Wesley J. Smith to Pro-Life Movement: Save Lives, Not Souls

Wesley J. Smith recently participated in a Symposium hosted by the Human Life Review. He was asked to react to the following statement:

In the decades between Roe v. Wade and Dobbs, most prolifers believed that Americans were more or less opposed to legalized abortion on demand because a) this was the case in 1973; b) it was imposed on us from above by “raw judicial power,” rather than legislated; and c) surveys repeatedly showed substantial percentages of Americans being disquieted by abortion, especially when you got beyond the hard cases and the earliest weeks of pregnancy.

In the first year or so following Dobbs, prolifers got a reality check through legislative defeats even in some reddish and purple states. We can say (what is true) that massive amounts of pro-abortion money peddling scare-mongering lies played a role in such defeats. Still, it has become clear that even the non-blue states are less pro-life than many believed, particularly if we understand the term “pro-life” to include the willingness of people who would never have an abortion themselves to legally deny other women the right.

In light of this, pursuing legislative and judicial pro-life victories, while important and even necessary, seems clearly insufficient to transform America into a nation where the unborn are valued and protected by society. It seems that only a long-term campaign to convert minds and hearts not only to personally value human life from conception to natural death, but to acknowledge the objective value of the unborn’s life according to something like the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” will suffice. In other words, for most people a conversion to belief in an objective morality that applies to everyone and therefore does not derive from political institutions or authorities but from a transcending authority—let’s say it, from God—is necessary for the pro-life cause to succeed nationally.

Following is his response:

The pro-life movement has always been closely associated with belief in God generally and in Christianity specifically. Indeed, explicit religiosity is one of its greatest strengths, infusing prolifers with energy, goodness, and courage as they unyieldingly pursue an often-unpopular cause.

But that isn’t the end of the pro-life story. Explicit religiosity is also one of the movement’s greatest weaknesses in the wider society, and indeed, may be the primary reason why in recent decades pro-life views haven’t attained majority support among the American people.

A 2024 Gallup poll illustrates the problem. It found that 54 percent of respondents “identified” as “pro-choice” versus 41 percent who embraced the “pro-life” cause. Of these prolifers, only 12 percent believed that abortion should be “illegal in all circumstances.” In contrast, a depressing 35 percent of those who described themselves as pro-choice believed that abortion should be legal “in any circumstance.”

Gallup poll findings also illustrate Christianity’s ongoing decline in the United States. Last year, 68 percent identified as “Christian.” That may sound good, but that is down from 87 percent in 1973. The importance of religion in peoples’ lives was also measured, with an anemic 45 percent of Americans saying that religion is “very important.” Notice how this “very important” response tracks closely with the 41 percent of those who identify as pro-life. It seems to me these figures indicate that people who are devoutly faithful likely already support the pro-life cause.

So, how do prolifers persuade people beyond the already convinced to care about abortion, assisted suicide, radical reproduction technologies, embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, biotechnology, medical conscience, et al., in an era in which Christianity and religious belief are in decline? I wish it were otherwise, but I don’t think it can be accomplished by further binding pro-life advocacy to religion or “God’s” natural law.

And if pro-life principles are about “natural law,” how many hours-long symposia will activists have to sponsor just to explain the concept? How many podcasts will they have to produce? How would that deep subject be discussed in a five-minute television interview? And, at a time of social media-driven shrinking attention spans, how many people would even pay attention to such pedagogy?

No. Practicality must be the watchword. And that means agreeing on the best way to reach and persuade liberals, conservatives, the indifferent, and everyone in between.

Toward that end, I think the movement’s focus should be on universal human rights, a secular concept and principle that still holds sway in a society riven by deep political division. Indeed, this was the late, great prolifer Nat Hentoff’s approach. He became pro-life after coming to understand that unborn babies — as a matter of science — are human beings and on hearing civil rights leader Jesse Jackson equate pro-choice belief with pro-slavery advocacy. These two understandings caused Hentoff to switch sides at great cost to his own career, writing in the Human Life Review: “I have learned the most fundamental human right is the right to life — for the born, the unborn, the elderly who refuse to give up on life.”

The success achieved over the last few decades in impeding the assisted suicide juggernaut demonstrate the wisdom of this approach. After Oregon legalized assisted suicide in 1992, most observers thought it would sweep the country. But it hasn’t. Yes, ten states and the District of Columbia permit doctor-prescribed death. But even many of the most liberal states have — so far — refused to join the death parade.

Why? Because prolifers understand that while their influence holds sway in conservative parts of the country — prolifers, for example, just passed a constitutional amendment against legalizing assisted suicide in West Virginia — in progressive states their visible opposition could push people bitterly opposed to pro-life advocacy into the pro-assisted suicide camp. In those cases, wise pro-life leaders have willingly assumed a less prominent public role to make room for activists who are more acceptable to politically liberal voters. This has usually meant relying on disability rights activists, who (generally) are fiercely secular, politically progressive, and not pro-life on abortion. But they understand that the euthanasia movement targets disabled and other vulnerable people for death, so they have fiercely engaged the issue — while prolifers shored up cultural conservatives. That coalition of politically strange bedfellows works brilliantly, to the distinct frustration of assisted suicide ideologues. This model has also been deployed successfully by prolifers working alongside feminists to prevent the legalization of commercial surrogacy. So, it seems to me that this should be the model going forward: finding people who might not even identify as pro-life to participate in coalitions of the willing (if you will) on an issue-by-issue basis based on human rights principles, not religion.

The issues prolifers engage are symptoms of a profound nihilism that has infected society. And I do agree that religious revival is the only solution to that crisis. But restoring religious faith to the center of society is not the purpose of pro-life advocacy. Rather, the goal of the movement must be to save lives, not souls, which will be best achieved through an explicitly human rights perspective.