No, Trump isn’t Pro-Life, or Pro-Choice

Let’s talk about the pro-life movement again. It’s been getting a whole lot of press lately.

Just to be clear, before we begin, I’m going to be using the word “fetus” to describe a baby that hasn’t been born yet and “infant” to describe a born baby, because that’s the proper medical term and it’s easier to understand what I’m saying if I do that. I’ve heard some pro-life people say “fetus” is a dehumanizing term and a way of signalizing you don’t value babies, but that’s never made sense to me. “Fetus” is just a Latin word that means “offspring.” It’s not a slur. And when I say “pro-life movement,” I’m not talking about this or that individual person who donates to the diaper drive, or who gets together with their friends to throw baby showers for poor women, or who babysits their single friend’s child for free so she can finish college, or anything like that. I’m talking about the political movement and the people who believe in that political movement to the hilt. Is that understood? All right, now we’re off to the races. Let’s talk about the pro-life movement.

After bullying everyone that we were a bunch of sinful baby killers if we didn’t vote for the newly Republican Donald Trump in 2016, and canonizing Trump as their hero after the overturning of Roe Versus Wade in 2022, the pro-life movement has been having a bit of buyer’s remorse. This is because the Republican party is having buyers’ remorse about the pro-life movement. The scattershot abortion bans across the country are causing chaos, hurting and maiming women suffering miscarriages as their doctors and emergency room staff waste time trying to figure out what they’re allowed to do without facing prosecution. And the bans haven’t brought down abortion rates either: the number of legal abortions nationwide has been going up since about 2017 and didn’t stop after Dobbs. It’s been pointed out that some of this rise in abortion rates might be due to expanded access to abortion pills, and that may well be part of it right now. But the change in the FDA’s rules about abortion pills happened in January of 2023, and those rates started climbing six years earlier when Republicans took control of the House and the Senate as well as the White House. Whatever the reason, the pro-life movement got their way and the abortion rate continued to climb. And ever since then, pro-life politicians have been losing at the ballot box. So many Republican candidates have started to distance themselves from the pro-life movement so that they can win elections and accomplish their actual agenda, which is mostly about tax cuts for rich people. Donald Trump is among these.

Last Friday morning, Trump posted to Truth Social: “my administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights!”

I watched as pro-lifers expressed their horror on social media.

Meanwhile, pro-choice people on social media warned each other, unnecessarily, that he was lying and definitely going to sign a nationwide abortion ban if one crossed his desk.

Yesterday, Thursday, Trump was asked how he’d be voting on a bill in his home state of Florida. If made into law, the bill would permit abortion up until viability (about 24 weeks of gestation), replacing Florida’s current law which forbids all abortions after six weeks. He seemed to say that he’d be voting “yes” on the pro-choice bill, in his usual garbled way. “I think the six week is too short. It has to be more time. I told them that I want more weeks. I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.”  And all around social media, I saw pro-lifers despair. They were sad that they’d been tricked. They thought they were getting a pro-life president, but they were used. And the pro-choice people still didn’t believe him.

His NEWEST, newest position, then, won’t be voting “no” on the Florida abortion bill to save babies’ lives. He’ll be voting “no” to stick it to the Democrats. Lord knows what he’ll say tomorrow.

For the record, I still don’t think that Donald Trump is actually going to vote “no” in November. I think he’s going to check off the box voting for himself in the presidential race, leave the rest of the ticket blank, and go about his business.

I don’t believe he’s pro-life. He’s not pro-choice either; he’s always been something else. It’s just more obvious now.

The pro-choice argument is that women are persons and that fetuses aren’t persons until they’re born; that’s why the woman has the right to decided to continue the pregnancy or not.  I used to believe that the pro-life argument was that both women and fetuses are persons, and I still think a lot of pro-lifers believe that. After witnessing the events from 2016 to the present day, I’m forced to admit that many in the pro-life movement, and especially those dictating their policy choices, think that fetuses are persons and women aren’t, a bizarre position that makes no sense. But I think there are still people who believe both are persons.

There is also a third position, which monstrously evil people have taken throughout history, and that’s that neither women nor fetuses are persons, but everybody is an instrument to be used. That’s the Nazis, who were completely anti-abortion for Aryan women no matter how those women felt abut it but pro-abortion and pro-infanticide for anyone else. That’s China’s one-child policy. That’s the people who trafficked slaves in America, wanting Black women to have lots of babies to sell right up until Black people were emancipated and then they wanted Black women sterilized. I was raised to believe that their position is identical to the pro-choice one, but it’s not. It’s its own category.

When I hear J. D. Vance talk, his sadistic disdain for women, his inability to not mock and belittle us, his weird fixation on having babies as the only thing that gives anybody any right to participate in society, I surmise that he’s the strange and cruel version of a pro-lifer I mentioned. I think he thinks that fetuses may be persons worth saving, but women certainly aren’t. Women are just wombs. As a Catholic, I cannot support that in any way. My faith informs me that men and women are both humans, created in the image and likeness of God.  You can’t hold an ethic that reduces us to incubators. Vance is wrong.

When I hear Donald Trump talk, on the other hand, all I hear is manipulation and grift.

I hear him saying absolutely anything that he thinks his audience wants to hear so they’ll give him what he wants in return. He’ll call for post-abortive mothers to be punished, then call himself “pro-life, with some exceptions,” and then mutter about states’ rights, and then claim to be pro-choice again, and then claim he’s pro-life, then he’ll make up a conspiracy theory about infanticide, but he doesn’t believe any of it. He wants to be a strongman dictator so he can enjoy giving speeches and having parades in his honor. He wants to have the ability to make all his legal woes disappear. He wants to be rich and famous.  He wants revenge on his enemies. That’s all he cares about, and he’ll do anything, no matter how underhanded, to make us give it to him. And as he gets older and more out of control, he’ll do more and more reckless things to get what he wants. People aren’t persons at all to him; they’re marks for his con. Nobody has any intrinsic value at all.

That puts Trump in that last category. That makes him somebody who doesn’t see women or fetuses, or infants or teenagers or men for that matter, as persons. He sees every one of us as instruments. He wouldn’t particularly wish to commit an atrocity like the Holocaust, but he would if he thought he could make a few bucks from it and he wouldn’t be sorry. That’s the very worst kind of man.

Yet I was told, way back in 2016, that I would go to hell and burn for eternity if I didn’t vote for him.

And now, here we are. The pro-life movement has pinned all their hope on Donald Trump, and he yanked out the rug. No one trusts them anymore, because they’re not worthy of our trust. They spiritually abused thousands of people into voting for a con artist who tried to overthrow our democracy and will probably try it again. Women are miscarrying in parking lots and losing their fertility because doctors are afraid to operate: and the abortion rates are going UP anyway. It’s the worst of all possible worlds.

How did we get here?

How did people who claim they just want to save babies, end up hitching their saddle to the worst and the second-worst man in the country?

Well, they’ve been hitching their saddles to progressively worse men for a long time now. I remember, or maybe I just think I remember, a time when people who claim to be pro-life really talked about being “pro-women, pro-child” or “loving them both” or “a consistent life ethic.” They were as against abortion as they were against the death penalty and war. And those people still exist, on an individual basis, but not as a movement. The movement just became a movement that worshipped Republican politicians no matter what, and only cared about overturning Roe and enacting legal abortion bans. It wasn’t about compassion or building a culture of life, it was all about feting certain human beings while threatening others with jail. It wasn’t about making a world where people felt safe starting families, it was about burning the whole world to the ground and then terrorizing families with the unborn as an excuse.

What if we’d stopped trying to hurt and punish people?

What if we’d stuck with that “consistent life ethic” business and really leaned into it? What if we’d supported every policy that could really make it easy to make the decision to bring children in this world– yes, in federal and state laws, but also in our culture, in our churches, in our interactions with one another? What if, when people thought about a pro-life Christian, they thought about the most loving and generous considerate “woke” people they knew?

The pro-life movement kept on kissing cynical politicians right on the lips, and now it’s got a mouthful of cold sores, and voters are so disgusted they don’t want to hear the message.

Serves them right.