Pro-life Divided
Can you split the baby between power and principle?
Former president Donald Trump has highlighted a current and important fracture in the pro-life movement. In a video posted online, Trump said he believes abortion should stay with the states and that he would not endorse a federal ban if he regains the White House. While Trump has changed his line on abortion a number of times, he believes that a hard ball pro-life position is not popular and will lose the election.
Folks who see the incremental steps which chipped away at Roe vs Wade (born alive legislation, admitting privileges for hospitals, partial birth abortion bans, cooling off periods, pain capable bills) believe that less ambitious goals are needed to secure power. While the aim is for an end to abortion, the thinking is that you must meet voters where they are. If you don’t take power, you can’t save lives.
On the other side of the divide are those who understand that like slavery, abortion cannot be left to individual states – if it is a moral evil (and it is), why should we tolerate it even a little? As with slavery, tolerating it in some states will lead to the “acceptance of it in all the states.”
It is clear that pro-lifers were not as well-prepared as they should have been for the post-Roe America. Far from embracing the cause of life wholesale, the presence of abortion for so long has made people reluctant to live without it; the marketing campaigns to gloss over the evil have worked their magic in many quarters. At his Substack, Rod Dreher gives the example of Hungary which has a conservative government sympathetic to Christianity, but “abortion rights are so firmly entrenched among Hungarian voters, mostly the legacy of communism, that any government that tried to chip away on them in any meaningful sense would find itself tossed out.”
Democrats will certainly be pushing abortion as a key issue in November – it might be the only issue they can really trumpet. If President Biden is returned to office, he has made it clear he intends to make unfettered abortion the law of the land. The patchwork of abortion laws across our nation shows we have a lot of work to do convicting Americans that abortion takes an innocent life. We can’t forget, though circumstances are not what we would have them be, that we worship a powerful God who can throw down presidents and establish presidents. And he can truly change hearts and minds.