The Three Pro-Life Movements

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, May 12, 2022

 

The pro-life movement is a case study for fusionist conservatism — because there are at least three pro-life movements, each with its own distinct goals and priorities. 

 

We usually think of the pro-life movement as beginning 50 years ago with the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. But that is the origin only of our youngest — and, if the Sam Alito decision is in fact the Supreme Court’s majority opinion on the matter, our most successful — pro-life movement. At least we think of it as part of the pro-life movement, though, strictly speaking, it is not that at all. The crusade against Roe v. Wade as a court decision is a crusade against defective, imperialistic jurisprudence, a campaign to defend the sanctity not of human life but of our constitutional order, against those who would pervert it for their own parochial political ends, using the Supreme Court as a superlegislature to grant the Left political victories that its allies in elected office are unable to win at the ballot box. The legal and constitutional case against Roe v. Wade need not be wedded to the anti-abortion cause at all, and, indeed, a small number of brave, intellectually honest legal scholars who favor abortion rights have conceded that Roe was an extraconstitutional power grab, intellectually indefensible and politically disastrous. 

 

Those who have come of age politically in the hyperpartisan media environment may be surprised to learn that the Federalist Society, founded in 1982, was in its early days home to a very large libertarian constituency whose members generally supported abortion rights. The Federalist Society was not founded as an anti-abortion organization — it was founded to fight for an originalist approach to jurisprudence. Its logo is not an unborn child but a silhouette of James Madison. In fact, the social libertarianism of the Federalist Society caused a good deal of friction in its early days, which gave rise to a number of more explicitly conservative and anti-abortion legal groups. 

 

As abortion historian Mary Ziegler of Florida State University College of Law told the Washington Post, social conservatives felt “there were too many libertarians in the early Federalist Society who were pro-choice. It was a divisive issue.” But none of those conservative groups rose to anything like the prominence of the Federalist Society, and the split between conservative and libertarian legal reforms was somewhat healed by persuading the libertarians that they should adopt the pro-life position not in spite of their libertarian views but precisely because of them — that abortion represents the grossest violation of individual rights imaginable. Here, science and technology have been powerful allies: Debates about issues related to pregnancy in the 19th and 20th centuries were conducted behind a partial veil of ignorance — the more we have learned about fetal development, and the more we are able to observe life in the womb, the more difficult it has become to deny the humanity of the unborn child. Bringing the libertarians around was a key political success of the 1990s — sometimes, it is necessary to preach to the choir. 

 

Roe galvanized the conservative legal movement for reasons having to do with practical politics as much as legal theory. Abortion is horrendous, visibly and viscerally so, and it provided a desirable point of focus for originalist reform. The movement needed such a point of focus, but many of the choices were unattractive. There have been many originalist scholars over the years who believed that Brown v. Board of Education was wrongly decided, but most people of good will welcome the outcome of Brown, and it would be politically very difficult to argue for having given the cause of segregation a legal victory to satisfy what seems to the average citizen a dry philosophical mandate. Similarly, Loving v. Virginia, the case that struck down laws against interracial marriage, appeared to many originalist scholars as a ruling that couldn’t “be reconciled with an originalist reading of the 14th Amendment,” as Ed Whelan has put it, noting that some later originalist thinkers have taken a different view. Of course, in an intellectually honest discussion of the issues, there is no conflict between abhorring racist marriage laws and believing that Loving was wrongly decided, but our political and legal debates are not conducted exclusively among the honest or the decent. Wickard v. Filburn had been on the books for 40 years by the time the Federalist Society was formed, and relitigating the New Deal would have seemed an eccentricity. But Roe was opposed from the day the decision was published — a bit before that, in fact: Like the Alito draft decision in Dobbs, Roe was leaked beforehand. 

 

Some of the more excitable voices on the right like to say, “The conservative movement has never conserved anything.” But the fight against Roe is precisely how radical change is effected: by building institutions, by organizing, by making winning arguments, with persuasion. Donald Trump was able to name three excellent originalists to the Supreme Court because the Federalist Society and other organs of the conservative movement had nurtured a generation of originalist lawyers and helped to advance their careers — it was a 50-year overnight success story. 

 

 Making the case against abortion per se is the work of the other pro-life movements. And if — if — it is the case that Roe is about to be vacated, the other pro-life movements will be put to the test as the abortion issue returns to the theater of democracy.

 

The pro-life movement that came into existence in the late 1960s and then exploded after Roe was built on top of an earlier pro-life movement that is still with us, though attenuated. Before Roe, abortion was an issue of interest almost exclusively to Catholics, many of whose immigrant ancestors had been the targets of aggressive eugenic attention by the forerunners of the modern abortion movement. As living fossils such as Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, and Jesse Jackson are here to remind us, ending abortion was once a Democratic issue — those WASPy country-club Republicans out in the suburbs had little to no interest in it. As historian Daniel K. Williams notes in an Atlantic essay, 

 

in 1973 many of the most vocal opponents of abortion were northern Democrats who believed in an expanded social-welfare state and who wanted to reduce abortion rates through prenatal insurance and federally funded day care. . . . Before the mid-1970s, active opposition to abortion in the United States looked almost exactly like opposition to abortion in Britain, Western Europe, and Australia: It was concentrated mainly among Catholics. As late as 1980, 70 percent of the members of the nation’s largest anti-abortion organization, the National Right to Life Committee, were Catholic. As a result, the states that were most resistant to abortion legalization were, in most cases, the states with the highest concentration of Catholics, most of which were in the North and leaned Democratic.

 

Those northern Democrats changed in two important ways over the coming generation: They left the North, and they left the Democratic Party, with the people who were then described as “white ethnic Catholics” shifting toward the Republican Party for several reasons: Many of them were in the same position as Ronald Reagan, New Deal Democrats who could not reconcile themselves to the increasing social and economic radicalism of the Democratic Party in the 1960s and 1970s. But those former northern Democrats also simply began to more closely resemble what was at the time the typical Republican voter: As they moved south, their pattern of life shifted from urban to suburban, they advanced generationally up the educational and professional ladders, and they grew more assimilated as they left behind their urban ethnic enclaves, easing into that most Republican of all demographics: generic white. 

 

In the North and the Midwest, progressive reformers had found many allies among socially minded Christian congregations, from Quakers to Methodists inclined toward the “social gospel” such as young Hillary Rodham. But southern Evangelicals had more agrarian roots, fewer urban connections, and a much more populist streak. Southern Baptists had signed up for the progressive project of Prohibition, but, by and large, conservative southern Protestants had not been on board with progressive social-reform movements, and many of them had actively — indeed, violently — resisted the most prominent of those movements, the campaign for African Americans’ civil rights. Like Catholics in the north, they were hereditary Democrats turned off by the countercultural radicalism of the 1960s, the anti-war movement (southerners have long been disproportionately represented in the military), rising crime, etc. — conservatives suspicious of an active federal role in the desegregation of local schools and businesses surely played a role, too, but it would be a gross oversimplification to pretend that this was simply about southern racism. 

 

The pro-life movement that ascended to dominance after Roe was more southern, more Evangelical, and more Republican than the one that had come before it. And while it never was the hysterically moralistic crusade it has been caricatured as, it was linked to the nihilistic libertinism of the so-called sexual revolution, the movement that was still called “women’s lib” in that polyester-clad era, and was characterized by a prescient appreciation of the anarchy and misery that eventually would be wrought by the skyrocketing divorce rate of the time. 

 

And though it may be counterintuitive, it may be on precisely those grounds that the pro-life movement will best be able to reach the people who are not only the core constituency for abortion rights but also the core constituency of the Democratic Party at large: unmarried women. The sexual ethic of practical polygamy that has emerged out of the wreckage of the Roe era has been absolutely brutal for a great many women. There are many women in our country who get pregnant and wish they hadn’t, and they merit our sympathy and help. But there is a much larger and more politically salient cohort of women who would like to get married but cannot find suitable mates thanks in part to a sexual culture that creates powerful disincentives for men to marry, along with women who enter middle age lamenting the children they never had — women who feel cheated, misused, thwarted, and lonely. Roe is not the only contributor to that culture, but it is part of a package deal — a terrible deal for many women. 

 

After Roe, the first challenge for the pro-life movement is to avoid becoming the brutish caricature its enemies would like it to be seen as. Yes, we want to prohibit abortion, but we want to do so as part of a program that puts women and women’s interests as women at the center of our efforts. That the pro-life movement today is mostly led by women is an encouraging indicator that these women’s interests and sensibilities will continue to inform the pro-life movement going forward. 

 

With all due respect to our friends fighting the legal battle — and much respect is due — overturning Roe will not be the end of the fight but the beginning. The fight against Roe has been a 50-year prelude to the opening scene in the drama to come. We should fight that battle in a way that we can be proud of 50 years from now.