‘They hate God’: US anti-abortion activists want to fight back on the 51st anniversary of Roe

Inside the subterranean levels of an upscale hotel in downtown Washington, just a few days before the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade, the anti-abortion movement was attempting a comeback.

Kevin Roberts stood on stage in a cavernous ballroom glowing with neon shades of blue, purple and pink. As chairman of the Heritage Foundation, Roberts leads one of the key think tanks behind recent conservative attacks on abortion. And he’s not happy with how things are going.

“We meet today in the midst of a pro-abortion media narrative of smug triumphalism,” Roberts told hundreds of young abortion foes who had gathered in the ballroom from across the country to hear him and other anti-abortion leaders speak.

‘You’ve heard the story. Less than two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, the abortion-industrial complex is celebrating an unprecedented political winning streak. Pro-life bills have failed across the country. The abortion referendums are over. Democratic leaders are crowing while too many Republican leaders are cowering from the fight.”

Roberts spoke at the annual National Pro-Life Summit, a one-day organizing camp for high school and college anti-abortion activists. This year’s summit faced a monumental task: Organizers and participants alike hoped to reinvigorate a movement that rose to the height of its power eighteen months ago with the overthrow of Roe—and then, in the months that followed, repeatedly crashed. -landed back on Earth.

Since Roe’s passing, seven states have voted on abortion-related referendums. In both cases, voters took decisive action to protect abortion rights, even in ruby ​​red states like Kentucky, Kansas and Montana.

In 2024, even more is at stake. Not only are another dozen states gearing up to potentially vote on abortion-related referendums, but the future of the White House is also at stake. If abortion hurts Republicans’ elections — as is widely believed to have happened in the 2022 midterm elections — anti-abortion activists could see the Republican Party as ballot box poison.

Overall, the National Pro-Life Summit is a window into what the anti-abortion movement is telling itself about itself — and right now, it’s not happy with Republicans. For years, the anti-abortion movement has rallied voters to Republicans. On Saturday, they repeatedly condemned the Republican Party for not adequately supporting their cause.

The last Republican president appointed the judges who overturned Roe, while Red States have passed more than a dozen near-total abortion bans since the ruling. But many Republicans are starting to back away from the issue. Before the 2022 elections, several quietly downplayed their viewswhile dozens of Republicans in the House of Representatives have postponed signing a bill to ban abortions nationwide.

“Our friends in the Republican Party need to touch some grass,” said Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America, the organization behind the summit. “Those who are now saying that we shouldn’t talk, that Republican candidates, those seeking office, should hide from the abortion issue – they continue to be wrong. We won’t win if we bury our heads in the sand.”

Democrats are already trying to use Roe’s impact on doctors to win votes, as Joe Biden’s reelection campaign has launched a series of events and ads timed to mark the Roe anniversary on Monday. Vice President Kamala Harris will launch a tour dedicated to raising awareness about abortion access, while Biden will host a meeting of his reproductive health task force.

His administration has also announced plans to expand access to contraception under the Affordable Care Act, as well as an initiative to spread information about a law that, the administration says, would guarantee Americans’ legal rights to emergency abortions, even in states that prohibit the procedure.

A thin line

The mood on Saturday was not exactly somber.

Attendees could purchase baseball caps that read “I’m just here saving babies,” sweatshirts with an image of a newspaper front page that read “ROE REVERSED,” and red hats emblazoned with the words “Make America Pro-Life ‘. Again” in the unmistakable style of Trump’s Maga hats. Young people excitedly posed for group photos in front of a backdrop that read: “EQUAL RIGHTS FOR PREBORN!” An illustrated fetus was curled up in a corner.

Yet one speech after another, activists told the youth that they were victims of enormous forces arrayed against them. They accused abortion rights advocates of spreading disinformation about voting referendums and said the opposition was simply outpacing them. In Ohio, abortion rights advocates reported receiving about three times as much money as an anti-abortion rights coalition.

“These people like chaos. That’s left. The left is inherently chaotic at its core,” said Will Witt, a conservative influencer who, like Roberts, addressed everyone present during the morning speech.

After quoting from the Bible in an attempt to show that God was the origin of the order, Witt continued: “This is why the left, this is why these pro-choicers, this is why they hate God. Because God represents order in the world, while they love chaos.”

The speakers at the summit tried to walk a fine line. While they tried to convince attendees that they were victims of a world turned against them, they also had to emphasize that opposition to abortion is a majority position — and an issue that could get Republicans elected.

“Our views on this issue, the issue, are not outside the mainstream, no matter how many times ABC tries to tell me that it is,” Hawkins told attendees at a workshop dedicated to understanding what went wrong with the abortion referendums. Most millennials and members of Generation Z, she added, “want some kind of limit on abortion.”

Polls on abortion are complex because respondents’ answers can vary widely depending on how a question is asked or how much context is provided. According to Gallup polls, most Americans believe abortion should be restricted after the first trimester of pregnancy. However, over the past two decades, more and more people have become open to keeping abortion legal later in pregnancy. Virginia Republicans failed to take control of the state legislature last year after promising to ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Gallup also found that as of 2020, more Americans identify as “pro-choice” than “pro-life.” Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022, more and more people have started calling themselves “pro-choice.”

Hawkins does not support only “some types of restrictions on abortion.”

“I never want abortions to be legal,” she said in an interview. She rejected the idea that abortions performed to save women’s lives could be classified as abortions. “If you look at a case where a woman’s life is in danger, where the doctor believes that she can no longer safely carry her child in her womb, or that she could lose her life – we wouldn’t consider that as a abortion, unless the abortionist enters with the intention of killing the child.”

Instead, she said, it is a “maternal-fetal separation.”

Hawkins’ point was an attempt to confront a phenomenon that has been particularly damaging to the movement: stories of women filing lawsuits after being told they were being denied medically necessary abortions.

Every state with an abortion ban has some kind of exception for cases of medical emergencies, but doctors in those states have widely said the exceptions are so vague as to be unworkable. In a recent research of 54 midwives in states with post-Roe abortion restrictions, more than 90% said the law prevented them from adhering to best clinical care standards.

‘You vote for life’

Last year, when the National Pro-Life Summit held a straw poll asking attendees to name their favorite 2024 presidential candidate, Ron DeSantis won. This year, when DeSantis was just a day away from dropping out of the presidential primaries, Hawkins gleefully declared the winner of the final poll: Donald Trump.

Ultimately, however much their leaders might meet Republicans or Trump — who has suggested that hardline abortion positions hurt Republicans — they are unlikely to withhold votes from the Republican Party. Even Trump’s former vice president Mike Pence, who was targeted in the January 6 riot and spoke at the summit, indicated that people should just move on.

“That’s why we have primaries. We sort them at each level. But after the primaries are over, you vote for life,” Pence said. ‘Stand with men and women who stand up for the right to life.’

A booth for the Heritage Foundation was decorated with logos for its “Project 2025,” including a playbook for the next conservative president. It recommends that the U.S. government stop funding or promoting abortion in international programs, boost existing government “oversight” efforts to collect data on abortion, and enforce the 19th-century Comstock Act to ban the shipment of abortion pills. That would essentially result in taking abortion pills off the market, which Hawkins said is a policy goal of hers.

“If Donald Trump were re-elected, the people he would appoint to his presidential administration would not be abortion activists,” Hawkins said in an interview. “Without a doubt, that’s a guarantee. And they will come to Washington to protect the people, and the people include the newborn children.”