'Pro-life stops at birth' is the line to answer, so let's answer it

The bumper sticker is short, which is why it has traveled so far. "Pro-life stops at birth." Six words, fits on a rear bumper, and delivers a moral indictment at forty miles an hour. You will hear it from relatives, coworkers, and the occasional columnist who has discovered that irony pays better than research.

You can respond with a snort. I'd urge you not to. The line has staying power because it points at something real: a movement that says every child matters ought to be the first one on the porch with a casserole, and the first one in the legislature asking what the family needs. The question is whether the charge is true as stated, partly true, or false. My answer is "partly true, mostly wrong, and instructive either way." Let's do this properly.

The strongest version of the charge

I will state it the way a thoughtful critic would, because a rebuttal to a cartoon is a rebuttal to nothing.

One. The pro-life movement says that unborn children have moral worth equal to anyone else's.

Two. If that is so, the movement has a duty to the children who are born, and to the mothers who carry them, and that duty includes material help: health care, housing, childcare, nutrition, a decent shot at an education.

Three. Some prominent pro-life politicians have voted against programs that supply those things, or have called for cutting them.

Four. Therefore the movement's concern is less about children than about winning a culture-war position, or at least it is applied inconsistently.

That is a serious argument, and I do not think it is stupid. Premise three is true in the sense that individual politicians have cast individual votes against particular programs, and a critic can find examples. If our reply were "that never happens," we would deserve to lose the exchange.

So the reply has to be more careful. It has four parts: the logic, the record, the disagreement over method, and the places where the movement can do better.

First, the logic

Premise two contains a leap, and it is worth naming. The pro-life position is a position about what the law may permit: whether the law should protect unborn children from being killed. It is not a platform covering every social program in the budget. A person can believe that government should not allow the killing of an innocent human being, and also believe that the best way to help a poor family is through a church, a neighborhood, a tax credit or a state program, not a federal one.

Consider the parallel. Someone who opposes homicide is not thereby obligated to support whatever the latest anti-poverty proposal is, and we do not say that anyone who opposes murder but votes against a housing bill "doesn't care about life." We recognize that people can agree on the principle and disagree on the policy. The same holds here.

Notice, too, that the charge cuts in more than one direction. A critic who says "you can't be pro-life if you oppose a program" is making an argument that proves too much, because by the same logic everyone is inconsistent about something. The conservative who opposes a program is told he is heartless. The progressive who opposes a particular spending cut is told she is reckless. Neither is automatically right. The only honest measure is the result: what actually happens to mothers and children, and who actually shows up.

That is a point about logic. Now to the evidence.

The record: who shows up

Pregnancy-help centers. Across the country, pregnancy resource centers, many run by churches and by nonprofit networks, offer material help to women who are pregnant: diapers, formula, baby clothes, counseling, referrals to housing and health care, parenting classes. These are mostly volunteer-driven and privately funded, and you can probably find one within driving distance of where you live. Some state governments have also created programs that fund "alternatives to abortion" services. Check your own state's budget to see whether yours does. The point is not that the centers are perfect, which no institution is. The point is that the thing the critic says does not exist does exist, in large numbers, and is mostly run by the people the critic is accusing.

Adoption and foster care. Religious agencies have long been part of the adoption and foster-care work in America. Faith-based agencies place children in homes, license families, and support those families afterward. In 2021 the Supreme Court decided Fulton v. City of Philadelphia unanimously, nine to zero, in favor of a Catholic foster agency, holding that the city could not exclude it from the foster system on the terms it tried to apply. We examined the decision in What the 9-0 Fulton decision means for foster care and faith agencies. If you want to see who actually opens their doors to children who have nowhere to go, look at the churches that run the agencies and the families who sit in their pews. For the practical steps to join them, see ten steps from a church pew to a licensed foster or adoptive home.

Safe haven laws. States have passed laws allowing a parent in crisis to surrender a newborn safely and without prosecution at designated places. Check your own state's rules for the details. These laws are an expression of the idea that the answer to a desperate situation is to protect both the child and the parent, and they have had support from people on every side of the abortion debate.

The record: what Congress did

Charity is half the answer, and critics are right to say it cannot be the whole thing. So here is the legislative record, with dates.

• The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, signed August 22, 1996. A Republican Congress pushed it, and President Clinton signed it after two earlier vetoes. It replaced AFDC with block-granted TANF, added work requirements, and opened with findings about marriage and family. We tell that story in two vetoes, one signature and the 1996 welfare law that put marriage in statute. It was meant, in the language of its own purposes, to help needy families care for children in their own homes and to encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.
• The adoption tax credit, 1996. The Small Business Job Protection Act of 1996 created a federal credit for adoption expenses. It was designed to lower a cost that stood between families and children waiting for a home, and it has been a fixture of the tax code since.
• The Adoption and Safe Families Act, 1997. Signed in November 1997, it made the child's safety and a permanent home the governing goal of the foster system. We explain it in who runs foster care, who pays for it and what the 1997 law changed.
• The child tax credit, 1997. Enacted at $400 per child and then $500, a Republican promise from the 1994 Contract with America. In December 2017 the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act doubled it to $2,000. Follow the dates in the child tax credit from $400 to $2,000, told bill by bill.

Say this list out loud, and see how it sounds as a record of people who "stop caring at birth." It is the record of a movement that kept returning to the family as the unit worth supporting. One can disagree with the design of any of these laws. One cannot honestly say they do not exist.

What help looks like for one household

Records are abstract, so here is a hypothetical. Picture a twenty-three-year-old in a mid-sized Ohio town, working part-time, whose landlord has just raised the rent and who has just found out she is expecting. This is an invented example, not a real person, and it is meant to show the layers.

The first layer is the people. A neighbor from church hears about it and brings groceries, then offers a ride to appointments. A pregnancy-help center gives her a crib, diapers and a mentor who has been through it. That layer is fast, personal and unbureaucratic, and it is the layer the bumper sticker never mentions.

The second layer is the state. Whatever her state offers through Medicaid, nutrition programs or childcare assistance is a question of state law and state budget, and it differs from place to place. A county caseworker, not a senator in Washington, decides whether the paperwork gets done in two weeks or two months. This is why a conservative who wants better results often focuses on state and county governments.

The third layer is the tax code. After the baby arrives, the child tax credit starts doing its job, and what it pays depends on her earnings and the rules in force that year. Here the 1997 and 2017 laws matter, because they decide how much of a modest paycheck the family gets to keep.

The fourth layer is the long road. If she decides she cannot raise the child, a licensed adoption agency, many of them run by churches, can walk her through a plan she controls. If the family falls apart later, a foster family from the same congregation might be the home a child needs.

Now ask the critic a question. At which layer did the movement "stop at birth"? The answer is not "none of them," because every layer has gaps, and a woman in a bad spot can fall through any of them. The answer is that the movement has built, or helped build, parts of all four. The work is to make the layers connect, and to be honest when they do not.

The disagreement over method

Here is where the honest part begins. Conservatives do disagree with the progressive left about how to help, and the disagreement is real. It is not about whether to help.

The conservative instinct runs in four directions.

1. Local over federal. Government closest to the family knows the family. A county knows its own foster families; a state knows its own labor market.
2. Civil society first. Churches, charities and neighbors give help that comes with relationships. A check does not ask how you are doing.
3. Work attached. The 1996 reform rested on the belief that work is the surest route out of poverty, and that aid should reinforce it, not replace it. We examine one side of that argument in Should the child credit pay families who don't work? The 2021 argument.
4. Cost and consequences. Every dollar spent has to be raised from somebody, and programs have incentives built into them. Wanting to examine those incentives is not callousness. It is arithmetic.

You can reject all four and still be a decent person. But you cannot say that a person who holds them has abandoned the child. They have a different theory of how to help. The test is whether the theory works.

Where the charge lands, and the movement can do better

I said I would be honest, and honesty has to cost something. So, here are the places where the critics have a point and we ought to say so.

Some votes do look bad. When a lawmaker who campaigns on protecting children votes against a modest, well-designed program for mothers or children with no alternative on offer, it looks like indifference, and sometimes it is. Whatever the policy reason, "no" without a "here's what instead" is a weak position, and the public notices.

The movement has been better at the first nine months than at the next eighteen years. It is a lot easier to build a campaign around a law than around a household budget. Churches that spend a decade fighting for a statute and a week on the family who needs a ride to the pediatrician have it backward. The pro-life movement is at its best when it is a movement of casseroles and car seats.

The advocacy has to include the mother. A woman facing a hard pregnancy will judge the movement by how she is treated in the first conversation. If the answer she gets is a lecture, nothing else will matter.

Conservatives have disagreed among themselves about the role of government, and have not always settled it. Whether the child credit should be refundable, whether paid family leave should be a federal matter, and how health coverage should work are all live arguments on our own side. Senators Marco Rubio and Mike Lee pressed in 2017 to expand the credit's value for working families, while others on the right resisted. Senator Mitt Romney proposed a different design in 2021. These are arguments among allies, and they will not be settled by a bumper sticker.

What to say when someone says it to you

Do not bristle. Here is a short script.

"That's a fair challenge. Here's what I'd point to: the pregnancy centers, the church-run adoption and foster agencies, the tax credits Republicans wrote for families. Here's where I think we can do better: [name something]. What do you think works?"

That last question is the important one. It moves the exchange from a verdict to a conversation, and a conversation is the only place anyone changes a mind.

The bottom line

• The charge has a real core: a movement that protects the unborn owes something to mothers and children. Admit that first.
• The record answers most of the rest: pregnancy-help centers, faith-based adoption and foster care, the 1996 welfare reform, the adoption credit, and the child tax credit are all on the books.
• Disagreeing about method, whether through local government, churches, work requirements or cost, is not abandoning a child. It is arguing about what works.
• Where we fall short, say so and fix it. Show up for the family, not just the statute.
• Your next step: pick one local group, a pregnancy center, a foster agency or a church ministry, and give it your time or money this month. Then you can answer the sticker with something better than a snort.