On Friday, President Trump will directly address the March for Life, a pro-life event that draws thousands of people to Washington, D.C., every year. He will be the first president to do so. This is significant, and it should tell us something about our current political situation and how the pro-life movement fits into it.
That this is a presidential first is remarkably telling. The March for Life began in 1974, a year after Roe v. Wade was decided, and since then, we’ve had five Republican presidents. Former President Gerald Ford never claimed to be pro-life, but the others did. And yet, it took the election of Trump (a man who, up until recently, was avidly pro-choice) to see substantive progress politically.
Trump is lending the credibility and authority of his office to the pro-life movement. And unlike many Republicans, he’s done more than just vocally support the movement. He’s appointed two constitutional, conservative judges to the Supreme Court who could have the chance to relitigate Roe v. Wade, a fundamentally flawed case that provided the groundwork for the legalization of abortion. This year, the Supreme Court plans to hear a case that could allow them to reenter the abortion debate and, at the very least, secure the rights of states to pass pro-life legislation.
Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services recently tossed out an Obama-era rule that mandated a hidden surcharge for abortions in government-subsidized healthcare packages. And the HHS partially defunded Planned Parenthood by forcing the abortion giant to choose between providing abortions or accepting federal Title X family planning funds.
The Trump administration has also expanded the U.S. policy denying federal funds to foreign nongovernmental organizations that provide or promote abortions, and it has significantly reduced the amount of federal funding given to research involving fetal tissue. And just this week, the administration announced it would allocate Medicaid funds to Texas for a family-planning program that specifically excludes Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers. So, even if the Supreme Court does not rule in favor of individual states’ pro-life efforts this year, the Trump administration has made it clear that it will support these states anyway.
For a long time, it seemed that the pro-life movement’s impact would be limited to the culture — an impact that is by no means insignificant. Indeed, public opinion overwhelmingly supports the traditional “safe, legal, and rare” standard, and just as many agree that there must be restrictions on the accessibility of abortion. And almost half of the public said last year they’d support legislation to withhold taxpayer funds from Planned Parenthood completely.
All of this has been accomplished without the help of the many, many Republican legislators who campaign on the backs of the pro-life movement and then ignore abortion policy when they arrive in Washington, D.C. But now, pro-lifers have the White House.
We should not make Trump the face of the pro-life movement given his past track record, but we should applaud his willingness to speak up for the unborn: “When we look into the eyes of a newborn child, we see the beauty and the human soul and the majesty of God’s creation,” Trump told the March for Life crowd via a prerecorded video last year. “We know that every life has meaning and that every life is worth protecting.”
Trump didn’t just say this; he went and he did something about it. That’s why his speech this Friday is so important. His words won’t be meaningless because he’ll have the policies to back them up. This is long overdue. The pro-life movement is a just and noble cause that deserves more than empty promises. Finally, we have a president who understands that.
