We Need the Pro-Life Old Guard

P resident Trump recently introduced a new raft of proposals to expand access to IVF, fulfilling campaign promises to do so. It revealed how his administration, in its rightful zeal to purge itself of the Republican old guard, has lost the ethical guardrails provided by the pro-life, natural-law-upholding intellectuals who guided prior iterations of the GOP.

The Trump era precipitated an internal housecleaning, ridding the Republican Party of a large number of political operatives and opinion-peddlers who simply could not abide Trump. Though many were sincere, several were either not very conservative or not very honest, and their departure is no great loss. An example of this addition-by-subtraction appeared in The Bulwark, which published a piece by Miles Bruner, a self-described “former Republican political hack.”

Bruner was a mid-level functionary for GOP state campaigns in California, and most recently with a national fundraising entity based in D.C. Many others have written some version of his essay, as he acknowledges, numerous times before: the agonized, longtime Republican who cannot tolerate the direction of today’s party under the influence of Trump.

Curiously, his “last straw” was the overturning of Roe v. Wade, enabled by Donald Trump’s successful confirmation of three Supreme Court justices. Bruner and his wife suffered the heartbreaking loss of a child because of a late miscarriage. In the wake of this tragic event, he grew angry over Republican anti-abortion policies, against which he had already begun to turn. “I couldn’t begin to comprehend that there were now states where women were going through the same sorts of emotionally shattering and potentially life-threatening experiences without the safety net of legal medical care.”

I greatly sympathize with the loss that he and his wife experienced, and I do not wish to mock Bruner or question his sincerity. Nonetheless, his reaction echoes Democratic talking points that contend, falsely, that pro-life states’ anti-abortion laws prohibit treatment for miscarriages and other interventions to preserve maternal life. As a conservative pro-life activist who started a nonprofit ob-gyn clinic specifically to help lower-income women, I do not agree that “the entire conservative movement” shows “contempt toward women and families.”

But the fact that overturning Roe was Bruner’s “red line” is a sign that, frankly, he shouldn’t have been working for Republicans. As Charlie Cooke pointed out on X, responding to the piece, the GOP had been openly trying to overturn Roe for decades before Trump. Trump simply succeeded in his Supreme Court picks where prior Republican presidents had failed, going three-for-three with justices whose philosophies were consistent enough to recognize Roe for the legal and constitutional disaster it was. Had Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or Jeb Bush won the 2016 election, they would have nominated the same kinds of people — maybe some of the exact same three people. Bruner tries to paint himself as being abandoned by his party, but he was clearly wandering ideologically himself and no longer all that conservative.

Nonetheless, his anger over abortion policy is ironic given that Trump’s GOP is now becoming less explicitly pro-life, not more. In the 2024 campaign cycle, Trump waffled about his abortion position as the GOP’s post-Dobbs posture became more unpopular. Countering Ron DeSantis, Trump condemned Florida’s ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, saying that it was “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.” On the plus side, Trump in his second term has reinstated the good, abortion-limiting executive actions from his first administration, and he has successfully cut off a year’s funding for abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood. On the other hand, he has been slow and ambiguous over limiting the abortion pill (the main driver of abortion in America today), and he has now made a push to expand IVF’s accessibility. NR’s religion editor Kathryn Jean Lopez laid out IVF’s deep bioethical problems in creating, eugenically sorting, and destroying far more embryos than can ever come to term.

The departure of Bulwark-esque individuals from the world of Republican operatives has been salutary for the party. It is staggering to consider the fraudulence — either then or now — of formerly conservative pundits such as Bill Kristol and Jennifer Rubin, or former political operatives like Tim Miller, Tom Nichols, and Michael Steele. After Trump’s rise, these people jettisoned almost every conservative viewpoint they ever held, including, for some, their alleged pro-life convictions (Kristol was once on the board of the Susan B. Anthony List, for goodness’ sake) — gaining prominence in the legacy media as they did so. This exodus was so thorough that The Bulwark now has to find lower-level employees like Bruner to write the latest edition of the “I’m leaving the Republican Party because of Trump” column.

Nonetheless, there are other, staunchly pro-life figures who have seen their influence on policy reduced in the Trump era. These individuals have almost universally remained consistent in their views pre- and post-Trump, and I shall broadly and loosely refer to them as “the pro-life intellectuals.” It is their sidelining that has likely contributed to Trump’s weakening pro-life position, the new push for IVF, and a troubling direction for the GOP on social policy.

George W. Bush established the President’s Council on Bioethics in November 2001. The council included a who’s-who of intellectuals from across the ideological spectrum, but the emphasis was on those who supported natural-law principles as applied to modern bioethical questions. Its significant names included Harvard professor and later Vatican Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon, Dr. Ben Carson, Princeton political scientist Robert George, Lutheran bioethicist and theologian Gil Meilaender, AEI’s Yuval Levin, Notre Dame professor Carter Snead, and physician and bioethicist Leon Kass. The transcripts of their proceedings, reports, and working papers (helpfully archived by Georgetown University) are an enduring contribution to the pro-life cause and those who broadly uphold the natural law.

The institution of the council formalized the influential role that many of its individual members already exercised within social-conservative politics and public policy. Their influence continued to have an impact within the GOP even after Obama dissolved the Council in 2009. Its leaders provided the Republican Party, both before and after Bush, with the intellectual framework necessary for considering social policy and bioethical questions in a principled way. Their influence was evident in the 2016 Republican platform.

No doubt, many in the pre-Trump crowd were opportunist, liberal backstabbers, and Trump 1.0 employed and listened to too many of them. One thinks of Miles Taylor, the eyeroll-inducing former mid-level DHS official in the Trump administration who was sending undermining op-eds to the New York Times under the “Anonymous” moniker. Trump was such an outsider in 2016 and 2017 that he needed to rely on the pre-Trump institutional GOP to staff his administration, for good and for ill. A large number of appointees were on the good side, with Mike Pence and former Council on Bioethics member Ben Carson at their head; they wanted the administration to hold the line on abortion and other bioethical issues.

There are still strong pro-life people in the Trump 2.0 administration, but the intellectuals are sidelined and their top-level influence is diminished. Trump, RFK Jr., and Doctor Oz seem indifferent to what Robert George or Yuval Levin have to say about IVF or mifepristone. Further, the Stephen Miller crowd of Young Trumpian Turks seem to view the pro-life cause as a distraction at best and a deeply unpopular political liability at worst, and they hold enormous sway. They ripped the pro-life planks out of the Republican platform in the 2024 cycle, and they are hardly subtle about making social-policy decisions on the basis of politics, rather than enduring pro-life principles.

Trump’s IVF push was unnecessary, but it was predictable in some ways given that the guardrails are gone. Trump’s team was right to toss out the old-guard bathwater — I just wish he had kept the baby.