Liberalism or Life: Why the Pro-Life Movement Fails

America’s culture of death did not develop through Millian means and will never be ended by them.

Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June of 2022, the pro-life movement has suffered consistent defeat across the nation. Ballot initiatives to expand pro-life laws in deep-red states such as Montana, Kentucky, and Kansas have failed. Abortion bans in several others have been outright repealed by Democratic majorities. In Ohio, Michigan, California, and Vermont, voters even approved amendments to their state constitutions codifying the procedure as a legal right. Polls consistently show the pro-life position as deeply unpopular and the sentiment is only growing.

However, listening to the rhetoric of the pro-life movement, you would never guess that is the case. At the March for Life last month earlier this year, which I attended, young activists hoisted signs that boldly read “I am the pro-life generation.” Many pro-lifers continued to express optimism that “changing hearts and minds” would lead to the eventual defeat of the culture of death in America. Some who chose to forgo the national march this year in favor of local events cited their hope that change in their community could “trickle-up” to the echelons of power in Washington, D.C.

Such idealism is not limited to just pro-life faithful. Recently, Students for Life condemned a media report that President Trump favored a sixteen-week federal ban on abortion as “not good enough.” The group added that it “looks like [Trump] needs a refresher on human biology,” implying that any political candidate who did not support a total ban on abortion from conception was undeserving of its support.

At best, such a detachment from political reality is naive. At worst, it actively undermines the cause of life. The hard truth is that the pro-life movement is failing in America. The simple reason for that is because it is operating within a system that will never allow it to succeed. Pro-lifers think they can advance an inherently illiberal end — that of affirming the objective dignity of life and Christian vision of human sexuality — through decidedly liberal means. The movement foolishly hopes that through “open debate” and “democracy,” society will simply come to its senses and reverse sixty years of the sexual revolution. It tries to arrive at Aristotle by aping Mill. And when it cannot do that, its dogmatic insistence on idealism ends up becoming political suicide.

At the core of this futile strategy lies a fundamental misunderstanding about the relationship between politics and culture. Despite the pro-life movement’s heavy emphasis on open discourse, few large-scale cultural shifts have come about through bottom-up changes in attitudes. During the French Revolution, it was not the peasant class that drove the resistance to the Bourbon Monarchy, but rather a network of highly educated lawyers and statesmen. In Russia, the rise of communism was almost entirely socially engineered by Marxist ideologues. This trend is true even of positive social changes — the abolition of slavery in the United States, for example, was not a result of voting or dialogue; it was the result of a war.

Similarly, the sexual revolution did not come about through some large-scale persuasion of the masses but instead through the outsized influence of political elites. These figures undemocratically used their influence to force their vision of unrestrained sexual liberation onto the rest of society, such as through the coordinated effort to get the Supreme Court to legalize contraception in Griswold v. Connecticut and then abortion in Roe v. Wade. Business elites also helped drive such shifts, supporting feminism as a way to drive women into the workforce and therefore increase the labor pool. As Patrick Deneen points out in his First Things piece “Corporate Progressivism,” “the sexual revolution’s egalitarian attack on patriarchy has been supported by corporations because it benefits their bottom line.”

Understanding such historical context is crucial because it demonstrates that the modern world — from entertainment, to business, to academia — has been socially engineered in such a way that puts the pro-life movement in an impossible position. From a young age, most American women are exposed to a casual, meaningless idea of sex that inevitably will view abortion as a necessary insurance policy. They grow up in a culture that lionizes autonomy and flexibility above all, with abortion seen as an essential tool of self-determination. They are told that a child is an obstacle to a successful career or education — and in many cases the economic system has been designed so that this is actually true.

The pro-life movement’s goal has thus far been to try and get a majority of Americans to reject cultural assumptions that were ingrained in them before they even had the capacity to think for themselves. It thrives on being the counterculture while making no real effort to become the actual culture. Most importantly, it gets politics backwards, believing that if enough conservatives have children, go to Church, or invest in “localism,” that our politics will miraculously correct themselves when the entire reason people are not doing these things is because of the political order that was handed to them. And this is why the pro-life position fails.

So what would a better way forward look like? The movement currently has two options, but in either case, messaging on abortion must currently be done with what is electorally viable this November. The first is that it can compromise. This would mean accepting that the American people are, by and large, not pro-life, but would agree to some restrictions like a limit at sixteen weeks. Such an approach would prioritize incremental reforms that could, in theory, make stricter laws more palatable to voters in the future. There is some evidence that this solution has worked in places like Georgia and Florida, where moderate restrictions on abortion have generally not spurred significant political backlash. However, in the long run, compromise is more likely than not to achieve a stalemate on abortion rather than abolish it.

The second, and better option, is that pro-lifers can recognize that banning abortion is not compatible with the liberal order as it currently exists. Changing hearts and minds is important, honest work, but this approach would acknowledge that hoping enough Americans come to suddenly reject the pro-abortion social order is a futile political strategy.

Instead, pro-lifers could work to actually change such cultural assumptions through the exercise of power, even if doing so does not conform with “democratic norms.” This could mean, someday in the future, executive action that unilaterally curtails abortion access, the revocation of abortion pill authorization, the enforcement of laws such as the Comstock Act, heavy-handed economic intervention, and ultimately a drive to have the Supreme Court outlaw abortion nationwide under the Fourteenth Amendment. The point is not that these actions be taken in the here and now, for that would be imprudent, but that the conservative and pro-life movement examine the tools available to their eventual success.

Beyond legal action, it also means creating an elite class of pro-life conservatives with influence over institutions of business, academia and entertainment. While it has become fashionable in many circles on the right to call a college education a “scam,” and instead promote plumbing or some ridiculous variant of the Benedict Option, nothing better explains America’s cultural decay than the absence of conservative Christians from the ruling elite. A serious pro-life movement would seek to put its allies in positions of power and reform our society in the only way it’s ever been done — from the top down.

To their credit, there are some pro-life organizations who are intelligently working towards such ends, especially in their promotion of the “14th Amendment for All” theory. However, many groups are increasingly rejecting both options, instead opting to senselessly force Republican candidates to tank their campaigns on the altar of purity. This strategy is worse than idealistic, and the only impact it will have is ensuring that pro-life candidates are shut out of political power indefinitely.

Like most pro-lifers, I have hope for a future in which abortion is illegal and unthinkable. But America’s culture of death did not develop through Millian means and will never be ended by them. It is time for our movement to choose: Will it be posturing or pragmatism? Virtue signaling or victory? Will it be liberalism or life?

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