As has been reported in multiple news outlets, the Republican Party significantly amended its issue platform this year. The current language reads:
We proudly stand for families and life. We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied life or liberty without due process, and that the states are, therefore, free to pass laws protecting those rights. After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the states and to a vote of the people. We will oppose late term abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance prenatal care, access to birth control, and IVF (fertility treatments).
Pro-life activists are split on the language. Several leaders issued a statement saying they were grateful for the acknowledgement of life and reference to the 14th amendment, while many others expressed disappointment. Former Vice President Mike Pence, issued a statement that said, in part, “The RNC platform is a profound disappointment to the millions of pro-life Republicans that have always looked to the Republican Party to stand for life.”
Tony Perkins, President of Family Research Council and a member of the RNC platform committee, issued a “minority report” that included this criticism of the platform: “That commitment to a human life amendment and a call for the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection application to children before birth has been repeated in every platform since and, by this declaration of principle, we extend it now. In no season, under no rationale spurred by the exigencies of a political moment, can or should we abandon the high principles that have created and sustained this party, with God’s grace, into a third century.”
Brent Leatherwood, president of ERLC, wrote a letter to the platform committee that said in part, “Now is the time to advocate for a robust vision for life — at all levels of government — not retreat from it. A moment when the abortion industry has been knocked on its heels is no time to shrink from a full-throated commitment to protecting preborn lives.”
According to a report by World magazine, the usual deliberate process of the platform committee was bypassed in favor of language adopted by the Trump campaign.
How should pro-life activists react to this development? First, we should lament that the GOP softened its more aspirational language that called for a human life amendment and stood up for the unborn. Since 1984, the GOP platform has always included robust language in defense of the sanctity of human life. It’s important that at least one major political party recognize what is clear from both Scripture and the witness of science: human life is sacred from the moment of conception and should be protected by law.
Though political and electoral challenges are a reality, party platforms are always meant to be aspirational and a kind of baseline ideals for a movement. The absence of strong moral language misses an opportunity to teach as well as mobilize another generation of pro-life activists. Ironically, the platform contains many other aspirational, yet likely unrealized items, such as an immigration deportation force. Why are Republicans allowed to dream about other policies but not about a day when all the unborn in America are allowed to live out the promise of our founding documents?
At the same time, we must acknowledge that all justice movements require prudence and wisdom. We live in a culture where much of the population, including significant elements of the conservative coalition, are not yet in agreement on the sanctity of life. In a democratic system, we have to work as hard as we can for as much change as we can, but understand our limits. Wisdom requires us to speak in ways that persuade and to work to build coalitions to pass laws that save as many unborn babies as we can, while continuing to work to persuade our neighbors of the humanity of the unborn. Every movement of justice in human history has been a gradual, slow, uneven movement. William Wilberforce’s campaign to end the slave trade in Great Britain took an entire life and career in Parliament. The civil rights movement in America took hundreds of years to call America to her highest ideals.
Many who are rightly disappointed in this shift have suggested that perhaps it was futile for Christians to get involved in politics at all. Some have suggested further retreat, given how frequently activists come away disappointed. But this kind of detachment ignores the good that can be done and that has been done for the cause of life. The half-century pro-life movement has made significant gains in overturning Roe, passing laws in multiple states and supporting federal policies such as the Hyde amendment, Mexico City policy and conscience protections that have been upheld in the courts. As much as we should push our politicians to do more for the cause of life, we should also be grateful for the work they have done. The Dobbs decisions is the culmination of years of courageous and hard work from conservative presidents from Ronald Reagan to George H. W. Bush to George W. Bush to President Trump. They deserve our gratitude.
Still, it is clear we have much work to do. The end of Roe was just the beginning. And so rather than disengage from politics, we should engage with discernment. If we abandon the process, we cede influence to those who don’t share our pro-life convictions. We are always working with imperfect leaders in imperfect parties in an imperfect world. Ryan Anderson says it well, “Courage has two opposing vices: rashness on the one hand, and cowardice on the other.”
Beyond politics, the pro-life movement needs to regain the moral force it once had at the beginning of the movement. Consider the impact of Francis Schaeffer’s video teaching series in the 1980s, which provoked the conscience of the nation to consider that unborn babies are not merely clumps of tissue, but human beings created in the image of God. Consider the way in which Martin Luther King leveraged Christian teaching and moral persuasion to move the nation on civil rights.
This will require pastors and everyday believers to speak up with both compassion and courage and political leaders who recognize that they are not mere technocrats, but teachers. Imagine if pro-life politicians echoed the courageous words of Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, a Southern Baptist, who took to the Senate floor and asked, “When does life begin?”
The sanctity of human life is the cause of our time and it is incumbent on us to speak up for the defenseless babies who cannot speak for themselves. May God give us both courage and wisdom.
