Whether disappointed or optimistic after the election, pro-life leaders aren’t planning to stop or even slow their work. “CareNet and Heartbeat and 40 Days for Life are more needed than ever,” Carney said. “The demand for 40 Days has skyrocketed since the overturning of Roe.” Without a federal law, the movement is “market driven,” he said. “It’s about hearts and minds. We need to have focus and clarity and put our foot on the gas.”

Last week, election night was a roaring success for the GOP as the party grabbed the presidency and a majority in the Senate. When the rest of the votes are in, they’ll probably keep control of the House as well.

It was harder to tell how the pro-life movement did. Three states that voted for Kamala Harris also voted to amend their constitutions to protect abortion, as you might expect. Two states that voted for Donald Trump rejected measures to expand abortion. One state that voted for Trump—Nebraska—voted to keep the current 12-week ban and not to legalize through viability.

And four states that voted for Trump—Arizona, Missouri, Montana, and Nevada—also chose to expand or maintain access to abortion, though Nevada needs another vote in 2026 before it takes effect. Missouri had the smallest passing margin of the night—51.6 percent to 48.4 percent—and was the toughest pro-life loss, erasing all restrictions the state had put in place during the Roe years.

Those disappointing losses suggest a further decoupling of pro-life issues from Republican values. This summer, the GOP rewrote its platform. For the first time in 40 years, it didn’t affirm that “the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed.” Instead, Republicans wrote that “states are, therefore, free to pass laws protecting those Rights.”

“That’s the platform that just won,” said Care Net CEO Roland Warren. “Here’s the problem: it’s going to be incredibly difficult to get Republicans to go back to the old position.”

Other pro-life organizations, including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Students for Life, and Americans United for Life (AUL), endorsed the platform. In a statement, AUL said it “worked closely with the [Republican National Committee] on developing platform language that preserves reference to the Fourteenth Amendment while updating the language to our post-Roe world.”

Overall, pro-life leaders seem cautiously optimistic about the election results. The state victories were the first legislative wins since Dobbs overturned Roe in 2022.

Not only that, but Harris’s loss “is a clear rejection of the extreme abortion agenda that she made the centerpiece of her campaign,” stated March for Life president Jeanne Mancini.

Running on Abortion

Before the Dobbs decision overturned the national right to an abortion, the Democrat and Republican parties each spent between 2 and 3 percent of their ad campaigns on addressing abortion.

After Dobbs, the Republican spending allocation didn’t change much. But the Democrat spending on abortion ads skyrocketed—in both 2022 and the first half of 2024, they spent between 28 and 38 percent of their national budget on abortion ads. In some states (Michigan and Arizona) more than half of Democratic ads were about abortion. In Georgia, it was more than 90 percent.

“Kamala Harris made abortion her No. 1 issue, the focus of the [Democratic National Committe], to the point where they were doing abortions in buses outside the DNC convention—and she lost,” said 40 Days for Life CEO Shawn Carney. In fact, Harris won a smaller margin of female votes than Joe Biden in 2020 or Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“That should give confidence to people worried about abortion—you can be pro-life and win,” Carney said. “Look at [pro-life Florida governor] DeSantis. He won big in 2022, five months after Dobbs.”

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