(RNS) — The Catholic Church is often said to think in terms of centuries, not years or even decades. But here in the United States, always a country on a hurry-up schedule, St. John Paul II’s encyclical “Evangelium Vitae,” promulgated March 25, 1995, has taken a mere 30 years to come into its own.
Perhaps the signal piece of pro-life teaching in the Catholic Church, “Evangelium Vitae” (“The Gospel of Life”) put the pontiff’s stamp on what had come to be called the “consistent life ethic” — a stance that opposes all forms of socially ordained killings: abortion, capital punishment, assisted suicide and euthanasia. For most of its existence, only one of the two U.S. political parties has been friendly to this single ideal, and even then, many old-school Republicans were hostile to it.
Over the last decade or so, however, that has changed.
The events that have brought about this change are well-known: the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the rise of nationalist populism; the fall of Roe v. Wade, followed by the defeats of state ballot measures that would have limited abortion; the rise of the abortion pill and, with it, a loss of the sense of what abortion even is; the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024, which brought on the final dismissal of those older Republicans and the exile of the Democrats, defeated so thoroughly that they are now trying to figure out what they want to be as a party.
In a recent RNS column I argued that this massive political realignment has led to the birth of Pro-Life 3.0 and a chance to bring a consistent life vision to the public sphere in new and more authentic ways. One of the most important pro-life talks I’ve ever encountered was Vice President JD Vance’s address to the 2025 March for Life, which laid out a game plan for being “pro-family and pro-life in the fullest sense of that word possible.” He went on:
Now, it should be easier to raise a family, easier to find a good job, easier to build a home to raise that family in, easier to save up and purchase a good stroller, a crib for a nursery. We need a culture that celebrates life at all stages, one that recognizes and truly believes that the benchmark of national success is not our GDP number or our stock market, but whether people feel that they can raise thriving and healthy families in our country.
The Heritage Foundation’s Roger Severino, formerly the head of the civil rights office in the Department of Health and Human Services in the first Trump administration, spoke for anyone paying attention when he tweeted: “The future of Life policy lies in Family policy.”
“Evangelium Vitae,” a document that uses the term “family” no fewer than 59 times, is very clearly a theme of John Paul’s pro-life vision. In part because the family is the “sanctuary of life,” he calls for “social policies in support of families” — including “programs of cultural development and of fair production and distribution of resources.”
These essential values mean Democrats have their own part to play in the turn toward the consistent ethic of life. The encyclical said it is necessary “to rethink labor, urban, residential and social service policies so as to harmonize working schedules with time available for the family, so that it becomes effectively possible to take care of children and the elderly.” These policies have long been pushed by Democrats, and their soul-searching is unlikely to lead them to abandon them.
As the Republicans move toward Vance’s style of populism, and Democrats continue to advance a similar kind of social support, pro-lifers operating in our new 3.0 space can and should work to advance paid family leave, in-home nursing and other kinds of care for the elderly, subsidies for child care and more social supports for the family.
That’s not the only way that “Evangelium Vitae” calls pro-lifers in the current moment to live into the consistent ethic of life.
John Paul urged the world in his encyclical to consider neglect or rejection of the elderly as “intolerable.” We need to recover a lost “covenant,” he wrote, between generations in which parents, in their later years, “can receive from their children the acceptance and solidarity which they themselves gave to their children when they brought them into the world.”
Invoking a pro-life commitment to nonviolence, the document is also deeply skeptical of the death penalty and war. It is in this context that John Paul said that the New Testament brings to perfection “the forceful appeal for respect for the inviolability of physical life and the integrity of the person.” The Gospel of Life, in this way, goes beyond negative prohibitions to positive obligations “to be responsible for our neighbor as for ourselves.”
The well-worn critiques that pro-lifers “only care about babies before they are born” or are obsessed with “pelvic issues” was never fair. But as the pro-life vision articulated in “Evangelium Vitae” finds its way into Pro-Life 3.0, those critiques are not long for this (very new) political world.