The Folly of Making Donald Trump the Pro-Life Poster Boy

​I’ve had the experience several times over the course of this election season of developing ideas of my own that I think are pretty good and then running into an article and admitting, “Wow—that’s so much better!” So I had realized that, absent my personal fear and distrust of a Trump presidency, I would actually have a much better time of it if he won than if she-who-must-not-be-named won, because then I could just sit back and watch the disaster unfold, knowing full well that I had done all that I could to prevent it. Then this article by Jonah Goldberg came along.

I had done some deep logical reasoning, I thought, on the whole you-have-to-vote-for-Trump-because-of-the-Supreme-Court issue, and then I ran across this excellent article by Ian Tuttle which went several orders of magnitude deeper.

Recently, and very belatedly, it occurred to me that not only was the Supreme Court issue being looked at incorrectly but the whole argument that reversing Roe v. Wade (not “repealing,” folks—this is a court case, not a law) would end abortion was mistaken. After all, as the PEOTUS said in his 60 Minutes interview, “it would go back to the states.”

Further, and even more unsettling, is the notion that now we’ve made Donald Trump the poster boy for the pro-life movement. So “pro life” joins “evangelical” and “Republican” as labels that have been stained and smeared in this election. (See Russell Moore’s excellent article from back in February, “Why This Election Makes Me Hate the Word ‘Evangelical.’” I’ve never really called myself that but will certainly be careful to avoid it in future. And this week I went in and changed my party designation from Republican to unaffiliated.)

When I stumbled yesterday across this article on The Federalist’s website I was just gobsmacked by how much further into the pro-life issues of this election the author went. He wrote it in October, and of course it’s tempting for me to think, ‘If only somehow every single pro-life person holding his nose and voting for Trump could have read this before going to the polls!’

Well, we can all read it now. I’m going to restrain myself from posting my usual “takeaway line,” because I’d end up quoting the entire article—it’s that good. (Except the part about voting for a third party, but we’ll forgive him for that.) What’s the point of doing so, though? It’s too late, isn’t it, for this sterling analysis to do any good? No, absolutely not. We have elections every two years in this country. And our principles must be, from now on:

I will never sell out my vote again. I will never be spoonfed or dictated to again. I will become a truly informed citizen, checking out the issues for myself.

Here’s the article:

“Donald Trump Would Set Back the pro-Life Cause More than Hillary Would”