Lies, Damned Lies, and Stupidity Flourish to Justify Trump’s Abandonment of the Preborn

Nobody can honestly say they couldn't have seen this coming -- least of all the sellouts who let it happen.

As I covered at LifeSiteNews here and here, Donald Trump kicked off the week with a bold new step in his de facto transformation of the Republican Party from an at least nominally pro-life party into a functionally “pro-choice” one, in which the right to life doesn’t matter beyond offering a more moderate, European-style alternative to Democrats’ prenatal bloodlust.

As was to be expected from their complete lack of interest in trying for a pro-life presidential nominee during the primary, much of the professional pro-life industry (with the noble exception of my old boss Lila Rose) and conservative media grifters deployed an array of excuses for why declaring the battle over at the national level wasn’t really the betrayal their audiences recognized it to be. We’re going to dismantle them here.

“The Dobbs opinion said abortion should be decided by the states”

No it didn’t. Samuel Alito’s majority opinion said “the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,” which encompasses both federal and state government. Brett Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion said the Constitution “leaves the issue for the people and their elected representatives to resolve through the democratic process in the States or Congress” (emphasis added).

“Leaving abortion to the states is the principled, constitutionally-correct decision”

This is libertarian misconception and/or moderate bias talking, not conservative first principles or sound jurisprudence rooted in textualism or originalism. As I wrote in November:

The preborn are living, individual human beings. Intentionally killing them via abortion is a clear-cut violation of the individual human right to life. Life is the first unalienable right identified in the Declaration of Independence. The Fifth Amendment declares that “No person shall [...] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Fourteenth Amendment explicitly forbids any state from “deny[ing] to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” which “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation.”

Josh Craddock’s May 2017 Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy essay “Protecting Prenatal Persons: Does the Fourteenth Amendment Prohibit Abortion?” contains ample proof that preborn personhood is rooted in the English common law tradition on which American law was built, and that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment understood themselves to be protecting all humans, not just former slaves.

As for conservative principles, federalism is a brilliant system that was never meant to be applied to literally everything. If I don’t like my state’s schools, taxes, COVID rules, business regulations, gun restrictions, drug laws, etc., and if I can’t persuade my fellow residents to change them, then I can escape those things by moving to a different state. But preborn babies can’t “vote with their feet”; they’re completely at the mercy of their mother’s desire to get rid of them and ability to leave their home state for a more murder-friendly one. That would be unjust enough; now that pro-aborts are devoting their energy to abortion travel funds, state constitutional amendments tying legislatures’ hands, etc., a knee-jerk “but federalism!” isn’t just wrong; it’s sticking one’s head in the sand.

“Leaving abortion to the states was the Right’s/the GOP’s/the pro-life movement’s position all along anyway”

This one is a straight-up lie. The official position of the Republican Party platform (as of 2016, the last time the party bothered to write a platform) is to “support a human life amendment to the Constitution and legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to children before birth.”

For decades, Congressional Republicans and all the major pro-life organizations have consistently supported federal legislation to ban infanticide, late-term abortion, and partial-birth abortions nationwide. The National Right to Life Committee, Susan B. Anthony List, Students for Life, the National Pro-Life Alliance, Americans United for Life, and American Life League—a spread that includes solid groups as well as squishy ones—all support various federal measures, up to constitutional amendments.

In his landmark essay “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation,” Ronald Reagan—the last real president this fetid joke of a party had—endorsed several bills that were pending before Congress at the time to “enable our people to reaffirm the sanctity of human life, even the smallest and the youngest and the most defenseless,” as well as the “more difficult route of constitutional amendment, and I will give these initiatives my full support.”

But sure, it’s a complete mystery where the idea of a national ban came from.

“‘Re-federalizing’ abortion will only result in national abortion-on-demand”

This talking point is so nonsensical that one can’t help but question if anyone but the most simple-minded of social media users saying it actually believes it.

It’s not as if federal pro-life laws (which, again, we’ve been pushing and sometimes enacting for years without incident) have some secret mechanism snuck into them by pro-abortion saboteurs that would give them new options they didn’t already have, or if they would set some legal precedent having the same effect. And it’s certainly not as if Democrats operate on the honor system and won’t push their federal abortion law as long we don’t attempt ours.

Indeed, Democrats and the feminazi hordes backing them have been chomping at the bit to nationalize abortion-on-demand for years. Joe Biden routinely calls on Congress to legislatively codify Roe v. Wade, and pro-aborts complain that Barack Obama failed to back when he was in office. The respective bills to do so, the Orwellian-named Women’s Health Protection Act and its predecessor the Freedom of Choice Act, would of course go much further than that and effectively destroy states’ ability to pass any pro-life laws.

And the only reason it hasn’t happened yet is because when Democrats have been in the Senate majority they’ve lacked the votes to kill the filibuster. That’s it. Their doing bad when they have the opportunity has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not we squander our opportunities to do good.

“Drawing any federal line will undermine stronger state laws”

This one is similarly absurd. Federal laws create federal offenses, and state laws create state crimes. If Congress passes a 15-week abortion ban, for instance, nothing about that would automatically make a state heartbeat law legally invalid. At most somebody could try to make a double-jeopardy argument against prosecuting someone twice for one abortion that fell under both statutes, but that would simply mean exercising prosecutorial discretion when necessary.

Again, it’s hard to read this as anything other than people contorting themselves to make up reasons to oppose federal laws to justify Trump opposing them.

“A full national ban is politically unpopular right now”

Um...duh? Virtually nobody is saying that the next Republican president has to commit to delivering a national abortion ban in the next four years. As we explored here, here, here, and here, of course abolishing abortion is a long-term project that will require years of onerous legal, political, educational, and cultural work to achieve. But stating the obvious is in no way responsive to having a problem with the presumptive leader of the ostensible “pro-life” party actively undermining that work.

It is amazing how many supposedly intelligent, serious voices think nothing of resorting to glaring logical leaps, such as the idea that the impossibility of reaching a long-term goal right now justifies or necessitates declaring that said goal was never really the goal, and that the national battle to reach it is not merely delayed, but over.

"Don’t preemptively rule out legislation Republicans and pro-lifers have been pushing for over a decade—bills which are already fundamentally moderate—or poison the well against our efforts to get more in the future” really shouldn’t be too much to ask of our standard-bearer for head of our party and movement, or too difficult for leading conservative voices to grasp. (And in fact, it isn’t. But hey, grift requires excuses.)

“Trump’s just being politically pragmatic for now; he’s not really abandoning the cause”

In order to make it as a MAGA shill, you have to get comfortable with ignoring what Trump actually says and pretend he meant something completely different that’s easier to defend. But the record is clear.

Trump, Meet the Press interview, September 2023:

I would sit down with both sides and I'd negotiate something and we'll end up with peace in that issue for the first time in 52 years [...]

Something's going to happen where the both sides are going to be able to come together and then we'll be able to go on to other things, like the economy, our military.

Trump, Truth Social announcement, April 2024:

I want to thank the six justices Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch, incredible people for having the courage to allow this long-term, hard-fought battle to finally end.

And let’s not forget that this is a guy who repeatedly attacked as “terrible” a heartbeat-based ban in Florida that has the exceptions he claims are so damn important, and who just today agreed that Arizona’s newly-enforceable pre-Roe abortion ban goes “too far” and needs to be “straightened out,” and who flippantly predicted victory for a radical pro-abortion amendment pending in Florida, without bothering to fake the slightest bit of displeasure with that outcome.

He’s not moving chess pieces as part of some long game. He’s not thinking about any deeper strategy to end abortion. He’s using the undeserved goodwill and deference given to him by grassroots conservatives to finally realize the dream of liberal Republican elites: making that uncomfortable, unseemly abortion issue go away so they can focus on what really matters to them.

The man doesn’t care about the sanctity of life. He doesn’t give a damn about slaughtered babies. The restoration of unalienable rights means nothing to him. It never did. And may God have mercy on those who choose to continue pretending otherwise.