Pro-Life Democrats Feel Shut Out of Party Influence

CHICAGO—As Vice President Kamala Harris galvanizes the Democratic base, there is a group of the party’s members who are not so high on her.

The pro-life Democrat is a vanishing species in American political life. When the activist group Democrats for Life of America began in 1999, it boasted 43 House Democrats as allies in its fight against abortion. Today, the only self-proclaimed pro-life Democrat in the House of Representatives is Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas. And while President Joe Biden showed some reluctance as he moved further to the left on abortion throughout his career, the leadership of Democrats for Life has little hope that his replacement on the 2024 presidential ticket will be as open to the pro-life argument.

“She needs to listen to what the other side is saying on this issue. The abortion lobby has her ear,” Kristen Day, the group’s executive director, told The Dispatch. Day’s organization held a panel on Monday, the first day of the Democratic National Convention. There, speakers complained to about 15 attendees of feeling unwelcome in the Democratic Party due to their view of abortion.

Biden’s gradual shift toward backing abortion rights mirrors the party’s evolution on the issue. Where he once voted to allow Congress and state legislatures to bypass Roe v. Wade and opposed taxpayer funding for abortion, he now supports the codification of the overturned Supreme Court decision into federal law and opposes the Hyde Amendment.

Similarly, where the Democratic Party once described its stance on abortion as “safe, legal, and rare” under the stewardship of President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, attendees at this year’s convention could obtain free medication abortions and vasectomies from a regional Planned Parenthood arm. It filled all available appointments.

In addition to denouncing the availability of abortion at the convention, Day criticized Biden’s record on the issue. She specifically named his administration’s rulemaking around the Pregnant Workers’ Fairness Act, which shoehorned abortion into a regulation after Sen. Bob Casey, one of the bill’s sponsors, said the executive branch could not do so. However, she said Harris is “definitely worse” than Biden on the abortion issue.

“I’m very, very worried about a Harris administration when it comes to protecting women,” Day said. She pointed to Harris’ investigation as California attorney general of anti-abortion activist David Daleiden—who covertly recorded Planned Parenthood employees and accused them of selling body parts of aborted babies—and her “attacks” on pro-life pregnancy centers in her home state.

As Day lamented the decline in the number of pro-life Democrats over the years, the panel featured just such a former congressman: Dan Lipinski, who represented Illinois for eight terms until he lost a 2020 primary to a challenger backed by pro-abortion groups. Lipinski accused Harris of not making room for pro-life members of her party.

“I just saw a quote the other day from one of my former colleagues who talked about how Vice President Harris is really presenting a big tent right now,” he said in his remarks. “But, clearly, this big tent does not include pro-life Democrats, so we ask the Democratic Party to practice what it preaches—inclusivity—and that means the party needs to welcome pro-lifers.”

Like Day, he expressed concerns about Harris’ embrace of abortion rights, noting that she became the first vice president to visit an abortion clinic earlier this year.

But, notably, while speakers expressed their dismay at any expansion of abortion access, they did not focus on restricting abortion at the federal level. Instead, they promoted proposals to “make birth free” and offer federal support for families.

A memorandum Day prepared has several pillars of a “Democratic Party for everyone.” They include welcoming pro-life Democrats, a call to “stop attacking pregnancy resources centers,” and programs such as an expanded child tax credit, paid family leave, and financial support for working families during pregnancy. It also endorses some pieces of legislation Republicans have proposed.

Day said she was focusing on such priorities since a federal abortion restriction is unlikely to garner the 60 votes in the Senate it needs to pass.

“I think we need to look for things that are possible,” Day told The Dispatch. “Making birth free is possible. Providing resources to women on college campuses … That’s possible, and I think we’re looking at what we can do and not what we can’t. What we can’t do right now is pass an abortion limitation bill on the federal level.”

The Democratic Party platform that delegates at the convention approved Monday focuses on reinstituting Roe through legislation, repealing the Hyde Amendment, and continuing to support access to medication abortion. It contains some family financial support programs similar to the ones in Day’s memo.

Meanwhile, the GOP has largely backed off the effort to establish federal protections for unborn children. Republicans last month stripped much of the historical abortion language from their party platform in favor of ambiguous wording that centered the issue on the states. Lipinski acknowledged that many pro-life voters were dissatisfied with that decision.

“The problem is that Republicans went from having 32 mentions of abortion in their last platform to having one … . They have some gobbledygook about the 14th Amendment, which makes no sense at all,” he said. “There’s a lot of pro-life voters who are very unhappy about that, but if the Democratic Party is not going to open the door a crack to pro-life voters, I think they’re just going to go and vote Republican.”

Still, though he twice voted in favor of an ill-fated abortion bill that would have effectively instituted a federal ban on the procedure after 20 weeks of pregnancy—a point after which the legislation stated a fetus can feel pain—Lipinski said it was not likely that his party would take up a federal restriction.

“I don’t think that’s where it would be fruitful for us to talk about it,” he said. “I mean, we each have our own opinions. I have my opinions. I’ve written about my opinions on this, but I don’t think that is really helpful to us here, because, right now, we just want the Democratic Party to accept people who are pro-life, and, from there we can see where it goes.”