James Earl Carter Jr., the 40th president of the United States, who died at age 100 on December 29, has been called an enigma. Many say he was a failure as president but a good man who lived an exemplary life. One distinction, however, should be receiving more attention. It is a fact that may astonish anyone who does not remember Carter’s term in office: Carter was a Democrat and pro-life. He never ceased to be either, even as radical pro-choice—arguably pro-abortion—activists took over the Democratic party in the forty-four years after the peanut farmer from Georgia left the White House.
The 1976 presidential election was the first to be held after the Supreme Court found a Constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973). In an interview on Meet the Press during that campaign, Jimmy Carter uttered a statement that would disqualify any Democratic candidate today: “I think abortions are wrong.” Though he never endorsed overturning Roe, Carter played a critical role at a key moment for federal abortion policy. The Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding of abortion, was first added to a federal spending bill in the year Carter was elected president. But when he was sworn in it had yet to be implemented, due to a court injunction. Carter chose Joseph Califano, an avowedly pro-life Catholic, to serve as secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Today it is impossible to imagine a Democratic president appointing a pro-life figure to lead this department’s successor, Health and Human Services. (We can no longer be confident that a Republican president will do it, either.) With Carter’s support, Califano fought successfully to have the injunction vacated, and annual spending bills continued to include this life-saving provision. Some in Carter’s party, including not just pro-choice groups but top White House staffers, tried to stop Carter from supporting Califano. Carter held firm, and Hyde survives to this day.
Following Carter’s presidency, pro-choice activists brought about a decades-long transformation of the Democratic party. The change can be seen in the policy platforms adopted every four years at presidential nominating conventions. During Carter’s two campaigns, the party’s internal struggle was on display in platforms that recognized “religious and ethical concerns . . . about abortion” as well as “the belief that a woman has a right to choose whether and when to have a child.” The party sought to downplay abortion in the next two elections by excising the word from the platforms while briefly mentioning “reproductive freedom” and “reproductive choice.” With Bill Clinton as the nominee in 1992, the word “abortion” was back, but with a Clintonian attempt to please both sides. For the first time, the party proposed a “national law” guaranteeing abortion access. But that law was framed within support for “reproductive choice—education, counseling, access to contraceptives.” During that campaign, Clinton famously declared that “abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.” When he ran for re-election in 1996, the platform stated that “our goal is to make abortion . . . more rare.” Pro-lifers were explicitly embraced: “We respect the individual conscience of each American on this difficult issue, and we welcome all our members to participate at every level of our party.” But the radical pro-choice forces did not want a “big tent” party or any negative connotations about abortion. They won. The 2004 platform dropped the rhetoric of inclusion, and the goal of making abortion “more rare” disappeared in 2008.
This was too much for Jimmy Carter, who in 2012 joined Democrats for Life of America in a letter that called for the party to de-emphasize abortion and recognize that some Democrats “find abortion wholly immoral and others find it acceptable only under limited circumstances.” But in 2016 the party took an even more radical turn, by calling in its platform for overturning all federal and state abortion restrictions and ending the Hyde Amendment. In the 2020 Democratic primary, frontrunner Joe Biden faced pressure to repudiate his support for the Hyde Amendment, which he had held since he first helped it pass the Senate. Unlike Carter, who would not back down on this issue, Biden caved. The Democratic party establishment had succumbed to extremism on abortion.
Though Jimmy Carter was a Baptist, he was not a conservative evangelical, and he remained a Democrat until the end of his life. Many deplore that he did not carry his personal views on abortion more fully into his public policy positions. But Carter never stopped speaking out on abortion. In his 2018 Liberty University commencement address, he condemned sex-selective abortions and lamented the “160 million girls and women who are not living today.” We must never forget the injustice of abortion, which Jimmy Carter proclaimed. May all Americans, especially Democrats, heed that voice of conscience now. And may he rest in peace.
Daniel Lipinski served in the U.S. House of Representatives, 2005–2021, and is a political scientist.
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