Don't Blame Trump for Pro-Life Struggles

Maybe people are becoming more pro-choice because they don’t like living in a country where pro-lifers get their way

On March 26, 2024, demonstrators protest and argue outside the U.S. Supreme Court. (Photo by Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Abortion has been much in the news this past week, and that’s likely to continue, given the confluence of several forces in our politics.

Among them:

• Democrats think (for good reason) that the issue helps them—and could well swing the election to Joe Biden in November by maximally mobilizing female voters, as it has done in a series of special elections around the country since the Dobbs decision overturning Roe was handed down by the Supreme Court in June 2022. With this incentive in place, Biden and his party are going to keep bringing up abortion, no matter what Trump and his party do or prefer.

• The pro-life movement is among the loudest and most influential factions in the Republican Party’s electoral coalition. Now that abortion can be restricted or banned without limit, the movement appears to care far more about restricting or banning the procedure in any way it can (by reviving long-dormant laws on the books, or by passing new restrictive legislation at the state or federal level) than it does about engaging in tactical moves to increase the likelihood the GOP wins the presidency and/or increases its margins in Congress. In this respect, the pro-life movement resembles the panoply of single-issue environmental and social-justice activist groups that punch far above their weight within the Democratic Party and regularly place their own priorities ahead of the party’s broader political interests.

• Donald Trump grasps intuitively that maximalism on the issue will hurt his chances in November. That’s why he released a video earlier this week foreswearing any attempt to pass federal restrictions on abortion and instead advocating that the fight be kept at the state level. I agree with pro-choice activists and Democratic-leaning analysts who insist this pledge is meaningless coming from Trump; if a GOP majority in Congress during a second Trump administration passed a federal bill restricting abortion, Trump could well sign it no matter what he says now. As always, it will depend entirely on his political calculus at that specific moment in time. But I also think Trump’s instincts at this moment are correct: the less his party talks about passing federal legislation to restrict abortion, the better for his campaign. If Trump could succeed in relegating abortion to the states, that might mean the issue would decrease in salience between now and November. But as the Arizona Supreme Court made clear the day after Trump released his video urging federalism, state-level developments are going to keep abortion front and center in the political conversation no matter what Trump says or wants.

Is Trump to Blame?

In the midst of all this abortion politics, Ross Douthat, the country’s most prominent pro-life pundit, has written a worthwhile column reflecting on why public opinion has seemingly shifted so sharply against the pro-life position in recent years (as captured in several different polls, as well as in the results of the special elections I noted above). Douthat raises a number of possible explanations, and gives each its due, but ends up settling on Trump himself as the primary causal factor.

This is something Douthat has been saying for years: Whatever tactical political victories an alliance with Trump might bring for the pro-life movement—and in appointing the Supreme Court justices who made it possible overturn Roe, those victories turned out to be substantial and unprecedented—the price paid will be very high, as the movement comes to be associated with someone so lacking in compassion and dragging along behind him such a long and vile record of flagrantly misogynistic words and deeds.

Or as Douthat puts it in this most recent statement of his position:

[O]ne does not need to be a monocausalist to see how the identification of the anti-abortion cause with his particular persona, his personal history and public style, might have persuaded previously wavering and ambivalent Americans to see the pro-life movement differently than they did before.

If you set out to champion the rights of the most vulnerable human beings while promising protection and support for women in their most vulnerable state, and your leader is a man famous for his playboy lifestyle who exudes brash sexism and contempt for weakness, people are going to have some legitimate questions about whether they can trust you to make good on your promises of love and care.

There is no doubt some truth to this. I can always appreciate a “Trump destroys everything he touches” line of argument. But I also think there’s another, more obvious and parsimonious explanation for where America’s politics of abortion seems to be going nearly two years after the overturning of Roe.

Republicans, Ideal v. Real