Steve Deace argues that after Roe fell the pro-life movement celebrated a legal victory but then watched abortion pills spread and the fight stall, and he calls out internal hesitation and a need for bolder political moves.
The Supreme Court decision that returned abortion law to the states was supposed to be the endgame for pro-life activists, but Deace says the ground game flipped the script. “We’re having this big debate right now within our pro-life circles about how to proceed moving forward. And somehow we’ve been exceedingly stalled,” Deace says, pointing out that “nothing of significance” has happened in the pro-life movement since the overturning of Roe.
He lays the blame on missed strategy and growing access to medication abortion. “Not only that, since we overturned Roe, basically every mailbox can have an abortion pill in America right now. Right? So something has clearly and systemically gone wrong,” he continues.
“We pulled off D-Day, but now we’re losing the war,” he adds. That line sums up his view: winning a legal fight wasn’t enough because the movement didn’t follow up with a plan to secure the outcomes it promised voters after Roe was overturned.
One big fracture, Deace says, is a tactical quarrel over abolition versus more incremental approaches. “My buddy Seth Gruber calls it equal protection, and it’s the idea that if you commit a murder, you should be held accountable as we hold people accountable for committing any other form of murder. And the mainstream pro-life movement is adamantly against this,” he explains.
Political risk and fear are the usual objections on the mainstream side, according to Deace. “The biggest source of opposition to this in the mainstream pro-life side, frankly, is they just don’t think it’s politically viable, and it’ll get us nuked,” he adds, noting that many leaders are calculating votes before moral clarity.
He doesn’t buy the political-excuse thesis as genuine conviction. “I don’t believe very many mainstream pro-life leaders truly believe in a second generation of third-wave feminism, there’s just a bunch of scared girls who don’t know what to do, like my mom 50 years ago before we saw what, you know, thermal imaging inside of the womb looked like,” he explains, noting that they’re making “political calculations.”
Deace accepts that politics requires compromise, but he wants a different kind of negotiating posture from conservatives. “We’re human beings in a fallen world,” he says, before laying out a provocative tactic that leans on leverage rather than capitulation.
“We’re going to ban all the abortions except your so-called exceptions. Are you in? Not because we agree that there’s exceptions to murder, but we’re going to call forth a false objection. We’re going to call a bluff,” he explains. His point is procedural: force the debate into a position where the pro-abortion side must reveal whether it truly seeks any limits or wants total access.
“We’ll even let the doctor determine if it’s an exception or not. Think they’d still take the deal? No. And why won’t they take the deal?” he asks, adding, “Because they want to kill them all.” Deace frames this as a test that exposes the underlying aim of advocates for unrestricted abortion, and as a clarifying tactic that could reshape political incentives.
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