WASHINGTON – Wherever she goes, Kristen Day is haunted by political ghosts.
Day is the executive director of Democrats for Life of America, which works to elect pro-life Democrats at the state and federal level. Day has held the job for more than a decade, and she is upfront about her organization’s waning support. She has not met with party leaders in nearly a decade. Her organization will be down to four or five supporters in Congress next January. And pro-life establishment leaders exclude her from meetings.
“It’s very lonely,” the 45-year-old Day said last Friday, walking from her office at 601 Pennsylvania Avenue to a Starbucks on D Street and Indiana Avenue NW. Ever hopeful and determined, Day adds that pro-life Democrats have inundated her office with calls after the party took a beating on Election Day. But as she sat down on a stool and drank an espresso on a chilly morning, she acknowledged that more pro-life Democrats have left the fold than entered it.
“Thousands and thousands of people have told me they used to be a pro-life Democrat, and they always say ‘I didn’t leave the party, the party left me,’” she said.
As the voters left, their congressional representatives followed. When Day recounts the Democrats her group used to endorse, she drops her smile, stares straight ahead at the questioner, and purses her lips.
“Jim Langevin,” she said, referring to the wheelchair-bound representative from Rhode Island who gave fresh hope to the pro-life movement when he won a seat in 1998.
How about Rep. Steven Lynch of Massachusetts?
Day shook her head.
How about one high-profile Democratic member of Congress?
“He has been a total disappointment,” she said.
The longer Day discusses the subject, the more her disappointment deepens. Losing Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper was a huge blow. The Pennsylvania Democrat gave pro-lifers an “in” with pro-choice Democratic women. “She was poor and got pregnant as a teenager, and she chose life for her child. She knows what it’s like,” Day said. Her successor, a white male Republican, does not have an “in.”
Three days earlier, over the phone, Day expressed not disappointment but exasperation that Democratic Party leaders had failed to recruit and support pro-life congressional candidates. The party’s poor showing in the midterm elections — Senate Democrats lost eight seats and may lose another seat next month in Louisiana, while House Democrats lost a dozen seats at least — was proof in her mind of leadership’s obtuseness toward pro-lifers. “When are they going to wake up? When are they going to wake up?” she said before adding a zinger about the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. “Debbie Wasserman Schultz has no clue about what it’s like to be a pro-life Democrat.”
Spokespersons for Langevin, Lynch, and Wasserman Schultz did not comment on Day’s statements. Day’s relationship with the pro-life establishment is little better. She signed on to a lawsuit that former Rep. Steve Driehaus of Ohio filed against the Susan B. Anthony List which claimed that the pro-life organization had spread misinformation about his campaign. (A federal judge tossed the lawsuit.)
Day used to participate in a monthly strategy session with top aides to the National Right to Life Committee, Susan B. Anthony List, Priests for Life, and Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, a Republican. Now she doesn’t.
Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, said Day has been a long-time friend and it has supported the work of Democrats for Life for decades. He said pro-life establishment leaders have excluded Day only from meetings in which “electoral strategies are being worked out that would favor Republican candidates. To me, this is simply an understandable political instinct, not a negative reflection on either Kristen or Democrats for Life."
Day’s job is to make support for the unborn a bipartisan cause. Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, the pro-life movement has not enjoyed the level of support in both parties that Israel or civil rights has, but as late as 1977, it had a bipartisan cast. It was a Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, who signed the Hyde Amendment into law that year, sharply limiting the circumstances under which Medicaid could pay for abortions.
The defeat of John Kerry, a pro-choice Catholic, in the 2004 presidential election helped shift the tide. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean became chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and he laid out a "50-state strategy" for the party to compete in every state. His blueprint included reaching out to pro-life Democrats such as Day’s organization. In the the 2006 midterm elections, many pro-life Democrats won seats in Congress.
By November 2009, Day felt the pro-life movement had returned to its roots. Working 80-hour weeks, she whipped House Democrats to support an amendment from Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan to prevent federal funding of abortion under a sweeping health-care bill.
She had worked so hard and well, she said, that she knew her whip count was more reliable than that of Rep. Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania. After the House passed the Stupak amendment with the support of 65 House Democrats, Day strolled out of Doyle’s office in the Cannon House Office Building on an emotional high. “We were giddy when we walked out of there. We had so many people who were with us, who were free and could vote the way they wanted to,” she said.
Brad Ellsworth, a pro-life former Democratic representative from Indiana, recalls that party leaders treated him no differently than pro-choice colleagues. “I don’t know if it was even said if you were pro-life. I think they understood my condition with my district from the get-go,” he said, citing the support of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.
For Day, the 12 months from the passage of the Stupak amendment to the 2010 midterm election were a blur. In March 2010, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law. That November, Democrats lost 64 seats in the House, nearly 12 percent of all seats in the 435-member body. Watching the election returns on TV in her four-bedroom house in Oakton, Virginia, Day felt horrified as one pro-life Democrat after another fell to a Republican challenger. “It’s just been falling apart since,” Day said.
Fellow Catholics criticized Day as a well-meaning but gullible apologist for an unapologetically pro-choice administration. In November 2011, Day defended the Obama administration’s proposed accommodation on the contraception mandate. "The Obama administration is already unfairly under attack by Catholic conservatives who are using the proposed final rule to spread anti-Obama sentiment to lay Catholics. The administration has no intention of forcing Catholic institutions to provide insurance coverage for services that are directly in opposition to their moral beliefs,” she wrote.
Paul Kengor, a conservative Catholic, jumped on Day’s statement. “Ms. Day has a good heart, a pro-life heart — just like Kathy Dahlkemper — but she, too, has been badly deceived by America’s chief Democrat,” he wrote for the American Spectator.
Despite the setbacks, Day is not defeated.
She vows to work hard to pass legislation to ban abortion after 20 weeks, saying that two Democratic senators can be expected to vote for the bill if it comes up for a vote in the new session of Congress.
Also, she volunteers the hope that a Republican-controlled Congress will work to remove the $300 million in federal funding that Planned Parenthood receives annually. She tweaks the abortion giant for its claim that bills requiring women to undergo an ultrasound intrude on women’s liberties. “Transvaginal ultrasounds are far less invasive than pap smears,” she said, before adding slyly the remarks “or what got you there in the first place, let alone undergoing an abortion.”
The lonely woman battling malign forces in Washington has become a common figure in American popular culture. Witness the television shows “Homeland,” “Scandal,” and “House of Cards.”
But in those programs, the heroine has an unseemly private life. From all outward appearances, Day does not share their problem. She has run 18 marathons and for her birthday this year, she ran a mini-triathlon.
More important to Day are her three children and husband. Day likes it that way. “I’m a mom first,” she said.
Mark Stricherzcovers Washington for Aleteia. He is author of Why the Democrats are Blue.
And today we celebrate...