Former President Donald Trump has had a complicated and ever-evolving position on abortion policy over the last 25 years.
In 1999, he said that he supported abortion, describing himself as “very pro-choice,” only to change course in 2016 and during his term in office when he appointed justices to the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade.
But in recent months he has taken a more moderate stance on the issue and has sought to downplay it, and nowhere was that more obvious than in his Wednesday night town hall with Fox News.
“I happen to be for the exceptions, like Ronald Reagan, with the life of the mother, rape, incest,” Trump said, before adding that “you have to win elections” and noted that his rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), had seen his poll numbers drop after signing a bill banning abortion in Florida after six weeks.
“If you talk five or six weeks, a lot of women don’t know they’re pregnant,” he said. “I want to get something where people are happy. This has been tearing our country apart for 50 years.”
But the former president also noted that the Democratic Party’s position that abortion should be legal until birth is extreme and completely out of touch with the average voter.
“They are the radicals; we are not the radicals,” he said.
But while Trump’s comments on the issue might seem to be an attempt to have it both ways, the reality is that he is more aligned with the electorate on the issue than those of us who hope for a total ban on abortion.
Abortion politics can be very depressing, especially if (like me) you are pro-life and believe life should be protected from conception until natural death. And while the ultimate goal must be a total and complete ban on abortion, the path to that goal is not at all clear.
In June 2022, the pro-life movement experienced the greatest victory it had achieved: the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the end to a constitutional right to abortion. But this landmark victory was quickly followed up by a disheartening and sickening tidal wave of losses in statewide referendums.
The most depressing of these losses was in Montana, a state that voted for Trump by a wide margin and where voters, by a 53%-47% margin, rejected a law that would have protected babies born alive after an attempted abortion in a 2022 referendum. This wasn’t a ban on abortion; it was a requirement that babies that survive abortions and are born be given life-saving care.
The reality is that the culture of death that has allowed abortion to become such a widespread and accepted practice is going to take generations to change. Abortion was legal in all 50 states for 49 years, and it will take at least another 49 to undo the damage wrought by that.
In an ideal world, the U.S. Supreme Court would recognize the humanity of the unborn as protected by the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of the right to life, but that is not going to happen any time soon.
As depressing as it is to say, I have a hard time coming up with a better electoral strategy on abortion than the one articulated by Trump. Some people would rather lose on abortion than offer any shred of compromise. And I sympathize with that. It is the morally unflinching position, and there can be no compromising on the morality of abortion.
But ultimately the goal is to save as many innocent unborn babies from this cruel, barbaric, and murderous action as possible. Losing elections will not accomplish this. It will only lead to more lives lost.
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If incremental protections to life are the only thing palatable to voters right now, then that’s what has to happen. But such incremental protections should be coupled with continued efforts to build a culture of life through education, media, and whatever other means are available to change hearts and minds so that the ultimate goal of making abortion unthinkable is reachable.
The alternative is electing a party that thinks they can and should kill a baby in the womb, even if the child can survive outside the womb.