Republicans who support abortion rights have long been an endangered species in the House of Representatives. But next year, the rare breed will finally be extinct.

The retirements of Reps. Charlie Dent and Rodney Frelinghuysen mark the end of the line for abortion rights supporters in the Republican Conference. And there’s no GOP nominee in a competitive race who backs abortion rights this year, according to abortion interest groups and party officials, which will leave Congress more polarized on the issue than at any time since Roe v. Wade — all of it with a bruising Supreme Court nomination on the horizon.


Democrats have a slightly larger tent on the issue of abortion — but only slightly. In the House, there are three remaining members who vote against abortion rights to varying degree: Reps. Dan Lipinski, Collin Peterson and Henry Cuellar.

The elimination of the last House GOP members to support abortion rights stands to have far-reaching effects, ranging from intensifying the partisan battles around government spending to making it significantly harder for those who hold moderate positions on abortion to get elected to Congress — from either party. As long as one party is in lockstep on the issue, the pressure will mount on the other to follow.

“The issue was put into so many bills and it became such a deep belief system of the Republican Party,” said former Rep. Richard Hanna, a New York Republican who supported abortion rights and retired in 2016. “They all jumped on board because they know fighting it doesn’t pay. You can’t win. I certainly couldn’t.”

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Dent declined to speak on the record for this story. Frelinghuysen did not respond to requests for comment.

The hardening of party lines comes as the anti-abortion movement feels more emboldened than ever. The presidency of Donald Trump — a one-time abortion rights supporter who won over anti-abortion groups with promises of nominating “pro-life” judges to the Supreme Court — has the movement excited about the prospect of nominating a fifth justice who may overturn the Roe v. Wade ruling establishing the constitutional right to access to abortion.

The conservative vise had been slowly tightening around abortion rights supporters like Dent and Frelinghuysen in recent years. Retirements — such as Hanna’s — and the losses of the few other abortion rights Republicans, left Dent and Frelinghuysen increasingly isolated. In Frelinghuysen’s case, he voted more conservatively. After opposing measures to defund Planned Parenthood, he flipped to support cutting off funds in 2015 after the release of sting videos targeting the organization.

Neither Dent nor Frelinghuysen counted as full-fledged abortion rights supporters — those Republicans are long gone from the House. Both lawmakers opposed a bill to ban abortion at 20 weeks of pregnancy last year, but both supported an effort to permanently prohibit federal funding of abortion, such as through Medicaid.

In his retirement statement, Dent did not mention the issue of abortion, but he decried "the disruptive outside influences that profit from increased polarization and ideological rigidity that leads to dysfunction, disorder and chaos."

On the other side of the Capitol, as of next year, there are expected to be only two Republicans who vote in support of abortion rights in the Senate: Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. On the Democratic side, Sens. Bob Casey, Joe Manchin and Joe Donnelly have voted against abortion rights to varying degrees.

Both in the House and Senate, pressure to fall in line with the party on abortion has intensified on both sides of the aisle. National organizations — such as National Right to Life and the Susan B. Anthony List on the right and NARAL Pro Choice America and Planned Parenthood on the left — have become significantly more politically powerful in recent years, leaving little room for lawmakers and candidates who defy the party line.

There’s no better example of it than Lipinski, who was the target of a vigorous primary campaign in March to oust him — in no small part because of his position on abortion. In a rare snub of a Democratic incumbent, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee declined to endorse him against his primary election challenger.

Lipinski barely squeaked past progressive opponent Marie Newman, who had the backing of NARAL, a pivotal abortion rights group, and other Democratic lawmakers who took the unusual step of endorsing a challenger against a fellow incumbent they said didn’t represent core Democratic values. The conservative SBA List, meanwhile, canvassed in his district — he’s one of the few Democrats the group supports — to help propel his victory.

For Republicans, the departure of the last abortion rights supporters in the House will be most noticeable during fights over government spending measures — bills that have become cannon fodder in the abortion wars over funding of Planned Parenthood and more recently, the Title X family planning program.

“The only thing they really only give a damn about is getting reelected, so they pander to their base,” Hanna said. “Every congressman has over 700,000 people in their district, and if all you care about are the people who vote for you in the primary, you’re not much of a congressman.”

If Republicans lose the majority this fall, GOP leaders would be incentivized to force even more anti-abortion votes in an effort to galvanize and energize the party grass roots for 2020 — and there would be no one within the ranks to discourage them.

“It’s going to be an issue that both parties have to show their base and show the organizations out there that are on their side of the issue that we’re doing something for you,” said Lipinski. “The legislative process has unfortunately become signal messaging.”

With the number of party-defying Republican abortion-rights supporters and Democratic abortion opponents dwindling to almost zero, the political action committees supporting those candidates have also withered.

Just this week, the leaders of the Republican Majority for Choice — a group that aimed to elect GOP abortion-rights supporters — said they’ve finally decided that there’s no room for them anymore. After 30 years of existence, they’re shutting down the group and leaving the GOP.

The group’s successes in supporting abortion rights Republicans since the 1990s, the group’s leaders wrote in a New York Times op-ed , “were dismissed by party leaders who became increasingly beholden to the social extremists who were winning primaries in our broken, gerrymandered electoral system.”

Democrats for Life followed a similar trajectory to Republican Majority for Choice — diminished fundraising and relevance leading to the termination of its PAC in 2015. The organization has since been working to start up a new PAC but has struggled to get it off the ground, according to executive director Kristen Day.

“It’s really extremely hard to raise money for pro-life Democratic candidates because the pro-life people with money don’t want to give to Democrats and the Democrats don’t want to give to pro-lifers,” Day said. “So polarization has really trickled over into Democratic fundraisers that don’t want to raise money for pro-lifers.”

Democrats for Life, which is hosting its first “I Want My Party Back” conference next month, chides the party for closing its doors to opponents of abortion.

A decade ago, then-Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean met with 18 anti-abortion Democrats to devise a strategy to find districts where their allies could win, Day explained. Last year, however, DNC Chairman Tom Perez said the party wouldn’t back candidates who oppose abortion rights, a comment that sparked intraparty tensions.

Dean, Day said, “made it very clear that he was pro-choice and that he disagreed with us. But he saw the value in finding these candidates to win.”