How the Pro-Life Movement Has Promoted Liberal Values

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Monday marks the 45th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, when the Supreme Court declared in a 7-2 decision that women have a fundamental right to an abortion. In the decades since Roe, the politics of abortion have remained at the center of America’s cultural divide.

On Friday, tens of thousands of anti-abortion advocates will gather for the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., to show solidarity for the unborn and to protest Roe. The March for Life is a useful symbol of pro-life activism: One of the surprising effects of the pro-life movement over the past half-century has been greater support for civil liberties like free speech. The politics of abortion have helped teach conservative Christians to value these rights.

For much of the 20th century, conservative Christianity emphasized tradition, morality and limits on individual rights. By contrast, liberals pushed individual rights and liberties for “nonconformist” minorities, protesting the Vietnam War, advocating for greater artistic expression and pursuing increased gender and racial equality. Conservatives, especially many religious conservatives, were generally opposed to these rights arguments and the groups that claimed them.

In this way, the “culture wars” of the 1970s and 1980s pitted progressives, who wielded individual rights arguments, against traditionalists — the “silent majority” or “Moral Majority” — who countered that rights should be limited to protect community morality.

So while the anti-abortion movement is often considered central to traditionalist culture-war politics, it also has an individual rights approach, owing to its progressive (largely Catholic) roots. Even before Roe, parts of the pro-life movement emphasized the universal rights of the unborn, drawing upon the language of human rights that was prominent in post-New Deal liberalism. These liberal pro-life activists sought to marry their cause to language used to support civil rights for African-Americans and promote human dignity by supporting antiwar efforts. The National Right to Life Committee, for example, was founded in 1968, intentionally emphasizing the rights of the unborn in its name.

Following Roe, many evangelical Christians were slow to join the anti-abortion movement, and when their pace increased at the end of the 1970s, their public arguments against abortion focused more on the immorality of abortion than the right-to-life of the unborn. If one leader epitomizes this approach, it was Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral Majority. Yet by the early 1990s, the right-to-life public argument would prevail, as evangelical advocates would emphasize, and the evangelical base would accept, the rights-of-the-unborn justification over the immorality of obtaining an abortion.

Not only did the pro-life movement teach about public rights arguments, but battles over abortion forced the movement to frequently claim expansive free-speech rights. Most notably, pro-life groups fought legal and legislative battles to defend their right to protest at abortion clinics and health care facilities many times between the late 1980s and 2000s.

In doing so, conservative Christian legal organizations were formed, and pro-life groups marshaled liberal free speech precedents established by antiwar and anti-government protesters. In the most recent abortion protest case decided by the Supreme Court in 2014, McCullen v. Coakley, several conservative Christian groups filed a brief arguing that the court should strike down a “buffer zone” outside a clinic in Boston. In their brief, the groups drew upon the pinnacle of free speech doctrine, Cohen v. California, in which the court in 1971 overturned a young man’s citation for wearing a jacket with a vulgar antiwar slogan on it in a courthouse. These conservative groups claimed for themselves a precedent they would have despised four decades ago.

These Conservative Christian groups are not just using these precedents when it serves them: They have also been supporting free speech cases when abortion is not directly involved. For example, many defended the student who was suspended for holding a “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner at an Alaska school event in Morse v. Frederick in 2007.

In this case and others, the controversial advocacy was justified by saying it was necessary to carve out space for pro-life speech.

Conservative Christian support for free speech has also grown among the rank-and-file, according to the General Social Survey, a nationally representative survey conducted about every two years since 1972. While nonblack evangelicals had one of the lowest levels of support for the free speech of atheists, gays and lesbians, Communists, racists and militarists in 1976, they now nearly match nonevangelical levels of support. Evangelicals increased their level of support for free speech by almost 50 percent from 1976 to 2014, while nonevangelicals increased it by 15 percent.

The survey data also show that abortion views are related to the public’s views on free speech, even accounting for other political and demographic characteristics. Evangelicals are generally less supportive of controversial speech than the general population. Before 1990, evangelicals with stronger pro-life views were even less supportive of free speech. But by 2000, the relationship between abortion views and free speech for evangelicals changed. Evangelicals who have more pro-life views are more supportive of free speech than those with more pro-choice views.

The politics of abortion have been teaching conservative Christians about the value of free speech. Certainly, their commitment to civil liberties has been episodic; there are incidents that reveal the lack of consistent support. But over the past half-century, right-to-life advocacy helped advance the values of liberalism.

As we reach the 45th anniversary of Roe, the abortion wars still often seem intractable. But over the course of these battles there has been an unlikely secondary victory for civil liberties, specifically free speech. Perhaps this is some needed salve for the wounds inflicted by our culture wars.