Jimmy Carter, the recently departed former president, leaves a legacy that is difficult to categorize into today’s dominant political categories of conservative, liberal, and populist because he had a finger in each pie. (Recently, at Politico, one headline declared “Jimmy Carter Wasn’t a Liberal,” while another dubbed him “The Last Progressive Evangelical.”) On abortion, Carter emerged victorious from the first post-Roe presidential election in 1976 by trying to play the role of a moderate. It was a sometimes awkward performance but one that Carter continued the rest of his life, even as his party marched toward abortion rights absolutism.
Carter the politician and abortion as a political issue emerged, both somewhat under the radar, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Abortion’s increased visibility was initially a result of liberalizing state laws in New York and California, both signed by Republican governors. Carter’s rise from Georgia state senator in 1962 to governor in 1970 did not center on abortion. Yet, the 1973 Roe decision and the candidacy of pro-life activist Ellen McCormack in the Democratic primaries meant it could not be ignored as he sought the White House in 1976.
The Democratic party of that era was a big tent that included vocal feminists on the left and more traditionalist Catholics on the right. The traditionalist wing had soundly defeated a proposed pro-abortion party platform plank in 1972 before presidential nominee George McGovern (dinged in the primaries as soft on “acid, amnesty, and abortion”) lost the election to President Richard Nixon. (Nixon later made no public statement in the wake of Roe but privately, and disturbingly, viewed abortion as necessary in cases of rape or interracial pregnancies.) But even the liberal stalwart McGovern (who, similar to Donald Trump, wanted to leave the issue to the states) had a more pro-life running mate—actually two, the original nominee Thomas Eagleton and his replacement Sargent Shriver.
Carter, in 1976, settled on a campaign strategy of strategic ambiguity. If pressed, he would express personal displeasure with abortion without offering support for any of the constitutional amendments then being floated. He did, however, vow to support the Hyde Amendment prohibiting federal dollars from paying for abortions. This annual budget rider was first passed in 1976 with bipartisan support, challenging a grisly post-Roe reality in which some 300,000 abortions were funded by taxpayers each year.
At the Democrats’ 1976 convention, Carter’s campaign ensured that the following plank was in the platform (under the heading “Civil and Political Rights,” not “Health Care”):
We fully recognize the religious and ethical nature of the concerns which many Americans have on the subject of abortion. We feel, however, that it is undesirable to attempt to amend the U.S. Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court decision in this area.
This non-aggression pledge regarding Roe plus Carter’s successful efforts to keep the pro-life candidate McCormack off the convention stage left many traditionalists fuming. Some of the jilted pro-lifers eventually worked with Bob Dole, who was set to replace the pro-abortion Vice President Nelson Rockefeller on the GOP ticket, to get the following language into the Republican platform: “The Republican Party favors a continuance of the public dialogue on abortion and supports the efforts of those who seek enactment of a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children.” That rather indirect endorsement of the right to life movement came after the platform acknowledged, “There are those in our Party who favor complete support for the Supreme Court decision which permits abortion on demand.” Among those was First Lady Betty Ford, who had publicly declared her admiration for Roe. Her husband was a bit more coy about his own personal pro-choice views.
Carter stumbled his way to victory at a time when abortion was still a second-tier issue. He likely lost more support from religious voters due to his Playboy interview late in the campaign than for his non-opposition to Roe. If personnel is policy, then President Carter instituted a policy of ambivalence. Roe attorney Sarah Weddington and fellow pro-abortion feminists like Midge Costanza worked in his administration. When Costanza wrote a memo urging Carter to change his position on Hyde, he retorted with a handwritten “No,” and noted that his public stance was “actually more liberal than I feel personally.”
Carter did not buckle on Hyde, even after Costanza brought dozens of female presidential appointees to the White House in a show of feminist force. In fact, he often touted the Catholic faith of Joseph Califano, his Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare responsible for overseeing the enforcement of Hyde. The Department of Justice defended Hyde in court, despite opposition from the Washington Post and others. The surprising 5–4 victory at the Supreme Court in Harris v. McRae required the support of three justices who supported Roe.
The continuation of the Hyde Amendment would become Carter’s lasting legacy on abortion policy. In 2012, Carter publicly called for the Democrats to move away from their full embrace of abortion. That plea went unheeded, but to his credit, Carter never publicly abandoned Hyde, unlike like Joe Biden. Nevertheless, Carter continued to publicly support the Democrats and, with the exception of a 2015 reiteration of his personal views to the New York Times, 2012 was the last time Carter publicly advocated for any moderation of the growing abortion extremism in his party. In 2016, he endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom he had appointed to a position in his administration decades before, despite her actively calling for publicly funded abortions. He went on to endorse Biden despite the flip on Hyde, and at 100 announced that he voted for Kamala Harris, despite her abortion cheerleading.
In 2019, I visited one of President Carter’s Sunday school sessions in Plains, Georgia. I used my ten seconds to thank him for supporting Hyde and urged him to speak out again. He made no reply and looked a bit sheepish. A letter on the same topic went unanswered. Carter was passionate and outspoken about many worthwhile causes, from Habitat for Humanity to the eradication of disease. On abortion, though, he tried to take a moderate position on an issue that logically affords none. Carter was unwilling to take on Roe at a time when a constitutional amendment was within the realm of possibility, and he helped to herd pro-lifers out of the party. Still, he supported the Hyde Amendment in its infancy. That act of leadership helped to build a bipartisan coalition that has kept taxpayer funds from paying for abortions for decades, likely saving millions of lives. There are worse political legacies to have.
John Murdock is an attorney who writes from Texas.
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