Where pro-life, pro-choice find common ground
In today’s fractious political world, it’s important to extend credit where it’s due. And so, as a pro-choice liberal, I want to thank a group of pro-life organizations that spoke up this week in support of a congressional deal to improve the child tax credit. Antiabortion Americans United for Life hailed the bill, which will primarily help lower-income families and families with a larger number of children, as “a core part of an American pro-life and profamily future.” Pro-choice Center for American Progress President Patrick Gaspard described the legislation as “an unmissable opportunity to reduce poverty among low-income children and families.”
With any luck, this will be the first major bipartisan collaboration to help American families this year, but not the last. There’s real cross-party support for policies to make it easier, safer and cheaper to have and raise children. With practice, such cooperation just might become a habit in Washington.
The often-justified liberal criticism of pro-life conservatives has long been that they elevate the lives of unborn babies over the lives of mothers, and that they’re eager to prioritize children in the womb but not in the world. After birth, it becomes more important to refuse “attempts to expand the welfare state” than to feed poor children when school is out during the summer; more vital to enforce a traditional heterosexual nuclear family where women stay home than to make sure children have access to safe, quality day care; more essential to reject federal help than to make sure children have health insurance.
When Roe v. Wade fell in 2022, many conservative lawmakers seemed to take every available opportunity to demonstrate to liberals that their real interest was in limiting autonomy not just for women and the children they might or might not have chosen to have, but also for the doctors who treat them, sometimes in the cruelest and most punitive ways imaginable.
But the Dobbs decision has also prompted some conservatives to show that their pro-life vision extends beyond unborn babies.
Last January, the leaders of Americans United for Life - one of the organizations that threw their support to the child tax credit expansion — and Democrats for Life of America teamed up to propose that birth be made free for all American women, no matter their income or source of their insurance. A wide range of pro-life activists and intellectuals signed on to a call to get more parents and children excellent, affordable health care, paid parental leave for mothers and fathers, and better child care options for parents who work. And there is broader support for other family-friendly policies, too. In five relatively conservative Sun Belt states, two pollsters found widespread parental support for policy innovations ranging from property tax credits for parents to investments in afterschool and summer care for school-aged children.
Turning those proposals — as well as many ambitious Democratic ideas to make family life easier — into policies will take cooperation, which itself depends on mutual trust and long-term commitment. It’s helpful that groups such as Americans United for Life have waded into the child tax credit fight. But the organization could stand to let that broader perspective infuse their agenda
as a whole. Its 2024 ranking of pro-life states doesn’t use any pro-family policies such as state child tax credits or paid leave policies as scoring criteria.
Still, when I spoke to Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.), who co-chairs the House Black Maternal Health Caucus, in January, she surprised me with her optimism about such relationship-building in Congress.
“There is a lot of discomfort with the idea that people are letting moms die,” she said bluntly. “I’ve tried to make sure that our Republican colleagues know that they are welcome in the Black Maternal Health Caucus, no matter why they’re interested in joining.”
Underwood accepts that some of them might come to the cause out of post-Roe political expediency, and that Republicans might not be able to embrace every proposal in the collection of bills she’s gathered
into her Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act. Instead, she’s offering her Republican colleagues “a la carte” ways to be involved, as in her work with Republican Rep. Gus Bilirakis (Fla.) on a 2021 bill aimed at reducing maternal mortality among veterans. At the same time, she maintains her own commitment to protecting access to abortion and addressing the brain drain of obstetricians and gynecologists from states with restrictive antiabortion laws.
Even if the expanded child tax credit becomes law, there will still be vast realms of policy for pro-choice and pro-life people to argue about.
But for now, Americans United for Life and other pro-life advocates are welcome allies in this fight for families. For the sake of American kids and parents, and American politics, let’s hope it’s not a one-off but a beginning.