This week, pro-life candidates for Governor and Attorney General of Minnesota lost their races, and pro-life Senators lost the majority in the Minnesota Senate. At the same time, pro-lifers may have taken control of the US House and notched up other victories around the country. Overall, however, the first post-Dobbs election was not the hoped-for landslide win for the cause of life. On the surface, then, it’s an odd time to be talking about future pro-life victories.
Some conservatives believe that the pro-life cause can never achieve victory under the current system, with conservative Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule tweeting that “It’s funny to see GOP types debating which candidates or issues would have made a difference, when the simplest hypothesis is that there is a critical mass of voters who will support left-liberalism…regardless of the conditions it produces.”
In the same vein, another conservative commentator writes that “the anti-abortion movement is dead in the water.” It’s sad to see these irresponsible reactions to what is simply an election setback - not the first, and not the last.
Vermeule and other commentators certainly have a point - we’re still waiting for a nationwide majority in favor of ending abortion, and Tuesday’s results in Minnesota and some other states suggest that we have a lot of work to do. But to focus on one tough election week would ignore the fact that almost every poll and survey, before and after Dobbs, shows that Americans almost everywhere (including in Minnesota) want abortion to be more limited than it was under Roe v. Wade, with wide support for a near-total ban on abortions after the first trimester.
What we saw this week was NOT a universal repudiation of the pro-life position. Rather, it was a selective and targeted rejection by (1) some demographics in (2) some areas. Let’s look at the data on who voted blue this year, according to CNN’s exit poll:
63% of people under 29 voted for Democrats
59% of unmarried people
68% of unmarried women
55% of childless women
As sad as it is to acknowledge, it is not surprising that the demographic who feels most vulnerable to an unexpected pregnancy, and is most susceptible to the lie that women need abortion–younger, single women–is breaking toward pro-abortion Democrats in such astonishing numbers.
This just underlines the work we still have left to do convincing women in Minnesota and across the country that abortion doesn’t just hurt a child, it hurt a woman - permanently, indelibly, and in ways that are sometimes hard and sometimes easy to see.
While some states saw blue wavelets, including Minnesota, the overall partisan shift from 2020 to 2022 was not large. And to kill the narrative that pro-life candidates lose, let’s take a look at these results:
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) signed a pain-capable law, won by 19.4%.
Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH) signed a heartbeat law, won by 25.6%.
Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) signed a heartbeat law, won by 7.5%.
Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) signed a heartbeat law and a trigger law with complete protections, won by 11.1%.
The 2022 Election does NOT tell us that pro-life leaders can’t win. We have a brand-new crop of pro-life legislators just in the Minnesota House and Minnesota Senate! What it does tell us is that we have work to do.
The pro-abortion movement outspent pro-lifers by 14 to 1, according to one measure. Those millions of dollars were well-spent, convincing at least some “soft” pro-life voters to cast a vote for a pro-abortion candidate, many using fear-based tactics such as an invented rape scenario (in at least one ad I saw).
We can no longer let the narrative on abortion be about what week of pregnancy at which to ban abortion. Those of us who support a total ban can find common cause with those who support a 15 week ban and unite on this point: elected officials who refuse to put any limits on abortion have disqualified themselves from holding office in our republic. They refuse to see that a profoundly immoral act should ever be limited - that the continued legality of abortion should be a cause of sorrow and national repentance.
Let’s continue to put the pressure on state and national leaders: where exactly would they draw the line - before birth? If they refuse to draw a line, why does what one pro-life activist calls the “magic of the birth canal” suddenly give a living child the right to life? Let’s keep telling the truth about abortion:
Women don’t need abortion
Abortion stops a beating heart
Children in the womb are unique and worthy of protection from the moment of conception
These are winning messages. The pro-life movement had wins in 2022 on just these messages, and we can expect many more wins to follow - in Minnesota and across the country. The fight is only just beginning.
