I cut my political teeth in the early 1980s, when the abortion debate bore little resemblance to what it has become today. At that time, Democrats still had political space to be prolife as part of a broader commitment to protecting the vulnerable, while a contingent of Republicans also held nuanced views, recognizing the economic and social forces that shape abortion decisions. There were prolife Democrats, and I had the privilege of working for one in the Michigan Senate—the late Stephen Monsma.

Our understanding was rooted in Catholic Social Teaching and what Cardinal Joseph Bernardin called a Consistent Ethic of Life: the belief that all human life is sacred and worthy of protection, from womb to tomb. To be prolife was not merely to oppose abortion, it was to ensure that mothers, children, and families could live free from poverty; that the marginalized were protected; that the death penalty would be abolished; and that weapons of mass destruction would be defunded and dismantled. It was a comprehensive moral vision.

This stood in stark contrast to the broader prolife movement, which increasingly narrowed its focus to a single objective: banning abortion. While conservative activists derided prolife progressives as “liberals in sheep’s clothing,” we held to a hopeful assumption—that common ground could be found with organizations like Right to Life to reduce the incidence of abortion itself.

We were mistaken.

The divide between these approaches proved to be more than strategic; it was philosophical. Progressive prolifers sought to reduce abortion by addressing its root causes—poverty, lack of healthcare, economic insecurity. The more powerful conservative prolifers, by contrast, pursued legal prohibition alone. They presented Pregnancy Resource Centers as evidence of compassionate solution, but these were a thin veneer—small in scale and insufficient to confront the deeper forces driving abortion.

To advance a more holistic vision, I was one of the founders of JustLife, a political action organization dedicated to supporting “consistently prolife” candidates. Our board included respected thinkers and leaders such as Stephen Monsma, Ron Sider, and Tony Campolo, and was guided by voices like Phillip Berrigan, Father Ted Hesburgh, Stanley Hauerwas, John Perkins, Richard Rohr, Jim Wallis, and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. Between 1988 and the early 1990s, we endorsed a bipartisan slate of 30+ congressional candidates in each election that included leaders like Rep. Paul Henry (R) MI.

Our approach was grounded in evidence as well as ethics. Legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon documented that developed nations which invest in childcare, maternal health, and economic security see lower abortion rates. By contrast, countries that rely solely on legal bans often experience higher rates. The lesson was clear: if the goal is to reduce abortion, one must address the conditions that give rise to it.

Yet even as this evidence mounted, the dominant prolife movement hardened its stance. Rather than pursuing policies that could reduce abortions in the present, it fixated on a legal endgame that, at the time, seemed politically and judicially unattainable.

One debate revealed this disconnect with painful clarity. In 1990, Congress considered the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), a policy designed to protect parents from losing their jobs after the birth of a child. By any reasonable standard, this was pro-family, pro-mother, and pro-child legislation—precisely the kind of policy that could reduce the pressure to seek an abortion.

Yet Right to Life and every other major prolife organization opposed it, arguing that it imposed undue burdens on business.

JustLife took a different path. We joined forces with organizations on the other side of the abortion divide— the National Organization for Women and the National Abortion Rights Action League—to support FMLA as a meaningful way to reduce abortions. Some prolife legislators, including Senator Orrin Hatch and Representative Henry Hyde, recognized this and voted accordingly. But they were exceptions.

The antiabortion movement (by this time it forfeited the right to claim to be “pro” anything) became defined by political expediency. In the 1990s, it embraced a strategy of demonization—casting abortion proponents, and often women themselves, as enemies. This rhetoric fueled outrage, energized a political base, raised tons of money, deepened the cultural divide, and cemented the status of its leaders has major players in the halls of right wing Christian circles of power.

Another episode illuminated that this transformation was not only rhetorical but moral. Michigan Right to Life invited Oliver North to keynote a fundraising dinner. North was the architect of the illegal effort to supply arms to the Nicaraguan Contras. Their terrorist actions led to the destruction of health clinics that cared for pregnant mothers and unborn children, including clinics sponsored by my own Christian Reformed denomination. The contradiction was impossible to ignore. A movement claiming to defend life was elevating a figure associated with its destruction. My loud and public objections to disinvite North were dismissed.

By the mid-1990s, the Republican Party’s “big tent” had collapsed into a narrower ideological project, with a ban abortion strategy as a central wedge issue that abandoned any serious pursuit of bipartisan solutions. What could have been a broad, consensus-driven effort to reduce abortion instead became a tool of the culture wars and a descent into moral compromise.

Many anti-abortion leaders aligned themselves with policies that stood in contradiction with a belief in the sanctity of life—support for capital punishment, deep cuts to health and food programs serving the poor, and use of torture in the War on Terror. The consistency that JustLife championed gave way to contradiction in the antiabortion movement writ large.

At some point, the dissonance became too great to ignore, and I realized that I had indeed missed the mark.

I recognized the underlying assumptions of the movement—the ways in which it often discounted the lived realities of women, its disregard for women’s moral agency, and their right to make decisions about their own wellbeing.

So I changed my mind. Not lightly, and not quickly—but decisively.

The tragedy, as I now see it, is that a movement that claimed to stand for life became entangled in power. In choosing political power over moral consistency, it forfeited opportunities to save lives in the here and now. In refusing common ground, it became complicit in the very outcomes it claimed to oppose.

In the first full year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, an estimated 1,037,000 abortions took place in the United States — the highest number measured in over a decade. The most recent data show abortion volume continuing to climb. The action promised to reduce abortions has not reduced abortions.

Here is the prophetic truth that must be spoken: A cause that abandons compassion for punishment and control while demonizing others will lose its soul. A movement that seeks purity over people will bear bitter fruit. And a faith that proclaims life, yet neglects the living, will find itself hollow before the judgment of history.

If we are to move forward—truly forward—we must recover a deeper vision. One that honors life not only in principle, but in practice. One that meets women not with coercion, but with support. One that confronts injustice not selectively, but wholly.

Only then can we claim, with integrity, to be truly prolife.