No one at this point in the 2016 presidential race offers pro-life voters much reason to cheer. The GOP platform speaks for them unequivocally, but it’s not on the ballot. The Republican nominee is, and he’s been wobbly on questions important to the pro-life movement, whose mind he clearly doesn’t share, his formal identification as a recent convert to the cause notwithstanding.
The Republican party first introduced an anti-abortion plank into its platform in 1976. Except for Reagan and, one could argue, George W. Bush, Republican presidential nominees in the past 40 years have tended to be not so much pro-life champions as good soldiers, curtly affirming their support for the right to life (punting, Ford objected to Roe v. Wade on procedural grounds, maintaining that abortion law was a matter for the states) and that was that. It’s been good enough. If you’re pro-life, Republican diffidence on the issue is preferable to straightforward Democratic support for the wrong side.
Even for some pro-lifers resigned to that state of affairs, Trump is a bridge too far, however, and a rickety one at that. George Weigel, Robert P. George, Albert Mohler, Russell Moore, and other conservative Catholic and Evangelical intellectuals who are unwavering in their commitment to the pro-life cause oppose Trump vigorously. He poses several grave difficulties. Each by itself is enough to disqualify him in the view of many traditional conservatives, but pro-lifers who are single-issue voters are boxed in: By their reasoning, no offense that the Republican nominee commits, and no degree of unpreparedness or wrongheadedness that he demonstrates, can change their decision as long as he and his opponent have checked the boxes marked, respectively, “pro-life” and “pro-choice.”
Single-issue pro-life voters who have been able to skate through the past ten presidential elections may find themselves for the first time seriously confronted by the imperative to think through their single-mindedness on abortion. If they’re conservative, they have probably never had to deliberate, except as a fanciful thought experiment, whether they would support a nominally pro-life presidential candidate whose outlook on foreign and domestic policy largely troubled them or who, in their judgment, lacked the temperament to be commander-in-chief. In the happy days of late-20th-century full-spectrum conservatism, pro-lifers looked around and saw that fiscal conservatives and national-security conservatives were also pulling oars for the party that served as the vehicle for, among other things, social conservatism in mainstream American politics. Their presidential nominee, the face of the party, was invariably a statesman with a sound head on solid shoulders. Those contributing to the team effort applauded it. Political ideas clustered, and people clustered politically, neatly obeying George Will’s sparkling epigram.
Now enter the Trump candidacy. It adds up to a worldview at odds with the conservatism of the old Reagan coalition, in whose mold the political beliefs of so many pro-lifers have taken shape and developed over the course of a generation.
The conservatism represented by the Republican party from Reagan through Romney has carried pro-lifers this far, but that vehicle is out of commission, at least at the top of the ticket. So do the pro-lifers simply pick up their cargo and load it onto any old truck whose crew agrees to carry it? Yesterday they were proud to belong to the small-r-republican-constitutional-conservative-limited-government party, which gave their cause a place at the table. Today, are they supposed to forget they ever signed on to all that? Do they join the big-state-nationalism-populism movement because the driver has opened the trailer and said, “Yeah, I think we can squeeze your cause in over there in that corner, under the pro-Putin, anti-NATO sentiment, next to the promise to ‘burn this bitch down’”?
Never mind for now the moral and intellectual adjustments that pro-lifers would have to make to do business with the new shipping vendor. A more immediate, practical question: Do they consider the risk that it would “lose” their goods along the way?
If Trump got into office and softened his pro-life stand, which is already ambiguous, or just let it fade into oblivion (he seldom raises the issue), pro-choice Republicans, standing by, would gladly facilitate the process of easing the party in the direction they’ve long favored. Before they knew what hit them, pro-lifers would find themselves not only shut out of one major political party but frozen out of the other. For decades, pro-choice Republicans have been quietly working to convert their party to neutrality on abortion or even to affirming Roe but tastefully, unlike those Democrats who are forever pushing “reproductive rights.” Remember Ann Stone, Roger Stone’s former wife? She’s still at it with Republicans for Choice. She advises a pro-Trump super PAC.