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Looking Beyond Politics to Be Pro-Life

Looking Beyond Politics to Be Pro-Life

Message from Walker: “Intellectual Takeout depends on donors like you to bring my work and the work of my stellar colleagues to the public. I love writing about art, culture, rural life, literature, and philosophy for ITO. If you value that kind of content too, please consider making a donation today. Together, we can help spread time-tested traditional ideals.”


It was a historic win for the pro-life movement when the Supreme Court justices overturned Roe v. Wade. There’s no denying Trump’s role in this achievement—he appointed several of the justices in question. But recent positioning by the Trump campaign calls into question Trump’s personal commitment to the pro-life cause and his effectiveness as a further pro-life champion. Just because he facilitated a significant pro-life victory doesn’t mean that we should place all our hopes in him, expecting him to somehow single-handedly bring an end to abortion. Trump—nor any other politician—will be the singular end to abortion. Here’s why.

Pro-Life and Politics

In the first place, Trump’s actual beliefs about abortion are hard to pin down, and they have morphed over time. As philosopher Dr. Edward Feser has pointed out, in a 1990 interview, Trump said he had no opinion on abortion. In 2000, when he first made an attempt to win the White House, he called himself pro-choice. In 2012, when he began seeking the Republican nomination, he said he had become pro-life. His actions in office—notably the Roe v. Wade win—certainly back up that claim, although we should remember that he was only indirectly responsible for the overturning of the ruling.

But now, in his 2024 campaign, Trump appears to be reverting to his older positions, though maybe in a milder way. Eric Sammons of Crisis Magazine notes that Trump may have seen the abortion issue damage Republicans in the mid-terms and chose to strategically distance himself from it to avoid the same result. On the other hand, maybe he considers pro-lifers firmly in his camp and can afford to appeal to other voting blocs.

Either way, it remains a fact that at the Republican National Convention the party’s anti-abortion platform was significantly dialed back. At the convention, there were pro-abortion speakers and little time spent discussing abortion in general. Recently, Trump posted on Truth Social, “My Administration will be great for women and reproductive rights.” He has also been critical of Florida’s efforts to pass anti-abortion laws.

Perhaps most significantly, Trump pledges that his administration would make the government pay for IVF treatments or mandate that insurance companies do so, in spite of the fact that IVF typically leads directly to the deaths of embryos.

Now, to be fair, Trump has framed this as a pro-family policy—“We want more babies!”—but he is either unaware of the actual consequences to human life of IVF procedures or else he is simply not pro-life on this issue. Infertility, is, of course, a growing problem, and the former president is right to want to address it, but a solution that leads to the further destruction of human life cannot be the right one.

So is Trump conservative when it comes to social and moral issues such as abortion? It’s hard to say. Basing his analysis on Trump’s actions and Trump’s own words in his books and articles over the years, Feser has made a compelling argument that Trump’s worldview is ultimately Hobbesian, seeing life as an arena, a dog-eat-dog fight, in which each person is looking out for his own interests. The goal of life for Trump is, ultimately, to win, to be a “winner” and not a “loser.” Of course, when Trump is espousing conservative values, there’s no one you’d rather have fighting for you, especially with an attitude like that. And Feser takes seriously Trump’s patriotism, love of his family, anti-illegal immigration stance, and the like, giving him credit where credit is due.

But when it comes to questions of social/moral conservatism, Trump appears to keep an eye to which way the wind is blowing, adjusting himself to support his chances of winning. In light of this, then, we can reasonably question how enduring Trump’s loyalty—along with most politicians’ loyalty—to the pro-life movement will be.

Which brings me to the crux of the matter: Even if Trump is truly a staunch pro-lifer, there’s another reason why pro-lifers cannot place all their hope in him alone. He’s just one man. And while the political front is, of course, an important one on which to wage the battle for life, it is not the only one. I do not think we can look for a solely political or legal solution to the problem of abortion because its roots go much deeper than that.

The Real Issue

Abortion is largely a byproduct of the sexual revolution and the destruction of traditional marriage. No one politician can possibly undo the effects of massive social and philosophical movements that have been underway since at least the middle of the last century—if not before.

When the West began to view the sexual act as oriented solely toward pleasure and self-expression, then the natural result of that act (a baby) became, in our eyes, an expendable byproduct.

I would propose that sex separated from marriage and procreation became self-centered, divorced from commitment to the other person (via marriage) or to society at large (via family and children). Sex was no longer seen as an act ordered toward both the good of the couple and the good of society, literally bringing forth a miniature society in the form of a family and, later, contributing more human beings to the building up of the wider society. The act became more recreational, not weighted with a responsibility to the partner, the offspring, and the world.

Indeed, sex was separated from love (however much people may have tried to substitute intense emotions for the real thing). This is because real love is always both loyal and fruitful—in this case, committed in marriage and incarnated in offspring, who are a gift to and between the parents, but also to the wider community. As all these notions were trampled by “sexual liberation,” and as means and ends became confused, unborn babies lost their value in the eyes of many. Rather than being the natural fruit of unitive love, they became an unfortunate and burdensome byproduct of the pursuit of personal pleasure. Literally, babies are often no longer seen as separate from the mother’s body (“my body, my choice”), just as sex itself is no longer seen as meaning anything beyond the individual’s own bodily satisfaction. It’s all about me.

There are other factors at play, of course, in the widespread killing of human babies—materialism and loss of belief in the human soul, widespread devaluation of human life in the totalitarian regimes and world wars of the 20th century, loss of the religious sense, etc.—but all of that only reaffirms my point that no one politician can be hoped to solve the abortion problem.

Rather, we need a much wider-spread and deeper-seated conversion of society to a pro-life, pro-marriage, pro-family mindset. You’d think this wouldn’t be that hard—most cultures throughout history recognized the inherent goodness of these things—but we’re up against some powerful forces.

Again, I don’t mean to downplay Trump’s role in the landmark victory of overturning Roe v. Wade, nor is any of this analysis intended as an overall assessment of Trump as a candidate. My point here is merely that pro-lifers should not hail Trump as an all-out savior. The pro-life mission is much bigger than one politician—in fact, it is bigger than politics itself.

Image credit: public domain

Walker Larson
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