The pro-life pivot

With just two months in office, J.D. Vance has become one of the most influential vice presidents in recent American history. He is Trump’s explainer and attack dog rolled into one, sitting down for press interviews to detail the president’s policies and responding on X to journalists, historians, and politicians to defend the administration’s actions. Trump has notably declined to endorse Vance as his heir-apparent (yet), but the vice president is clearly second only to the man himself as the voice of the White House.

Consider what the vice president has been saying about the sanctity of unborn life. At the Conservative Political Action Conference last month, Vance cited several of the Trump administration’s pro-life policies and praised Trump’s selection of the Supreme Court justices that brought down Roe v. Wade. Then, he went further. “We’ve got to persuade our fellow citizens that unborn life is worthy of protecting, it is sacred in the eyes of God,” Vance said, “and it should be sacred in the eyes of man, too, and we have to pick up the torch and fight for that every single day.” 

This unequivocal statement is encouraging because during the presidential campaign, Vance shifted away from his previously sterling pro-life credentials to echo Trump’s pro-choice stance. He affirmed his support of Trump’s position on the abortion pill, and told the press that Trump would veto any federal abortion legislation. Vance also came off as apologetic about pro-life views during the vice-presidential debate with Tim Walz and his interview with Joe Rogan.

Prior to being the vice-presidential nominee, Vance had consistently defended the comprehensive approach of the pro-life movement. As he told me in an interview during his Ohio senatorial campaign: “I think any truly pro-life movement is going to focus not just on the cultural pressure to have an abortion, the legal right to have an abortion, but also on the economic pressures that will make that more likely to happen in the first place. To the American pro-life movement’s credit, I think we have tended to fight on all those fronts.”

Vance was precisely right, as the network of more than 3,000 crisis pregnancy centers across America proves. But during the presidential campaign, he began to emphasize that the pro-life movement must “do better.” This is true as far as it goes—a movement committed to saving unborn lives should always seek to improve—but Vance’s comments were clearly a tactic rather than a critique. To be fair, he was in a tough position, trying to echo the presidential candidate’s evolving position on abortion while remaining true to his own principles. But at times, he wasn’t quite pulling it off.

The fears of pro-life leaders were greatly allayed by Vance’s decision to give a speech at the March for Life in Washington, D.C. a mere five days after the inauguration. Vance began by affirming that he would be “back next year,” as well, and it was a heartening start to an administration that had pivoted away from the pro-life movement more than any other in decades. And as his speech at CPAC indicated, Vance is clearly seeking opportunities to publicly reaffirm his pro-life convictions.

His bombshell speech rebuking the European elites for their censorious policies at the Munich Security Conference in February, for example, triggered political shockwaves—but few noted that Vance had also used the speech to explicitly affirm the humanity of the unborn and implicitly condemn abortion. Noting the example of Adam Smith-Connor, the U.K. veteran arrested for praying in front of an abortion clinic, Vance stated that Smith-Connor was praying “on behalf of his unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aborted years before.” In an interview with Fox News earlier this month, Vance revisited the subject. The idea that we should “throw [people] in jail for silently praying in front of an abortion clinic. … These ideas are going to destroy Western civilization,” he said.

It is far too early to speculate on who the GOP presidential nominee will be in 2028, although J.D. Vance is obviously gunning for it. But with Donald Trump’s pivot on abortion—including the removal of explicit recognition of the right to life of the unborn from the Republican platform for the first time since 1984—the future of the GOP as a fundamentally pro-life party has been in question. Thus far, the way J.D. Vance has been answering that question is very encouraging.