Pro-Life Politics and Donald Trump
Thinking Through the Latest Controversy Regarding Trump and Abortion
The removal of pro-life language from the 2024 Republican Party platform has reignited a firestorm among evangelicals. Donald Trump is back to being persona non grata among prominent Christians just as the GOP is set to nominate him as its presidential candidate during the Republican National Convention next week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The following sentences, which were part of the GOP’s platform in both 2016 and 2020 (they were added to the platform in 1984), were removed at Trump’s direction:
Accordingly, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed. We 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 platform language on abortion reads as follows:
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).
In this slimmed-down 2024 platform that Trump himself created, this mention of abortion comes near the end of the document. Abortion is discussed nowhere in the platform’s 20 key principles.
The answers of two key senators on the Sunday morning talk circuit helped generate even more passion among evangelicals against the changes to the Republican Party platform. Senator Marco Rubio told CNN’s Dana Bash that with the fall of Roe, people in the states now get to decide abortion policies. Passing a federal law on abortion, he argued, is out of the question due to political circumstances.
On Meet the Press, Senator J.D. Vance essentially restated the elements of the new GOP platform. He, too, said abortion is a question for voters in the states to resolve and that the GOP is working to ensure that it’s more affordable for families to have babies. More controversially, he also supported Americans having access to mifepristone, an abortion pill, per a recent decision by the Supreme Court. Vance’s response comes on the heels of the publication of the Project 2025 policy agenda, which the Biden campaign is trying to hang around Trump’s neck.
Before evangelicals cast a vote for the American Solidarity Party in November, they should think more deeply about the implications of the changes to the GOP platform—and the future of the pro-life cause in America.
First off, the Republican Party has never been as strongly opposed to abortion as many evangelicals would like. It has never stood for the abolition of abortion nationwide, without exceptions. No previous Republican president or presidential hopeful supported outlawing all abortions. President Trump supported a 20-week national ban on abortion in 2016 and 2020 as part of the GOP’s platform (this legislation failed in the Senate in 2018). Were these honorable pro-life stances, or were they all betrayals of the pro-life cause?
Another consideration is that Trump’s campaign team is clearly trying to cobble together a wining national constituency in a post-Roe milieu. His goal is not to craft the perfect set of laws, but to correctly discern the political environment and then act prudentially given the constraints he faces. This is why Trump’s messaging on abortion throughout the 2024 campaign, which has been the same as what now appears in the GOP’s updated platform, has been to let people in the states decide the question of abortion in the hopes that they choose life.
Though clearly an imperfect solution—abortion is a great evil whatever voters decide—Trump is trying to navigate political terrain that’s arguably more difficult to traverse than what past Republican campaigns faced when Roe was still law. Performative measures, some of which simply kept up appearances, and symbolic legislation that never had a chance of passing are no longer enough. And it must be pointed out that the pro-life stalwarts who have steered the movement for decades have clearly been unable to attain any notable victories apart from Trump, a recent convert to the cause.
There is also no question that current political realities preclude the passage of a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. While past GOP platforms supported adding a human rights amendment to the Constitution, this was unsuccessful at a time when church attendance was higher than it is now and more Americans identified as being Christian. If the support was insufficient in 1984 to pass such an amendment, it certainly isn’t there currently.
Furthermore, evangelicals must understand that they are not the only constituency that Trump is worried about keeping in his fold. As Daniel Darling points out, the mostly unchurched working-class voters that Trump is attempting to bring into the Republican Party are “ambivalent at best about abortion.” Instead, they are “more animated by immigration” and “trade,” among other issue areas. This group also votes in higher numbers than traditional evangelicals—Darling notes that “only 13% of the GOP showed up in the Iowa primary.” This is exactly why Trump is currently spending more political capital on this group than evangelicals, who also face another disadvantage because their political views are not as popular as those of the working class. If evangelicals voted in larger numbers, however, this problem would largely be mitigated.
Not only do evangelicals not vote in the numbers that they should—if they did, Republicans would win every national election in a landslide—neither do they give sufficient money to the pro-life cause. For example, a political action committee in favor of adding abortion protections prior to fetal viability to the Florida Constitution has so far received $38 million in contributions. Meanwhile, pro-lifers have only given $269,000, with $105,000 of that coming from the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops and two Catholic dioceses. In fact, historically, far more money has gone to pro-abortion causes than pro-life ones. Open Secrets has reported that pro-abortion groups have outspent pro-life groups by a significant margin, though this gap has closed significantly since the Dobbs decision.
The pro-life movement itself also has a role to play in helping create our current dilemma. Though well intended, the “love them both” slogan that is common in the pro-life world moves perilously close to denying women who get an abortion any culpability in that act, softening its great moral evil. This tactic is far different than how Christians tend to treat less socially acceptable sins, which increasingly are even accompanied by heavy ostracism and cancellation campaigns for those who are targeted.
Also, though the popular refrain that abortion is pre-political is true—that life begins at conception can never be altered by the vote of a majority—this doesn’t change the fact that abortion is unfortunately a political issue in our day. Though we would rather it was not, it has become so due to many reasons, including the failures of pastors, the capitulation of men to modern feminism, and easy access to the abortion pill.
Since abortion is on the ballot, this also means it’s competing with other political issues in the minds of voters, including immigration, the economy, and so on. Most people are not single-issue voters and instead view politics as a series of tradeoffs between candidates who will necessarily have flaws of some kind. Pro-lifers of goodwill can disagree on how they judge a specific candidate and not betray their consciences. And a candidate who changes his views on abortion does not necessarily betray his previously stated principles. R.R. Reno noted in a recent First Things pro-life symposium that “measures short of full protection of the unborn can be supported, as long as we are clear that these compromises are for the sake of securing the conditions propitious to the fuller implementation of the pro-life cause in the future.” The question pro-life evangelicals must contend with is if Trump himself violated this standard—and the answer to that is not as immediately obvious as it seems.
The structural issues that have led to our culture of death must also be reformed. Our social safety net must be changed to disincentivize out of wedlock births, including the imposition of serious legal consequences. Fathers must be incentivized to stay with their families—both through the law and a culture that shames men who abandon their wives and children. Family courts must be significantly reformed to stamp out the clear issues in that system. No-fault divorce, which created the conditions that led to a notable increase in abortion, should be repealed. And government benefits should be tied to having a stable, two parent household.
Dreams of nominating Ron DeSantis at the top of the ticket next week will not help matters—it’s inevitable that Trump will be the Republican nominee in 2024. Evangelicals must therefore work within the present reality, where imperfections abound. As Edmund Burke once wrote, “Indeed, all that wise men ever aim at is to keep things from coming to the worst. Those who expect perfect reformations, either deceive or are deceived miserably.”
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