When Vice President J.D. Vance spoke Friday at the March for Life, the annual anti-abortion protest pegged to the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, he heralded the Trump-Vance administration’s record of “undoing the evils” of the Biden administration.
“Where the previous administration mandated taxpayer funding for abortions, including travel costs across the entire government, this administration ended it!” Vance said. The crowd cheered.
It cheered again and again when Vance touted new policies the administration had rolled out the week before Friday’s event to protect taxpayers from being complicit in abortion. Before the March, the Trump administration announced that it was banning National Institutes of Health funding of research conducted on aborted human remains; conducting an audit of COVID relief funds that had gone to Planned Parenthood; and expanding the “Mexico City Policy,” which bars federal funding to nongovernmental organizations that perform or promote abortions, to also target groups that promote “gender ideology.”
But not everyone in the crowd was pleased. “It feels like we’re being gaslit,” Terrisa Bukovinac, founder of the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, told The Dispatch after Vance’s speech concluded. Bukanovic was referring to the dissonance between Vance touting measures to end taxpayer-funding of abortion and President Donald Trump’s comments just two weeks ago telling House Republicans to be a “little flexible” on the Hyde Amendment—which generally prohibits taxpayer funding of abortion except in rare circumstances—as they negotiate expanded subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.
Trump has had an increasingly fraught relationship with the pro-life movement. It started out as a transactional relationship in 2016 with a promise to appoint Supreme Court judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade, among other pledges. But it turned into an abusive relationship after the Supreme Court overturned Roe with its Dobbs decision in 2022, and the pro-life side faced a drubbing in statewide abortion ballot measures. In 2023, Trump abandoned his 2016 pledge to support a federal limit on late-term abortion, and he attacked state-level “heartbeat laws” (that generally ban abortions after an unborn child’s heartbeat is detectable) as “terrible.” That same year, Trump blamed the pro-life cause for the GOP’s underwhelming 2022 midterm results, when Republicans like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—who both signed heartbeat laws—won easily while kookier Trump-backed U.S. Senate candidates lost.
Trump’s 2026 comments on the Hyde Amendment took his abuse of the pro-life movement to a whole new level. A wide array of pro-life voices, including former vice president Mike Pence, have been pushing back. And some, such as Dan Lipinski, a former Illinois Democratic congressman and co-chair of the congressional Pro-Life Caucus, argued Vance should not have been invited back to speak at the March for Life this year. “Playing up J.D. Vance at the March after what the administration has done over the past year just signals a capture of the movement by the Trump administration, rather than the movement having influence over the administration,” Lipinski told The Dispatch in an interview. “No taxpayer funding for abortion—the Hyde Amendment—is the lowest rung on the ladder of pro-life policy.”
Writing in The Pillar, Lipinski said that Vance should not have spoken at the March not only because of the administration’s ongoing willingness to sign an Obamacare deal that lacks the Hyde Amendment but because it has maintained rules implemented under the Biden administration allowing the abortion pill to be shipped through the mail without a single in-person visit to a health care provider.
Other pro-life writers, including Kathryn Lopez and Alexandra DeSanctis at National Review, shared Lipinski’s view that Vance’s keynote speech at the March was a mistake. Lopez wrote that Trump’s call for flexibility on taxpayer funding of abortion was an “invitation for a declaration of independence for the pro-life movement”—and called for pro-lifers to “to fight on both parties — or start a new one.” “Trump-Vance is the most anti-life Republican administration in history,” Peter Laffin wrote in the Washington Examiner.
In his speech on Friday, Vance was heckled by a small group of marchers, led by longtime anti-abortion activist Randall Terry, who was shouting into a bullhorn: “Ban the abortion pill!”
“I must address an elephant in the room, and I’ve heard the guy over here talking about it,” Vance said, referring to the hecklers. While he didn’t directly address the administration’s handling of abortion-pill rules, he mentioned a fear that not enough progress had been made on the pro-life cause and said that debates about how “prudential we must be and the cause of advancing human life” are good and “help keep people like me honest.”
But, Vance continued, “I’d ask you to look where the fight for life stood just one decade ago, and now look where it stands today.”
For many pro-life leaders, that is exactly their objection. While they see the end of Roe as a generational victory that has already resulted in saving the lives of tens if not hundreds of thousands of infants and toddlers via new state laws, there has also been a great deal of backsliding in the Republican Party on the pro-life cause. “Some Republicans have abandoned our long-standing opposition to taxpayer funding of abortion altogether,” former Vice President Mike Pence wrote in a Washington Examiner op-ed published Thursday. “These concerns extend to the executive branch as well. President Trump has recently called for ‘flexibility’ on taxpayer funding of abortion, and as more than half of all abortions are now carried out through chemical means, the administration has failed to act.”
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the leading pro-life group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, took the Trump administration to task over these issues in a Washington Post op-ed before the March for Life and in a statement afterward. “When Vice President Vance said in his speech, ‘I ask you to look where the fight for life stood just one decade ago, and now look where it stands today,’ that comparison reveals a harsh reality,” Dannenfelser said on Friday in a statement noting that the overall number of abortions is up.
Even though studies show state abortion laws have prevented some abortions, other trends have led to an overall rise in the abortion rate. While some have pointed to the rising cost of living as one factor likely increasing the abortion rate, Dannenfelser blamed it primarily on the unfettered access to mail-order abortion pills. “The Trump-Vance position of [sending abortion policy] ‘back to the states’ is being undermined every single day as abortion drugs flood illegally into pro-life states,” Dannenfelser said. “Women are also paying the price, with horrifying cases of abuse and coercion emerging—including in Vice President Vance’s home state of Ohio.”
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Trump administration has not banned the abortion pill—both he and J.D. Vance campaigned in 2024 on maintaining its availability. Still, the administration’s decision so far to not reinstate the abortion pill rules issued under President Barack Obama in 2016—rules in effect throughout Trump’s first term—has been disheartening to many pro-life activists.
Jennie Bradley Lichter, the president of the March for Life, is nevertheless grateful for Vance’s keynote speech at the 2026 March, as well as the new pro-life policies announced by the administration. The Trump-Vance administration is a “fundamentally pro-life presidential administration,” Lichter told The Dispatch, and “we want to stay in conversation with them.”
“All the policies that were announced this week are significant pro-life policy wins and they are, in several cases, directly responsive to things the pro-life movement has been asking for,” Lichter said, adding that the “March for Life continues to publicly and privately urge swift, decisive, and definitive action by the FDA to end unfettered access to chemical abortion drugs.”
On the stage at the March for Life, Lichter urged attendees to contact their senators to protect the Hyde Amendment in any Obamacare deal. One big outstanding question for the pro-life movement after last week is whether the Trump administration will simply use those newly announced pro-life policies as cover before it caves to Democratic demands on providing enhanced Obamacare subsidies that are not protected by the Hyde Amendment. But even some reliable Trump allies think that issue is a red line that must not be crossed. “Christians cannot compromise on policies that would force taxpayers to fund abortion,” Franklin Graham, the evangelical leader closely aligned with Trump, told The Dispatch in a statement. “But I don’t believe that is what our president wants. I don’t just look at what our leaders say—I look at what they do.” Graham pointed to the record of Trump-appointed justices overturning Roe, among other matters, to say he still believes Trump is “the most pro-life president of my lifetime.”
Another question is how a cause that in statewide referenda has been politically battered since the 2022 Dobbs decision can increase its influence. “It is up to us as activists to harness and create enough social tension to change the law, to put pressure on these lawmakers to actually make political change,” Bukanovic told The Dispatch. Stephanie Luiz, a first-year Notre Dame Law School student at the March for Life, told The Dispatch that given the Democratic Party’s support for abortion, “There’s not even a conversation about who to vote for. But I think that’s to our deficit a lot of times. We can’t pressure.”
But in the mind of one marcher named Melissa, a student from the College of William & Mary who declined to share her last name, there is a deeper problem with the pro-life movement being tied so closely to the Republican Party and Trump. “It’s seen as a MAGA thing instead of a human rights thing,” she told The Dispatch, “and so it gets lumped in with ICE and a lot of unjust things.”