In this year’s election cycle, a great number of news stories have popped up about how Donald Trump has betrayed the pro-life movement. Apparently, some people on the religious right have even said that they won’t vote for him in 2024 because of this.
Here, for instance, is the beginning of a Rod Dreher column entitled “Nixon To China — Trump To Abortion Clinic:”
“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” — Johnny Rotten.
So said the singer of the Sex Pistols at the end of what proved to be their final concert (follow the link to look at the clip). Pro-life supporters of Donald Trump have the right to say the same thing now.
Mike Pence was on the same bandwagon back in April, when he wrote an editorial for the New York Times entitled “Donald Trump Has Betrayed the Pro-Life Movement.” The same blunt accusations of betrayal are on the front page of First Things, and they’re being echoed by pro-lifers with humbler platforms. Bethel McGrew’s ramblings at FurtherUp.net are as good a sample as any:
Having thus thrown socons under the bus, he has proceeded to back up over them, repeatedly. Democrats will still insist he could be playing 4D pro-life chess this whole time, because that’s how they will get themselves elected. The rest of us are free to state the obvious.
Donald Trump has given pro-lifers plenty of reasons to believe that he isn’t one of them. He removed the call for a federal abortion ban from the GOP platform at this year’s convention, and he doesn’t want to use the Comstock Act to ban the shipment of abortion pills by mail. He has vacillated on how he’ll vote in Florida’s abortion referendum this fall. He has spoken out in support of in vitro fertilization. And he’s said that his administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights” — whatever that means. Basically, now that Trump has fulfilled his original promise to get Roe v. Wade repealed and turn abortion back into a states’ rights issue, he doesn’t feel as though he owes the pro-life movement anything else.
Obviously, Trump’s rhetoric isn’t going to win him support among Democrats. They know an enemy when they see one, and they’re not going to forget that it’s because of Trump’s judicial appointments that we’re debating these issues in the first place. But Trump apparently believes that it’s important to reassure moderate Republicans and swing voters that he, personally, is not a threat to their “reproductive rights.”
Meanwhile, on the conservative side, most people are astute enough to admit that a federal ban on abortion or IVF has no chance of getting through Congress, so it doesn’t really matter if the president wants to sign one or not, and that Trump is still much more deserving of our votes than Kamala Harris. At the same time, many of these right-wing commentators (Dreher included) are intent on chalking this up to the pro-life movement being “weaker” now than it was during the Reagan and Bush administrations, when (so the story goes) their cause demanded, and got, more respect from Republican officeholders.
But when you actually look at the facts, even this version of history is fantastical.
Donald Trump himself was never much of a social conservative, and everybody knew this. Trump’s core promise to the religious right was that he would appoint originalist justices to the Supreme Court, who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade so that pro-lifers could enact the laws that they wanted in their own states.
And this is exactly what happened! Trump had the tremendous good fortune to appoint three justices, and all three of them — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — voted with the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center. Because of this, abortion is now illegal from conception in fourteen states, and illegal after a baby’s heartbeat is detected in four more.
Prior to Trump, those numbers were zero. That’s not a coincidence.
And so, next to Trump — who didn’t promise social conservatives everything they wanted, but who did deliver on his most important promise — how do other Republican presidents stack up? How were pro-lifers treated by Reagan and the Bushes, who were good at flattering them and making them feel important?
Well, as it turns out, the last Republican president before Donald Trump who didn’t appoint at least one pro-choice Supreme Court justice was…Herbert Hoover.
I am not making this up. Since Hoover, we’ve had Dwight Eisenhower (appointer of two pro-choice justices, Brennan and Stewart), Richard Nixon (who appointed three: Burger, Blackmun, and Powell), Gerald Ford (Stevens), Ronald Reagan (O’Connor and Kennedy), George H.W. Bush (Souter), and George W. Bush (Roberts). Granted, these six presidents, in addition to appointing ten pro-choice justices, also managed to appoint four pro-life justices among them (Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito). And yet, judging by the actual results, the pro-life movement all throughout this time was extremely weak.
But from Ronald Reagan’s time onward, Republicans knew how to exploit their pro-life base. They knew how to get a crowd riled up. They knew how to shed crocodile tears about what was happening in American abortion facilities, and how to recite platitudes about how all lives matter, and how to make useless gestures like pledging to support a constitutional amendment banning all abortions (which they knew would never get enacted). Meanwhile, they kept rolling over like a bunch of dogs in front of the one enemy that really mattered: liberal judges, who not only could count on the total submission of the Executive and Legislative Branches to their rulings, but who also benefited from by a steady supply of new liberal judges appointed by fake conservative politicians.
Through all of this, pro-life leaders of the more optimistic sort deluded themselves by insisting that, deep down, America was really a pro-life country. The American people, they said, had sadly been blocked from legislating their principles by the tragedy of Roe v. Wade, but by working hard to build a “culture of life,” they could still triumph in the end. Although these people probably thought they were taking the moral high ground, they had really just rediscovered the Nuremburg Defense — basically, they were saying that abortion is murder, but that we Americans aren’t really guilty of mass murder because, unlike those nasty Europeans who actually wanted to legalize abortion, we Americans were just following orders.
Of course, the myth of a hidden pro-life majority is belied by the fact that the original Roe v. Wade decision — which came down in 1973, at a time when most voters were against abortion — was met with peaceful acquiescence instead of an 1848-style “Day of the Barricades,” when ten or twenty million people refused to go to work in the morning and poured into the city centers instead, seizing government buildings and blocking all the roads, and not abandoning their positions until either (1) Roe v. Wade was retracted or (2) the army ran them over with tanks, like what the Soviet Union had done in Budapest and what China would later do at Tiananmen Square.
And so, in the real world, what we were left with was a pro-life movement that felt (correctly) that something was deeply wrong with their country’s embrace of abortion, but at the same time really didn’t want to admit that their own side represented only a minority of Americans, and a minority whose convictions were often quite tepid at that.
Thus, in a certain sense, the pre-Trump GOP was a perfect match for the religious right’s activist class. The activists turned out the voters, and in exchange, the politicians made the activists feel important with their words and gestures, while their actions (i.e., appointing just enough pro-choice judges to ensure that abortion never came to the ballot) shielded everybody involved from having to admit just how unpopular their cause was becoming with the common people, who were rapidly evolving to view their sexual freedom as the summum bonum of life.
For a long time, most of the Republican base played along with this. With very few exceptions, pro-lifers refrained from protesting in the one circumstance when protests would have really mattered — that is, when Republican presidents tried to appoint judges with a record of being living constitutionalists (John Roberts) or even of supporting abortion earlier in their careers (Sandra Day O’Connor).
Instead, these people poured most of their protest energy into useless virtue-signaling like the March for Life, a demonstration that was ostensibly aimed at the Judiciary — the branch of government least responsive to public pressure.
Indeed, when the Court reaffirmed Roe v. Wade with Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, the five-justice majority defended its decision by writing about how it didn’t really matter whether the legal arguments for Roe were sound or not because the Court needed to stay the course or risk losing its “legitimacy” by surrendering to popular opinion. (Yes, those justices really were that awful — and all five of them were appointed by Republican presidents. The only Democrat justice at the time, Byron White, was a conservative holdover from the Kennedy administration.)
Fortunately, this state of affairs was not to last forever. As the years dragged on, the perfidy of the GOP establishment became more and more obvious — not only to the religious right, but also to the libertarians, and to the old-fashioned Buchananite conservatives, and to the Tea Party, and to everyone else who expected right-wing politicians to do more than just vote for tax cuts and foreign wars.
When the blowback finally came, in the form of Donald J. Trump, the central issue was illegal immigration. But the pro-lifers also had their place in the Make America Great Again coalition. Trump didn’t promise them everything that they wanted, but he did promise that he would appoint originalist judges to the Supreme Court, and thereby return the abortion issue to the states.
And then, with the help of Mitch McConnel, Leonard Leo, and the Federalist Society, Trump actually did it.
Donald Trump is the only Republican president in the last half-century who has kept his central promise to the pro-life movement.
And yet now, even as abortion is illegal or severely restricted in eighteen states (18 more than at any other point in my lifetime, or even in my parents’ lifetimes), Trump is being vilified and called a traitor, because he says the wrong words, and because he doesn’t make pro-lifers feel as though they’re more important than they actually are, and because he won’t advocate for a federal abortion ban or a federal IVF ban — laws that have no chance of being enacted anyway in a country where most people are clearly pro-choice.
Pro-lifers need to decide whether they care more about actions or words. They need to decide whether they will support the president who promised them half of what they wanted, and then delivered it, or whether they prefer the defeated remnants of the old GOP, which promised them the moon, over and over again, and delivered nothing.
While I would personally like to see abortion banned in every state, I’m also sensible enough to admit that banning it in the third or so of the country where most people share my views is a big win in and of itself. Indeed, it’s about the biggest win that’s possible at the moment. Donald Trump deserves the credit for this.
And also, unless you are excited about the prospect of Roe v. Wade being reinstated in a stronger form, with American taxpayers being compelled to fund abortion up to the moment of birth in every state of the Union, then Trump deserves your vote this November.
Twilight Patriot is the pen name for a young American who lives in South Carolina, where he is currently working toward a graduate degree. You can read more of his writings at his Substack.
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