Why Pro-Life Democrats Disappeared

Today there is only one Democrat left in the House of Representatives who opposes abortion. There are no antiabortion Democrats left in the Senate.

There are few other issues that have united Democrats more than support for abortion rights. The Democratic Party spent more money for ads on abortion than for adverting on any other issue in both 2022 and 2024, NPR recently reported.

But this year, the Democratic Party is mentioning abortion a lot less in its advertising. So, could the party become a little less rigid in its pro-choice stance and win back a few more pro-lifers?

Unfortunately, the answer is probably not. Until very recently, pro-lifers were a strong minority contingent in the Democratic Party. But the process by which the party became monolithically pro-choice is not easily reversible.

To understand why pro-life Democrats have almost completely disappeared, we need to understand who the pro-life Democrats were when they did exist – and why they proved to be so politically vulnerable.

Pro-Life Democrats Lasted a Long Time in Congress

Given the Democratic Party’s current strong commitment to abortion rights, it might be easy to forget how long the now near-extinct species of pro-life Democratic congressional representative actually existed. Even though the national platform of the Democratic Party has endorsed Roe v. Wade since 1976, dozens of pro-life Democrats in Congress felt free to break from the party’s official stance and support restrictions on abortion for more than thirty years after their party adopted that platform plank.

As recently as 2009, there were still 62 Democratic congressional representatives who were willing to vote for the Stupak-Pitts amendment that restricted insurance coverage for abortion under Obamacare.

And in earlier decades, the number of Democrats in Congress who were pro-life was much higher. More than a third of the Democrats in the House of Representatives in 1992 met the National Right to Life Committee’s stringent standards for being considered pro-life. And in 1983, nearly one-third of the Democratic senators (15 out of 46) voted for a constitutional amendment proposal that would have rescinded Roe v. Wade.

But today nearly all traces of that earlier pro-life presence among both Democratic politicians and Democratic voters have vanished.

Fifty years ago, nearly half of all Democratic voters supported a constitutional amendment to protect human life from the moment of conception and ban nearly all abortion, but today only 15 percent of Democratic voters say they want to make abortion mostly or entirely illegal.

What happened to the pro-life Democrats?

The answer is that a shift in the views of three constituencies – northern white Catholics, southern African American Protestants, and southern white evangelical Protestants – explain the disappearance of a figure that used to be quite common: the pro-life Democrat in Congress. In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, most pro-life Democrats came from one of those three constituencies. But today, support for pro-life Democrats in each of those constituencies has almost completely collapsed.

Northern Catholic Democrats

Catholics were the most vocal group of pro-life activists during the 1970s. To a much greater degree than most Protestant churches at the time, the Catholic Church propagated a strong theology of protection of human life from the moment of conception. Although the average Catholic did not entirely agree with their church’s theology when dealing with questions of whether abortion should be allowed in cases of rape or when a pregnancy endangered a woman’s health, a majority of Catholics in the 1970s opposed the legalization of elective abortion.

That’s why, in the early 1970s, the strongest opposition to abortion came from the most heavily Catholic states. Rhode Island, the nation’s most Catholic state, was (along with Utah) one of the last two states to agree to comply with Roe v. Wade by legalizing abortion; it did not do so until 1975.

But there were three reasons why Catholic voters lost influence in the party. One was that they were a minority of voters in most states. In 1975, only one state (Rhode Island) was majority Catholic. In the other northeastern states, Catholics were a plurality, but not a majority, of the population. That meant that in no state other than Rhode Island could a politician win an election by appealing to the Catholic vote alone; they had to build a coalition.

That led to the second problem facing Catholics: In the states where Catholics were most numerous, the non-Catholics in those states were strongly supportive of abortion rights. In contrast to white evangelicals in the South, who were surrounded by others outside of their religious coalition (such as African Americans) who also opposed abortion, northeastern Catholics in the late twentieth century were surrounded by mainline Protestants, Jews, and non-religious people who supported abortion rights. That meant that in no New England state after the mid-1970s could one get a viable statewide majority in favor of abortion restrictions. Even if Catholics voted as a bloc in favor of an antiabortion policy, they would likely be outvoted by the majority of voters who were not Catholic, because those non-Catholic voters were overwhelmingly opposed to abortion restrictions.

But that brings up the third problem that pro-life Catholics faced in the late 20^th century: Catholics did not vote as a bloc. Approximately one-third of Catholics approved of Roe v. Wade, according to Gallup polls taken in the mid-1970s, and some of the two-thirds who did not approve of Roe nevertheless wanted to keep abortion legal under certain circumstances even if they did not approve of “abortion on demand.” In 1976, 52 percent of Catholics said they favored a constitutional amendment to ban abortion – but 42 percent opposed it.

Since most northeastern voters who were not Catholic supported abortion rights – and since only a slight majority of Catholics in the mid-to-late 1970s were strongly opposed to abortion – only in the most heavily Catholic districts could a politician be rewarded for taking a stand against abortion. If a congressional district was overwhelmingly Catholic, voters would probably be willing to elect a pro-life politician. But if Catholics were only a slight majority, the district would probably still swing pro-choice, because the strong minority of Catholic voters who supported abortion legalization, along with the overwhelming majority of non-Catholics who did, would probably be enough to make the district generally pro-choice.

Yet in the heavily Catholic, still churched regions of the Northeast, there were still districts where pro-life Catholics had enough voting power to keep sending pro-life Democrats to Congress. That was why several New England Catholic Democratic congressional representatives in the late twentieth century – such as Joe Moakley from Massachusetts and Edward Beard and Robert Weygand from Rhode Island – consistently voted for legislation to restrict abortion.

On most issues, pro-life Catholic representatives such as Moakley voted with the liberal or centrist-liberal wing of their party. Moakley was a strong supporter of government-funded healthcare, for instance, and Weygand supported gun control and opposed the death penalty. But on abortion, their views reflected the views of their devout Catholic constituents – who, in a very heavily Catholic district, might have just enough political power to constitute a majority. When consistent life ethic Catholics express a desire today for politicians who integrate a pro-life stance on abortion with broader support for social programs that accord well with the Catholic Church’s teaching, it is this type of politician they have in mind – and from the 1970s until the beginning of the 21^st century, there were several of these pro-life Democrats in the House.

But even as some members of the House in Rhode Island and Massachusetts supported antiabortion legislation, the senators from this region generally did not, regardless of whether they were Catholic or Protestant. That is because while individual districts in some parts of New England might have had enough socially conservative Catholics to elect a pro-life representative, the states as a whole did not.

But today even the pro-life Catholic Democrats in the House have almost entirely disappeared. That disappearance is relatively recent; it happened only in the 21^st century. To understand why it happened, we need to know something about Catholic church attendance and pro-life beliefs.

Catholic Mass attendance began falling in the late 1960s, but in 1980, nearly a third of Catholics in the United States were still in church every week, and 64 percent attended at least once a month. By 2021, only 17 percent attended weekly, and only 37 percent attended at least once a month.

Today Catholics who attend Mass every week are almost as conservative on abortion as evangelical Protestants are; 68 percent say that abortion should be illegal in most or all cases.

But Catholics who don’t attend Mass very often are generally very liberal in their views on abortion. Sixty-five percent of Catholics who attend Mass less often say that abortion should be legal in most or all cases. And since the majority of self-identified Catholics rarely attend Mass, every survey of Catholic opinion on abortion that does not differentiate Catholics by church attendance habits shows that the majority of Catholics are pro-choice. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey shows that 56 percent of all US Catholics said that abortion should generally be legal.

Although the Catholics who remain in church are becoming more conservative, the massive drop in Catholic church attendance in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries means that many former Catholics no longer identify as such and that even among those who still call themselves Catholic, the majority hold positions on abortion that are at least as liberal as the general population.

That’s why states like Massachusetts and Rhode Island – which were havens for pro-life Democrats only twenty-five or thirty years ago – are now strongly pro-choice. Rhode Island is still the nation’s most heavily Catholic state, but only 41 percent of Rhode Islanders today now identify as Catholic (down from over 50 percent in the 1970s). And of those Catholics, pro-lifers are only a small minority, just as in other nominally or historically Catholic regions of the country.

Today 78 percent of Rhode Islanders – as well as 78 percent of Massachusetts residents – say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. A pro-life candidate, whether Democrat or Republican, probably cannot get elected in those states anymore – even though in the 1990s and very early 2000s, pro-life Democrats still could, at least in some heavily Catholic congressional districts. The massive attrition from the Catholic Church in those states has taken a toll on pro-life sentiment – and there are not enough pro-life evangelical Protestants or other pro-lifers in New England to compensate for that loss.

As this has happened, the Catholic Democratic congressional representatives from New England who had once supported restrictions on abortion shifted their positions. When Democrats in Congress introduced legislation in 2022 to codify the terms of Roe v. Wade in federal law and make abortion legal nationwide, several New England Catholic Democrats who had once supported restrictions on abortion – including representatives such as Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts and Jim Langevin of Rhode Island – voted for the pro-choice bill. The pro-life cause among northern Catholic Democrats was over.

African American Democrats

A similar trajectory occurred among African American Democrats in the South, but for different reasons.

In the 1970s, African Americans were more strongly opposed to abortion than either white Catholics or white evangelical Protestants were. Their opposition to abortion softened over time, but still remained fairly strong well into the 21^st century. Gallup polls taken between 2001 and 2007 showed that only 31 percent of Black Americans (compared to 41 percent of non-Black Americans) said that abortion was “morally acceptable,” and only 24 percent said that it should be legal in all circumstances.

Unlike white evangelical conservatives, few Black Democratic voters used abortion as a political litmus test when voting or wanted to make abortion entirely illegal, but their general conservatism on abortion meant that southern Democrats in Congress could vote for abortion restrictions without alienating their African American supporters. This was true of numerous white southern Democrats in Congress in the 1980s and 1990s. While the majority of their support generally came from whites, southern white Democratic candidates in the last two decades of the 20^th century had to also win the African American vote to fend off Republican challengers and stay in office – and it helped them that both African American Democrats and southern whites shared a general social conservatism on the issue of abortion.

A few African American congressmen who represented socially conservative districts made a similar calculation and took either pro-life or centrist positions on abortion. One of the supporters of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment in 2009 (which was an amendment to the Affordable Health Care Act to restrict insurance coverage for abortion under Obamacare) was Rep. Sanford Bishop, an African American Democrat representing a central Georgia district.

But just as white Catholic Democrats in the North became increasingly pro-choice in the 21^st century, so did African American Democrats in the South. While a majority of African Americans were morally uncomfortable with abortion for decades, many of them were also deeply concerned about issues of race and poverty, and they became increasingly uncomfortable with a pro-life movement that was tied to a party whose policies on those other issues did not match their priorities.

As this happened, Black Protestants became more supportive of abortion legalization – a shift that dramatically accelerated after 2019, a moment when the Democratic Party became noticeably more focused on preserving abortion access in reaction to Republican attempts to overturn Roe v. Wade and pass restrictive abortion legislation in southern states.

In the first decade of the 21^st century, fewer than half of African Americans supported full legalization of all abortion. This changed after 2010, but even between 2010 and 2019, only 56 percent of Black Protestants said that abortion should be legal in most or all cases. Yet by 2023, 72 percent of Black Protestants thought that abortion should be legal. (A Pew survey taken in January 2026 puts this number at 68 percent – which, while slightly lower than the percentage indicated in the 2023 PRRI survey, is still far higher than for any other religious group, including white mainline Protestants).

As this shift happened, African American Democratic politicians who had once supported some restrictions on abortion or abortion funding became fully supportive of abortion rights, just as their northern Catholic counterparts did. In 2022, Rep. Sanford Bishop voted for the Women’s Health Protection Act, the legislative proposal to make abortion legal nationwide.

White Southern Democrats

But the largest contingent of pro-life Democrats in Congress in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries were white southerners. Eleven of the fifteen Democratic senators who voted for an antiabortion constitutional amendment in 1983 represented states of the old Confederacy or a border state.

The vast majority of these white southern Democrats were hawks when it came to military spending bills and fiscal conservatives when it came to social welfare spending.

Some of them were more conservative than Republicans. For example, the pro-life Democrat Kent Hance, who defeated George W. Bush in a congressional election in Texas in 1978, was widely viewed as more conservative (and certainly more of a Texas populist) than the Bush family was at the time.

That’s largely why the white southern pro-life Democrats disappeared: either they or their constituents became Republicans. Kent Hance switched to the Republican Party in 1985. Other southern Democrats in Congress switched parties in the 1990s – or, if they didn’t become Republican themselves, they were replaced by a Republican. By 1999, nine of the fifteen senators who had voted for an antiabortion amendment in 1983 had been replaced by a Republican.

Things became even worse for the southern pro-life Democrats after the election of Barack Obama set off a counter-wave of Republican voting across the South. A string of Republican victories in the 2010 midterms swept away 19 of the 35 white southern Democrats still left in the House. Those with the most socially conservative, pro-life voting records – such as
Gene Taylor of Mississippi and Jim Marshall of Georgia – were especially vulnerable.

They lost their seats to pro-life Republicans, so the number of congressional representatives opposed to abortion didn’t change.

But their defeats eroded the last forces moderating the Democratic Party’s position on abortion. No matter how conservative they were, there was one thing separating the white southern Democratic politicians of the early 2000s from their Republican counterparts: the multiracial nature of their coalition. White southern Democrats in the early 2000s could not stay in office without winning the Black vote in their states. Their conservative positions on abortion represented a multiracial consensus in the South.

After the end of the conservative southern white Democrats’ careers, the prospect of winning a Democratic race in the South through a socially conservative, pro-life, multiracial coalition also vanished. The socially conservative, pro-life voters in the South simply would not vote for a Democrat. That meant that the Democrats in parts of the South that were not majority Black had to look for a different sort of candidate – a candidate who could win with a coalition of pro-choice, moderately progressive white Christians; pro-choice, centrist or progressive secular voters or other non-Christians; and Black and Hispanic Christians who increasingly supported abortion rights (or at least did not object to a candidate’s pro-choice stance).

In other words, the leading white Democratic politicians in the South became people a bit like James Tallarico – people who perhaps could speak Christian language, but whose pro-choice, pro-LGBTQ+ stances played well with many centrist and moderately progressive suburban whites even while bypassing the sort of socially conservative voters that the previous generation of southern white Democrats had relied on. Most of the time, these Democratic candidates lost; the vast majority of white senators and representatives from the South were Republican. But in the rare cases in which they won – as Senator Jon Ossoff did in 2020, for instance – they relied on a coalition of suburban supporters who were considerably less socially conservative than the rural white evangelicals who had kept a previous generation of pro-life Democrats in office. Those pro-life rural white evangelicals were now so staunchly Republican that Democratic candidates no longer made much of an effort to win their vote.

On a smaller scale, something similar happened in the small number of socially conservative rural northern congressional that had once sent pro-life Democrats to Congress. In 2010, one of the most stalwart pro-life Democrats – the Catholic Jim Oberstar, an 18-term congressional representative from northern rural Minnesota – lost his bid for reelection to a Republican.

The loss of the party’s southern conservative pro-life wing, along with most of what remained of its northern Catholic pro-life contingent, meant that there was no longer any force to moderate the party’s pro-choice stance.

That had not been the case in 2000, when the party included in its platform a statement of tolerance and diversity on abortion views that it had borrowed from Republican Bob Dole: “We also recognize that members of our party have deeply held and sometimes differing views on issues of personal conscience like abortion and capital punishment. We view this diversity of views as a source of strength, not as a sign of weakness, and we welcome into our ranks all Americans who may hold differing positions on these and other issues.”

In 2000, the Democratic Party still had many pro-life members, but by 2014, there were only three Democratic members of the House – and none in the Senate – who had earned 100 percent ratings from the National Right to Life Committee. The party therefore had no compunction about moving to a more extreme pro-choice position. In 2016, the Democratic Party platform promised for the first time to abolish the Hyde Amendment, the restriction on abortion funding that had enjoyed bipartisan support for the previous forty years. In 2019, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign team advised him that he would not be able to win the party’s nomination unless he began opposing the Hyde Amendment. He dutifully complied.

And in 2020, one of the last remaining pro-life congressional Democrats, Rep. Dan Lipinski of Illinois, suffered a primary loss to a progressive, pro-choice challenger after several other members of Illinois’s Democratic congressional delegation supported the challenger over their incumbent colleague.

That cleared the way for the party to make abortion its signature issue in the 2022 and 2024 elections. Kamala Harris became the first US vice president to tour an abortion clinic while in office. And the party spent more money on advertising its abortion stance than it spent on any other issue in those two elections.

Can the Democratic Party Moderate Its Abortion Stance?

The Democratic Party’s shift to a staunchly pro-choice stance did not take place overnight. Pro-life Democrats continued to play an active role in Congress for several decades after Roe v. Wade. And throughout those decades, many pro-lifers continued to hold out hope that they could work within the Democratic Party while still campaigning against abortion.

It’s difficult to retain that hope today. One can blame a decline in Catholic church attendance, a southern white abandonment of the Democratic Party, or a shift in African American views on abortion for this shift, but the end result is that party leaders now seem to believe that the party has little to gain by moderating its position on abortion.

This has given the Republican Party cover to do what might have been unthinkable only a few years ago: facilitate an expansion in access to abortion through the increased availability of abortion pills. (After all, if the Democratic Party is so monolithically pro-choice, the Republican Party arguably doesn’t have to do very much to retain the pro-life vote). As I argued in a recent article in Christianity Today, the Republican Party is increasingly adopting policies that are de facto pro-choice even if the party remains officially anti-Roe.

So, pro-lifers who want meaningful restrictions on abortion will find little support from either political party.

But if that’s the case, perhaps Democrats will finally realize that making support for abortion rights their number-one campaign issue is not a path to victory. Given the results of the last election, the strategy arguably did not work, which is why this year the Democrats are not emphasizing the issue in the way they did in 2024.

And if that’s the case – and if the abortion issue recedes in importance as a campaign issue – I think that we can hold out a slim hope that party leaders may eventually realize that they could safely move a little closer to their party’s official position on abortion in 2000 without losing much support. I think that there’s arguably a path for the Democratic Party to pick up a few votes by running pro-life candidates in heavily Hispanic districts in the South – such as the one that the last remaining pro-life Democrat in the House, Rep. Henry Cuellar, represents. Even if pro-life Democrats cannot win in most of the North and many parts of the South, I think there’s reason to believe that the situation is different among some Hispanic voters, a swing constituency that the Democratic Party cannot afford to take for granted.

Perhaps in the current political climate, it would be naïve to hope that the Democratic Party will try to recruit any more pro-life candidates to run in such districts. But the fact that even one pro-life Democratic congressional representative remains is an indication that despite all of the political changes that have led to the demise of the pro-life cause in the party, there are a still a small number of Democrats who would like to protect unborn life – even if the party as a whole does not.

Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of “Roe v. Wade.”

Photo credit: A Democrats for Life of America banner at the 2006 March for Life in Washington, DC (Wikimedia Commons)