that Americans approach sex and marriage and religion, does that imply that it should be the business of the pro-life movement to be a pro-marriage or even pro-chastity movement as well? (“Our primary task isn’t to persuade people of the humanity of the unborn,” writes Ryan Anderson, adding, “but to change how people lead their sexual lives.”) Or is it more a matter of patience, as Dougherty implies — of being faithfully present as atomization and sterility deepen, because our decadent society may soon find itself “scrambling through its own subcultures for sources of renewal and new life”?
No doubt the outcome and aftermath of the election will shed light on all these options. But for now my own contribution is to stress the strangeness of the political situation in which pro-lifers find themselves. The end of Roe has forced the movement to confront its manifest political limitations … while also handing pro-lifers a remarkably large amount of policy territory to defend.
Right now there are more than a dozen states where pro-life preferences are actually the law, plus another eight with meaningful restrictions. By way of comparison, the movement for marijuana legalization, whose position is much more popular right now than the stringent pro-life position, has succeeded in legalizing the recreational use of cannabis in 24 states and Washington, D.C.
So the pro-pot movement is in a relatively normal place for an activist movement, with both a reasonable harmony between the popularity of its ideas and the state of its policy advances and also room to grow (so to speak) when it comes to expanding on those victories. Whereas the pro-life movement, in the near term, is in the more unusual position of defending policy victories that it didn’t earn in the court of public opinion.
It earned the overturning of Roe, to be clear, with a multigenerational strategy that kept the constitutional debate alive and eventually, against long odds, forced the issue back into the democratic process. But the movement didn’t build enough overall public agreement with its cause to support the legal landscape that the overturning has restored.
That suggests that both national-level strategies — What should the G.O.P. platform say? Should a Republican president support a national late-term abortion ban? — and grass-roots, cultural-change approaches need to be judged primarily on whether they help the movement hold this unearned ground.
To my mind, that makes a case for the national strategy that the Trump-Vance ticket would be pushing in the alternate reality where a Trump-led ticket were capable of making its ideas cohere. This strategy would start by combining Trump’s support for abortion federalism with Vance’s support for generous family policy. But then, alongside a national pro-family policy like a larger child tax credit, it would also make more federal dollars available for state-based policies that aim to support expecting mothers and reduce abortion rates.
The pro-life states have already taken modest steps along these lines: As Patrick Brown of the Ethics and Public Policy Center noted recently, since the fall of Roe “every state that has laws on the books protecting life in the womb has passed laws that expand support for pregnant and new moms and their babies.” But those steps have been insufficient to the scale of what abortion restrictions ask of women in difficult situations, and therefore insufficient to the task of creating a post-Dobbs social contract that conflicted Americans find credible.
In part they’ve been insufficient because of reflexive Republican resistance to social spending. But they’ve also been insufficient because many pro-life states are among America’s poorer states, with limited fiscal capacity for any substantial policy project, let alone the semi-utopianism of a fully pro-life vision.
So a natural task for national pro-lifers, then, is to do everything possible to help put state pro-life policy on a more sustainable footing — to help prove that the abortion restrictions of, e.g., Texas or Arkansas or Louisiana can actually work and to further reduce abortion rates in pro-life states, whatever happens elsewhere. And meanwhile where national debates are concerned, the concomitant goal should be to make the pro-life case aspirationally, but otherwise accept that pro-lifers are playing defense for the time being — again, trying to hold ground that they didn’t really win.
Trump understands the playing defense part. But he’s constitutionally incapable of making the aspirational case, which is part of the price the pro-life movement is paying (and likely to continue paying) for making a bargain with him in the first place. And unless Vance is extremely influential, I doubt that a second Trump administration would prioritize family policy over the mixture of anti-immigration efforts and conventional tax-cutting that it’s more likely to deliver.
But to the extent that the anti-abortion movement is looking for a single incrementalist goal instead of a dozen different ones, this seems like the right place to focus: Make it as easy as possible, in terms of cash flow as well as legal cover, to be a pro-life state in a pro-choice country.
Breviary
The great leaps of Evel Knievel.
The performances of Judith Butler.
Israel’s trickle-down natalism.
The feel-bad movies of the century.
The bard of inceldom.
Against the fertility saboteurs.
Advertisements for Myself
I will be leading a discussion at the Catholic University of America next Tuesday, Sept. 17, at 6:30 p.m. on the pressing question: Can Humanity Survive the Digital Age? The event is free and open to the public.
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