Last year, New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein suggested that the Democratic Party should be willing to run pro-life candidates for office. “I want to see real decisions being made to try to compete in Kansas and Missouri and Ohio,” he told New Yorker editor David Remnick. “When Obamacare passed, about forty House Democrats were pro-life. People got very upset about that. I get why, but I think it’s worth thinking about this.” In an interview with his colleague Ross Douthat, he said Democrats need “to open your coalition to people you didn’t want it open to before.” The reaction was fierce. “Throwing vulnerable people under the bus,” read a response in The New Republic, isn’t “a compelling electoral strategy.” In Slate, Jill Filipovic opined that “pro-choice politics are also smart politics even in red states.”
As a voter happy to be represented by pro-life Democratic congressmen in Illinois’s third district for most of my life (first Bill Lipinksi, then his son Dan), I was surprised to find myself more disappointed in Klein than in his critics. This is because while promoting the idea, Klein failed to engage any element of pro-life policy or philosophy—even from an opposed perspective. As a result, his proposal comes across as purely instrumental. The last Democrat elected in many currently red districts happened to have been pro-life, and pro-life Democrats were critical to passing the Affordable Care Act. So, if Democrats want to win and thereby safeguard democracy, the reasoning seems to run, they need to hold their noses and temporarily set aside certain priorities—even women’s bodily rights—in order to win the broader fight. This vision of a pro-life Democrat is not a real candidate with a message worth hearing, but a mere symbol of the party’s willingness to expand the Democratic coalition to gain power.
In other words, Klein seems to share the view of his critics who caricature all pro-lifers as moralistic, evangelical hypocrites—a key part of Trump’s base that could never be meaningfully alienated from him. They can’t imagine a pro-life voter worth trying to engage with and sway. Without any deeper understanding of pro-life voters, Klein’s proposal inevitably reads to his primary audience as a bone thrown to immoral monsters.
Texas candidate for U.S. Senate James Talarico recently offered an improved version of this message. “If someone like Pope Francis,” he said in a 2025 interview, “who may be anti-abortion, but is also anti-war, anti-poverty, anti–climate change—if someone like that can’t find room in our coalition, then we have a huge problem.” This is a welcome observation, but it still doesn’t offer a clear answer to the objections raised against Klein: namely, that compromising on abortion is neither practically necessary nor morally acceptable. It is not enough to simply say the views of a Pope Francis or Pope Leo can find a place in the Democratic tent; Democrats would need to demonstrate in both their electoral messaging and policy frameworks that the pro-life movement is no longer anathema.
Genuine outreach to pro-life voters and candidates would have to start by understanding where previous generations of pro-life Democrats came from, why they won, and why they are now nearly extinct. The historic pro-life Democratic constituency was, in large part, Catholic. Because many urban Catholics were pro-life union members, they naturally elected Democrats who supported both labor rights and restrictions on abortion. But as the old ethnic-religious enclaves dissolved, Catholic Democratic lawmakers who once considered themselves pro-life started to change their policy stances. Governor Mario Cuomo was the prototypical example in the 1980s; retiring Illinois senator Dick Durbin and former president Joe Biden subsequently navigated a similar shift.
At the Democratic National Convention in 1992—the year I was born—Bob Casey Sr., the Catholic governor of Pennsylvania, was denied the opportunity to present his minority position against abortion. Since then, the Democratic Party as an institution has held firm, and no pro-lifer has been given the opportunity to make a pro-life case to the party as a whole. Of course, many pro-life Catholics simply switched parties in response, but many others still proudly voted for—or campaigned as—Democrats.
But things got even tougher for pro-life Democrats in the 2010s. They drew the wrath of their own party when they held up the passage of the Affordable Care Act to try to prevent or limit taxpayer funding for abortion. And when they ultimately voted for it without the strong guarantees they had hoped for, they drew the wrath of Republicans. This cohort of pro-life Democrats was besieged both in primaries and general elections by candidates who, thanks to the Citizens United decision, could now receive huge cash infusions from national interest groups. The worst damage came from pro-life organizations offended that pro-life members of Congress had not stopped Obamacare, the signature legislation of “the most pro-abortion president ever.” Almost all pro-life Democrats were out of Congress within a few years, either via voluntary retirement or lost elections, while the holdouts regularly faced well-funded and well-organized challengers.
But pro-life Democrats still exist. Some 12 percent of Democratic voters support significant legal limits on abortion, and various state-level elected officials still do identify as both Democrats and pro-life. Given this trajectory, why—and where—do they remain in still significant numbers? What would it actually look like, in terms of either rhetoric or policy, to engage these voters’ and candidates’ beliefs?
Many contemporary pro-life Democrats, whether Catholic or not, hold to some version of Cardinal Bernardin’s Consistent Life Ethic, which treats all issues related to human rights and dignity as inextricably connected as part of a “seamless garment.” In most respects, they look like conventional Democrats with respect to issues like the social safety net, voting rights, and the environment. Even without any significant congressional caucus, pro-life Democrats and other Consistent Life Ethic activists have been trying to use their influence in Washington to push for progressive policy reform. Recently, the organization Democrats For Life of America has been gathering bipartisan support in Congress for the Supporting Healthy Moms and Babies Act, part of their agenda to “Make Birth Free.” In addition to promoting sound public policy, Consistent Life Ethic organizations are capable of making powerful arguments. For example, Rehumanize International partnered with Secular Pro-Life to rally pro-life leaders and demand that ICE return to its previous policies and stop detaining pregnant and postpartum women.
On the state level, pro-life Democrats have also had successes worth celebrating. Former Louisiana governor and pro-life Democrat John Bel Edwards was able to win two terms as governor in a state that has otherwise been electing Republicans consistently for decades. He expanded Medicaid, brought Louisiana into efforts to fight climate change, paused executions, and took multiple stands in defense of LGBTQ rights—none of which would have happened under a Republican governor. Edwards’s consistent personal stand against party orthodoxy on abortion gave him credibility among independents and Republicans when he took stances on other issues.
Edwards seems to have started a local trend: a dozen current Louisiana state legislators have been endorsed by Democrats For Life of America. It seems that because these lawmakers sincerely share pro-life voters’ convictions about the value of human life—rather than regarding them as bigots whose backward beliefs need to be either endured or changed—they are able to earn a hearing on a variety of other issues. Although Klein hasn’t, to my knowledge, discussed Louisiana directly, the state proves his point that pro-life Democrats can deliver electoral and policy wins—thereby saving lives—in otherwise deep-red regions.
Despite being rejected by both parties, Cardinal Bernardin’s consistent life ethic has survived. Acknowledging the value and basic human dignity of those-not-yet-born can lend more credibility and urgency to efforts to improve the social safety net, ensure quality health care for everyone, and protect the environment, especially in red states. On a rhetorical level, Republican failures and hypocrisy on all of these issues can be laid bare more effectively when the alternative is a pro-life Democrat. By the same token, Democrats can leverage the moral witness of figures like Pope Francis or Pope Leo more effectively when they can’t be immediately accused of ignoring the Catholic Church’s moral witness on abortion.
Gavin Newsom has suggested that the Democratic coalition should cover the spectrum “from Manchin to Mamdani.” It should also be possible to find pro-lifers at every point on that spectrum, not just in places where it is deemed electorally advantageous.
For the past thirty years, all major policy proposals directly aimed at abortion from the pro-life side have either been advanced by Republicans or otherwise needed to tailor themselves to Republican sensibilities. To the American political imagination, to have pro-life sympathies has come to mean preferring Republican policies across the board. But the belief that the unborn are due a level of moral consideration and protection does not belong to one party or the other—and certainly not to Reaganite libertarianism or Trumpist populism.
Admittedly, it isn’t clear what it would mean for the progressive policy agenda to open itself to a pro-life sensibility; nor, for that matter, is it obvious how a government should integrate the pro-life movement’s basic moral claim into its laws. But open communication is the first step. I know many pro-lifers who are eager to discuss conventional progressive priorities: restorative justice as an alternative to the American obsession with retribution, the many human costs of American interventionism, how to reverse the tide of inequality. Of course, Republican politicians generally don’t care for these kinds of conversations, but too many progressives refuse any association with pro-lifers, which leaves potential coalition partners on the outside looking in.
If discussion is opened up within a progressive framework, the narratives and assumptions that underlie bans on abortion would inevitably fall under scrutiny in a way they don’t on the religious right. If a woman’s decision to seek an abortion is a rational response to social and economic incentives, then every condition that contributes to those incentives needs to be reexamined. Even if the final decision falls on the woman, the responsibility for her choice falls on everyone who makes it harder to integrate a new and helpless human being into our society. Anyone who calls her a baby-killer for seeking an abortion or an unfit mother for raising a child in less than perfect circumstances is hiding from their own complicity in what liberation theology calls structures of sin.
Klein seems to suggest that the party can embrace certain pro-life Democrats under certain strategic conditions without fundamentally changing its orientation toward the movement. He’s wrong. Letting us into the coalition means letting us into the conversation, not just about abortion and maternity care, but an array of other interconnected justice issues. Coming to a better understanding of progressive perspectives on these issues could give Consistent Life Ethic advocates arguments that they can carry back to persuade pro-life voters to accept a variety of progressive reforms. This process may even lead pro-life activists to think more carefully about what legal restrictions on abortion ought to look like. If the party genuinely engages the pro-life movement not as an abstraction or stereotype but as a group of people invested in many of the same values and goals as mainstream progressives, there is great potential for growth—for both the party and the movement.
If the Trump administration’s overreaches and blunders continue, finding space for earnest and consistent pro-lifers may not be strategically necessary for the Democratic Party to secure victories in the 2026 midterms or maybe even the 2028 presidential election. If James Talarico is any indication, they may not even need to embrace pro-lifers in order to reclaim some of the legitimate moral power of religious language in politics. In the long term, though, if Democrats want to create a durable coalition for a more just society, they must, at the very least, be willing to acknowledge the moral legitimacy of the belief that widespread abortion is a grave injustice.
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