By The Catholic Herald
Published July 1, 2026 at 9:00 PM

             In this episode of In Conversation With, Mary Margaret Olohan sits down with Congressman Chris Smith, the New Jersey Republican who has co-chaired the House Pro-Life Caucus for decades and spent forty six years in Congress on three fronts he treats as one fight: the unborn, the trafficked, and the religiously persecuted. Smith is not a man in doubt. He describes hate mail, bullhorn protests and death threats as the ordinary cost of the pro-life position, and his answer to that cost is not caution. It is, in his words, to bend into the wind rather than with it.

             The abortion pill is the conversation's central exhibit. Smith cites a large study finding that just under eleven per cent of women who take the drug suffer serious complications requiring hospitalisation, against an official rate the FDA has cited of roughly half of one per cent. He holds the agency responsible across three administrations, Clinton, Obama and Biden, for what he calls a cover up unlike anything he has encountered in decades of legislating, and he points to Planned Parenthood and international bodies marketing the drug worldwide, including into countries with no access to skilled birth attendants should a woman haemorrhage. Only the more conservative press, in his account, has been willing to cover the consequences to women rather than the politics of access.

             Smith is equally unsparing about the politicians who once stood where he stands. He names Jesse Jackson, Dick Gephardt, Harry Reid, Dick Durbin and Al Gore as men who were once firmly pro-life and reversed course as their ambitions grew. He goes further, describing how the primary process has been used to remove pro-life Democrats from Congress entirely, citing the defeat of Congressman Dan Lipinski and naming Henry Cuellar as the lone holdout, the only Democrat to vote against a bill Smith says would legalise abortion up to birth in every state.

             On the argument that the issue is now an electoral liability, Smith is direct. He recalls a constituent convinced she was pro-choice who, once asked under what circumstances abortion should be permitted, described a position closer to the Hyde Amendment than she realised. He cites the Marist poll's yearly finding that self-described pro-choice majorities collapse into pro-life positions once specific restrictions are named, and his own district polling, which he says never once favoured the pro-choice line even in supposedly hostile years. He is similarly precise about the Dobbs decision itself, noting that Justice Alito's opinion, which he has read closely, returns the question to lawmakers generally and not, as is widely assumed, to state lawmakers alone.

             The conversation's second half turns to trafficking, where Smith's record is more concrete than rhetorical. He wrote the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, the law under which Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to twenty years and which he says has been used against nearly five thousand other exploiters, including, in part, Jeffrey Epstein. He is candid that prosecutors weakened that outcome by also charging the far lesser Mann Act, and he traces the same commodifying logic from that case back to the 1980s pornography commission he helped establish under Attorney General Edwin Meese, a task force he says the Clinton administration later dismantled entirely, including its child pornography enforcement. A successor bill, closing gaps that remain, has already passed the House twice with strong bipartisan margins and died twice in the Senate, killed once by Bob Menendez, with Thomas Massie among the recorded no votes.

             His sharpest observation is about language. He hears in "the fetus is a parasite" and in the votes to permit sex-selective abortion of girls, which he calls theatre of the absurd, the same dehumanising instinct that lets pornography and trafficking treat women as commodities rather than people. He suspects history will eventually judge this era the way it now judges slavery, as something contemporaries defended and later generations cannot understand having defended.

             Asked what should be done, Smith's answer is personal rather than programmatic. Stand up regardless of the cost, because the polling and his own long career suggest the fear of doing so is overstated. Finish the trafficking bill the Senate has twice let die. And do not mistake silence, from institutions or from individual members, for safety. In his account, the faith community and its allies remain, as he puts it, the only ones standing between current policy and something considerably more coercive.