Would Pro-Lifers Really Sit This One Out?

A late summer break from the news was interrupted by an alarming article from a Catholic intellectual. And it merited a response.

As I mentioned in my last article a few weeks ago, I’ve mostly taken off the month of August from media consumption. But you can’t entirely avoid the news, and I came across one article so disturbing—and so relevant to my little corner of the world—that I decided to respond. Ed Feser, a Catholic scholastics professor with a reasonably well-trafficked blog, posted a lengthy missive in which he laid out the argument for pro-lifers deciding not to vote for Donald Trump this November.

Suffice it to say, I couldn’t possibly disagree more. We’ll break it all down along the following lines:

*Some concessions, on the areas where Feser’s article is strong and arguments that at least deserve consideration.
*The state of the Republican Party—particularly the Trump-supporting America First populist movement.
*What Trump still offers pro-lifers—from validating his past record to looking ahead.
*Where some of Trump’s pro-life critics—including Feser—go beyond making reasonable arguments and take approaches that just feel petty.
*The fatal blind spot far too many Catholic conservatives have.
*The real rub in all of this
*Some other perspectives on this same topic

With the table set, let’s get into it.

Some Concessions

I’ll give credit where credit is due. You can tell Feser has a good understanding of Catholic moral theology. If you can set aside this specific issue, and simply read through his foundational grasp of what a Catholic is and is not obligated to do, he nails it. My disagreement is not at the philosophical level, it as at the practical.

Let me make a further concession—I don’t think there’s anything wrong with choosing a third-party or write-in candidate. I’ve done so in the past. I’ll probably do so again in the future. Yes, in this particular case, I think any critic still holding on to their 2015-16 view of Trump is…how do I say this nicely…showing an impressive commitment to stubbornness. But, as a matter of principle, it’s the job of the major parties to make their case to you, not your job to knuckle under.

Finally, let me further say that while I think Kamala Harris’ extremism on abortion—legal at any point up to birth (and perhaps beyond) for any reason, anywhere in the country, should be argument enough for pro-lifers to vote for Trump, I also believe that simply pointing out how awful the other candidate is, isn’t necessarily enough.

Whatever your issue or cause is, if you don’t have the ability to “swing”, you don’t have real leverage. For a pro-lifer, completely excluded from the Democratic Party, the threat of sitting out is your only leverage point. The issue is whether the situation with the two major parties is dire enough to consider exercising that leverage. Feser thinks it is. I think that’s wildly misconstruing both Trump and the present moment.  

It would be a serious misunderstanding for pro-lifers to feel Trump is excluding us. It would be a mistake of all-time epic proportions to take it to the extreme of sitting out.  

The State of the Republican Party

Feser argues that Trump is “effectively transforming the GOP into a second pro-choice party.” In this Feser echoes the words of another Catholic intellectual, Jeff Mirus over at Catholic Culture, who recently wrote the same thing in calling this election “largely useless”, and basically undermined what was otherwise a thoughtful commentary on how the pursuit of the Good is the only thing that will truly save us, and our country.

Mirus and Feser should ask the Christians in China if they would take Trump as their leader, and if it would make a difference in their efforts to evangelize. But we really don’t even have to go that far. Because their fundamental premise—that Trump’s America First movement is allegedly hostile or indifferent to pro-lifers—is not true.

I’m active at the grass-roots in Massachusetts politics. By the end of this cycle, I will have done volunteer work for four different candidates for the State House. All of them are pro-life and will be on our side if they make it to Beacon Hill. All of them love Trump. All of them understand why Trump has taken the tack he has on abortion. None of them feel like they’re being sold out.

That is what is actually happening at the grass-roots. Even in Massachusetts. For the locals in our subscriber list, join the Freedom Fighters PAC run by pro-life Catholic Jim Lyons to keep connected.

Feser’s not grasping what the grass-roots of the rising America First movement looks like can be written off to a simple misunderstanding. But he then rises to the level of delusion, when he seems to imply that a Trump victory will be taken as a vindication of his decision to repudiate (allegedly) social conservatives, and that a Trump defeat would be an opportunity for social conservatives to regain their status in the party (whatever status that was—a whole separate can of worms)

Let’s say Trump loses the election. There are two possible narratives the media might choose to run with…

*The first is what Feser seems to think would happen, which is that the media and Republican strategists would have this grand awakening and realize the need to reach out to pro-lifers and social conservatives.

*The second is that the media and Republican strategists would attribute Trump’s defeat to being due his historic role as the man who did the most to overturn Roe vs. Wade, and that voters rose up and demanded abortions, at any time in pregnancy, be enshrined as the law of the land.

Which of those two scenarios do you think is most likely to happen?

When you poll voters on different issues and ask which candidate would do a better job, there is only one issue where Harris outpolls Trump. Guess which one it is?

So yes, the second of those narratives would be adopted. Moreover, it would probably be reasonably true.

Thus, if you are a pro-life voter, what is at stake in 2024 is simple—either Trump’s historic role in the fall of Roe will be repudiated by the electorate. Or it will be affirmed/accepted. Suffice it to say, it would be a tragic irony if repudiation came because pro-lifers sat out.

What Trump Still Brings to the Table

One thing Feser says in his article is that simply because someone has done good things in the past (for a pro-lifer voter, overturning Roe), doesn’t mean they get a free pass in the future. This is a perfectly fair statement. The 2024 election is also about deciding what kind of future pro-lifers have. And Trump still has plenty to offer.

Let’s start with what I noted above—the state legislative candidates I’m working for that are all pro-life. Trump’s rise in politics has brought in an influx of outsiders, looking to participate in the process. They are, for the most part, pro-life people—or at least closer to us than they are to Kamala Harris’ extremism. By seeking to remove the federal government from the equation as far as possible, Trump is allowing the rise of these candidates—and their ability to enact protections for the unborn at the state level—to take place. Harris seeks to crush that movement by imposing pro-abortion legislation even more radical than Roe as the law of the land.

Then there’s the question of pro-life persecution. The same Department of Justice that is persecuting Trump and persecuting January 6 protestors, is also actively hunting down people who pray outside abortion clinics and handing out jail sentences on spurious charges.

Here in Massachusetts, the radical pro-abortion governor Maura Healey, has launched a multi-million dollar campaign to discredit crisis pregnancy centers—places that don’t even lobby for legislative changes, but simply provide material support to pregnant women who want to choose life. A part of that campaign is a website where people can report being given “misinformation” from a center. Lawsuits backed by the state surely aren’t far behind. It seems safe to say that this kind of state-level persecution will be well-backed by a Harris regime, while not supported by a Trump Administration.

The pro-life movement is in a vulnerable place right now. We’re figuring out how to pivot into the post-Roe world and there’s a lot of messiness that’s coming with that. Moreover, the movement itself is not unified on every single issue that gets discussed under the pro-life umbrella.

For example, here at Corned Beef Catholicism, we believe life begins at conception, that every life deserves protection regardless of the circumstances of that conception, that handing out birth control pills will only make things worse and that this whole IVF/surrogacy thing is just flat-out embarrassing.

But those aren’t views uniformly held across the pro-life movement. There are some wings of Christian evangelism that belief life begins when the heartbeat is detected—a view that has consequences regarding the “morning after pill.” Trump is not wrong when he points out that Ronald Reagan also believed in the “exceptions”.

There are elements of the pro-life movement that really do believe in this whole IVF/surrogacy thing—Trump wasn’t wrong when he pointed that out, although I suspect he indulged in some vintage Trumpian overstatement when he insisted on how much everyone in the pro-life movement loved the idea. As someone for whom the pursuit of a family did not work out the way I hoped, I find resorting to IVF and surrogacy nothing less than bizarre. But, while my view might be shared by pro-life Catholics, it’s not necessarily the norm across the movement as a whole.

All of which is to say that the pro-life movement needs time. We need time to be able to pursue all the things we were already doing in the Roe era (crisis pregnancy centers, etc) free from the threat of persecution. We need time to organize and decide what tangible legislative goals we should now be pursuing at the state level. And we need time to find the right candidates and get them into office.

Trump offers us what we need most—protection and time.

This, in conjunction with his prior record, is why he not only deserves a pro-lifer’s vote, but he deserves real support. He is much more than just the “lesser of two evils.”

Pro-Life Pettiness

Feser also goes places that, as a pro-life voter, I find petty and embarrassing to be associated with, even tangentially. Take this shameless attempt to deny Trump even any credit for his historic role:

“First, it was by no means a sure thing that the justices Trump appointed to the Supreme Court would vote to overturn Roe, and it is not clear that Trump himself believed they really would or even wanted them to.”

If you are even considering whether this charge is true, please take two minutes and watch this debate clip of Trump with Hillary Clinton.

Trump explicitly says the following:

*He is putting pro-life justices on the Supreme Court
*He expects that by doing so, Roe will be overturned
*That the issue will be returned to the states

Trump did exactly what he promised he would do. Maybe the SCOTUS ruling wasn’t a “sure thing”. But Trump had pretty clear intentions.

If Ed Feser were the only one taking this kind of petty, credit-denying tack, I’d let it go. But he’s not the only one. For example…

*Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor to the Court, in spite of being begged by pro-lifers not to do so. This was a far bigger transgression than anything Trump has ever said or done. Look, I love the Gipper, and none of this should be taken as me turning on him. I had already accepted his mistakes (as I have with Trump, and as I hope either would do with me if they tracked every decision I made as closely as I track theirs). But when I hear pro-lifers of my generation singing Reagan’s praises as a means of contrasting him with Trump (which I do), I have to wonder what the real motivation is.

*I know of pro-lifers who will sing the praises of Liz Cheney, as being a person of integrity with a model pro-life voting record. She does have the latter. She’s also the proud heir to a family whose deceitful warmongering leveled the Middle East, killed thousands of Iraqi children, left veterans scarred, and cost trillions of dollars. When I heard a pro-life commentator praise her in 2021, as a means of contrasting her to Trump, I wondered if this commentator was going out of his way to affirm every negative stereotype of the pro-life movement. Which brings us too…

The Fatal Blind Spot

In the strong part of Feser’s article—the philosophical underpinnings—he does a good job explaining why we, as pro-lifers, have been so unyielding in insisting on this issue as a basic threshold in the question of preserving human life. As part of that, he notes clarification from different Church authorities, including then-Cardinal Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) that while there can legitimate grounds for waging war, there is no legitimate ground for denying legal protection to innocent human life.

That’s all true—but if you live in the United States in the 21^st century, can we start having a big come-to-Jesus moment on how thoroughly that “prudential judgment” rationale for the waging of war has been used and abused to facilitate support for politicians who pushed immoral and unjust wars, all the while being cloaked with the pro-life label?

The criteria that must be met for a war to be considered just are actually quite narrow. Yes, if you’re attacked, or reasonably likely to be attacked, self-defense is justified. What does that have to do with any of the numerous wars the United States has participated in since the end of World War II? From Vietnam to Iraq, American troops died for reasons that had nothing to do with our national survival. From Ukraine to Gaza, we fund, and thereby perpetuate, wars that have nothing to do with legitimate self-defense. We overthrow governments in the name of democracy (Libya 2011, Ukraine 2014, and countless others). We run bombing campaigns in places like Syria for reasons that will never impact the lives of the average American.

So yes, the philosophical foundation of Catholic thinkers like Feser is good, and it’s important. But it’s also important to step beyond the philosophical and see how it’s being implemented in the era you actually live. The United States fights and funds far too many wars and almost none (if any) can be morally justified. That reality has to be a pro-life question.

There’s only one president since World War II that has kept us out of foreign wars. It would be the man who also overturned Roe vs. Wade. Can pro-life Catholic commentators still resistant to Trump acknowledge that?

The Real Rub

All of this is bringing us to the real rub here. Feser goes on to say that, even beyond pro-life and social conservatism, Trump should not have been renominated this year, because he tried to “overturn the election.”

Trump—like all of us—wanted the disputed states to review their votes by using signature-match for the mail-in ballots. Some of us happen to believe that this have changed the outcome. Maybe you disagree. That’s fine. We’ll never be able to find out. Some scholars think Mike Pence had the authority to send the votes back to the states. Others don’t. That’s fine. We could have had Pence act, and then let a court settle it. None of the above involves attacking the foundations of democracy.

What Feser bringing this up does do is underscore the real debate going in between pro-lifers, conservatives, and anyone else who operates in the Republican context. Feser, and others, have never liked Trump, and nothing he does will ever be enough. Not keeping his promises. Not doing do so at the price of ongoing attempts to bankrupt, imprison and murder him. If he hasn’t won them over by now, then, quite clearly, they can’t be persuaded. The right-to-life is simply today’s convenient vehicle to convey that message.

I speak as one who didn’t like Trump when this whole saga began in the summer of 2015. In fact, there is nothing good I’ve ever said about Trump that didn’t come with great wrangling, right down to choosing him over Ron DeSantis in this year’s primary sweepstakes. When it comes to my support, nothing has come easy for Trump.

But at what point do we just say, enough? He fulfilled his core promise to us, extracted us from an alliance with the War Hawks, and can offer some protection as our movement starts a new era. He might be the only major leader who’s even interested in stopping World War III. And did I mention that this is going on while courts try to bankrupt and imprison him, and the Deep State tries to murder him?

I think that’s a pretty good resume. Historic, even. It doesn’t mean we should deify Trump, or any other political figure. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be able to say when we disagree with him. That’s part of being in a coalition together. But it does mean dropping the “lesser of two evils” rhetoric and just saying that Donald J. Trump offers far more of what’s good than he does of what’s bad.

So, let me co-opt the Harris slogan and say simply “I’m With Him” (we’re a progressive society, don’t judge me).

OTHER RESOURCES
*I wasn’t the only who noticed Feser’s commentary. Our friends, Phil and Leila Lawler, did a podcast in response. While not as hard-core Trump as I am, they’re always fair and always worth listening to. And on the bottom line in the voting booth, their conclusion is the same.

*I just came across the writer Peachy Keenan (a pen name) and finished reading her book Domestic Extremist. While it turned out to be more for a female audience, it was still a good, well-written rebuke of modern feminism. And on this particular subject today, she wrote a good response to pro-life critics of Trump.