For as long as I can remember, I’ve considered myself pro-life.
I’m a center-right conservative. Twenty-five years ago, I was drawn to the conservative movement and a Republican Party that seemed empowering, even and especially for women.
Economic policies that removed barriers to entrepreneurship, cut government waste and regulations, promoted democracy and its freedoms around the world, lowered the debt and deficit all seemed to be right and good for everyone. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” as the saying goes.
I wasn’t really animated by the social issues, and there were parts of the platform I didn’t agree with.
I’d always supported gay rights, and found that to be conservative, too. If we want the government out of our private lives and to promote the institution of marriage, this only made sense to me. Republicans—and many Democrats at the time—did not agree.
I opposed capital punishment—it didn’t seem just or conservative to support government-sponsored killing, especially when the government could falsely convict someone.
And I was pro-life, but in a way I knew was very different from many in my party. I wasn’t religious—in fact, I was a devout atheist. I supported religious freedom, and defended Christian America, but was also highly suspicious of its undercurrents and motivations.
My version of pro-life found the procedure to be lamentable and sad from the position that the deaths of tens of millions of unborn babies couldn’t possibly be a society’s best answer to unwanted pregnancies. I wished for better alternatives, and bemoaned where the left seemed to promote and celebrate abortion as an expression of women’s liberation.
But I didn’t hate or judge women who made that agonizing decision. I’d known women who’d gotten abortions. To a person, these were excruciatingly tough decisions, and at least one later expressed a deep regret.
Importantly, my version of pro-life accepted fully that Roe v. Wade was settled law. It indeed appeared to be, as Supreme Court justices over many administrations upheld it.
I was comfortable settling on the Clintonian bargain that abortion should be “legal, safe, and rare.”
Since my early entry into conservative politics those many years ago, the Republican Party has long left me. No longer empowering, it is oppressive, cruel, punishing, and regressive.
From book bans to abortion bans, anti-gay bills to anti-immigrant bills, now it markets itself to an increasingly condensed group of far-right absolutists for whom compassion is a mark of wokeism and “lifting others up” is tantamount to socialism.
And that’s not even addressing Donald Trump’s assault on democratic institutions, the Republican Party’s corrosive white nationalism, the propagation of racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and sexist rhetoric, and the Right’s embrace of dangerous and baseless conspiracy theories—some of which have resulted in actual violence.
The modern Right’s perversion of conservatism has been disorienting, to say the least. I’ve often felt like an orphan. But it’s also put something in sharp relief.
When it comes to abortion and Roe, as it turns out, my place on the spectrum of views is not only fairly moderate but very popular.
According to recent polling by Monmouth University, only 36 percent of Americans want to see Roe overturned.
Only 33 percent want abortion legal with no restrictions, and just 8 percent want abortion effectively banned. Most—57 percent—do not favor the all-or-nothing approach offered by the Far Left or Far Right. So laws like the one in Texas are unpopular…even in Texas, where only 13 percent say abortion should never be permitted, even in cases of rape and incest.
Overturning Roe doesn’t seem to solve an actual problem most Americans have. Abortion rates haven’t skyrocketed—in fact, they have been falling steadily over time, thanks in part to increased access to contraception.
And a federal ban on abortion doesn’t really protect the unborn. It would still allow individual states to decide whether abortions can be performed and with what restrictions, which would presumably drive abortion seekers to those states in which it were legal.
To the contrary, overturning Roe would likely add problems, like limiting access to abortion for women in rural and poor communities, where healthcare is already scarce or too expensive.
Criminalizing abortion for women who are rape or incest victims is just revictimizing them. When a society believes women should make the choice between prison and carrying their rapist’s baby, we can no longer call ourselves civilized. And creating a new body of abortion police and prosecutors to hunt down the procurers of illegal abortions is Draconian and puritanical.
None of this would be good for America.
Like so many other political issues, we’re not talking about abortion in ways that solve problems, either.
If you were only to listen to the loudest voices in the room, you’d think the extremist and absolutist positions were the popular ones, instead of the outliers they are.
I’ve long believed both sides have gotten it wrong when it comes to messaging abortion.
The decades-old scenes of protesters outside of abortion clinics yelling at women and abortion providers—“Murderer!” and “You’re going to hell!”—were always chilling and seemed like an ill-fated strategy.
Whose mind is going to be changed by calling them a murderer?
But changing hearts and minds on any issue has become a forgotten, if totally abandoned, exercise in politics, where the only goal is not to identify converts but seek to out the heretics and burn them at the proverbial stake.
We’ll never solve problems that way. Take gun violence, for example. I’m a gun owner who left the NRA years ago, frustrated with its cede-no-ground approach to commonsense gun restrictions. But calling law-abiding gun owners “murderers” after a tragic shooting isn’t going to get them to the table, where you need them, to pass any meaningful legislation.
The Right treats abortion proponents the way the Left treats law-abiding gun owners—neither are criminals, but both have blood on their hands, if you ask their opposition.
This only hardens and incites the very people you’re trying to persuade.
After decades of being called “murderers,” the pro-choice movement only radicalized its messaging, unsurprisingly.
The Democratic Party, under which Clinton coined the phrase “legal, safe, and rare,” removed the “rare” part from its official party platform in 2012, and the pro-choice movement has attacked adopters as impure and insufficiently pro-abortion.
Efforts like “Shout Your Abortion,” a social media campaign designed to minimize and normalize what is often a traumatic decision for women—and let’s not forget, the end of an unborn life—seem not only distasteful but unnecessary.
The American voting population already supports legal abortion. There’s no need to celebrate it as if it’s a fun milestone like getting your ears pierced. Dehumanizing a deeply human experience and detaching it from the loss it involves diminishes the value of all lives.
Over the course of five decades, popular culture depictions of abortion have, interestingly, handled the issue with much more nuance—and sensitivity—than we have in politics.
In 1972, the hit Normal Lear sitcom Maude featured a 47-year-old title character wrestling with the decision to have an abortion. That decision was presented honestly, with Maude torn, supported by her daughter and husband, but offered a differing opinion by a friend.
In 1987, the hit movie Dirty Dancing, set in the early 1960s, deals with the trauma and health risks of back-alley abortions.
In 1996, Julia from the Gen X drama Party of Five finds out she’s pregnant. She goes through a gamut of emotions. Her boyfriend wants to keep the baby and at least be a part of the decision-making. She considers adoption. Her siblings offer her an array of opinions. In the end, she has a miscarriage.
In 2001, Sex and the City, a show that tried to push the boundaries of sexual norms, handled abortion in shockingly conservative terms. Miranda, the high-powered lawyer, finds herself pregnant after one night with Steve-the-bartender. While she initially plans to get an abortion, after some soul-searching and discussion with friends, she decides she can’t go through with it and decides to keep the baby. Meanwhile, her friends admit to having had abortions, and share their experiences.
In 2007, the film Juno deals with teen pregnancy, as a high school girl visits an abortion clinic and ultimately decides to give up her baby for adoption.
That same year, in the Judd Apatow comedy Knocked Up, the irresponsible, unemployed, pot-smoking friends of Ben are uncomfortable even saying “the A word” when he gets Alison, a one-night-stand encounter, pregnant. Instead, one suggests she get a “shmashmortion.” Others encourage him to keep it.
All these depictions covered the contours of a complex issue more accurately and sympathetically (to both sides) than the extremes of either party routinely do.
Compassion and nuance in politics are in short supply these days.
Neither are politically profitable. Fear, division, and keeping systems broken are incentivized. You don’t win new voters today by finding common cause with the opposite side. You can’t fundraise on problems if you solve them. Fear is the ultimate turnout machine.
This is gross and lamentable, but it’s also why so many American voters don’t believe the two parties adequately represent them. A 2019 NBC News/WSJ poll showed a paltry 11 percent of voters thought the two-party system works fairly well.
A lack of compassion, particularly in the abortion debate, is driving our rhetoric to awful extremes. While I don’t think flippant and celebratory attitudes toward abortion from the Left are helpful, the Right is leading a hideous charge against women with medieval abortion bans and a total lack of concern for women’s reproductive, emotional, and mental health.
As a pro-life woman who nevertheless understands the realities of our modern world and the necessity of having this option, I hope Roe is not overturned. I hope abortion remains legal, safe, and, yes—rare. I hope we keep the commonsense restrictions that most Americans agree on. I wish we’d make alternatives, like adoption—by any loving would-be parent or parents—an easier and more attractive option. And I wish our political leaders would speak to the majority of the country on this and every issue, instead of speaking to the fringes.
I’m certain that my position on this, in saying tough things to the Left and Right, will be rejected by both wings of the debate as insufficiently pro-choice or pro-life. But that’s where most voters actually are, in an inconvenient box that’s hard to exploit for political gain.
I might be a lonely conservative who’s rejected today’s Republican Party—and I’ve been rejected by it!—but on abortion, I’m also a woman like millions of others in America. I’m somewhere in the middle and firmly in the majority—and yet it feels as though I am completely unseen.
S.E. Cupp is a nationally syndicated columnist, author, and CNN commentator.
