For the first time in 51 years, the 2024 presidential election is set to take place without an artificial judicial hedge-Roe around abortion. Yet the Republican Party platform committee has responded by offering pro-life, pro-family voters the least robust legislative agenda in 40 years. Those in charge of the process thrust an anemic plank on them as a fait accompli.

The 2024 GOP platform condemns late-term abortion but relegates all other protections to the states. It does not even promise to end taxpayer-funded abortion, much less ban abortion-mongering groups like Planned Parenthood from receiving Title X funds.

Worse yet, those who have previously campaigned as pro-life champions applauded the great platform putsch. “I think our platform has to reflect our nominee,” Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday.

In reality, history shows delegates instituted and often maintained the pro-life plank over the opposition of their presidential nominees.

Two Decades of Fighting ‘Our’ Nominees

The GOP endorsed a right-to-life constitutional amendment in 1976 — the first presidential election after Roe v. Wade was handed down. President Gerald Ford privately considered himself pro-choice and publicly favored the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Yet Republican delegates defied Ford, who had never been elected outside his Grand Rapids-area congressional district, by producing a pro-life platform that called for “a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children.”

Ford would later come out against the plank. But since about half those delegates supported Ronald Reagan, and the nomination hung in the balance, he opted not to rock the boat in ’76. In the general election, Ford spun the text to say he favored a “people’s amendment” — letting each state’s voters “make a decision by public referendum.”

Of course, he also lost that election to Jimmy Carter.

The next open challenge from above came 20 years later from Ford’s former running mate, Bob Dole. When running for the president in 1996, Dole tapped Rep. Susan Molinari (R-N.Y.) to be the convention’s keynote speaker in order to woo “soccer moms.” Dole essentially campaigned against his own party’s views. “I’m not bound by the platform,” he said. “I haven’t read it.” Dole’s ultimate vice presidential pick, Jack Kemp, referred to the pro-life amendment just once — to accuse its supporters of “intimidation.” He instead highlighted the Democrats’ support for partial-birth abortion as the reason the Republican ticket was the better choice.

But Pat Buchanan’s delegates wrote an America First platform that demanded action to protect the unborn.

Dole, too, lost his election to Bill Clinton. (Molinari left her seat in the next cycle, endorsed Biden in 2020, and now runs Google’s super PAC.)

Pro-Life Strength Creates Electoral Success

On the other hand, Ronald Reagan strengthened the platform’s pro-life protections. The 1984 Republican Party platform endorsed “a human life amendment to the Constitution” and “legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.” Later that year, the man Ford once called “unelectable” won the greatest electoral landslide in modern history.

In the intervening years, the candidates’ fidelity to the platform has ebbed and flowed. The most successful candidates did not violate the party’s core commitment to protecting innocent life.

The secret of Donald Trump’s success lay in representing the views of his party’s voters — on illegal immigration and border security. On prioritizing U.S. citizens’ well-being over foreigners’. On a humble foreign policy averse to starting new forever wars. On recognizing that China is our greatest long-term strategic threat. And, yes, on appointing a specific list of Supreme Court justices who would respect the Constitution, not rewrite it. The 2016 platform that Trump ran — and won — on contains Reagan’s protective pro-life language.

How awkward would it be if Trump, the ultimate foe of P.C. culture, becomes the figure who implemented the GOP Establishment’s 2013 “autopsy report” on social issues?

The People’s Platform

Since the GOP has done something unprecedented, I will do something equally unprecedented: I will quote former RNC Chairman Reince Priebus.

When presidential candidate Mitt Romney privately voiced objections to the platform in 2012, Priebus responded, “This is the platform of the Republican Party. It is not the platform of Mitt Romney.”

That means it is not the platform of any one person, even the nominee. The party platform voices the abiding values of tens of thousands of volunteers and 1,000 times as many voters in each election over generations. Its goals are often long-term and aspirational. But they don’t change unless its voters change. In this case, the voters were not even consulted. The new platform language does not represent the majority of Republican voters (nor many independents).

Some in the party structure may take evangelicals for granted and ask, “Where else are they going to go?” While I will encourage every pro-life advocate to vote this November, I will say that unless Republicans offer concrete steps to protect life, our voters may well go to the same place they went in 1976, 1996, 2008, and 2012: anywhere but to the polls. If the states are to be the battleground for these defining issues, then it is to the states that evangelical Christians will channel our activism, volunteer hours, and money.

Our New Civil War

But the anti-life platform fight lacks political savvy. The campaign foisted the weak language on delegates just as Democrats’ efforts to portray the GOP as opponents of “Our Democracy”^TM blew up in their faces. Trump could have easily uses a pro-life platform to his party’s advantage: “The fact that I received more votes than any Republican presidential candidate in history while disagreeing with this plank proves the GOP is the Big Tent party. The Democrats have a purity test of extremism. Ask Kristen Day of Democrats for Life how tolerant the Democratic Party is toward pro-lifers.”

The good news is that lax platform language will not stop pro-life members of Congress from acting. Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) recently introduced a bill that would make it illegal for abortionists who receive any federal funding to carry out an abortion. Other pro-life legislation will undoubtedly come forward, with or without the party elites’ blessing.

The retreat from protecting life at the national level represents a break from all Republican history since the antebellum era. The states-only approach to abortion echoes the Popular Sovereignty doctrine of Stephen Douglas, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1860. His opponent, Abraham Lincoln, declared, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free.” America has been a house divided since the Supreme Court deepened the rip in our social fabric in 1973. Our cold political warfare over abortion has claimed 10 times as many lives as the acknowledged Civil War: the 63 million innocent unborn aborted since Roe v. Wade.

The GOP should know that pro-life advocates will never stop. We will never cease. We will never cede the battle nor abandon the most vulnerable and most innocent.

With one voice, we will continue to declare, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

Rev. Ben Johnson (@therightswriter) is senior editor at the Family Research Council’s news website, The Washington Stand, and a pastor in the Eastern Orthodox Church. His views are his own.