How Conservatives Are Rebranding Pro-Life

Jessica Valenti
·6 min read

Americans don’t want abortion to be banned. In fact, they barely want it legislated at all: A 2024 poll found that 81 percent of voters don’t want abortion issues to be regulated by the government. Instead, they want the decision to be between a patient and their doctor.

That overwhelming support for legal abortion leaves Republicans with a major problem: How do you defend and push a policy that no one wants? In the nearly two years since Roe v. Wade was overturned, the GOP has faced an unprecedented backlash. They’re losing election after election — from the 2022 midterms to state Supreme Court races — and abortion rights win every time they are on the ballot. Republicans are even considering doing away with the term “pro-life” because Americans view it as too extreme. The horror stories regularly coming out of states with abortion bans certainly don’t help.

In response, anti-abortion lawmakers and groups have recently launched a new two-pronged attack. They’re changing the way they publicly talk about abortion, using specific terms and phrases to make Americans believe that they’re softening on the issue; at the same time, they’re systematically chipping away at democracy so that voters won’t have a say in the matter, just in case their talking points don’t work.

I’ve been tracking these tactics in my newsletter, “Abortion, Every Day,” since Roe was overturned, finding that the GOP’s deception runs deeper than most people realize.

It wasn’t long after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision, for example, that anti-abortion organizations and politicians stopped using the word “ban.” (James Bopp, general counsel for the National Right to Life Committee, called the term “the big ban word.”) Instead, they replaced it with words like “standard” and “consensus.”

It makes sense: “I support a national consensus” sounds a whole lot better than “I support a national ban,” especially given how unpopular Republicans’ bans are.

More recently, conservative lawmakers and activists are using the phrase “the will of the people.” Donald Trump used it when announcing that he believed abortion should be left to the discretion of the states, and Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, used the phrase six times in an interview with The New York Times. Like “consensus,” “will of the people” gives voters the impression that the GOP actually cares what Americans want.

And in a moment when so many states are using citizen-led ballot initiatives to restore and protect abortion rights, Republicans are also eager to claim that “the will of the people” is being represented by legislators — rather than voters having a direct say on an issue. Before the Supreme Court heard arguments this spring over lifesaving abortions in emergency rooms, for example, conservative legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom accused the Biden administration of “overrid[ing] the will of Idaho voters enacted through their elected representatives.”

Anti-abortion lawmakers and the organizations directing them are desperate to hide the truth: They know Americans don’t want abortion banned, and they simply don’t care. In fact, they’re willing to pass bans at any cost to democracy, and to women’s lives.

Consider the dirty tricks Republicans have pulled in every state where abortion has been on the ballot. In Ohio, not only did lawmakers try to raise the standards on ballot measures to require 60 percent of the vote instead of a simple majority, but Secretary of State Frank LaRose admitted to working with anti-abortion groups to craft a biased ballot summary. That means when voters went to the ballot box to decide on a pro-choice amendment, they didn’t actually see the amendment as it was being proposed — but an anti-abortion interpretation of the measure. (Voters were so eager to restore abortion rights that the amendment won regardless.)

In Kansas, anti-choice groups sent out text messages to voters to “Vote YES to protect women’s health,” even though a “yes” vote would have removed abortion protections. As pro-choice activists collected signatures to get abortion on the ballot in Missouri, anti-abortion groups warned voters via text messages that “out-of-state strangers” would try to steal their personal information by asking them to sign petitions. Missourians got texts instructing them to “protect yourself from fraud & theft” by not signing any petitions. This move came after the state’s attorney general held up abortion-rights advocates signature-gathering for months by refusing to sign off on a cost estimate for the ballot measure before being forced by the state Supreme Court to let it move forward.

In Arizona, Republicans took a different tack. After an 1864 ban was allowed to stand by the state Supreme Court, sparking a national backlash, Republicans decided to propose a ballot measure of their own in order to trick angry voters. A leaked GOP strategy document laid out the party’s plan to introduce a ballot measure that sounded pro-choice in order to siphon votes away from the real abortion-rights amendment in the state. They even floated using names like the “Arizona Abortion Protection Act” and the “Arizona Abortion and Reproductive Care Act.”

Anti-abortion groups in Nebraska did much the same thing earlier this year: After the pro-choice group Protect Our Rights launched a ballot initiative, conservatives proposed a similar-sounding amendment that they called Protect Women and Children. They claimed the measure would protect abortion in the first trimester of a pregnancy. What they failed to mention is that Nebraska recently enacted a 12-week ban; that means passing their “pro-choice” amendment would actually enshrine a ban into the state constitution — making it nearly impossible to repeal.

All of these efforts — the fake ballot measures, text trickery, and the war on language — are being pushed precisely because Republicans know that Americans support abortion rights. They know they can’t win on their own arguments and merits, so they try to lie and fool voters in order to win. As we speed toward the election this November, we’ll see the same kinds of tactics from the Republicans running — including Trump, who is desperate to escape voters’ post-Roe fury.

But as dystopian as the attacks on democracy are, there is also good news. The anti-abortion future Republicans want for this country is a vision shared by only a handful of powerful extremists. The vast majority of us want people’s health protected, women’s humanity and dignity intact, and personal health decisions to stay personal.

We quite literally have the power of the people on our side. We just have to be ready for a long-haul battle that doesn’t stop with one state or one win. And we have to point out, again and again, that what the GOP is doing with abortion rights is being done against our wills.

More from Rolling Stone

Best of Rolling Stone