Donald Trump is far from an ideal candidate, but pro-life voters can still vote for the former president. While Trump has retreated on the issue of abortion, Vice President Kamala Harris’s extremism makes the alternative unacceptable.
The position of some pro-life advocates, such as Live Action founder Lila Rose, is that pro-life voters should not vote for Trump. Given his wavering rhetoric, abortion pill stance, in vitro fertilization promotion, and comments on Florida’s six-week ban, Trump’s position has changed and he does not merit anti-abortion support, in Rose’s opinion. “It is not the job of the pro-life movement to vote for President Trump,” Rose told Politico. He hasn’t earned the vote, plain and simple.
Rose is right that Trump now appears basically pro-choice. None of the positions he has articulated are strongly pro-life, some even anti-life — not something a pro-life advocate would want to endorse. Rose’s frustration is understandable. The pro-life movement would like a federal ban. That remains the ideal, but we have to start somewhere.
Right now, we start with Trump. He is not “just a fraction better than” Harris, no matter Rose’s thinking otherwise. If he were, Harris would look a lot more tame. But Harris is an abortion extremist, clearly. She supports unlimited, easy-access, late-term abortions, and she has worked against the freedoms of pro-life groups to oppose these things. People in the pro-life, anti-Trump camp let an insufficient GOP platform outweigh the consequences of “the fact that the Democratic Party under Harris is as radically pro-abortion as it can possibly be,” as Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan Anderson put for First Things.
It is not only Trump who is being put in charge of things by his election. He has a staff, and by all expectations, it will be more competent and more conservative than he is. It will be quite to the pro-life advantage to have a committed team writing consistent policy, among other areas. This behind-the-scenes, incremental work is the prudent move that will offer strong returns.
That is not to say that Trump is lying about his position, either. (Of course, it is always possible.) He has done a surprisingly good job keeping a solid states’ rights line — plausibly pro-life despite the high likelihood that his personal views are much more accepting of abortion.
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Nor does that leave the morality of abortion some sort of private matter to judge. It can be determined as objectively wrong, and it is good to want that reflected in the law.
It is a real matter of consideration, however, to decide whether to vote for Trump in this election. He is arguably pro-choice, and that rattles the conscience. Still, a Harris presidency is not worth risking the infant lives that could be saved by a Trump victory. Perhaps pro-lifers are not “morally responsible to vote against Kamala Harris by voting for someone like Donald Trump,” per Rose. They are certainly not morally responsible not to vote for him.