The first week in October was a rough one for the pro-life movement, even if it wasn’t much of a surprise. As it has done for years now, the Trump administration once again deferred action to slow down the juggernaut of drug-induced abortion. On October 7, the Department of Justice delivered the news to a U.S. district court in Louisiana that it would not be able to complete its review of the safety of mifepristone for women until mid- December nor release its findings until at least March 2027.

Pro-life groups expressed their exasperation with the Trump FDA over the implications of its constant delays, which means that actors in other states, and even overseas, can continue to mail abortion drugs to a state where they are prohibited and have been used to induce abortions against women’s will.

One pro-life legal organization, Americans United for Life, openly questions whether any review of mifepristone and the process used to drop health safeguards, such as the FDA’s elimination of requirements for in-person maternal exams, has actually been initiated. Delay until March 2027 will bring to more than two years the time the Trump administration has had available to it not only to review studies of the drug but to take such elementary steps as reinstating mandatory reporting of adverse events it causes. Pro-lifers can be excused for concluding, as many have, that the Trump administration is simply carrying through on its view that abortion is a losing issue and its pledge, as then-candidate J.D. Vance stated it, to veto any abortion ban “because we don’t want to have a nonstop federal conflict over this issue.”

The challenge posed by Louisiana, Texas, and other pro-life states to this desire to dodge any robust defense of the sanctity of human life at the national level is that this litigation shows how states cannot enforce their policies in the teeth of a transformed abortion debate. The abortion pill incorporates most of the issue into an interstate and international drug war — some two-thirds of U.S. abortions are now carried out through the mails or via FedEx, UPS, or another carrier. Whatever the merits of a state-centric approach might be, it is infeasible and, indeed, thanks to the Comstock Act, already contrary to law.

It is fair to say at this point that the Trump administration is, to borrow a phrase from some decades ago, “operationally pro-choice.” It has been the GOP pattern for a long time, and the fact that, in the face of this flaccid political mindset, Roe v. Wade was nevertheless reversed is a tribute to the tenacity of a pro-life movement that has never given up on its vision of protecting every innocent life from conception to natural death.

The first matter the movement must address is whether the new platform President Trump’s team installed in 2024 is acceptable. That it was enacted more or less by fiat, with meeting room doors locked and amendments barred, that it insists the issue has no place in national debate or action, is the harsh reality. Whether it is extended in 2028 or replaced with something akin to the GOP platforms that held from 1980 through 2016 is an open question. The sequence of events in 2023-2024 showed that this question will likely be answered by the party’s choice of a candidate for 2028. If that candidate celebrates the new watered-down GOP stance on life, the 2028 platform will likely be a linguistic improvement but substantively unchanged.

As the GOP standard going forward, a third term for this major dilution of the life ethos will likely define the party for years to come. If the 2028 nominee is more stalwart and visionary on life — recognizing that it is a creed that undergirds and permeates our social contract — a new course can be set with a chance of political success.

This is not a new challenge for right to life advocates. In 1980, I traveled to Detroit with a contingent of state and federal pro-life leaders — Anne O’Donnell and Kathy Edwards of Missouri, Carl Anderson and Phyllis Schlafly, Guy Farley of Virginia, Marlene Elwell, and others. A book could be written about the battle to secure that first truly pro-life platform with its endorsement of pro-life judges and an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to protect the unborn.

Even with Ronald Reagan’s endorsement, it was no easy fight. Platform chairman John Tower of Texas was not a friend. Much of Reagan’s team was not with him on his decision to embrace the issue in the campaign. After the platform text was secured, I remember bumping into a senior aide, Marty Anderson, in the Joe Louis Arena. He paused before our group and opened a notebook, reading us some daunting polling on abortion that didn’t seem to cut our way. He suggested we were fortunate to have won the language we did, closed the notebook, and walked off.

Over the decades, at conventions, in Hill meetings, in the halls of the White House, pro-life voices have faced all manner of resistance from opponents in the GOP and even from somewhat friendlies. Some of it was helpful as prudential checks on rash actions or statements. But much of the pushback was deceptive or damaging. Anyone present in D.C. all those years can recount how political figures flipped or betrayed causes they presumably cared about.

Abortion is not the only social issue on which fingers were lifted in the wind and directions shifted according to prevailing breezes. It is hard to think of any social issue — life, the definition of marriage, drug legalization, gambling — where social conservative resistance remained fully undiluted and thereby succeeded. Today’s focus on transgender issues may prove different, but history tells us there is no guarantee.

My interpretation of events is that March 2027 is far enough out, by design, that administration and GOP inertia will simply bleed into the next request that the right to life wait another election cycle for action on core concerns. October 2024 seems too early to raise storm warnings, perhaps, and the results on November 3 will certainly stir the political pot, but in this era of the everlasting campaign a 2028 mentality will emerge swiftly. Political campaigns now start early and rely on massive funding and, sadly, vicious attack ads. In past campaigns, in addition to party platforms and speechmaking, pro-life groups sought commitment letters from candidates stating what they would do to restore and advance respect for life and support for marriage and family. Candidate Trump signed such a letter in the summer of 2016. So had Ronald Reagan in 1980, a necessary step after he saw he had been duped by the California legislature into signing an abortion legalization bill in 1967.

Pro-lifers should think through what they not only want but must have from a presidential candidate in the next go-round. A consensus among the major groups would be helpful. Among items that might be included are, of course, the continued nomination of judges committed to an originalist understanding of the Constitution. That promise has been kept to date by the Trump administration but may be at risk and should be reasserted.

Beyond that, the next endorsee(s) should be asked to embrace the three unfulfilled pledges President Trump made in 2016: to make the Hyde Amendment permanent, to end federal funding of the Sanger-Guttmacher empire called Planned Parenthood, and to enact a federal limit on abortion. Additions to this list will be critical as former approaches to life protection are frayed in many areas. Among areas of potential action are major expansion of the child tax credit (without severing ties to work and earned income), the removal of abortion drugs from the market, comprehensive protection for parents’ rights to safeguard their children from the abortion merchants, protection of abortion pill reversal, and restoration of robust data collection as a federal-state responsibility.

Finally, pro-lifers need to strengthen the pursuit of sound science and medicine, building resources to strengthen maternity care, accelerate advances in neonatal medicine, protect children with diagnosed prenatal disabilities from destruction, and measure outcomes in these areas so as to build and identify model systems. The laboratories of 50 states can tell us which are doing best at promoting maternal and fetal well-being. For the women subjected to chemical abortions, asked to endure this severe loss in what has become the killing field of the home, subjected to injury and urged to lie to emergency personnel anxious to aid them, made to witness the small body of a son or daughter castaway in a bathroom toilet — for them our side must be prepared to increase our efforts to win judgments against the profiteers who have betrayed them.

Many more policy prescriptions to heal our nation are needed. Will any of this succeed? The victory over Roe v. Wade was no small thing, and we must rejoice in the resolve that accomplished it against great odds. Now the odds arrayed against us are even greater, but still we reside in the freest nation on Earth. We have learned from our success and even more from our failure. Above all, let us encourage one another to fight the good fight and press on in the marathon on behalf of the most vulnerable among us.