Within the subterranean levels of a fancy hotel in downtown Washington, just a few days before the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade, the anti-abortion movement was trying to mount a comeback.
Kevin Roberts stood on stage in a cavernous ballroom aglow with neon shades of blue, purple and pink. As president of the Heritage Foundation, Roberts leads one of the main thinktanks behind recent conservative attacks on abortion. And he is not happy with how things are going.
“We meet today amid a pro-abortion media narrative of smug triumphalism,” Roberts told hundreds of young abortion foes, who had gathered in the ballroom from across the country to hear him and other anti-abortion leaders speak.
“You’ve heard the story. Less than two years after the supreme court overturned Roe, the abortion-industrial complex is celebrating an unprecedented political winning streak. Across the country, pro-life bills have failed. Abortion referenda have passed. Democrat leaders are crowing while too many Republican leaders are cowering from the fight.”
Roberts was speaking at the annual National Pro-Life Summit, a one-day organizing camp for high school- and college-aged anti-abortion activists. This year, the summit faced a monumental task: organizers and attendees alike hoped to reinvigorate a movement that, 18 months ago, soared to the height of its power with the overturning of Roe – and then, in the months that followed, has repeatedly crashed-landed back on earth.
Since Roe’s demise, seven states have voted on abortion-related ballot referendums. In each case, voters have decisively moved to protect abortion rights, even in ruby-red states like Kentucky, Kansas and Montana.
The stakes are even higher in 2024. Not only are roughly a dozen more states gearing up to potentially vote on abortion-related referendums, but the future of the White House is on the line. If abortion hurts Republicans the election – as it’s widely thought to have done in the 2022 midterms – anti-abortion activists may see the GOP brand their movement as ballot-box poison.
The National Pro-Life Summit is generally a peek into what the anti-abortion movement is telling itself about itself – and at present, it is not happy with Republicans. For years, the anti-abortion movement has corralled voters for Republicans. On Saturday, they repeatedly condemned the GOP for failing to adequately support their cause.
The last Republican president appointed the justices who overturned Roe, while red states have enacted more than a dozen near-total abortion bans since the ruling fell. But many Republicans have begun to back away from the issue. Before the 2022 elections, several quietly downplayed their stances, while dozens of House Republicans have delayed signing onto a bill to nationally ban abortions.
“Our friends in the Republican party need to touch some grass,” said Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America, the organization behind the summit. “Those who say now that we shouldn’t be talking, that Republican candidates, those seeking for office, should hide from the abortion issue – they continue to be wrong. We won’t win if we put our head in the sand.”
Democrats are already attempting to use Roe’s impact on doctors to win votes, as Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has launched a blitz of events and ads timed to the Roe anniversary on Monday. Vice-President Kamala Harris will kick off a tour devoting to spotlighting abortion access, while Biden will assemble a meeting of his reproductive health taskforce.
His administration has also announced plans to expand access to contraception under the Affordable Care Act as well as an initiative to spread information about a law that, the administration says, guarantees Americans’ legal rights to emergency abortions, even in states that ban the procedure.
A thin line
The mood on Saturday wasn’t totally dour.
Attendees could buy baseball caps that read “I’m just out here saving babies,” sweatshirts that bore an image of a newspaper front page that proclaimed “ROE REVERSED”, as well as red hats adorned with the words “Make America Pro-Life Again” in the unmistakable style of Trump’s Maga hats. Young people excitedly posed for group photos in front of a backdrop that read, “EQUAL RIGHTS FOR THE PREBORN!” An illustrated fetus was curled up in one corner.
Yet, in speech after speech, activists told young people that they were the victims of vast forces arrayed against them. They accused abortion rights supporters of spreading misinformation about ballot referendums and said they were simply outspent by the opposition. In Ohio, abortion rights supporters reported receiving about three times as much money as a coalition that opposed abortion rights.
“These people love chaos. That is the left. The left is inherently chaotic at its core,” said Will Witt, a conservative influencer who, like Roberts, spoke at the morning address to all attendees.
After quoting from the Bible in an effort to demonstrate that God originated order, Witt continued: “This is why the left, this is why these pro-choicers, this is why they hate God. Because God represents order in the world, whereas they love chaos.”
The summit speakers were attempting to walk a fine line. At the same time that they were attempting to convince attendees that they were the victims of a world turned against them, they also had to make the case that opposition to abortion is a majority view – and one issue that can get Republicans elected.
“Our opinion on this issue, the issue, is not outside of the mainstream, no matter how many times ABC wants to try to tell me it is,” Hawkins told attendees at a workshop dedicated to understanding what went wrong with the abortion referendums. Most millennials and members of Gen Z, she added, “want some sorts of limits on abortion”.
Polling on abortion is complex, since respondents’ answers can vary widely depending on how a question is asked or how much context is provided. Most Americans believe that abortion should be restricted after the first trimester of pregnancy, according to polling from Gallup. However, over the last two decades, more and more people have become open to keeping abortion legal later into pregnancy. Republicans in Virginia failed to take control of the state legislature last year after they ran on a promise of banning abortion past 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Gallup has also found that, since 2020, more Americans identify as “pro-choice” than “pro-life”. More people have started to call themselves “pro-choice” since the US supreme court overturned Roe in 2022.
Hawkins is not in favor of only “some sorts of limits on abortion”.
“I want to see no abortions be legal, ever,” she said in an interview. She rejected the notion that abortions performed to save women’s lives qualify as abortions. “When you’re looking at a case where a woman’s life is at risk, where the physician believes that she can no longer safely carry her child in her womb, or she may lose her life – we wouldn’t consider that an abortion unless the abortionist goes in with the intention to killing the child.”
Instead, she said, it’s a “maternal-fetal separation”.
Hawkins’ point was an effort to contend with a phenomenon that has been particularly damaging for the movement: stories from women who have sued after they said they were denied medically necessary abortions.
Every state with an abortion ban has some kind of exception for cases of medical emergencies, but doctors in those states have widely said that the exceptions are so vague as to be unworkable. In a recent study of 54 OB-GYNs in states with post-Roe abortion restrictions, more than 90% said that the law prevented them from adhering to the best clinical standards of care.
‘You vote pro-life’
Last year, when the National Pro-Life Summit held a straw poll asking attendees about their preferred 2024 president candidate, Ron DeSantis won. This year, with DeSantis a day away from dropping out of the presidential primary, Hawkins cheerfully proclaimed the latest straw poll victor: Donald Trump.
As much as their leaders may lock heads with Republicans or Trump – who has suggested that hardline abortion stances hurt Republicans – they are ultimately unlikely to withhold votes from the GOP. Even Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, who was a target of the January 6 riot and who spoke at the summit, indicated that people need to simply get on with it.
“That’s why we have primaries. We sort ’em out at every level. But after the primary’s over, you vote pro-life,” Pence said. “You go get behind men and women who are going to stand for the right to life.”
A booth for the Heritage Foundation was emblazoned with logos for its “Project 2025”, which includes a playbook for the next conservative president. It recommends that the US government stop funding or promoting abortion in international programs, turbocharge the government’s existing “surveillance” efforts to collect data about abortion, and enforce the 19th-century Comstock Act to ban the mailing of abortion pills. That would effectively result in the removal of abortion pills from the market, which Hawkins said is a policy goal of hers.
“If Donald Trump would be elected again, the people he would appoint to his presidential administration would not be abortion activists,” Hawkins said in an interview. “Hands down, that’s a guarantee. And they’re going to be coming to Washington to protect the people and the people includes the pre-born children.”
