Many pro-life Trump supporters will be shocked and angered at such a statement. But I urge them to resist this emotional reaction and dispassionately consider the cold, hard facts. Trump supports preserving access to the abortion pill, which is responsible for the majority of abortions in the United States. Since these pills can be sent by mail into states where abortion is restricted or banned, preserving such access largely undermines recent state-level pro-life measures. Trump also actively opposes those measures in any event, insisting that they are “too tough” and need to be “redone.” He has repeatedly said that, even at the state level, abortion must remain legal beyond six weeks. And he wants the federal government to pay for, or to force insurance companies to pay for, in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments – a practice that results in the destruction of more human embryos than even abortion does. The only threat to the unborn Trump has clearly and consistently opposed is late-term abortion, which accounts for a mere 1% of abortions. In short, the policies Trump favors would prevent very few abortions and encourage the discarding of millions of embryos. True, Trump is much better than Harris in supporting the rights of pro-lifers. But he is now only a little better in upholding the rights of the unborn.
To be sure, the enthusiasm of many pro-lifers for Trump is understandable. The Supreme Court Justices he appointed were crucial to overturning Roe v. Wade. He took other pro-life steps during his first term, such as reinstating the Mexico City Policy, which prevents taxpayer dollars from being used to fund abortions overseas. Pro-lifers are desperate for a champion, and Trump’s grit and victories over pro-choice extremists like Harris and Hillary Clinton can make him seem to fill the bill. But none of that changes the unhappy facts summarized in the previous paragraph. None of it changes the fact that Trump rigged the GOP party platform process so as to exclude pro-lifers and ram through a removal of the pro-life plank. None of it conflicts with the clear evidence that Trump pushed a pro-life agenda during his first term only out of political expediency rather than conviction, and has reverted to the moderate pro-choice position that he held for decades because he judges that that is now the politically more expedient course.When I and
others raised
the alarm about these problems during the campaign, there were many pro-life
Trump supporters who quietly acknowledged them but urged that criticism of
Trump be muted until after the election, lest it help Harris. But the election is now over and Trump won
handily. There is no longer any excuse
for keeping silent. And pro-lifers must not keep silent, because Trump’s
policies on these matters are gravely immoral.
Let’s look more closely at both the IVF issue and Trump’s current stance
on abortion to see just how grave the situation is.
The gravity of the IVF issue
The Catholic
Church is the best-known critic of IVF, but it is crucial to emphasize that the
moral problems with IVF have nothing essentially to do with specifically
Catholic premises, or indeed with religious premises of any other kind. As with abortion, even an atheist could
object to IVF on completely secular moral grounds (even if in fact most atheists
no doubt don’t object to it). There are
many moral problems with IVF, but for present purposes I will focus only on
those that anyone who already agrees that abortion is wrong should be able to
see. This is by no means a trivial
exercise, because in recent months, a number of people often thought of as
staunchly pro-life have endorsed IVF.
Trump himself is an example, as are Ted
Cruz, Marco Rubio,
and other Republican U.S. Senators. It
is important for pro-lifers tempted to accept IVF to see that they cannot do so
consistently with their opposition to abortion.
Now, in
vitro fertilization itself simply involves bringing sperm and egg together
outside the normal context of the womb, so as to yield a new human embryo. While there are moral grounds for objecting
to this practice, this much does not amount to homicide, as abortion does. But it is by no means the end of the
story. For the IVF procedure to yield
the results desired, producing a single embryo is not sufficient. Usually several embryos are generated, even
as many as a dozen. From them, those
considered the best candidates are chosen for implantation in the mother’s
womb. The rest are discarded, used for
research, or frozen for possible future use.
Among those implanted, one is often judged the healthiest and brought to
term, and the others aborted if the mother does not want more than one
child.
Destroying
unused embryos is morally on a par with abortion, and killing unwanted embryos
after implantation just is a kind of
abortion. To speak harshly but
truthfully, the destruction of embryos that is typically involved in IVF is
murder, no less than abortion is. A recent
estimate puts the number of embryos lost in in the IVF process every year in
the United States at over a million and a
half– twice the number of abortions
that occur in the U.S. every year. Nor,
again, is this an evil that can realistically be avoided if IVF is to have the
results desired from it. Experts judge that“discarding embryos is inherent to the IVF process.”
Freezing
embryos indefinitely is also gravely evil.
Most of those frozen are simply abandoned. But even those that are not are done a grave
injustice. A child has a right to be
provided for by his parents, with food, shelter, instruction, and the
like. Any parent who would deprive a
child of these things would be considered wicked. But how much more does a child have a right
to be nurtured in the womb and brought into the world, which is a precondition
of these other goods? A parent who leaves
an embryo frozen in the expectation that it might eventually be taken by others
is comparable to someone who abandons a child on a doorstep. A parent who allows a frozen embryo to be
abandoned altogether, eventually to die, is comparable to the pagans of old who
would abandon unwanted babies on garbage heaps.
To
characterize a presidential administration that actively promotes IVF as
“pro-life” would be ludicrous, indeed obscene.
Yet Trump intends for his administration to do just this. Again, he wants the federal government either
to pay for all the costs of IVF procedures, or to force insurance companies to
do so. If Catholic institutions are
forced to participate, this would be an assault on religious freedom no less
grave than Obama’s attempted contraception mandate. To be sure, Trump has
indicated that he might be open to a religious exemption. But that is nowhere near good enough. The fundamental problem is not that Catholics
would be forced to participate in the murder of embryos, bad as that would
be. The fundamental problem is the
murder of embryos.
Some might
suggest that Trump’s call for an IVF mandate was just campaign rhetoric that
will quickly be forgotten. But while we
can hope this is true, we cannot
complacently assume that it is, and
in fact the evidence points in the opposite direction. Trump has not merely made a perfunctory
statement or two on the issue. On the
contrary, he repeatedly and enthusiastically promoted the IVF mandate during
the campaign, going
so far as to characterize himself as “the father of IVF” and to
pledge that the GOP will now be “the party for IVF” even more than the
Democrats. Other Republicans with
pro-life reputations have also in recent months taken
positive action to promote IVF.
Even JD Vance, despite his reputation as a faithful pro-life Catholic, has
enthusiastically spoken in favor of it. Elon Musk, a major Trump ally and advisor, is
an especially vigorous proponent of IVF, several of his children having been
conceived via the procedure.
As one
commentator has concluded,
“if Trump makes good on his promise of federally-funded IVF, it will be one of
the most objectively anti-life acts in US government history.” But even this is only the half of the problem.
Trump is now pro-choice
In the years
since Roe was overturned, Trump has
repeatedly said that the abortion issue should now be left to the states rather
than the federal government. Yet he has
during the same period also repeatedly criticized state-level restrictions on
abortion. When the Arizona Supreme Court
ruled in favor of enforcing an abortion ban, Trump
complained that it “went too far.” When Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a
law banning abortion after six weeks, Trump
condemned the ban as “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.” The reason, he explained, is
that he thinks “the six week is too short, there has to be more time” – more
time, that is to say, for the mother to decide whether to have an
abortion. And again, he
says that the restrictive measures some state Republicans have
pushed for are “too tough, too tough” and “are going to be redone.”
During the
campaign, Trump repeatedly obfuscated on Florida’s Amendment 4, which would
have expanded abortion access even to late term. At one point, when asked whether he would
vote against it, he
responded that he would “be voting that we need more than six weeks”
– thereby giving the impression that he would vote for the amendment. After an outcry from pro-lifers, Trump then
said that he would vote against it, but reiterated that he still
thought a six week ban was too restrictive.
But then, on Election Day, he
refused to say whether he had in fact voted against the amendment.
At one
point, Trump said
that a fifteen-week ban on abortion at the federal level might be
“reasonable” and reflected “the number of weeks” he was “thinking in terms
of.” He later
changed course and declared that he would veto any federal ban. But when you consider his initial view that a
fifteen-week federal ban would reflect a “reasonable” time frame, together with
his repeated criticism of six-week bans at the state level, the natural
conclusion to draw is that the most Trump would support in defense of the
unborn is a fifteen-week ban on abortion at the state level. In other words, Trump’s position seems to be
that abortion should be legal, even at
the state level, before fifteen weeks.
That is
manifestly an example of what every pro-lifer before twenty minutes ago would
call a pro-choice position. It is what
no pro-lifer would have tolerated in a Republican presidential candidate before
Trump. True, it is not as extreme a pro-choice position as the
one that Kamala Harris and other Democrats now routinely take. But it is still manifestly pro-choice, and
not pro-life.
Now, 93% of
abortions in the U.S. occur
at thirteen weeks or earlier– that is to say, precisely during the
period that Trump apparently wants abortion to be legal even at the state
level. And again, he has also stated
that he “will not block” access to abortion pills, which
account for the majority of abortions and can be mailed across state
lines into states with restrictive abortion laws. In short, Trump’s
current position on abortion would permit well over 90% of abortions even at
the state level. As with his IVF
policy, it would be ludicrous and indeed obscene to characterize this as
remotely close to a “pro-life” position.
Here too it would
be naïve to think that Trump’s recent statements are mere campaign rhetoric
that will be forgotten now that he has been elected. Trump has not merely refrained from
advocating pro-life policy when running for a second term. He has actively
fought against such policies when Republicans have pushed them even at the
state level, and took positive action to
remove from the GOP platform its commitment to defending the lives of the
unborn. He has
emphasized that his new administration “will be great for women and
their reproductive rights,” standard code for pro-choice policies. Late in his campaign, Trump’s wife Melania
released a memoir which was loudly
marketed as, of all things, an expression of her commitment to
abortion rights. It would be absurd to
suppose that the Trump campaign would permit this if it were not trying to send
a reassuring message to those worried that Trump would return to pro-life
advocacy once elected. And far from
distancing himself from this message, Trump has effusively praised
the book (and at the Catholic Al Smith dinner, of all places). He has also now surrounded himself with
pro-choice advisors like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, and gotten
even the once staunchly pro-life Vance to temporize on the issue.
Some
pro-life Trump supporters might suggest that while Trump’s current position is
regrettable, it is irrelevant. By
helping to overturn Roe, they might
say, he has opened the door to fighting abortion at the state level, and
pro-lifers can now do this as effectively without Trump’s support as they could
with it. But this too is naïve. Trump is clearly convinced that the pro-life
cause is now a liability for him and for the GOP in general. That is the best explanation for why he has
fought even state-level restrictions rather than staying neutral. With only thin majorities in Congress and
worries about how the midterms might go, he is likely to continue to try to discourage
Republican governors and lawmakers from pressing for restrictions on
abortion. Presidents can exert
considerable pressure, especially when they are popular with the party base and
have won decisive electoral victories. And
as I have argued in a
previous article, Trump’s record shows that he is likely to be
vindictive against those who resist him on this matter. Pro-lifers will have their work cut out for
them.
Some common responses
I’ve found
that while some pro-life Trump supporters are clear-eyed about these problems, others
are extremely reluctant to face up to them.
There are several stock responses I’ve seen over and over, not only
throughout the campaign but even after Trump won. It is worthwhile to explain why, though emotionally
attractive to some, these responses completely miss the point or otherwise have
no force:
1. “How can you say Trump is
pro-choice? He got Roe overturned! Have you no
gratitude?”
Yes, Trump
was instrumental in overturning Roe and
deserves thanks for that. But getting
rid of Roe does not by itself save
any unborn lives. It merely removes a
certain obstacle to saving them. One has
to take further positive steps in order actually to protect the unborn. And the trouble is that Trump has both
opposed such steps (insofar as he has actively opposed both federal action
against abortion and the state-level measures Republicans have pushed for), and
also proposed a new policy that positively threatens the unborn (the IVF
mandate).
Suppose
someone bought you a car but also both made it difficult or impossible for you
to get any gasoline, and encouraged others to steal the car. Obviously, it would be silly for someone to
defend him by saying “Don’t be ungrateful!
After all, he bought you the car!” Buying someone a car is hardly much of a gift
if you also make it impossible for the person to use or keep it. The point of having a car, after all, is to
drive it. Similarly, for pro-lifers, the
point of overturning Roe was to open
the door to protecting the unborn. For
Trump to help overturn Roe but then
go on to oppose federal and state-level restrictions and promote IVF defeats
this purpose. Trump is taking back with
his left hand what he gave with his right.
2. “But it would be politically unrealistic
to push for a national ban on abortion or IVF!”
This is no
doubt true, but it is beside the point, because no one is criticizing Trump for
failing to do that. His critics realize
that current political circumstances make such bans politically
unfeasible. But it is one thing simply
to refrain from pushing for a federal
abortion ban. It is quite another thing actively to oppose such a ban, and actively to remove the pro-life plank
from the GOP platform. It is one thing
simply not to oppose IVF. It is quite another actively to promote IVF and to push for federal funding of it. Moreover, the problem is not just that Trump
actively opposes any federal action in this area. It is that he has also actively opposed the
steps pro-lifers have been taking even at the state level to restrict abortion.
3. “After Dobbs, abortion is a state-level issue anyway, so Trump’s current views are
irrelevant”
There are
three problems with this response.
First, while Trump and his supporters often speak as if Dobbs permits the states alone to restrict abortion, that is not
true. After Dobbs, either the states or
the federal government may put restrictions on abortion. It may currently be politically unfeasible to
push for federal restrictions, but it is dishonest to insinuate that the Dobbs decision somehow rules out such
restrictions.
Second, even
where state-level restrictions are concerned, Trump’s current views are not irrelevant. Again, though out of one side of his mouth he
says that the states can do what they like, out of the other side he has been
actively opposing recent state-level restrictions. He clearly thinks these restrictions are
politically harmful to him and the GOP, and wants to discourage Republicans
even at the state level from pushing for them.
A president has tremendous influence on what happens in his party at all
levels, especially when he has tight control over the party apparatus and has
won a decisive electoral victory. Republican
politicians down-ballot who want the support of the president and the party are
bound to feel strong pressure not to resist him on the abortion issue.
Third, whatever
one says about abortion, Trump’s proposed IVF mandate would itself be a federal initiative. It is he, not his critics, who is making of
IVF’s threat to the unborn a federal issue rather than a state issue.
(Some
Catholic Trump supporters have argued that the natural law principle of
subsidiarity requires dealing with abortion only at the state level rather than
the federal level. But this is not true,
as I have shown in another
article.)
4. “No political candidate is going
to fit some imagined ideal. By
criticizing Trump, you are self-righteously making the perfect the enemy of the
good and encouraging a purity spiral that will only damage the pro-life cause!”
This is a
straw man. Trump’s pro-life critics are
not demanding perfection. And again,
they aren’t criticizing him for simply refraining from pushing a pro-life
agenda in a hostile political climate.
Rather, they are criticizing him for doing things that are positively gravely damaging to the
pro-life cause. As we have seen, Trump’s
current position on abortion would effectively permit over 90% of abortions, and his IVF proposal would actively promote
a procedure that entails even more
killing of the unborn than abortion does.
That is not merely imperfect or less than ideal. It not only permits but positively
facilitates the vast majority of killings of the unborn. It does not merely fail to promote the
pro-life cause, but is directly contrary
to it.
5. “But Harris is worse! It would have been insane for pro-lifers to
help her defeat Trump!”
Yes, Harris
is even worse than Trump, which is why I consistently said for months that it
would be better for her to lose and that it was justifiable for pro-lifers in
swing states to vote for Trump in order to ensure that she lost. But as
I also argued during the campaign, in no way did this entail that
Trump’s current position was not seriously problematic, or that pro-lifers
could be excused from criticizing his betrayal of the unborn. In any event, that is now moot. Harris has lost, Trump has won, and there is
no longer any excuse (if there ever was one) for pro-lifers to remain
silent.
6. “This is all just Trump
Derangement Syndrome (TDS)! You’re just
a NeverTrumper!”
This is the
most brain-dead response, and not really worthy of comment. But because it is extremely common, I’ll
offer a reply.
First, I am
neither a “NeverTrumper” nor “deranged” in my criticisms of him. Though I have always had serious reservations
about Trump, I did vote for him in 2016 and 2020 because the alternatives were
worse. To be sure, his behavior after
his 2020 defeat, and especially what he tried to pressure Mike Pence to do,
were in my opinion disgraceful and a grave
assault on the rule of law.
That alone should have prevented Republicans from ever nominating him
again. All the same, had I lived in a
swing state, I would have voted for him even in this election, just to keep
Harris out. I have also many times
explicitly acknowledged that Trump has real strengths and has done some good
things, and that many of the things his critics say about him are false. My article “Trump:
A buyer’s guide,” while very critical of him, also defends him
against these excessive and unfair criticisms.
No reasonable person who reads that article could accuse me of “TDS.”
If I really
were suffering from “TDS,” I would have been writing critical things about
Trump for years. In fact, in the years
since he took center stage in American politics, I have written very little
about him. The reason is that I find it
very unpleasant to do so, given that so many of his biggest critics and biggest
fans alike are unable to discuss the subject in a reasonable and civil
way. Whenever I have said positive
things about Trump, I have been accused of being part of the “MAGA cult” or the
like. Whenever I have said critical
things about him, I have been accused of “TDS” etc. So many people on both sides are so shrill
and irrational on the subject of Trump that for a long time I judged it better
to avoid saying much about him. Anyone
who has been paying attention will know that I started frequently commenting on
Trump only after he began to sell out the pro-life cause. The reason, as should be blindingly obvious
to any rational person, is not that I have an animus against Trump, but because
I have an animus against abortion.
In any
event, even if I did have an animus against Trump, that would be completely
irrelevant to the cogency of the arguments I have given here and in earlier
articles. The arguments stand or fall on
their own merits, whatever my motivations.
To suppose otherwise is to commit a blatant ad hominem fallacy.
But while
we’re on the subject of motivation, it’s worth noting that the issue cuts both
ways. Pro-life Trump voters are often
accused of putting politics ahead of their pro-life principles. The accusation is usually unfair, but not
always. Any pro-life Trump voter who,
even after he has been safely elected, would still refuse to criticize him for his betrayal of the unborn
thereby proves the critics right.
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posts: