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Jimmy Carter was personally conservative but his actions overall set the stage for the triumph of forces determined to erode the sanctity of human life and of natural marriage.

The passing of our 39th president, Jimmy Carter, over the weekend has spurred a range of reflection from observers of American life and leadership. No previous president lived a full century, and Carter’s 44-year post-presidency was full of public engagement that offered new perspectives on a man whose character was generally admired in our bitter age. His 77 years of marriage to Rosalynn, his childhood sweetheart, was exemplary, as was his devotion to the home-building nonprofit Habitat for Humanity.

It is customary when someone has died to speak only well of them or to hold one’s peace. It is a good civilisational standard, but when an individual occupies a premier space in public life, it is hard not to offer an assessment, after a decent interval, of their role in the debates of the age. With Jimmy Carter, that assessment will be made for decades because of the turbulent time in domestic and foreign policy that brought him to the fore. For social conservatives, the assessment must be mixed at best. Carter was personally conservative, as some of his decisions and his character attest, but his actions overall set the stage for the triumph of forces determined to erode the sanctity of human life and of natural marriage. He could have been a force as well as a voice for good.

Most accounts of Carter’s presidency dwell only lightly on the posture of the political parties in the 1970s. The country had been rocked in swift succession by the Watergate scandal, a presidential resignation, the sexual revolution and Woodstock Nation, Roe v. Wade, the energy crisis, record inflation and interest rates and, overseas, the Iran hostage-taking and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It was a time of social and moral upheaval, following a decade of assassination and street conflicts, and the election of the temperate southern Democrat Carter seemed to many as a potential balm for the nation.

Today’s politics may obscure for us how the political polarisation of America differed from what we see today. In the 1976 election, the contrast between the two major political parties was not as sharp on social questions. The redefinition of marriage was in view only in the most arcane publications of sex therapists and radical progressives. The abortion rulings were only three years old and the positions of Carter and the Republican incumbent Gerald Ford were not starkly different.

The 1976 Democratic platform cited the Declaration of Independence’s classic phrase on “unalienable rights,” including the right to life. On abortion, the platform acknowledged the validity of differences of opinion: “We fully recognise the religious and ethical nature of the concerns which many Americans have on the subject of abortion. We feel, however, that it is undesirable to attempt to amend the U.S. Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court decision in this area.” Meanwhile, the GOP platform stated, “The Republican Party favors a continuance of the public dialogue on abortion and supports the efforts of those who seek enactment of a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children.”

These statements reflected the reality in Congress, where the parties reached a working agreement in the summer of 1976 that has lasted to this day: support for the Hyde Amendment barring federal funding of abortion. On June 8, 1976, the House of Representatives approved the amendment by a margin of 199 to 165. One hundred and seven House Democrats voted pro-life on the amendment, while 133 opposed it. Among the Republicans, the pro-life margin was 92 to 32. Hyde was a bipartisan proposition in 1976, and as a candidate and during his presidency Jimmy Carter embraced it. He defeated Ford in the closest electoral college contest since 1916. Once in office, Carter overcame the objections of the D.C.-based Democratic leadership and named Joseph Califano, a committed advocate for the right to life, as his Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, the forerunner of today’s HHS. Carter stood by his nominee who was subjected to aggressive questioning by Bob Packwood, a pro-choice Republican who epitomised a swath of the GOP in the pre-Reagan era.

This process more or less set in stone that changes in successive administrations over the next four decades would not affect the Hyde Amendment. Many Democrats and some Republicans had placed their hope in the Supreme Court finding Hyde unconstitutional, but the 5-4 ruling in Harris v. McRae in Carter’s last year in office put that outcome to rest. But Carter’s actions with respect to the court and judicial nominees generally undermined his expressed pro-life convictions. He named a record number of federal judges (262) during his time in office. He elevated two key architects of future liberal rulings by the court, advancing Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer to seats on federal appeals courts, whence they were launched to the Supreme Court by the openly pro-choice Bill Clinton in 1993 and 1994, respectively.

Carter’s decisions as president advanced claims about abortion that he professed not to believe. Throughout the 1980s, Democrats who believed in the sanctity of human life continued to cast votes in Congress, although their numbers steadily diminished in the face of the legal, financial, and political forces that dominated the party. The eradication of the Democratic pro-life remnant came in 2009-2010 with the adoption of the Affordable Care Act. The ultimate passage of this legislation hung on the resolution of pro-life Democrats’ objections to various provisions of the bill regarding abortion and conscience rights. A cache of manoeuvres by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama brought over the reluctant pro-life Democrats, leading to the rejection of most of them by pro-life voters in 2012. This inaugurated the near-complete polarisation of the national parties that persists today.

Jimmy Carter Post-Presidency

During his post-presidency, Carter continued to display the unsteady nature of his views on social issues. He became the increasingly rare national Democrat who was willing to criticise the party for its emphasis on the issue. In 2018, at a commencement address at Liberty University, Carter criticised communist China’s policies on abortion, which he noted had led to the death by sex selection of some 160 million infant and unborn girls. He called for evangelical voices to unite in opposition to such violations of human rights, as well as human trafficking. “One of the things we have to learn is how to get along, to do good for one another … in other words, just following the mandates of the Prince of Peace. … We don’t need enemies to fight, nor do we need ‘inferior’ people whom we can dominate.”

That said, Carter still took very dissonant positions on other issues that have been central concerns of people motivated by biblical Christianity. Soon after the Liberty University address, Carter said in an interview with HuffPost Live that he believed Jesus would “approve” of same-sex marriage. “I think Jesus would encourage any love affair if it was honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else — and I don’t see that gay marriage damages anyone else.” In the same interview, he repeated his belief that abortion was wrong. “I have a hard time believing that Jesus would approve abortions unless it was because of rape or incest or if the mother’s life was in danger. So I’ve had that struggle … but my oath of office was to obey the Constitution and the laws of this country as interpreted as the Supreme Court, so I went along with that.”

That thought did not seem to apply four years later when the Supreme Court reversed the 1973 abortion decision. The Carter Center in Atlanta issued an unsigned statement saying, “The Carter Center is deeply disappointed with today’s Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe vs. Wade, which puts women’s health at risk by denying them the right to make their own health-care decisions.” Carter himself was not quoted but the statement accorded with Democratic boilerplate on the law he regularly chose not to challenge.

As 2025 begins, history shows some signs of repeating itself as a new president who has criticised abortion but defended its legality approaches office. Roe has been reversed, but a Secretary of Health and Human Services has been nominated who endorses legal abortion. The Hyde Amendment in all its various forms is likely to be renewed and enter its sixth decade in force, saving tens of thousands of human lives. China’s massive human rights violations may be subsiding, but its inability to reverse the impact of the one-child policy continues to stun its leaders and many of our own. Republicans willing to champion human life from conception, with consistency and real policy commitment, may be declining in number, absent leadership from the top.

As Jimmy Carter is laid to rest, the nation can cast a glimpse backward at a time when the potential for bipartisanship on so fundamental an issue seemed in view. Consensus on the defence of innocent human life became the road not taken, even by so faith-driven an individual as our 39th president. He lived an estimable life, and the pull of party and power affected him in a way we now see that all of us can fall prey to. May we appreciate the best of him and pray for everyone in public life who faces the same pressures to conform to the spirit of the age.

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Republished with thanks to The Washington Stand. Image courtesy of Unsplash.