Since its founding in 2006, Students for Life and its annual National Pro-Life Summit have become driving forces in the anti-abortion movement. This year, the event brought in over 1,000 people, largely college-aged young people, for a day of speeches and workshops from voices and groups driving anti-abortion policies. Panelists from the Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2025, the Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal architects behind the Dobbs decision and dozens of anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ lawsuits working their way through the courts, and other think tanks and nonprofits shared their victories and plans for the future during the 2026 National Pro-Life Summit.
Kicking off the day, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts identified how the anti-abortion movement is central to conservative policy goals. “The two top questions that we have to get right are — how do we protect every unborn life? And two, how do we build a culture of life, starting with revitalizing the American family and honoring the dignity of every human person?” asked Roberts. “Everything else, all of the important policy issues … whether it’s tax policy or education or foreign policy, they’re important, but they ultimately are immaterial if we get those two answers to those questions wrong.”
Legislative action against abortion has proven to be electorally unpopular, with many states running successful ballot initiatives, like Colorado’s Amendment 79, to enshrine abortion access in their state constitutions — Nebraska and Florida being notable exceptions.
Speakers during the Summit’s breakout sessions were not shy about discussing the limitations of the anti-abortion movement.
“If we’re not able to make converts, we’re going to lose,” said Patrick Brown, from the Christian think-tank the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “As we’ve seen in the last three years since the Dobbs decision, public opinion is not with us on the question of abortion per se.”
This electoral pushback is causing conservative anti-abortion activists to rethink conservative economic policy. “Students for Life released a survey and said to Gen Z and Millennials, ‘Let me ask you in a poll so I know what you think about abortion,’” said Anna Fronzaglia of the Clapham Group. “Sixty-six percent of registered voters — Millennials, and Gen Z — said, ‘We want limits on abortion, some limits on abortions.’ When we introduced to that same polling demographic, ‘What if we told you that there are policies that exist that support women with child tax credit, which means you want to put more money back into your pocket?’ We want to figure out a way to give you parental leave that doesn’t burden taxpayers, that basically says, ‘Women, we hear you, that one in four women go back to work within two weeks of having a baby.’ We say, ‘We can reach you in that need, we can give you a practical solution,’ and oh, by the way, more often than not, over 40% of women find themselves in debt when they’re having a baby. So we’re gonna make it more and more affordable. That number went from people who originally were like, unfettered access, we want total abortion. Seven percent then said, and now that we’re from 66% to 73% of them say, ‘Actually, we will totally put limits on abortion so long as there are policies in place to show we can support that baby and quality of life when that mother gives birth.’ We would shift the Overton window to our favor when we have a holistic understanding that our support is not the first three trimesters, it’s the fourth trimester and beyond.”
Brown even suggested shifting some support from the bulwark of Republican voting demographics — senior citizens. “We march every January in Washington, D.C., because the people who we march for can’t march for themselves, and we witness on behalf of the unborn,” he said. “Babies don’t vote — but seniors do — and seniors get a lot of attention from politicians. … I don’t mean this is too much of a criticism, but it is a criticism. In the most recent tax package that was passed last year, we made sure to include a $200 increase in the size of the child tax credit. I’m grateful for that. I truly am. We have four kids at home. That will be very beneficial come tax time. We also made sure to include a $6,000 exemption for seniors. That will cost about $93 million over the course of the 10-year budget period. For that same amount, we could have given $2,000 to every parent who had a baby last year over the next 10 years.”
Brown also suggested policies that would receive bipartisan support. “The city of New Orleans just launched a new universal program where every mom that gives birth within the city limits gets a visit from a nurse up to three times in the weeks and months after birth,” he said. “That was something that both Democrats and Republicans got together on because they have very high rates of maternal health problems in New Orleans.”
In addition to proactive policies, anti-abortion advocates continue to embrace the tactic of denying public funds to entities that provide abortion. “On [July] 4, 2025, the president signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and in that bill, there was a lot of stuff — tax law, healthcare law — and in the bill was a provision to defund abortion providers for one calendar year,” said Connor Semelsberger of the Heritage Foundation. “So any abortion providers that are getting government grants, particularly through the Medicaid program, a big pot of money, if you’re doing abortion, you can no longer receive Medicaid money, which is a big pot of money for one calender year. So again, this is something we worked on for years and years [for] Congress to do. It’s something the executive branch, really on its own, can’t do. It’s something that Congress has to pass a law to do, so they did it for the first time. As you can tell unfortunately, it’s only for one year, so a year from now on our 250th anniversary of our country — July 4th, 2026 — that [restriction on] funding will expire.”
Melanie Israel, a former staffer for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and current Heritage Foundation Fellow, claimed that Planned Parenthood is using gender-affirming care to make up for their shortfall in abortion funding. “When we talk about defunding big abortion, it’s actually not just abortion,” she said. “It’s also getting to the question of these sex-rejecting drugs and procedures. And so when we’re able to cut off that Medicaid funding or other grants and contracts to Planned Parenthood, that’s also going to be protecting bodily integrity for people who are turning to Planned Parenthood for those sex-rejecting procedures.”
While Republicans are upset about Planned Parenthood’s spending on abortion and gender-affirming care, the real issue is Planned Parenthood’s political spending. “Planned Parenthood itself is a $2 billion organization,” said Tom McClusky of Greenlight Strategies. “Taxpayers pay for almost half of that, be it at the city-, federal-, state-levels. And while legally they cannot use that money to pay for elections, that does not mean that they can’t share resources. So the taxpayers are paying for the desks, for the phones, for different things. So how much money do they give to candidates every year? In the last cycle, they gave about $584,000 to candidates. You can guess how many went to Republicans — zero dollars. … We are funding against ourselves when we’re funding organizations like this. If Planned Parenthood wants to exist, it should not exist on our tax dollars, especially not when it’s very clearly a very partisan organization.”
Where policy and funding solutions fall short, anti-abortion activists have litigation. “What the legal landscape right now looks like is kind of a free-for-all,” said Caleb Dalton, senior counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom. “States can do whatever they want. What does that mean for us? It’s a huge opportunity. It’s an opportunity for us to pass pro-life legislation, to engage in pro-life litigation at the state level. But that also means it’s a lot more work. It’s not just one case we need to overturn with Roe v. Wade. It means there needs to be a 50 state approach.”
The biggest obstacles for anti-abortion activists are medication abortion and shield laws, say anti-abortion advocates, which protect patients and providers in states where abortion is legal. “The shield laws have been passed in many states, and they are literally designed to protect prescribers that are prescribing these drugs across borders,” said Dalton. “They’re drug traffickers and they’re violating the law in the state that they’re sending the drug to, but the states that they live in — for example California and New York — there’s doctors in those states who have violated the law and they’re supposed to be extradited for violating the laws, but in in California and New York, both, the governors have said, ‘We will not extradite this criminal, this criminal drug trafficker in our state, because of their shield laws.’ They passed these laws saying, ‘We will not help you enforce your law. We will actively keep you from enforcing your pro-life laws.’ The two things that are really in many ways undermining the pro-life laws that states have been passing are the FDA’s removal of the in-person dispensing requirement [for mifepristone] and then the shield laws that even prohibit pro-life states from prosecuting and enforcing their laws against these doctors that are shipping these drugs, trafficking these drugs into their states.”
Additionally, Dalton touted ADF’s victory over Colorado’s Senate Bill 190, which banned abortion pill reversal. “Literally thousands of babies are alive today because of this process, and unfortunately, because it’s so successful, many states have been starting to try to either regulate it or censor information about it,” said Dalton. “One of those states is Colorado. We were honored to represent a nurse practitioner, Chelsea Mynyk, in a case called Bella Health and Wellness v. Weiser. In Colorado, they prohibited licensed medical practitioners from prescribing progesterone only for abortion pill reversal. It’s an evil act, and it’s an anti-choice act.”
U.S. District Judge Daniel D. Domenico, a Trump appointee, ruled in favor of Bella in August, finding the state lacked a compelling argument in regulating the practice. Recently, Colorado was ordered to pay $6.1 million in legal fees. The Becket Fund, which represented Bella Health and Wellness, received $5.4 million, and the Alliance Defending Freedom, representing Mynyk, of Castle Rock Women’s Health, received $700,000.
