The Pro-Life Movement’s Midterm Reckoning

It’s impossible to sugarcoat it,” Marjorie Dannenfelser of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America wrote in a memo issued on November 3. The 2026 midterm election results “are a disaster for the unborn, for their mothers, and for the country as a whole. Democrats are on track to control two of the three pieces they need to legalize taxpayer-funded abortion on demand, up until birth, in all fifty states—something they promise to start pushing as soon as they take office in January.”

She’s right. The blue tsunami that swept the country on Tuesday shocked even pessimistic conservatives, handing the Democratic Party the House, the Senate, and a springboard to 2028. Outgoing Florida governor Ron DeSantis noted that even if Republicans manage to win the presidency in 2028, it will be impossible to confirm “worthy successors” to Justices Alito and Thomas until 2033. 

In Virginia, Question 1, a constitutional amendment on abortion, passed with 62.4 percent of the vote, protecting abortion in the first two trimesters with broad exceptions in the third trimester that amount to legal feticide until birth. Question 1 will not change the status quo much—Virginia already had a very permissive abortion regime—but as Ed Whelan explained, it also enables minors to obtain cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers without parental consent.

In April, the Founding Freedoms Law Center (FFLC), the legal arm of The Family Foundation in Virginia, filed suit asking a Virginia court to find that Question 1 “violates the Virginia Constitution because the question put to voters is materially misleading.” The FFLC is also seeking a permanent injunction barring enforcement of the amendment. That effort is ongoing.

In Nevada, voters approved the Right to Abortion Initiative (Question 6) with 63.4 percent of the vote. This will amend Nevada’s constitution to protect abortion until viability and afterward if a healthcare professional deems it necessary. Abortion is now legal until birth in the Silver State. Conversely, Missouri’s Amendment 3, which would have repealed the 2024 constitutional amendment protecting abortion and banned sex-change surgeries for minors, failed with 44.5 percent of the vote. 

It is not all bad news. Idaho voters rejected the Reproductive Freedom and Privacy Act (Proposition 1), a ballot initiative that would have legalized abortion until birth, barred lawmakers from legislating protections for unborn children, and nullified Idaho’s pro-life laws. The proposition needed a simple majority to pass, but 56 percent of voters opposed it. The Defense of Life Act, which took effect on August 25, 2022, remains in place. Idaho voters chose pro-life laws that ban abortion in almost all cases. 

Notably, Idaho Republicans—from Gov. Brad Little on down—did not run from the pro-life issue but fiercely opposed Proposition 1. “The people of Idaho have spoken,” Stop Prop 1 communications director Mary Strow stated. “They saw through the smokescreen of deception and barrage of out-of-state funded ads that sought to rewrite our laws and reshape our values. Idaho is and will always be a state that values life and protects the unborn.”

Other Republicans adopted a different strategy. In Michigan, Senate candidate Mike Rogers closed out the campaign by reposting a video in which he assured voters that he is opposed to pro-life laws. This move was unlikely to win Democrat voters, but there are indications that plenty of pro-life voters decided to stay home rather than choose between a pro-choice candidate and a pro-abortion one. Rogers lost to Abdul El-Sayed.

Many GOP candidates have forgotten that while they cannot win with pro-life voters alone, they cannot win without them, either. “Republican turnout was the major problem in this election, and it was a major problem among the pro-life base,” Dannenfelser wrote in her memo. “At the doors, we found almost zero pre-existing enthusiasm among pro-life voters for Republican candidates this election. We warned this would happen unless the GOP changed course.”

Trump’s sustained pivot away from the pro-life movement and his support for abortion policies are having an effect. Dannenfelser cited a Cygnal poll revealing that 32 percent of Republicans would be “less enthusiastic” about voting if the GOP abandoned pro-life policies, and 34 percent would be less willing to volunteer, “numbers that rise even higher among the most engaged GOP voters.” This puts the pro-life movement in a very difficult position. 

Democrats have outlined plans to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would establish federal protections for “abortion access” and ban state pro-life laws, in the first hundred hours of a Democrat-controlled Congress. Trump may have abandoned the pro-life movement, but to openly attack the notoriously prickly president for this pivot could result in his declining to veto this catastrophic legislation. Pro-life leaders must simultaneously focus on shaping the GOP moving forward—the first priority being restoring the pro-life plank in the party platform—without burning a bridge that may be badly needed. 

“Democrats have told us exactly what they’ll do if they win in 2028, and millions of lives hang in the balance,” Dannenfelser concluded bluntly. “Over the next two years, Republicans are going to have to figure out how to stake out a pro-life position that remotivates the base and wins over some of the millions of cross-pressured voters who oppose the Democrats’ abortion-on-demand-until-birth regime.”