One of the most prominent leaders in the U.S. Senate has called on the Republican Party to reject “chaos and confusion” about the issue of abortion and “boldly and unabashedly” proclaim that it supports the right to life.
Under its current leadership, the Republican National Committee (RNC) has replaced its endorsement of a pro-life constitutional amendment with a standard-bearer’s vow to veto any “national abortion ban,” with little debate. The GOP must return to its historic commitment to the unborn, said one senator.
“In a time of chaos and confusion and a time of trial that we are facing, I think it’s time that we say clearly with one voice: There is no right more important than the right to life,” said Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) at the 2024 Pray Vote Stand Summit in Washington, D.C. on Friday morning. “Every single person is created in the image of God. That is our foundational truth. It is our foundational commitment. And we need to say it again, boldly and unashamedly.”
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Contemporary American culture seems “all-too willing to discard those whom it deems weak or unworthy. That’s not the United States of America that I know,” Hawley warned. “Let’s take our stand boldly together now and say again to this nation that life is worth fighting for.”
The senator’s ideological call-to-arms comes as pro-life Republicans have been subjected to a hostile takeover at the national level. After four decades of embracing robust pro-life policies, the Republican Party leadership forced through the 2024 Republican Party platform which stripped out any concrete promises to defend the unalienable right to life in federal legislation. The tightly-controlled process scrapped a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution and interpreting the 14th Amendment to confer protections on unborn children from the moment of fertilization — after only 15 minutes of deliberation.
“We got steamrolled,” said Chad Connelly, CEO of Faith Wins, at the time. And life protections disappeared.
“It was tragic, and it was disgraceful,” said Robert P. George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, at a panel later that day at the Pray Vote Stand Summit. “They swept in. They eliminated the [platform’s pro-life] language. They didn’t give you or others an opportunity to even make the case for the child in the womb,” George told the panel’s moderator, FRC Action President Tony Perkins, who served on the platform committee in July.
The Trump-aligned forces’ removal of historic protections for mothers and their unborn children accomplished a cherished goal of those seeking to pull the party leftward, he said. “The best and the brightest on the liberal side in the Republican Party had tried for all those decades to eliminate that language,” said George. A tiny but well-funded and overexposed group called Republicans for Choice — headed by Republican strategist Roger Stone’s wife, Ann — endeavored for years to neuter the party’s stance on life. “We fought off figures like Arlen Specter and Robert Packwood,” remembered George. Specter, a now-deceased senator from Pennsylvania, left the Republican Party only to lose his Democratic primary, while Packwood supported abortion-on-demand throughout his Senate career until he left politics following a torrent of credible sexual harassment allegations.
Where they failed, 2024 RNC leaders succeeded. George said the pro-life movement has gone from being “strong and robust” to “weak and ineffective,” because “we allowed people to believe that they could have our vote without earning our vote. We gave up any leverage we had. We allowed ourselves to be left with no place to go, because the prospects on the other side were unthinkable.” The threat of the Left’s full-bore promotion of abortion, transgenderism, and extreme left-wing ideology stopped Christian conservatives from withholding their votes from weak Republican leaders, voting third party, and often from endorsing a “less electable” Republican during the primaries.
“We should never again allow ourselves to be in a position where we have no leverage,” George told Perkins.
Christians and other pro-life advocates should not back down, in part, because they have the better legal argument, said George, an Ivy League law professor. The 14th Amendment states that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” which many argue is violated when an abortionist kills an innocent child. Furthermore, Section 5 of the amendment states that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” That provision, George explained, proves “it is Congress’s responsibility, and not just Congress’s right, to ensure that every state confers on every person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
“Mic drop. End of story. This is not controversial,” said George. “There could be nothing more contrary to the heritage and history and legacy of the Republican Party” than attempting to instate the state-by-state approach to abortion that Abraham Lincoln’s foe, Democrat Stephen Douglas, proposed on the issue of slavery.
“The Republican Party has deviated from its historical stand for life,” lamented Perkins. “We’re never going to course-correct the party if we don’t talk about it.”
Many dismiss the importance of platform language, which they say represent mere words on a little-read document. Experts could not disagree more. “Platforms matter a great deal,” said Brent Keilen, vice president of FRC Action. Researchers have found that members of Congress vote according to the party platform more than 80% of the time, he said.
Some excuse the platform change by noting that previous Republican presidents failed to deliver its aspirational promise of a constitutional amendment, nibbling around the edges by refusing to fund the abortion industry or protecting children from extremely late-term abortions. But that took place before Dobbs. “It’s a big difference to have incremental change in the right direction [as compared with] proactive change in the wrong direction,” said Keilen.
The GOP’s newfound, noncommittal view on abortion holds the potential to impact the fabric of American culture, said Hawley. “The American soul is good, because our history is shaped by the foundational truths of the Bible,” the Missouri senator declared. “There’s not much that Joe Biden and I agree on — but of course, there’s not much that he remembers from yesterday. But he’s right about one thing: He says often that we are in a struggle for the soul of America. Well, he’s right about that.”
In the haze of cultural war, it’s easy to find the right way forward: Christians must “stand for the innocent,” said Katy Faust, author of “Them Before Us.” “You are never going to be on the wrong side of history when you are on the right side of biblical truth. You’re never going to be on the wrong side of history when you’re on the side of child protection,” she said.
But history will not automatically come to a predetermined end without our participation — a Hegelian philosophical concept popularized by communist philosopher Karl Marx, George pointed out. “It’s not true that history will always self-correct. We have no guarantee of that,” he told the crowd inside the Omni Shoreham Hotel. “The way things actually change is when people make decisions, when they make choices, when they act, when they make sacrifices, when they take risks, when they lead.”
The change in politics and culture depends on Christians “exercising those great virtues, those theological virtues of faith, hope, and love to make a better world,” George concluded.
