Eight years ago our founding editor, Matthew Lee Anderson, wrote these words in explaining why there was no pro-life case for Donald Trump:
Accepting such a nominee’s character as a permissible side-effect of the chance of getting pro-life judges eliminates any interest in anything besides the law from the pro-life movement’s political reasoning. It indicates that pro-lifers are willing to accept personal and cultural decay of our leaders for the sake of conservative judges and legal opinions.
Such a stand bifurcates the pro-life movement into two, allowing technical, legal rationality to come apart from the broader cultural conditions pro-lifers are trying to establish to end abortion. Such a bifurcation represents a kind of legal triumphalism that views the law as the paradigmatic and final means of social change. I think the law changes things: you’ll hear no platitudes about “hearts and minds” from these quarters. But if such opinions are not minimally reflective of the broader moral fabric of a society, they will not have the effect intended.
Additionally, setting forth such laws without the cultural conditions necessary to support them might even engender a backlash, and undermine the fragile gains pro-lifers have already made. This is one of the lessons from Roe, which was not at all reflective of our broader cultural mores at the time. It created incredible social divisions and galvanized the pro-life movement. Disconnecting the legal from the cultural allows the pro-life movement to do the same, except in reverse. But if the recent history of morals legislation in this country is any indication, such a strategy does not work well over the long term. Judicial myopia leads to, in this case, cutting off the pro-life movements cultural nose on the slimmest of hopes of saving its political face.
Then I wrote this in January of 2020 when Trump addressed the March for Life:
The goal of the pro-life movement is not simply that Roe would be overturned but that ours would be a society friendly to life. As long as our laws allow for the killing of the unborn we cannot claim to be such a society. But the erasure of such laws will not, in itself, absolve us of the charge of being a society that is deeply inhumane and hostile to life. Justice is not appeased simply through the changing of civil law; it is appeased when we render to each what they are due. It is achieved, in other words, through repentance, through the acknowledging that we do not render to each what they are due and through a resolution to amend our ways so that we would do that.
And this is what makes the embrace of Trump as a pro-life champion so damaging to the movement: It substitutes politique for mystique and in so doing it diminishes the goals of the pro-life movement, reducing them from the lofty and inspiring ideal of creating a society hospitable to life down to simply overturning a badly argued Supreme Court ruling. And by reducing the ideal in this way it actually drains the life from the pro-life movement, rendering it equivalent to any other political advocacy group whose sole objective is narrowly political in nature.
Our case, for the entire time Mere Orthodoxy has existed, has been that the pro-life movement has a political component to it, which included (but was not limited to) ending Roe, but also that those political goals were indissolubly linked to broader cultural and moral goals.
In this, we were simply standing in a long and honored line of pro-life thought that was articulated most clearly and forcefully by Pope St John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae:
We are facing an enormous and dramatic clash between good and evil, death and life, the "culture of death" and the "culture of life." We find ourselves not only "faced with" but necessarily "in the midst of" this conflict: we are all involved and we all share in it, with the inescapable responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life.
For us too Moses' invitation rings out loud and clear: "See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. ... I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live" (Dt 30:15, 19). This invitation is very appropriate for us who are called day by day to the duty of choosing between the "culture of life" and the "culture of death". But the call of Deuteronomy goes even deeper, for it urges us to make a choice which is properly religious and moral. It is a question of giving our own existence a basic orientation and living the law of the Lord faithfully and consistently: "If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you this day, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his ordinances, then you shall live ... therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice, and cleaving to him; for that means life to you and length of days" (30:16,19-20).
At our best, the pro-life movement lived up to John Paul's call. We started a network of pregnancy resource centers that spanned the country, far outnumbering the number of Planned Parenthood clinics and refuting the lie that the pro-life movement was unconcerned with the lives of at-risk women.
At our best, our leaders lived up to that call in their own speech, as when Richard John Neuhaus pledged, only months before his own death, not to weary or rest in the cause for life:
We shall not weary, we shall not rest, until every unborn child is protected in law and welcomed in life. We shall not weary, we shall not rest, until all the elderly who have run life’s course are protected against despair and abandonment, protected by the rule of law and the bonds of love. We shall not weary, we shall not rest, until every young woman is given the help she needs to recognize the problem of pregnancy as the gift of life. We shall not weary, we shall not rest, as we stand guard at the entrance gates and the exit gates of life, and at every step along the way of life, bearing witness in word and deed to the dignity of the human person—of every human person.
Against the encroaching shadows of the culture of death, against forces commanding immense power and wealth, against the perverse doctrine that a woman’s dignity depends upon her right to destroy her child, against what St. Paul calls the principalities and powers of the present time, this convention renews our resolve that we shall not weary, we shall not rest, until the culture of life is reflected in the rule of law and lived in the law of love.
But our commitment to that cause, our commitment to fight the culture of death on all fronts, has waned. In the years since the ascendancy of Donald Trump, another bloc in the pro-life movement has emerged, one which held, whether it would admit it or not, that one could separate the political goals from the moral and cultural goals.
When first met with that argument eight years ago, Anderson loudly protested.
He, and others like him, were ignored.
So here we are.
And where is that, exactly?
To review, the Republican nominee for president or his running mate, a professing Catholic who should probably be barred from communion, has:
Here is the thing we need to get fixed in our minds: John Paul and Neuhaus and Anderson and all the rest were correct. You cannot reduce the cause for life down to a single political objective. When you attempt to do that, all you do is cripple the cause for life and strengthen the culture of death. If you doubt me, I ask that you please review the bulleted list provided above.
When you announce that one can be pro-life and support a philandering womanizer and twice divorced serial adulterer who has been credibly accused of rape, you discredit the cause and tell people you aren't really serious.
When you announce that one can be pro-life and support a man who was closely associated with Jeffrey Epstein and even joked about Epstein's alleged pedophiliac assaults of children, you discredit the cause and tell people you aren't really serious.
When you announce that one can be pro-life and support a man who refused to straightforwardly answer when asked if he has ever paid for an abortion, you discredit the cause and tell people you aren't really serious.
Pro-life Trump supporters have spent eight years telling everyone that, when the chips are down, being pro-life is really only about repealing Roe and is basically divorced from any sort of broader culture of life.
And guess what? People listened.
Roe is dead. So what more do pro-lifers want, they wonder. To be sure, the culture of death is stronger than ever. The elderly and the mentally ill are now legally killed in many western nations. In Canada they'll even kill you for being poor. We tolerate cruelty in countless forms all across our society. Indeed, I expect that J. D. Flynn's comments this week regarding the future of those with genetic disabilities are exactly right:
It isn't even just that the pro-life movement was gutted through an act of ritual suicide. It's worse, actually: As Anderson predicted, repealing Roe without having a broader base of cultural support or a credible and broadly engaged pro-life movement provoked a fierce and devastating backlash.
In light of that backlash, the GOP did the electoral math, concluded that the pro-lifers have been appeased, and that any further pro-life policies were an electoral loser. Therefore it was both safe and necessary to throw them under the bus.
Why would they think they could do such a thing?
Because pro-lifers have spent the last eight years telling them they could.