This month, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced a bill to ban the abortion drug mifepristone and revoke the FDA’s approval of it.
In the recent past, few would have been surprised that a socially conservative Republican member of Congress would introduce a bill to restrict abortion pills. Ever since the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved this use of mifepristone in 2000, during the Clinton administration, many pro-life Republicans have wanted to reverse it—especially since mifepristone is now used in more than 60 percent of all abortions in the United States.
But this time, Hawley’s target is not a Democratic administration FDA, but a Republican one. Under President Donald Trump, the FDA has expanded access to abortion pills by approving a second form of mifepristone last October.
During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump assured voters that he did not support a national abortion ban, and he removed a promise of a human life amendment from the Republican Party platform. Yet at the same time, he frequently took credit for the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.
While some saw Trump’s mixed signals on abortion as political posturing, the reality may have been more straightforward: Trump and many of his allies have repositioned the Republican Party as a party that is mostly pro-choice—but anti-Roe.
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This is difficult for some pro-lifers to grasp, because many are used to equating support for abortion legalization with support for Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that declared abortion a constitutional right.
Indeed, for the Democratic Party, support for abortion rights was for decades inseparable from its support for Roe. After a conservative Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022, Democrats immediately made restoring Roe (by which they meant restoring federal protection for abortion rights) a top priority. “With a Democratic Congress, we will pass national legislation to make Roe the law of the land again,” the 2024 Democratic Party platform promised.
This promise has united almost all Democratic elected officials. Today there is only one Democratic member of Congress who opposes abortion legalization: Rep. Henry Cuellar (Texas). And for many Democrats, support for Roe is inseparable from a larger feminist vision and a constitutional interpretation framed around an expansion of women’s rights.
Republicans in recent decades have not subscribed to this rights-based feminist vision, and they have not had much regard for Roe. From 1976 to 2016, the Republican Party platform included a promise to overturn Roe through a constitutional amendment.
Leading pro-life organizations, such as the National Right to Life Committee, have therefore found much stronger support for their cause among Republicans than among Democrats—especially when overturning Roe v. Wade was a central goal for the pro-life movement, as it was for decades.
But now that Roe has been overturned, it has become clear that the GOP is more anti-Roe than anti-abortion. In the last four years, the Republican states of Montana, Missouri, Arizona, and Ohio have passed ballot measures protecting abortion rights. Similarly, in the Republican states of Kansas and Kentucky, voters rejected referendums to restrict abortion.
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Democrats hoped that these voters would leave the Republican Party over abortion, but they didn’t. Instead, they evinced little interest in the Democrats’ project of reinstating Roe through national legislation even as they voted to keep abortion legal in their own states.
While 63 percent of Republican voters say they want to make abortion mostly or entirely illegal, those Republicans are disproportionately concentrated in the most socially conservative states of the Bible belt and parts of the Midwest. In states where church attendance is lower—including in strongly conservative states that Republicans know they need to win—Republican voters are much less supportive of abortion bans.
Trump, it seems, has discovered a politically successful formula for much of middle America: keeping abortion legal and widely available in most of the United States, even while dismantling the federal protections for abortion rights that were grounded in a 20th-century liberal vision that most conservative Republicans dislike.
As a result, pro-lifers have gained no traction in their efforts to restrict abortion at the national level, even though Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House. Hawley’s bill is unlikely to make it out of the Senate.
Pro-life success in restricting abortion pills will instead likely be confined to a handful of socially conservative states where Republican voting is also paired with high rates of church attendance. In South Dakota and Mississippi, bans on abortion pills have already passed the state legislature and are awaiting a governor’s signature.
But in most of the rest of the country, pro-lifers have to face the reality that just because the Republican Party is anti-Roe does not mean that it will restrict the availability of legal abortion.
After all, even Hawley’s own heavily Republican home state—Missouri—allows abortion up to the point of viability. If his proposed ban on abortion pills fails in the Senate, it won’t be solely the fault of Democrats; it will also be an indication that even in conservative states, opposition to Roe may be a lot stronger than concern for the unborn.
Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of Abortion and America’s Churches.
