Abortion and partisan politics

This week, Massachusetts’ Democratic governor Maura Healey signed a law removing existing restrictions on late-term abortion, thereby legalizing it to the moment of birth.  The move has prompted widespread outrage, as has the ghoulish signing ceremony in which the governor was surrounded by jubilant women applauding this license to murder children.  Republican partisans have cited this episode as evidence of the depravity into which the Democratic Party has fallen.  And it is true that the Democrats remain worse on the issue of abortion than the GOP is. 

But another and uncomfortable truth is that the Republican Party is itself worse on the issue than it was a little over two years ago.  The reason is Donald Trump.  Indeed, as Peter Laffin has argued, “Trump-Vance is the most anti-life Republican administration in history.”  During the 2024 campaign, Trump rigged the GOP party platform process so as to exclude pro-lifers and ram through a removal of the pro-life plank.  He actively opposed Republican efforts at the state level to restrict abortion.  He has actively supported IVF, which kills more embryos than abortion does.  He has urged Republicans to be more “flexible” on the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds for abortion.  Trump and Vance promised during the 2024 campaign to preserve access to abortion pills, and the administration has kept that promise.  Yet abortion pills are the means for the majority of abortions in the United States today.  As Laffin notes:

Trump’s DOJ-enforced and FDA-approved mail-order abortion regime effectively nullifies the overturning of Roe v. Wade.  That’s because, in practice, it all but guarantees the right to an abortion no matter what state you live in.  Under the current rules, abortion providers in blue states freely ship their product into red states.  This availability of mifepristone via “telehealth” providers largely accounts for the climbing total of abortions nationally since the fall of Roe.

It is true that opposition to late-term abortion remains in the GOP platform and is still part of standard GOP rhetoric.  But the significance of this fact should not be overstated.  Early-term abortions are no less murderous than late-term abortions.  They are simply less grisly.  And pro-lifers are in other contexts sensitive to the fact that the grisliness of a practice is not what is fundamentally at issue when determining whether it counts as murder.  For example, they vigorously condemn euthanasia and assisted suicide as murder, even when they are carried out painlessly.  Hence, if pro-lifers express outrage when Democrats support late-term abortion, then they should also express outrage when Republicans like Trump support abortion pills and the like.

As it happens, though, too many pro-lifers who are rightly outraged by what Governor Healey has done have over the last two years either kept silent about Trump’s betrayals or offered only muted criticism.  This shows how far the tail of partisanship has come to wag the dog of principle.  Pro-lifers have tended to support the GOP because they believe that that is the party more likely to promote their goals.  But that will be true only to the extent that pro-lifers make it clear that the GOP will pay a political price for betraying them.  If instead they remain silent in the face of betrayals, they will ensure that the Republican Party will move even further away from pursuing any serious pro-life policies.  It is not they who will be using the GOP for their ends, but the GOP that will be using them for its ends. 

Some pro-lifers nevertheless rationalize relatively uncritical support for Trump and the GOP on the grounds that they are the lesser of two evils.  In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis noted the dangers of this kind of thinking:

I feel a strong desire to tell you – and I expect you feel a strong desire to tell me – which of these two errors is the worse.  That is the devil getting at us.  He always sends errors into the world in pairs – pairs of opposites.  And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse.  You see why, of course?  He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.  But do not let us be fooled.  We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors.  We have no other concern than that with either of them. (p. 145)

When we stay silent about a purportedly lesser evil, we end up aiding and abetting that evil rather than merely avoiding the greater evil.  The thing to do is to oppose all evils, whether great, small, or in between.  That requires putting all political parties and politicians at arm’s length, and vigorously criticizing any and all of them when they promote policies at odds with respect for the lives of the unborn.