How Trump Betrayed the Pro-Life Movement

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.

The Trump administration’s reluctance to act should come as no surprise. Trump committed to ensuring access to the abortion pill in December 2024; JD Vance had voiced the same position months earlier on NBC’s Meet the Press. The administration has also been strongly advocating for IVF, which results in a catastrophic annual loss of embryonic human life.

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.”

Pence is loath to echo this. In an interview with First Things, he gave full credit to President Trump in effusive terms four separate times—but did affirm that he prioritized the pro-life agenda from day one: “As we moved through the campaign, daily conversations about issues and priorities, it was very natural for me to make the case for life with a president who I give all the credit in the world for the progress we made on the sanctity of life during our four years together.”

“The animating center of my public life,” Pence said, “has always been a commitment to the sanctity of life.” After converting to evangelicalism in 1978, Pence’s study of Scripture compelled him to join the pro-life cause. When he ran for Congress in 2000, he sat down to tell his children why they had sold their dream house and used their savings to run for office: “We told them it was for the babies.” At the urging of Henry Hyde, he made life his central issue, spearheading the campaign to defund Planned Parenthood. Pro-life policy remained a priority when he served as governor of Indiana.

Pence chaired the transition team after the 2016 election and set to work ensuring that like-minded people would staff the administration. Two key positions (among many) filled by pro-lifers were U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretaries Tom Price and Alex Azar. “The vice president’s allies and former aides are salted throughout the administration, carrying out significant shifts in federal health insurance programs,” Reuters noted at the time. “In the Trump White House, Pence serves as a chief advocate for religious conservatives, making sure they have a voice in policy-making.” In one instance, Pence “made a forceful argument directly to Trump” about rewriting Title X rules to cut out abortion providers. 

His influence on policy ruffled the right feathers. Emily Stewart, Planned Parenthood’s vice president of public policy, told Politico in 2019 that Pence “has clearly recruited people connected to him who share his very extreme views . . . This has been one of the most active administrations ever on rolling back reproductive rights and there’s no way that happens unless you have people in the White House driving the effort to put out policies at such a rapid clip.”

“There’s an old saying in my line of work, which is ‘Personnel is policy,’” Pence told me. “That’s why the appointment of a pro-life secretary of HHS, understanding the judicial philosophy of nominees to our federal courts with lifetime appointments, knowing that our administration was a pro-life administration and should reflect that in all of the executive policies [was essential].”

“In many ways, I came from the pro-life movement,” he explained. “I knew people in the movement. I knew the leaders at the grassroots level, the people that had led National Right to Life, the Susan B. Anthony List, and a whole range of leaders, largely from my experience in Congress. I was a part of the pro-life movement in my private life and in my public life, and I think in some ways, I felt I was a bridge for [Trump].”

Then, of course, there were the all-important judicial appointments, which would ultimately lead to the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Here, too, Pence played a key role. “My first major assignment, after the transition itself, was the president asked me to interview all of the finalists for the Supreme Court,” Pence recalled. “That would go on through the next two openings on the Court. I was always the last one to interview them before the president, and then shared with him, confidentially, my reflections.” This did not involve directly asking the finalists about their position on abortion, “but there’s ways that you can get to what would be a worldview, a judicial philosophy.”

“It was the glory days,” one former staffer who worked on pro-life issues during the first Trump administration told me. “‘You’re pro-life and in the Trump admin? You can do whatever you want!’ People attributed that to Trump, but he was never involved. We tried to go around his office and through Pence’s office because we suspected that Trump was not aligned and we were pretty certain that Ivanka was pro-choice. We just tried to avoid the West Wing.” 

Pence will not recount conversations he had with the president—not in his memoir, not in interviews. But he makes no secret of the fact that he consistently advocated for the pro-life cause. “I would sometimes hear that there were contrary views to a particular regulatory policy at HHS that we were advocating that was pro-life,” he recalled. “Virtually every time I could remember that when it came to my level and it was something I needed to bring before the president, I brought it before the president as a priority for our pro-life supporters around the country. There was a great deal of deference there.”

Marc Short, who served as Pence’s chief of staff, emphasized that Trump deserves credit for supporting pro-life policies. “Pence was the person the pro-life community came to on issues to try to advocate inside the White House,” he said. “I think it’s a false choice to say it was Mike Pence and not Donald Trump. It was both of them. But I do think that when you see Mike Pence get deleted from the equation that the administration has not, in the second go-around, had the same commitment to life. It has been a complete reversal.” He cited the appointment of RFK Jr., “the most pro-abortion secretary in HHS history,” as one consequential example.

There are certainly pro-life stalwarts in the second Trump administration. Vice President JD Vance attended the most recent March for Life, seemingly to placate pro-lifers. But the contrast with Pence is stark. Where pro-lifers once had a direct line to the vice president’s office—formerly a “moral compass” of the administration—Vance, though Catholic, has offered no comparable assurance. He has not made himself the movement’s man on the inside. Instead, pro-life policy this time around is coming primarily from Marco Rubio’s State Department, which has produced an expanded Mexico City Policy, sent diplomats to the U.K. to interview pro-life protesters arrested for praying outside clinics, and added the prevalence of abortion and restriction of pro-life speech to annual human rights reports. Personnel is policy.

As the battle for the post-Trump GOP begins, a historical corrective on the first Trump administration is particularly essential. Pro-lifers who spent four years thanking the wrong man are now learning, belatedly, that transactional relationships have a price. The bill is now coming due, one abandoned commitment at a time. The future of the political pro-life movement rests on whether the party’s standard-bearers, going forward, will be men and women of conviction, beholden to their consciences as well as their political allies. Lives, not just elections, hang on the outcome.