What Is Pro-Life Realism?

“We are all incrementalists now.” So writes Ryan Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, speaking on behalf of the anti-abortion movement in a new essay for First Things on pro-life politics after Dobbs.

That “all” might be an exaggeration, but Anderson is correct that a series of setbacks for abortion opponents — losing big in red-state referendums, losing ground in the public polling, losing some crucial pro-life language in the Republican platform — are forcing the anti-abortion movement toward gradualism and compromise, and creating a substantial market for what National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty calls pro-life “realism.”

The difficulty is that nobody can yet fully agree on what incrementalism means. Perhaps, as many Donald Trump supporters argue, it requires uncomplainingly accepting Trump’s pro-choice pivot as the price of protecting pro-life interests against an increasingly pro-abortion Democratic Party. Perhaps, as my colleague David French suggests, it means the opposite: Doing whatever it takes to scrub the Trumpian taint off the cause of defending unborn human life, even to the point of voting for Kamala Harris in November.

You can hear me and French debate in last week’s installment of our Matter of Opinion podcast, in which I expressed some strong skepticism that the pro-life cause will gain more than it loses in a Harris-Walz administration.

But disagreeing with my colleague about the implications of a Harris victory doesn’t yield any certainty about alternative modes of incrementalism. Should pro-lifers fight hard to make sure that Trump’s compromising spirit doesn’t take hold among other candidates and officeholders, as Ryan Anderson argues in First Things? Or should they recognize, as Matthew Lee Anderson suggests in The Dispatch, that Trump has sound political instincts and that his leave-it-the-states stance is a “politically palatable” position that the pro-life movement should have “proactively embraced”?

Should pro-lifers make a big effort, as Marvin Olasky argues, to be compromising and understanding in hard cases and more focused on social and economic policies that make it easier to choose life? Or, as Bethel McGrew argues, should they depoliticize in certain respects, placing less faith in the princes of the Republican Party, but maintain their own uncompromising integrity, their commitment to a thou-shalt-not-kill moral absolute?