Is the Pro-Life Movement Losing Its Party Platform Again?

Pro-life concerns are at an all-time low in the Republican Party. And abortion’s importance has been waning for a long time.

As a child, I paid attention to how adults at church talked about party politics. Often, when someone brought up an upcoming election or party politics, another would acknowledge that neither party fully represented Christian values. However, there was always someone either in conversation or from the pulpit who would insist that one option was clearly better than the other. The reason? Because Republicans cared about abortion.

However, data going back to 2004 shows a consistent decrease in the share of Republicans who say that abortion is “very important” to them as a voting issue.

A Brief Note on Methodology

This trend is found in the Pew Research Center’s published reports on voter values. But before looking at the numbers, I should make a note on Pew’s methodology.

Up until 2018, Pew utilized phone calls via cellphone and landline to conduct their surveys. In 2018, Pew switched to address-based sampling. In addition to using different sampling methods, we are also going to be looking at numbers derived from two different surveys. From 1987 to 2012, Pew used the Values Survey. Since 2014, Pew uses the American Trends Panel. In addition, the sample sizes (n) in these surveys varies.

We should keep these points in mind as we look at the data that Pew has put out in the past two decades. Longitudinal analysis, or comparing data over time, is not always straightforward.

Abortion’s Importance Wanes

The chart we will be discussing here is drawn from multiple reports that Pew has published over the years. I tabulated data from reports in 2007, 2012, 2016, and 2024.

What these reports allow us to measure is the share of Republican voters who identify abortion as “very important” as a voting issue. Below, I tabulated percentage points in 2004, 2007, 2012, 2016, 2020, 2022, and 2024.

One thing to notice in the table is that Republicans are more likely to identify abortion as “very important” during an election year. Notice how the percentage drops significantly from 2004 to 2007, or from 2020 to 2022. With these data points, we obtain this graph:

The Party-less Pro-Life Movement

Those familiar with American political history know that this wouldn’t be the first time that the pro-life movement has faded in a party platform. As historian of American religion Daniel K. Williams has shown so well, abortion was not always a Republican voting issue. Nor was it always an evangelical voting issue.

Prior to the infamous Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, the pro-life movement was composed not of conservative evangelicals, but New Deal Catholics. This is the subject of Williams’s 2015 article, “The Partisan Trajectory of the American Pro-Life Movement: How a Liberal Catholic Campaign Became a Conservative Evangelical Cause.” These New Deal Catholics connected their pro-life ethic to a wide variety of socioeconomic positions. The “right to life” was one among many human rights, including the rights to:

• Living wages
• Collective bargaining
• Community programs for childhood care and education

In addition, opposition to abortion was linked to opposition to racism and economic oppression. As William documents, younger Catholics went further to the Left. For these Catholics, their anti-abortionism was linked to opposition to war and capital punishment, government assistance for unmarried mothers, improving the adoption system, and maternal health insurance.

While the Catholic pro-life movement had succeeded up until the 1970s, their values conflicted with another rising group in the American Left coalition: feminism. Feminism brought with it discourses of bodily autonomy, which did not square well with the unborn’s right to life. By the time Roe was decided, the stage was set for evangelicals to become the champions of anti-abortionism. Only this time, the pro-life movement was now linked to culture war issues: opposition to gay marriage and feminism.

The Pro-Life Movement Party-less Once Again?

The pro-life movement, up until the 1970s and 1980s, was robustly grounded in a consistent life ethic. Since becoming predominantly evangelical, the pro-life movement lost its committed linkages to economic injustice, and instead has been solely focused on cultural flashpoint issues.

This is perhaps the reason for its waning importance within the Republican coalition. While the GOP enacts symbolic victories for their Christian base, such as the White House Faith Office or pressuring the IRS to capitulate on the Johnson Amendment (which I have written about here), much of what passes for “Christian values” in US party politics is horribly watered down.

I am reminded of a passage in Acts, in which the Sadducees arrested the apostles for preaching the Gospel. Gamaliel stayed their fury and jealousy. He said to them:

keep away from these men and let them alone, for if this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail (Acts 5:38, ESV).

I believe there is a principle here. Perhaps God is showing us through this stretch of US history that the Christian life ethic is un-representable in America’s two party system. When it is consistent, as it was for New Deal Catholics, it clashes with worldly attitudes of rights and autonomy. Bodily autonomy is an important, fundamental right. But the right to autonomy and the right to life must be mutually upheld. When the Christian life ethic becomes distilled and reactive, as it is currently, it wanes due to its lack of substance.