Several weeks after the 2016 election, Marjorie Dannenfelser received a voicemail from President-Elect Donald J. Trump. Her organization, the Susan B. Anthony List, had knocked on over a million doors on his behalf in exchange for a lengthy list of pro-life policy commitments, and he was calling to express his gratitude. “I want to just thank you, thank all of the people that were with you, and we’ll never forget,” Trump said.
It was the beginning of an extraordinary partnership between the Trump administration and the pro-life movement, one that would culminate in the overturn of Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022. For four years, pro-lifers experienced unprecedented levels of access to the White House. The administration acted on their priorities; in a presidential first, Trump even spoke in person at the 2020 March for Life. Pro-life leaders called Trump the “most pro-life president in American history,” a title he embraced with gusto.
That title has come back to haunt the movement. In 2024, Trump ordered the removal of a pivotal line from the GOP platform that had been there since 1984, effectively transitioning the GOP into a pro-choice party: “The unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.” He condemned pro-life protections in states like Florida as “too harsh” and “a terrible mistake,” and he made clear that he does not share the pro-life movement’s conviction that life begins at conception and that government has a responsibility to protect the unborn. (Pro-lifers narrowly defeated the 2024 Florida abortion referendum—which would have enshrined a right to abortion up to twenty-four weeks and struck down the state’s six-week ban—no thanks to Trump.)
Donald Trump only qualified to be the “most pro-life president in American history”—a title he boasted about as recently as January—if the term “pro-life” is reduced to a list of policies, appointments, and public statements rather than personal conviction. Trump was famously pro-abortion until it became politically advantageous to become pro-life. His first-term pro-life record was impeccable, but aside from his evident horror at late-term abortion, his personal views were never clearly articulated. Post-Roe, after a string of ballot-referendum losses in which several states enshrined abortion as a constitutional right, his political calculus changed.
Abortions have increased since Dobbs, as a national network of abortion pill distributors has effectively nullified pro-life laws in over a dozen states by shipping deadly drugs across state lines. The Trump administration could stop this by reversing the Biden-era Covid policy that eliminated the in-person dispensing requirement for abortion pills. Despite intense lobbying from pro-life leaders, it has yet to do so. In October, the Food and Drug Administration approved a second generic abortion pill, lowering costs and expanding access.
In January, to the dismay of pro-lifers, Trump urged GOP lawmakers to be “flexible” on the Hyde Amendment, which has restricted federal funding for abortion since 1976. Dannenfelser phoned him; the call went to voicemail. She bluntly told the Wall Street Journal in May that “Trump is the problem.” Five days later, Reuters reported that pro-life leaders had attended a private White House meeting that a spokesperson for SBA Pro-Life America described as “constructive.” Nevertheless, the administration has been stalling on every major request from the pro-life movement since.
Why did the first Trump administration produce an unprecedented number of pro-life policies, while the second has sought to sideline the pro-life agenda? Who was primarily responsible for pro-life access and pro-life appointments? Many rank-and-file pro-lifers erroneously believe it was Donald Trump.
In fact, the primary figure behind many (if not most) of the first administration’s pro-life accomplishments was Vice President Mike Pence. Dannenfelser said as much in an address to Pence’s March for Life reception in January: “There has been no one else more influential in my own leadership than Vice President Pence.” Pence, she told the gathering, led “from the vice president’s office” and was the “moral compass” of the first administration.
Tim Chapman, speaking after Dannenfelser, put it more bluntly: “Vice President Pence was the pro-life movement’s man on the inside for four years. His leadership on the inside is why so many good things happened in that first Trump administration.”
