The Pro-Life Movement's Slow Suicide Continues at the GOP Convention
Hacks are out in force spinning the new Trump-directed Republican Party Platform.
By now you’ve probably heard all about the Republican Party’s new Trumpified party platform. You can click here for my coverage of all the details for my day job, but the gist is that MAGA yes-men rammed through the platform committee a new 16-page platform (down from 58 pages) that reads almost indistinguishably from a Trump campaign pamphlet. It dramatically cuts down on specific policies and policy details in favor of rhetoric about general goals and ideas—all the better to give Donald and like-minded Republicans wiggle room to “negotiate” or “evolve” in office on issues like gun rights—references to which are almost completely gone.
But the change that’s garnered the lion’s share of attention so far is the deletion of the GOP’s longstanding pledge 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.” The new language reads:
We proudly stand for families and Life. We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights. After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the States and to a vote of the People. We will oppose Late Term Abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments).
The lingering acknowledgment of the Fourteenth Amendment, which empowers Congress to guarantee equal protection, becomes nonsensical when connected to states being free to pass pro-life laws, which they always were irrespective of the amendment. But it did its real job, which was to give Big Life sellout organizations a fig-leaf of an excuse to rubber-stamp the platform, which many of them did.
As was to be expected, a motley assortment of Trump fanboys, MAGA grifters, get-along types, and Republicans who never really liked the pro-life cause anyway are out in force making excuses for gutting the cause’s ultimate goal from the GOP. So I decided to use this column as a guide to answering some of the most common talking points.
“How dare pro-lifers turn on Trump after he did what nobody else ever could and overturned Roe v. Wade?”
This is grotesque on multiple levels. First is the sick cultish notion that it’s “betrayal” to continue holding a candidate for office to standards after he did good things in the past. Pro-lifers have been thanking Trump gushingly for years about the good things he did. That doesn’t mean he’s owed our silence when he does bad things. None of his pro-life actions were personal favors; they were part of his job responsibilities that we forced him to live up to in exchange for our support. Which we gave him in 2016 and 2020, thereby fulfilling our end of the bargain. Now he wants our support for a third election, but instead of promising to deliver on the pro-life cause’s current national-level needs, feels entitled to demand our support while drastically changing for the worse.
Second, the idea that Trump is uniquely responsible for something all the “losers” before him couldn’t deliver in overturning Roe ignores a mountain of facts—including that the Dobbs majority was comprised of appointees from three Republican presidents; that it took 50+ Republican senators to confirm each of them plus holding Antonin Scalia’s seat open through the end of Barack Obama’s presidency; that three SCOTUS vacancies opening during Trump’s tenure was pure luck rather than something he planned or caused; and the fact that selection of Trump’s judges was famously outsourced to conventional conservative/Republican legal minds as a condition of getting pro-lifers to accept him, meaning a President Cruz or President Rubio would have certainly chosen justices at least as good (and quite possibly even some of the same exact names). How many people are aware that Trump himself said he didn’t actually ask his nominees how they’d rule on Roe because his Swamp advisors told him he wasn’t supposed to, meaning he literally did not know whether they would actually do the thing for which he’s now claiming sole credit?
(Click here for a comprehensive review of Trump’s first term on life issues, which includes details and sources for the above.)
“Trump already got you pro-lifers what you wanted; the rest is up to the states anyway.”
First, it’s pure ignorance and/or dishonesty to suggest that returning abortion to the states and leaving it there was ever any kind of consensus pro-life position. We’re having this discussion because of how long the GOP’s national platform has explicitly recognized that’s not the end of the issue. See above and my April column for elaboration. Yes, there have always been individuals on the Right—mostly moderate and/or libertarian types—who’ve advocated stopping federally after Roe was gone, but they’ve always been the clear exception, not the other way around.
Second, overturning Roe is most certainly not the “only thing” pro-lifers wanted, and frankly the claim is so contrary to reality I doubt if any reasonably knowledgeable observer actually believes it. Contrary to revisionists, supporting eventual national prohibition has been widely understood to be at the top of that list since the Reagan years, and here’s a small sampling of other important roles presidents have long been understood to have in the abortion battle:
Support for federally banning late-term abortion (which Trump satisfied in Term 1 but now opposes)
Opposing taxpayer funding not only of abortion but of Planned Parenthood (Trump was good on that in Term 1; but his new platform doesn’t say anything about it)
Prosecuting Planned Parenthood for the numerous federal laws it broke in the baby-parts scandal (which Trump completely neglected in Term 1)
Opposing taxpayer funding of birth control (Trump’s new platform endorses “access to Birth Control”)
Rescinding pro-abortion EOs and regulations, replacing them with pro-life ones (Trump was pretty good there in Term 1, but just recently he said he’s fine with distribution of abortion pills and supports the Supreme Court’s recent decision to let Biden’s flagrantly-illegal abortion pill rules stand)
Opposing other anti-life practices such as cloning, embryo use in stem cell research, and IVF (Trump now vocally supports IVF; as for the others in Term 2, who knows?)
Use the presidential bully pulpit to give rhetorical support for state pro-life efforts (Trump has spent the past year actively undermining state pro-life efforts)
That last point deserves elaboration. Gutting the GOP’s commitment to the pro-life movement’s ultimate long-term goal is more than enough to justify pro-lifers turning on Trump, but as anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the past year could tell you, it’s far from the only thing he’s done to earn our enmity.
He demands exceptions in pro-life laws, but then says heartbeat laws that have exceptions are still too extreme. He says the cause is up to the states now, but instead of encouraging his fans to do the right thing in their states he expresses total indifference to the outcome of state abortion battles. He says the big thing to do nationally is focus attention on Democrats’ extremism, but refuses to even say how he’ll vote as a Florida resident on a ballot initiative to write effectively unlimited abortion into the state constitution.
For decades, talk radio has decried establishment “RINOs” and their desire to purge the right to life and other pesky social issues from Republican politics. They never succeeded—but in just a couple of years, Donald Trump brought Washington GOP Swamp creatures closer to that goal than ever—with the near-total acquiescence of not just the talk radio set but Big Life itself. We are entering uncharted waters, and it’s not at all clear whether America will have a viable, national-level pro-life movement when it reaches the other side.