Editor’s Note: In an article published last week, The New Yorker portrays part of Donald Trump’s strategy to win the 2024 election: sidelining the established pro-life movement in order to build a new vision of conservative family policy.

In the article, “The New Pro-Life Playbook,” reporter Emma Green writes, for two generations, members of the pro-life movement were oriented around the political and legal goal of overturning Roe v. Wade. Along the way, they lost the culture. The next Trump administration will be staffed with people who wish to change that.

To discuss this topic and what the shifting GOP strategy on abortion reveals about our current political climate, EWTN News’ Catherine Hadro spoke to Green, a staff writer for The New Yorker who was previously a staff writer for The Atlantic.

The interview transcript is below:

Emma, thank you so much for joining us. Really fascinating reporting. And I want to go ahead and highlight one of the other major points that you made. You write, quote, “social conservatives within Trump’s coalition have been workshopping a new playbook. They have a much broader social policy agenda in mind for his next term, overhauling the way Republicans think and talk about family.” Emma, can you go ahead and expand on that? How are Republicans shifting how they talk about the family, and why?

As I started reporting this story, I was interested in this question of where the pro-life movement is in this moment post-Dobbs and heading into the presidential election, now a new presidential administration. The thing I kept hearing over and over from people who are part of traditional pro-life groups, but also part of this broader pro-family scene is a desire to focus on this question of family in all aspects of federal policymaking. So to have it, as the head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts told me, be the North Star for how they think about policy. And this is taking family policy beyond the areas that we normally think of, such as the child tax credit or tax credits for child and dependent care, going to issues like housing and thinking about housing regulation and availability as a family issue; thinking about trade and tariffs as a family issue. Can men get jobs that will allow them to support a family and be a single breadwinner so that potentially a mom who wanted to could stay home with her children? It’s the expansive vision that frames family policy as the center of everything that the Republicans can do.

That, to me, is the real shift here. And I’ll be interested to see how much momentum that gets as President Trump takes office and the new session.

As one of your interviewees phrased it, “pro-life is out; pro-family is in”; and with this shift away from a focus on abortion, how are pro-life leaders reacting to this new tactic?

I think there’s a lot of frustration. Not everyone is willing to talk ahead of an election season and be open and honest and vulnerable about their sense of political weakness. But my perception from the people who were willing to talk to me is that that is what people are feeling. A sense of marginalization within the GOP coalition, a sense of political vulnerability and weakness around very specific pro-life goals, meaning abortion restrictions. And it was pretty clear for everybody to see that President Trump during his campaign tried to put distance between himself and the pro-life movement — very different from how he campaigned for his first win in 2016. So, obviously, across the pro-life movement, which is very large, very diverse and very grassroots, there are lots of different perceptions about what the right path forward is and what the politics are going to look like. But from my interviews, the strong sense that I got was a sense that people are frustrated. They wish that there was more attention being paid to these issues within the GOP coalition. And there’s a sense of uncertainty about what the pro-life movement will look like moving forward.

You know, historically, conservatives have fought against expanded government spending, but is that no longer the case, especially with, as you mentioned, this push for child tax credits?

And so forth, within a segment of the conservative coalition, what I called in my article, the realignment conservatives, but they’ve also been called national conservatives, the new right. There is a growing sense that there’s been too much reticence on the right to do things that are good, to do things that help people in the way that conservatives wish people to be helped. So they’re very much in favor of expanded government spending if it’s going to help people to have kids and to have families, to get rid of some of those old hang-ups within the GOP coalition around small government. And I saw this, both at the federal level — hearing people who are around, for example, Vice President-elect JD Vance, and how they think about this — potentially from the federal level, but also at the state level. And we saw this especially in the wake of Dobbs, that many of the states, all of the states that have restrictions in place after Dobbs on abortion have also passed expansions to the social safety net. And the state that I spot lit in my reporting was Mississippi, where it all started with the Dobbs decision. And it was clear that in Mississippi, there are people, especially Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who led the Dobbs case, were pressing the Republican Legislature to be more willing to step out and help people to expand the social safety net in ways that potentially they haven’t been willing to in the past.

How much of this new vision that we’re talking about is being shaped specifically by Catholics and Catholic thought? You mentioned JD Vance. He’s one of the biggest proponents of it, and he’s notably a convert to Catholicism.

I think JD Vance is a prime example of someone who’s clearly been shaped by his conversion to Catholicism in the way that he thinks and articulates his vision of the good. Notably, his shift to Catholicism also followed a political shift. He was more liberal libertarian in past iterations of his political life — now is much more open to this idea that the government is going to have to spend money. And, indeed, he said that on the campaign trail. But there are many other prominent Catholics who are also involved with this new pro-family vision. Kevin Roberts, who is the head of the Heritage Foundation, someone that I interviewed for this piece, is a great example of someone who really believes in the pro-family vision. It was a big topic in his book. And he himself is both Catholic and has been a leader of a Catholic institution, Wyoming Catholic College. So I think that influence — theologically, religiously, the sensibility around helping people reaching out to the margins, the vulnerable, seeing the way that government policy and politics might be able to work in that direction — that’s a huge influence in this movement.

Emma, as we’re continuing to sift through the election results, I mean, there were states where both Trump won and the abortion ballot initiative succeeded. So you had voters who were voting both for Trump and for abortion. In your opinion, does this reveal that Trump’s abortion strategy ultimately paid off this election?

I think there will be many autopsies done on this election, but I think it is very clear at this moment that President Trump made a calculation that putting distance between himself and the pro-life movement in the most traditional sense, meaning anti-abortion in all of its forms, that it was a calculation that he made and potentially that it paid off. And we are already hearing from voters who describe themselves as being both “pro-choice” and pro-Trump who didn’t see a vote for President Trump as necessarily a vote for the pro-life movement or a vote against abortion. And so I do think that that’s the strategy that the Trump administration and the Trump campaign have taken. Whether or not that continues, I think is a question. And certainly going into the new administration, I would guess there will be a lot of action at the administrative level to try to shore up some of those restrictions on abortion at the federal level and to reverse some of the Biden administration’s policies. But whether or not the pro-life movement has influence with the new Trump administration, I think, is an open question.