A Détente on Abortion
Everyday Americans want something different than the parties have on offer.
By Joshua Sohn, attorney and author in Washington D.C.
It’s perhaps a sign of the times that pro-choice and pro-life America are both anxious and dissatisfied. Pro-choice America has seen the Democratic Party rally around unrestricted abortion up to viability—and has also seen that same Democratic Party lose the White House and Congress. But that hasn’t meant the topic is a guaranteed winner for Republicans: pro-life America has endured a two-year stretch where 13 out of 16 ballot propositions have gone against the pro-life side, even in red states like Missouri, Ohio, and Montana. Whether you’re pro-choice or pro-life, there’s a good argument that the current strategy is not working. Abortion is also a fault line driving Americans further apart, as if the country wasn’t polarized enough as it is.
There’s no silver-bullet solution here. But if there’s one piece of advice for pro-choice America, it’s that they should back away from toxic policies like unrestricted abortion regardless of term. After all, only 37% of Americans favor legalized abortion after the first trimester. Meanwhile, pro-life America does itself no favors by making every policy issue about “owning the libs” at every opportunity. Imagine an alternative world where pro-choice America offers meaningful concessions to the pro-life side, and where pro-life America reciprocates the gesture by getting serious about what a pro-life party could look like. That would be a world where abortion policy starts knitting Americans together instead of pulling them apart.
For Pro-Choice America: Is Later-Term Abortion Really a Hill to Die On?
For pro-choice America, consider giving ground on later-term abortion. Abortion in the second trimester and beyond is not moral, it is extreme, and it poisons the well for social conservative support on other issues.
Let’s start with morality, and let’s not mince words. A second-trimester fetus has a heart, a brain, eyes, and ears. She can suck her thumb. She can feel her surroundings. And aborting such a being is a bloody business. It typically involves suctioning the fetus out of the uterus with such force that the fetus is literally torn apart.
Banning second-trimester abortion would not turn the United States into a theocracy—not unless Germany, France, and much of Western Europe are theocracies. Justice Scalia wasn’t wrong when he wrote (in his Roper v. Simmons dissent) that allowing elective abortion up to viability puts the United States at odds with most Western democracies.
Allowing abortion up to viability is also so revolting to social conservatives that it may block them from allying with liberals on other issues, even issues where liberals and social conservatives should be natural allies. After all, few social conservatives want to see seasonal traditions wrecked by climate change. They don’t dream about sweetheart tax breaks for hedge fund managers. They value personal responsibility (shouldn’t we all?), but don’t want to drown government in a bathtub or take an Ayn Randian shredder to the social safety net. There are plenty of issues where social conservatives could make common cause with thoughtful, center-left liberals. But when the center-left policy agenda includes unrestricted abortion up to viability, it’s understandable that social conservatives may be disinclined to partner on any of this agenda.
Maybe you’re worried that social conservatives would pocket any abortion concessions, and snub you on every other issue anyway. If that’s the concern, then call their bluff! Propose a bill that pairs a 12-week abortion ban with better health care options for pregnant women, or a progressive tax tweak, or desperately needed foreign aid. Logrolling is a time-honored tradition, and there’s nothing wrong with a creative logroll to see if social conservatives and liberals can find common ground.
Maybe you still couldn’t accept a no-exception 12-week abortion ban. That’s fine, and many social conservatives would even agree with you. If a doctor decides in good faith that abortion is necessary to save a mother’s life or health, then that should be the end of the matter. If a second-trimester anatomy scan uncovers catastrophic fetal defects, perhaps it’s too cruel to force a mother to continue carrying a baby who will never survive outside the womb. But these agonizing situations are the edge cases, not the norm. And for the vast majority of normal pregnancies, second-trimester abortion is a bridge too far for most Americans.
For Pro-Life America: Build Bridges Instead of Owning the Libs
Like the pro-choice movement, the pro-life movement also has a problem with toxic baggage and unpopular positions. On abortion itself, eight states prohibit abortion even in cases of rape and incest—a wildly unpopular position that eight in ten Americans oppose. Any abortion stance that doesn’t include rape and incest exceptions (along with crystal-clear exceptions to protect maternal life) is doomed to political failure. To his credit, President Trump has consistently advocated for all these exceptions, and the pro-life movement should do the same.
But there’s also a broader problem for the pro-life movement, and it’s one that Trumpism will emphatically not fix. Namely, large swaths of the pro-life movement seem eager to troll liberal America in a very Trumpian way, on abortion and beyond. For example, Kristi Hamrick, vice president of Students for Life of America, recently called environmental laws “the devil’s own tools.” The Heritage Foundation and other conservative institutions pair pro-life positions with other policy positions that are tailor-made to repel every left-leaning or even centrist voter. Republican electeds, like now-Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio, say it’s “crazy” for post-menopausal women to even care about abortion policy. This is a fine strategy if your goal is to get clicks and fuel the outrage machine. But if your goal is to actually persuade, it’s a stone-cold loser.
There’s a better path: beyond moderating on core abortion issues like rape and incest exceptions, the pro-life movement could broaden its appeal by nudging the GOP back toward the American electorate on other issues that are broadly connected to life—things like robust healthcare for pregnant women or life-sustaining foreign aid. To illustrate the salience of these “life-adjacent” issues, there’s a stalwart pro-lifer out there who nonetheless boasts a 70% approval rating among liberal Americans. He’s pulled off this trick by championing the right to healthcare, compassion for the poor across the globe, and other issues that tend to be more left-coded. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. He lives in the Vatican and has been Pope for the past 14 years.
Flippancy aside, there’s a lesson here. Pro-choice Americans support abortion rights by definition, but they care about other issues too. In the crudest political terms, pro-choice Americans tend to be Democrats, and tend to care about the other issues that Democrats care about. And this means the pro-life movement can potentially nudge these Americans to the right on abortion by showing that the pro-life movement cares about these other issues. Suppose, for example, that the pro-life movement spoke out against some of the more egregious GOP policy suggestions, such as drastically cutting Medicaid or ending life-saving foreign aid. Democrats would applaud this courage—and maybe, just maybe, it would cause them to give pro-life arguments a closer look.
Is this sort of pro-life pivot impossible? Hardly. A few brave pro-lifers are already doing it. Just days ago, four esteemed pro-life writers wrote a New York Times op-ed arguing against the Trump administration’s disruption of the PEPFAR program that helps prevent prenatal HIV in Africa. They made their argument from a distinctly pro-life perspective, explaining that there is a straight line between “protect[ing] life in the womb at home” and “extend[ing] protection to babies born abroad.” Pro-life Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy made a similar argument from the same point of view. This is the sort of bridge-building that can expand the pro-life tent instead of shrinking it. To use an au courant cliché, we’re at a fork in the road. We can keep the status quo, where pro-choice America clings to abortion maximalism while pro-life America trolls the libs from the far right. Or we can give ground, reconsider dogmas, and build fresh policy alliances. The choice is ours.