Abortion and prohibition: will the 2024 election be like 1932?

This essay is cross-posted from the Anxious Bench.

This year’s treatment of abortion by both major parties is reminiscent of how both parties engaged with the issue of alcohol regulation in 1932, the last election before the end of Prohibition.

Only a short time before the 1932 election, advocates of Prohibition had every reason to be jubilant. In 1928, they had experienced what was arguably their greatest triumph since the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment when the “dry” candidate, Republican Herbert Hoover, defeated the “wet” Al Smith by a landslide.

But by 1932, the writing was clearly on the wall for the temperance movement when both parties shifted toward the “wet” side in their views on Prohibition. The Democratic Party called for outright repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment and the immediate national legalization of beer while the repeal process to legalize hard liquor worked its way through the state legislatures. This was perhaps not altogether surprising for Democrats (especially those in northern cities), many of whom had been openly skeptical of Prohibition for years. But one might have expected the Republican Party, a haven for midwestern Protestant moralists, to hold the line on Prohibition.

It did not. Though the GOP did not go as far as the Democrats had in endorsing outright repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, the Republican Party advocated passage of a new amendment which “shall allow the States to deal with the problem as their citizens may determine” while also giving the federal government the power to regulate – though not necessarily prohibit – alcohol sales. Prohibition, the Republican Party now knew, was controversial, and they no longer wanted to make it a party issue. “Members of the Republican Party hold different opinions with respect to it and no public official or member of the party should be pledged or forced to choose between his party affiliations and his honest convictions upon this question,” the Republican platform of 1932 declared.

We’ll never know for certain what Republicans would have done about Prohibition after the election of 1932, because they didn’t get a chance to implement their states’ rights proposal. Instead, incumbent Herbert Hoover lost by a landslide to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, thus making the party’s official position on alcohol regulation irrelevant.

Once Roosevelt was in office, he did exactly what his own party platform had promised: He immediately legalized the sale of beer and set in motion the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, a process that was completed by the end of the year. Prohibition on the national scale was gone, never to return. And the temperance campaign was dealt a blow from which it never recovered.

Though some Christian groups continued to advocate legal restrictions on prohibition for several more decades, the number of those who did so continued to diminish. And by the end of the twentieth century, most of the Christian groups that had once been strong advocates of Prohibition had lost their zeal not only for legal restrictions on alcohol but even for personal moral injunctions against it. They were drinking along with everyone else.

Abortion in the 2024 Election

If the 1932 presidential election was the death knell for Prohibition, the 2024 election could be a similar watershed for abortion and the pro-life cause. By that, I don’t simply mean that if the Democratic presidential candidate wins, it will be the end of any meaningful restrictions on abortion, just as the election of the Democratic candidate in 1932 was the end of Prohibition. Rather, I mean that since both parties have shifted toward a more supportive stance on abortion (just as both parties moved closer to a pro-alcohol stance in 1932), this election will move the country away from a restrictive stance on abortion, regardless of who wins the presidential race.

The parallel between the situation that the pro-life movement faces today and the situation that the Prohibitionists faced in 1932 is uncanny. As was the case with alcohol in the early 1930s, the shift in political opinion on abortion has been very rapid. Only four years ago, there was little hint that the Republican Party would soften its pro-life platform. But the public reaction to Dobbs and its aftermath (or, at the very least, the media coverage of Dobbs and its aftermath) has changed the political equation.

The Democratic Party, which a generation ago downplayed the issue and publicly called for tolerance of a diversity of views in the party on the matter, has now made abortion rights one of its foremost concerns. Kamala Harris has become the first vice president in American history to visit an abortion clinic, and she has repeatedly emphasized her firm support for abortion rights. She has pledged to sign legislation making abortion legal nationwide.

And the Republican presidential standard-bearer, Donald Trump, has followed suit by moving to the center on the abortion question, proclaiming that it is a matter for the states to decide, and pledging to veto a national abortion ban if Congress passed one (which congressional Republicans are now highly unlikely to do). His states’ rights position on abortion, combined with his encouragement for individual Republican candidates to “follow your heart on this issue” rather than to be limited by even a softened GOP abortion platform, seems closely parallel with the changes that the Republican Party made to its position on Prohibition in 1932.

Pro-life activists have every reason to be worried – though I haven’t seen much indication that they fully recognize the magnitude of the potential blow that they may be facing.

If Harris wins, I expect that she will follow through on her pledge to try to legalize abortion nationwide. Whether she can do so or not will depend partly on who controls the House (it’s currently a toss-up, with Democrats possibly poised to retake it by a slim margin) and whether senators will be willing to abandon the filibuster in order to pass national abortion legislation, as Democrats have proposed. Currently, control of the Senate is in limbo, with Republicans most likely to recapture it by a 51-49 margin, but with Democrats having an outside shot of retaining control. If Democrats do retain control of the Senate, I suspect they would pass a national abortion legalization bill, as the party has pledged to do.

If Republicans hold the Senate by a 51-49 margin, one might suspect that the Senate won’t be able to pass an abortion legalization bill, but that’s not necessarily a foregone conclusion, since two Republican senators – Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine – are both pro-choice senators who cosponsored a Reproductive Choice Act in 2022 to protect abortion rights nationwide. With some negotiation, I suspect that pro-choice advocates could get 51 votes in the Senate for a bill legalizing abortion nationwide, even if the Democrats lose a couple Senate seats in this election.

So, while it’s far from certain, there’s a strong possibility that if Harris is elected, abortion could be legalized nationwide within the next year, ending the abortion bans that currently exist in some states. And if that happens, I suspect that abortion law would not merely return to where it was at the beginning of 2021; instead, there would be far more funding for abortion than existed in 2021, because some Democratic states have already expanded funding for the procedure – and there’s a lot more impetus in the Democratic Party for continued expansion of abortion funding in order to ensure abortion access for everyone.

That also means that in a Harris administration, the abortion rates will likely continue rising. During the Clinton and Obama administrations, one could make a plausible case that a pro-choice Democratic administration was likely to result in decreases in the abortion rate, since expanded health insurance or better economic conditions for the poor could be plausible paths to reducing the abortion rate. But I don’t think that one can make that argument for a Harris administration. The Democratic Party’s commitment to expanding funding for abortion will almost certainly result in more abortions, since the abortion rate has long been correlated in part with the amount of public funding for abortion.

But perhaps even more significantly, the re-legalization of abortion in the United States would, I expect, end any serious attempt to enact meaningful restrictions on abortion again, just as the repeal of Prohibition ended any serious attempt to implement Prohibition at the national level. The public narrative would be that abortion prohibitions failed, just as the public narrative after Prohibition was that the national attempt to restrict alcohol was an embarrassing failure. I don’t think that narrative is entirely true in either case, but there’s enough evidence to support it – such as rising abortion rates even in the face of abortion bans and the denial of needed medical care to a few women facing miscarriages – that would sustain it. The pro-life movement would then have to enter a very different phase, just as the temperance movement did after 1933. It would become like the Canadian or British pro-life movements, which hold public lectures and continue to advocate for their cause, but which exercise very little partisan influence in national politics.

But what if Trump wins instead? Wouldn’t a Trump presidency – especially if combined with a Republican Senate and maybe (if Republicans are extraordinarily lucky) a Republican House – allow the pro-life movement to continue its gains? Probably not. If Trump wins, he and other Republicans will likely credit his victory to the party’s shift to the center on abortion. Trump has said nine times in the last few months that he is opposed to federal restrictions on abortion, and he has promised to veto one if it reached his desk.

Some of his pro-life supporters hope that he was lying on all nine of those occasions – or that he can be convinced to reverse his position once again – but I think that’s unlikely, given the unusually strong efforts he made to ensure that the Republican Party’s traditional pledge to seek a ban on abortion was kept out of the party platform this year. He now views abortion as politically radioactive – and he wants to do everything he can to ensure that it doesn’t hinder his campaign. Some pro-lifers imagine that Trump will use his executive powers to help their cause, as Project 2025 calls for, but Trump has given every indication that he will not – and this time, I suspect that he’s probably telling the truth.

In the recent past, some Never Trumpers (rightly) accused their fellow pro-life Christians who supported Trump of accepting a Faustian bargain by overlooking Trump’s moral character and disturbing policy positions in order to advance the pro-life cause. But this year he’s not even offering that bargain; at best, he’s simply promising to be less “extreme” on abortion than the Democrats.

Congressional Republicans are generally following suit on this, with a few who once touted their pro-life credentials now calling themselves “pro-choice.”

And if neither Congress nor the president show any desire to restrict abortion any further, I think that it’s unlikely that the Supreme Court will, especially since the court has already declined to restrict mifepristone.

Pro-lifers will be left to fight this out at the state level, where they’re going to have to mount a concerted effort to protect their existing gains against the challenge of state referendums. Right now, polls show that in at least two states that currently restrict abortion – Arizona and Missouri – ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights are likely to pass.

So, even with a Trump victory, there’s a very real possibility that pro-lifers will see continued losses during the next few weeks, with no real possibility of additional gains once Trump takes office. And with each loss, the narrative that Republicans can’t win with a pro-life platform will be reinforced – which is why the party’s shift away from the pro-life position will probably continue to accelerate in the next election cycle. The abortion rate, which started increasing during Trump’s first year in office, will almost certainly continue to increase if there’s a second Trump term, and the Republican Party will continue to shrug off continued expansions in abortion’s availability.

And at that point, the pro-life cause will be largely discredited in the public’s mind anyway, especially because many pro-life activists and organizations have spent years cultivating an extraordinarily close alliance with Trump – a highly polarizing figure who is widely seen by his critics as a misogynistic autocrat. Most Democrats now have less sympathy with the pro-life cause than ever before, but in the near future, many of those within the Trump camp will also distance themselves from the pro-life movement (if not repudiate it altogether), because they see the pro-life campaign as an increasingly unnecessary burden for the GOP. When that happens, the pro-life movement will have nowhere to turn.

Given this, pro-lifers face the choice between losing all of their post-Dobbs gains immediately (with a Democratic victory) or losing them more gradually (if the Republicans take control). They don’t have the option of preventing those losses altogether.

As these losses happen, pro-lifers will have to find a way to persuade the next generation of their values even in the midst of a culture in which neither party supports their position. Pro-lifers in other countries have already been doing this for a long time, so this should not be an impossibility. But in the United States, Christians have had a very poor track record of maintaining their moral opposition to newly legalized activities that they once fervently opposed.

The Church’s Moral Witness

After Prohibition was repealed, mainline Protestant denominations that had once supported the restriction of alcohol lifted their opposition to personal consumption of alcohol beverages within a generation or two. Evangelicals took a little longer to change their position, but by the twenty-first century, opposition to alcohol was mostly a dead letter in much of evangelicalism, at least among those who gravitated toward the Reformed wing of the movement.

The same could be said about the views of contraception among Catholics. Outside of the small number of conservative Catholics who still follow the church’s teaching on the issue, the church’s official teaching on contraception receives almost no adherence – which is very different from the late 1940s, when the church participated in successful campaigns in New England to maintain statewide restrictions on the sale of birth control devices. Once those prohibitions were lifted in the 1960s, it became very difficult for most Catholics to accept the possibility that the church could be right in opposing a practice that both the legal code and the prevailing culture said was perfectly right.

The same could be said about the attitude of both evangelicals and Catholics toward divorce or, to an increasing extent in recent years, same-sex marriage. It’s far easier to maintain moral opposition to a cause when it’s the subject of a political campaign to restrict it than to maintain that same level of moral fervor when it’s clear that a political campaign on the subject has no chance of success.

It might seem difficult to imagine how abortion – which has been the target of countless sermons among both evangelicals and Catholics – could be widely accepted in such circles, but the events of the past few decades have shown that such moral shifts can occur quite rapidly. Few of the Methodists who were at the forefront of the campaign for Prohibition could have imagined in the 1930s that only a generation later, in 1968, the United Methodist Church would repeal its ban on clergy’s consumption of alcohol. In the space of only three or four decades, Methodists moved from believing that alcohol was a vice that needed to be banned entirely for everyone in the nation to believing that it was all right for their own pastors to drink.

It’s not too difficult to imagine a scenario in which evangelical opinion on abortion could follow this script. Once the Republican Party abandons the last vestiges of its pro-life position, it’s easy to envision how a new generation of evangelicals could embrace a narrative that their elders’ campaign against abortion was just as misguided as their great-great-grandparents’ position on alcohol was. Abortion bans were terrible for women, they might think. After all, that’s what a lot of the media is already saying. And while evangelicals might embrace the idea that abortion is still morally wrong – even if it shouldn’t be made illegal – it’s easy to imagine that within another generation or so, they might begin to fudge even on this, just as liberal Protestants have moved pretty rapidly over the course of the last two decades from thinking that abortion should be both rare and legal to saying that abortion services are an essential part of healthcare and that people who choose abortion should feel no moral shame about their choice.

In this election, it’s already too late to protect the pro-life cause’s legal gains; those will be eroded no matter who wins in November. But it’s not too late to protect the church from losing its interest in cherishing the value of unborn human life. Some Christians will likely lose interest in this cause, but to prevent that from happening in our own circles, we’ll have to remind each other that the pro-life cause was always more than a political campaign. At its best, it has been an expression of the church’s longstanding witness to the value of each human being made in the image of God, whether that person is inside or outside of the womb.

The challenge of maintaining this witness will become harder after November, no matter how the election turns out. But the imperative of doing so will become more urgent than ever – not primarily to preserve the nation (as so many pro-lifers have long thought) but to preserve the moral integrity of the church.

The advocates of Prohibition lost their hold on the national political culture and eventually failed to maintain their influence even in the church. Today advocates of the pro-life cause are similarly losing their hold on the national political culture. In my view, there’s no realistic scenario in which they’re likely to regain it, at least for the foreseeable future.

But I hope for the church’s sake that their influence in the church will continue – because it is in the church that the pro-life movement’s real test will occur. If the church can be a beacon of light that upholds the value of all human life, including the unborn and their parents, the pro-life movement’s Christian witness can endure, even if the Democrats – or even if the Republicans – win this election.