Pro-Life Campaigners Meet Antagonistic MAGA At Republican National Convention

Terrisa Bukovinac, founder of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU), said that as an atheist, “How can I be pro-life? I am against murder. I don’t want to live in a world where people murder each other. I don’t believe in a life after death or that God will right all the wrongs in the end. The unborn only have one chance to experience this rare conscious experience of the universe. Who has the right to take that from them? I don’t believe anyone does.” Despite her fundamental beliefs, she was met last month with hostility at the Republican National Convention. But at the Democratic National Convention, she found frank curiosity on the part of fellow progressives.

PAAU protesters were at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago August 18-22, bearing placards reading ‘Kamala is a Baby Killer Cop’, ‘Queer rights begin at Conception,’ ‘Abortion pills Suffocate tiny People,’ and ‘Embryos are people and Abortion is Murder.’ The group also bore signs denouncing the current war in Gaza.

Bukovinac, who formerly led Democrats for Life, founded the Washington DC-based PAAU in 2021 as a single-issue organization and has been involved in the pro-life cause for nearly a decade. In an interview, she underlined her group’s focus on “progressive feminist values of equality, non-violence, and nondiscrimination through an anti-capitalist lens,” but “committed to ending elective abortion no matter how long it takes, as well as inclusivity of pro-life voices, “magnifying secular, leftist, and LGBTQIA+ identifying pro-life voices, especially those belonging to people of color.”

“Capitalism creates incentives for exploitation and that’s what we’re seeing with abortion. We call it the abortion-industrial complex that thrives on the exploitation of disenfranchised people during their most vulnerable circumstances. It’s capitalism working. We need to take away the incentive of monetary power away from this institution to ensure that they stop exploiting poor children, kill their children, and profit off them,” she said.  

In a world where both abortion and exploitation of poor people is abetted, she said: “It’s much more complicated, more costly, and more difficult to manage unplanned pregnancies in such a world. Abortion is a band-aid solution. People have been killing children similarly for all of human history and found a way of making it okay. But we can’t build a better world on a pile of dead babies. We oppose this.” 

Bukovinac said she was aware of the support for abortion expressed by the Democratic party and presidential candidate Kamala Harris. She observed, “It is absolutely critical for leftists to dissent from the Democratic party. It is essential that they see other people who have those same beliefs about the world and how things should be and recognize that abortion is genocide. I’m not a blue-dog Democrat, a conservative Democrat. I am progressive and pro-life.”

PAAU activists protested throughout the DNC, which culminated with Vice President Harris’s acceptance of her party’s nomination. Bukovinac said her group was greeted with curiosity from progressives at the convention. “It was especially interesting to contrast it with the Republican National Convention [RNC], where people were extremely hostile. We were assaulted multiple times at the RNC and constantly told to go home and that pro-lifers are ruining the Republican party. But the attitude at the DNC was very different.” 

She observed that progressives are “turning their backs on the Democratic party. So there was a sense of camaraderie among opponents of the Democratic platform.” She said, “The reactions of DNC attendees was more like ‘Oh look, that’s interesting.’ We got lots of thumbs up. There were no assaults, no hostility. It was definitely a different atmosphere than the Republican convention.” 

PAAU executive director Caroline Taylor Smith, a practicing Catholic who has worked for Protect Life Michigan and volunteers for Democrats for Life, said in an interview that her pro-life principles are compatible with progressive politics. “We spent a few days protesting outside the Planned Parenthood bus outside the convention, where abortions were being carried out,” she said. According to reports, Planned Parenthood carried out vasectomies and at least two dozen abortions at the DNC.

Smith recalled that PAAU was also present at the July 15-18 Republican convention in Milwaukee, where, she said, “The reception was very different.” At the DNC, she said that "there was confusion when they saw that we’re pro-life and progressive. It was an interesting contrast to the RNC, which was not what we expected,” she recalled. 

“We went to the RNC to call out the party for its watered-down stance on abortion. They actually confirmed and released it during the convention. We called them out and shamed them for abandoning babies,” she said. She said that her fellow activists told RNC attendees that the Republican party is “betraying unborn people and collaborating with the abortion industry. We believe they are trying to get more votes by softening their stance on abortion. That angered a lot of people. They found it insulting. It was very weird and not what we expected.”

On July 8, the RNC adopted language on abortion that removed the previous “right to life” language from the platform and its call for a federal law protecting unborn babies that had been in place for decades. Previous platforms had underlined that unborn children have a “fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed” and called for a constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to life. Pro-life Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), a Catholic, told CNN the party should reflect the position of former President Donald Trump, which “is grounded in reality … that you can’t pass a federal law [protecting unborn life] even if we wanted to.” Republican nominee Trump praised the platform change.

The DNC put abortion front and center. Vice President Kamala Harris,during her August 22 speech accepting her party’s nomination as presidential candidate, pulled no punches regarding her abortion advocacy. Harris slammed former President Trump for appointing Supreme Court judges who overturned Roe v. Wade. She erroneously claimed that as a president he would enact a nationwide abortion ban, even without Congressional approval. “They are out of their minds,” Harris said.

Smith said that while PAAU was not in existence when Trump nominated justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, she and PAAU founder Bukovinac both agree that their ruling against Roe v. Wade, which devolved laws regarding abortion unto the states, was a pro-life victory even though she dissented from other Republican policies. “As an organization, we have to work with who we’re going to get. Getting those justices into the court was a critical step for the pro-life movement and one we didn’t expect. Now, we have to work at the local and state level,” she said.