Marjorie Dannenfelser wanted to stand up and scream. She had been in this conference room so many times before, plotting the future of the conservative movement at the weekly invitation-only meeting of Republican power brokers. But today was different: her life’s work was under attack.
Dannenfelser had fought for the chance to be in this room, to be part of this coalition. The attendees were a who’s who of activists—from fiscal hawks to foreign policy hard-liners to National Rifle Association leaders—who came together every Wednesday at 10:00 a.m. sharp to discuss the future of the Republican Party. People in the know simply called it the “Wednesday Meeting,” hosted by the quirky anti-tax guru Grover Norquist.
She wouldn’t scream, of course. Dannenfelser stuck out already, a matter-of-fact mother in the largely male world of Republican politics, a Catholic in an increasingly secular Washington, who fought for her cause while shuttling around her five children. She ran on Diet Coke, an endless call list, and weekly Mass. She loved her high school friends, elaborate birthday breakfasts, and being a mom. She rarely lost her cool.
So, this Wednesday in early 2013, Dannenfelser sat and listened. But inside, she fumed. She had already read all one hundred pages of the report that the Republican strategists were presenting that day. It was all anyone in her professional world had been talking about all week. The report was called the Growth and Opportunity Project, a new twist on GOP. But everyone knew what it really was. An autopsy of their failures, designed to identify why their party had lost the 2012 election so badly to President Obama and how they needed to change to win.
Ever since she’d arrived in Washington as a young woman, Dannenfelser had devoted herself to a singular cause: ending abortion in America. Her organization, the Susan B. Anthony List, worked to elect like-minded politicians, in hopes that one day they would have enough power in Washington to end abortion rights. SBA was small but it had a vision to convert America to its cause, just as Dannenfelser herself had converted as a student, years ago at Duke University.
As Dannenfelser flipped through the pages, she saw a big warning. America was changing dramatically, making the Republican Party’s future “precarious,” the strategists said. Relying on voters who were white, male, and older would no longer work. Only 72 percent of voters were now white, down from 88 percent in 1980, they said. White people would be less than half the country by 2050. Young people were “rolling their eyes” at Republican values. Women were trending Democratic. Already, Republicans had lost the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections.
If Republicans did not change, and change fast, they risked losing again, the strategists warned. These changing demographics seemed like political destiny to them, and this new America could condemn them to defeat for generations. To win, Republicans needed to be more “inclusive and welcoming,” especially of women and voters of color, they wrote. And on the bottom of page 8, Dannenfelser saw the phrase that chilled her. Republicans needed to drop reactionary “social issues.” Partially that meant opposition to gay marriage. But she knew exactly what else “social issues” meant. It was code for an issue Republican leaders found too damaging, or maybe just too futile, to even name in the report.
Abortion.
The 2012 campaign was—without question—disaster after disaster, both for her issue and for the Republican Party. Months before Election Day, a Republican congressman named Todd Akin, who was running for a Senate seat in Missouri, unexpectedly tanked his campaign in a television interview in which he claimed that women could not become pregnant after being raped.
“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” Akin said, his tanned forehead shining under the studio lights.
Democrats seized the moment. Republicans, they said, were waging a toxic “war on women.” Akin, a longtime antiabortion activist who had previously been arrested for protesting clinics, was labeled a Republican embarrassment. Dannenfelser’s cause was guilty by association. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, abandoned her movement altogether, going out of his way to reassure voters that he had no intention of rolling back federal abortion rights. “There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda,” he said in an interview with The Des Moines Register.
Akin lost, and Romney and a slew of Republicans lost too. Pundits, Democrats, and even establishment Republican strategists pronounced the religious right and the values it represented all but dead. Abortion was a losing issue for the party, Republican leaders decided. And those like Akin and Dannenfelser, who focused on ending it, were on the wrong side of history. The words of autopsy made it undeniable: nationally, the antiabortion movement was at its lowest point in years.
Listening to the presentation, Dannenfelser could not shake the feeling that Republicans were casting her out of the party that had been her home for her entire political life. Her allies had abandoned her. Even worse, the country had too.
The autopsy didn’t say it, but 2012 was a defining year beyond politics. It marked the first time in American history that white Christians—evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and Catholics—became a minority in America, falling to just below 50 percent of the adult population. When the Susan B. Anthony List started in 1992, white Christians were almost two-thirds of the country, a demographic supermajority. But America was growing more secular with what felt for many in the antiabortion world like alarming speed and society was changing accordingly. The values that many socially conservative Christians saw as a foundation of American life—where family was made by a husband and wife who had children and went to church on Sundays—were falling out of the mainstream. Marriage rates were dropping. States were starting to legalize same-sex marriage. And church membership was declining.
In this new America, abortion was fading as a contentious political issue for many voters, viewed as a concern from a bygone era in which women fought for basic rights, a battle fought by boomer mothers and grandmothers that had largely settled into a stalemate between liberals and conservatives. A majority of Americans accepted Roe v. Wade as settled law and supported legal abortion. Many Americans backed some restrictions on the procedure, although they disagreed on what those limits should be. But only 16 percent of Americans believed abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, and just another quarter believed it should be illegal in most circumstances. Dannenfelser and her allies were in this minority.
That minority had a very different vision for America’s future. They largely believed that human life began at conception, when sperm and egg fused into a single cell. To them, that cell was a full human being worthy of legal rights, which meant that ending that life through an abortion was child murder and must be outlawed. A country that sanctioned the murder of babies was committing a grave moral injustice, they argued.
“The great call of our time is to reclaim the human center of the abortion debate,” SBA wrote in its internal business plan in 2013. “We do this because every human life is made in the image of God and no innocent life is ever worth sacrificing.”
Ever since Roe, abortion opponents felt they were fighting a battle of biblical proportions. And in some ways, they were. The fight over abortion, over women’s lives and the children they bear, touched essential questions of human existence and a fundamental one at the heart of American democracy: In the body politic, whose bodies count?
The Supreme Court answered that question for America on a warm January day in 1973, when nine justices—all men—issued one of the most consequential rulings in American history. A woman in America had the right to get an abortion until a fetus could live separately—a point the court called viability—which at the time was about twenty-eight weeks into pregnancy. She could make private decisions about her pregnancy with her doctor, without interference from anyone else.
The decision was instantly a symbol so enduring that it burst into American consciousness as a single word—Roe. The ruling was a watershed, hailed as the crowning achievement of liberal feminism, instantly reshaping decades of law and life to follow. The decision changed how millions of women and girls imagined their lives, offering the ability to control their reproductive futures.
Roe was a reformation. And just as quickly, it ushered in a counterreformation.
From the start, most Americans supported legalized abortion in some form, including, at first, key Christian institutions like the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention. But a small group, led by Roman Catholics and soon joined by the conservative evangelicals of the nascent religious right, never accepted the Roe decision as settled law.
For forty years, the antiabortion movement worked and prayed, grasping hope as they wandered in the wilderness of an America where Roe was the law of the land. Every town seemed to have a church with an antiabortion pregnancy ministry, or a Catholic school that annually sent teenagers to Washington for the March for Life, or a Baptist pastor who preached against the sin of abortion.
The antiabortion movement won some critical victories and lost others. The Supreme Court opened the door to state restrictions on abortion in 1989, with its ruling in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. But three years later, the court said in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey that those restrictions could not place an “undue burden” on a woman, a deep blow to activists’ efforts to overturn Roe.
At any given moment, changes in the White House, in Congress, in the fifty state legislatures and governors’ mansions invigorated one side or the other of the abortion fight. The antiabortion movement persisted, even as it was dwarfed by Planned Parenthood, EMILYs List, and other organizations that supported Democratic women who championed abortion rights. Its determination went beyond politics, driven by a higher call. Dannenfelser dreamed of changing hearts and minds about abortion, of convincing America to end—as the movement so often called it—the “culture of death” that ruled their nation. For her, and the people she represented, the political fight over abortion was at heart a spiritual battle, about the essence of being human and saving America’s soul. Her movement did not think simply in electoral cycles. They planned in generations, shaped by twenty centuries of a story that stretched back to a pregnant and likely teenage girl who gave birth to a baby and laid him in a manger. The story of Christianity at the heart of their mission was one of divine birth and of resurrection from the dead.
So where the Republican consultants saw defeat, Dannenfelser saw slow progress. Like the Republican strategists, she and her movement saw Obama as a fundamental threat—an “abortion radical,” as SBA called him in campaign ads. Even if Obama didn’t expand abortion rights through executive actions, he put two liberal justices on the court, confirmations that ensured that the justices who most vocally opposed Roe—Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Antonin Scalia—remained a minority.
But just because Obama won a second time did not mean his vision for America would last. Since 2010, Republicans had dramatically expanded their power in the states. They now had unified Republican control of state government in twenty-three states. Democrats held only fourteen. Their party controlled thirty governors’ mansions, nearing their all-time high in modern political history, in the 1920s. In Indiana, US representative Mike Pence won his race for governor. Maybe he could run for president, Dannenfelser thought. He was on her advisory board. She’d asked him to consider it before.
In this Wednesday meeting, consultants kept offering solution after solution to a problem Dannenfelser didn’t believe was a problem at all. “They can’t possibly mean what they say they mean,” she thought.
But listening to this presentation by powerful players in her party, she realized her movement needed a new strategy if they wanted to win. For these Republicans, Todd Akin had been a scapegoat. But he could instead be a sacrificial lamb, a lesson for her cause for the future. To make the country in their image, antiabortion activists would start from within their ranks. They would consolidate their power and show Republican leaders that they would not be left behind. And then hope for a miracle.
Dannenfelser knew the zeal of her movement. She saw many people who opposed abortion, who felt that Roe ignored their voice. Official Catholic teaching opposed abortion from conception, rooted in its theology about what it means to be human. And evangelicals often shared similar beliefs, pointing to Bible verses about God knitting humans in their mothers’ wombs. She did not see these Americans as a minority but as an untapped political powerhouse that just needed to be activated by the righteousness of her cause. “There’s this sleeping giant, political giant,” she thought. “You can’t outstrip the will of the people.”
Yet, abortion opponents did not need to convince a majority to change the country. People with minority positions had changed America on issues from civil rights to women’s rights to gay rights, shifting public opinion through yearslong political campaigns. They could enact change beyond their size and often acted against powerful social and political norms. She did not see her cause as rooted in religion but in general human rights.
Other interest groups who came to the meeting never found their mission at risk from the party, even if most Americans disagreed with their positions. She saw the National Rifle Association as a prime example. A majority of Americans favored stricter gun control restrictions, but Republicans didn’t dare cross the gun lobby even when the worst happened, like the recent horrific killings of young children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, or as the number of mass shootings increased. Through it all, the NRA held the line, mobilizing its grassroots supporters and donors and refusing to give an inch. The NRA was an unstoppable political machine, Dannenfelser thought, and that was a model for antiabortion activists.
To win there could be no compromise, Dannenfelser decided. If the Republican Party kicked the antiabortion movement out, her activists would dig in. They would do their own polling, she decided. They would find their own experts, doctors, and scientists who supported their mission to counter mainstream scientific and medical views. And they would build policy, messaging, and political institutions to compete with their enemies on their own terms.
“I am not asking anymore,” she thought. “It seems impossible, but we are going to do it on our own.”
Her strategy reflected the earliest lessons of her movement. John C. Willke, the Catholic doctor from Cincinnati who was a godfather of their cause, argued that to end abortion, they could not speak in religious terms. They needed people to see the fetus as a human and to see their cause as not simply a Catholic issue. “If we make it only a religious question, we lose,” he explained once to a University Faculty for Life conference.
Instead, he modeled their activism after the biggest political victory of his time, the Civil Rights Act, and kept in mind something Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had said in 1962 just before its passage. “It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated,” King said. “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me.”
Abortion opponents could not force America to embrace their belief that the first cell of a fetus deserved rights, Willke decided. But their cause could win anyhow if they could pass laws that banned abortion.
And now, in this moment of weakness, Willke’s old plan found modern expression in a new cohort. The antiabortion movement was reemerging in conservative states across the country, even as it struggled nationally. The Tea Party Republicans who swept into statehouses and Congress in 2010 ran as economic conservatives, fueled by racial animosity to Obama and a backlash to the financial bailouts of the Great Recession. But they were also powered by antiabortion fervor. The next year, Republican statehouses pushed through a whopping ninety-two new restrictions on abortion, more than in any previous year—“a watershed,” bragged their allies. For Dannenfelser and her movement, it was a reason for hope. “A turning point for protecting the unborn is near,” she wrote in SBA’s internal plan in 2013.
Dannenfelser knew they needed power at the highest levels to lock in these new laws coming from the states. SBA’s first target would be to secure antiabortion control of the Senate, people who would vote for antiabortion Supreme Court justices if they got the chance. Next, they would need a president who would appoint those justices. And then they could strike at Roe.
For a brief second, as Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meeting ended, Dannenfelser wondered if she was overreacting. She walked out with her longtime strategist and friend, Frank Cannon, president of the American Principles Project, a socially conservative think tank.
“Maybe we should listen more?” she asked him.
“No,” he said. “It was as bad as we thought.”
Dannenfelser made her decision. Unless their movement fought back, she believed they could lose everything, perhaps forever.
Dannenfelser did not see it then. No one did—not Republican leaders, and certainly not Democrats or the American public. But the autopsy heralded a birth: the final decade of the Roe era in American history had begun.