How Democrats have been more consistently ‘pro-life’ than Republicans

The same day that the Supreme Court overturned federal protections for legal abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) signed a proclamation banning the procedure in his state.

“We are issuing this proclamation to restore our state authority to regulate abortion and protect life,” Parson said. He went on to praise what “generations of Missourians have worked and prayed for,” victory in the “fight to protect innocent life.”

On Tuesday, Parson released a statement on a different but overlapping subject: the execution of Marcellus Williams for the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle.

Williams insisted from the outset that he didn’t commit the crime. Over time, questions about the handling of evidence used against him and the composition of the jury led even the office responsible for prosecuting him in the first place to call for dropping the death penalty.

“We hope this gives finality to a case that’s languished for decades, re-victimizing Ms. Gayle’s family for decades,” Parson said of moving forward with the execution. Gayle’s family had, in fact, called for Williams to receive life imprisonment instead. Parson’s predecessor, also a Republican, had stayed Williams’s execution and established a board to consider the case. Upon taking office, Parson dissolved that effort. Any chance that Williams would be exonerated was lost.

Americans generally don’t have much difficulty in reconciling the sort of contrast posed by Parson — someone who is “pro-life” in the context of abortion, but pro-execution as a tool of criminal justice. Parson’s presentation of innocence is carefully delineated so that it necessarily includes a fetus but excludes Williams.

That said, very few Americans are consistently “pro-life” on these issues. The General Social Survey, a national poll usually conducted every two years, has been evaluating views of the death penalty and abortion for nearly half a century. About a quarter of Americans have consistently supported both capital punishment and the right of a woman to obtain an abortion for any reason. A smaller segment of the population sits at the other end of the spectrum, “pro-life” on both issues. Everyone else agrees with one or the other: the use of the death penalty or the availability of legal abortion.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a partisan difference among that last group. Most Republican voters (here meaning Republicans and independents who lean Republican) are inconsistently “pro-life,” supporting the death penalty while opposing abortion. A quarter support both.

Forty years ago, the views of Democratic voters looked like those of Republicans. Over time, though, support for the death penalty declined on the left as support for abortion rose. In 1980, there were about 3.5 Democrats who supported the death penalty but opposed abortion for every Democrat who supported abortion but opposed the death penalty. Now, there are about 3.5 Democrats who support abortion and oppose the death penalty for every one who supports the death penalty and opposes abortion.

Because Democrats have more consistently opposed the death penalty, Democrats have been more consistently “pro-life” over the years than have Republicans by this measure.

It’s interesting to also consider one group that might be expected to be consistently “pro-life” on abortion and capital punishment: Catholics. In general, the pattern among Catholics looks like that for Republicans, but with lower levels of support for capital punishment.

While Democrats were more consistently “pro-life” until about 2000 (in part because Democrats were less likely to embrace capital punishment during the crime spike in the 1990s), about a quarter of Catholics both opposed capital punishment and abortion for most of the past 20 years. That has declined recently (as it has for other groups).

It is obviously overly neat to apply the term “pro-life” in this way. Of course, advocates of legal abortion would argue that it’s overly broad to refer to some contested procedures as entailing a termination of life in the first place. Rhetoric is often imperfect, often intentionally.

Parson offers a particularly good example of the way in which Americans deploy that rhetoric in ways that, to an outside observer, might seem hard to understand. Over the past 40 years, though, it has consistently been the case that fewer than half of Americans oppose both abortion and the death penalty or support both. The majority holds diverging views — with some of them nonetheless adopting the mantle of “pro-life.”