If pro-lifers want to win hearts and minds, they need to be anti-poverty

Indiana is one of the most pro-life states in the nation. After the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade and handed abortion law back to the states, Gov. Eric Holcomb made the Hoosier state the first to outlaw most abortions, with only narrow exceptions.

As I have written before, I think this kind of legislative extremism around the earliest abortions is impractical, unenforceable and ultimately counterproductive — both to the pro-life cause and to our broader civic culture. That said, pro-lifers would do well to take one lesson from Indiana: the state’s recent (and long overdue) expansion of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.

SB 265 moves the income eligibility threshold for a family of three to participate in the TANF from 16 percent to 50 percent of the federal poverty rate. This move could serve as a starting point for the pro-life movement to endorse anti-poverty initiatives as an integral and indispensable piece of the anti-abortion cause. There are two main reasons why an explicitly pro-life embrace and expansion of anti-poverty programs like the TANF would be wise for the anti-abortion cause: the first is substantive and the second is political.

Substantively, care for the unborn cannot be legitimately separated from care for the poor, the hungry or the otherwise needy. A belief in our duty to protect, at the most basic level, the lives and health of those who cannot fend for themselves is the foremost reason to oppose abortion. All other considerations — the ways the “culture of death” allows men to treat women, the feminization of poverty and so on — are important, but secondary.

It’s a well-known fact that the children blessedly living rather than dead because of anti-abortion laws are mostly the offspring of single mothers in financially precarious positions; to pass pro-life laws while doing nothing to help relieve (at a bare minimum) the food insecurity that can result from that precarity is not just immoral, but also nonsensical.

Whether or not one is Catholic, the church’s understanding of a “consistent ethic of life” — that is, the idea that providing for life itself and for the opportunity to “flourish” in life is a “seamless garment” — makes “pro-life” and “pro-poor” threads inextricable from one another. Any cash assistance that benefits innocent children’s ability to access food is, as Indiana State Sen. Jon Ford said of the state’s new TANF law, a “hand up, not a hand out.” And even if it’s also a hand out — that is, if some of those children’s parents are, as is inevitably the case among any group of people, less than honest or sub-optimally responsible — to be pro-life is to do what we can to facilitate a basic opportunity for those children to flourish anyway.

After all, the pro-life position is a fundamentally progressive one: it is arguing for the greater consideration and inclusion of a historically marginalized human group (in this case, the unborn) by the body politic. To contend that a voiceless, powerless person is comparable to people with voices and power (including the comparatively powerful person in whose body the child is housed) is the best and purest of progressivism. That many pro-life people see themselves as conservatives — and that pro-life Democrats are virtually nonexistent on the national stage, even though many remain among the rank and file — is a complex accident borne of coalition politics gone awry. Pro-life Americans may be conservative on a whole range of issues, but to be pro-life is nonetheless progressive on the issue of abortion.

This brings us to the political wisdom of the anti-abortion movement embracing a broader, explicitly pro-poor understanding of what it means to be pro-life: it is the likeliest to appeal to our pro-choice interlocutors.

Although there are unreasonable groups within the pro-choice movement (such as those engaging in the “shout your abortion” trend and those who don’t want any restrictions on abortion), most pro-choice Americans are reasonable people who make considered, rational, historically grounded arguments for the legality of abortion, against what may seem like a revolutionary impulse to overturn precedent in the service of an admittedly idealistic pro-life agenda. Good-faith pro-choicers are, on this issue if no other, taking a more conservative position, in that they are defending the status quo of abortion’s historical ubiquity and the rights of those they can see, hear and recognize as fellow human beings (i.e., pregnant women). This is not an unreasonable impulse, and these are the pro-choice Americans that the pro-life side should be engaging.

Many such pro-choice Americans find progressive arguments for inclusion generally persuasive, and new technology clearly shows the humanity of the unborn. So, if the pro-life goal is to change hearts and minds, as well as laws, it makes sense to attempt any pro-life evangelism by embracing the progressive nature of the anti-abortion cause. Showing ourselves to be pro-life after birth — not just before — is the best way to start.

It’s somewhat rare that a given course of action is both morally correct and politically advantageous; the explicit pro-life embrace and branding of anti-poverty initiatives is such an occasion. Let’s not waste it.