It is still unclear whether President Trump, personally, is staunchly pro-life.
It still seems likely that, based on past comments and behavior, he does not have strong feelings one way or the other on the issue. Yet Trump has managed somehow to become the most pro-life president since at least the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision.
On Thursday, during the fourth and final night of the 2020 Republican National Convention, Trump assailed his opponent, Democratic nominee Joe Biden, knocking the former vice president’s long history of support for abortion.
“Joe Biden claims he has empathy for the vulnerable,” said the president. “Yet the party he leads supports the extreme late-term abortion of defenseless babies right up until the moment of birth. Democrat leaders talk about moral decency, but they have no problem with stopping a baby’s beating heart in the ninth month of pregnancy.”
Trump added, “Democrat politicians refuse to protect innocent life, and then they lecture us about morality and saving America’s soul? Tonight, we proudly declare that all children, born and unborn, have a God-given right to life.”
This is an especially strong pro-life declaration for any U.S. politician, left or right. But it is an even stronger and more noteworthy declaration coming from the president. It is also weirdly normal for this chief executive, who has backed the pro-life movement in both word and deed since coming into office.
The Trump administration in 2017 reinstated the “Mexico City policy,” which prohibits federal funding for private organizations that perform abortions. The Trump administration disqualified programs and facilities that perform abortions from receiving Title X family planning subsidies. The Trump administration backed the State Department’s decision to end federal funding for the United Nations Population Fund, which the State Department said “supports, or participates in the management of, a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.” The Trump administration’s Office for Civil Rights established the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division to protect healthcare workers from being pressured into performing abortive services in violation of their religious beliefs. The Office for Civil Rights in 2019 went to town on a Vermont medical center after it allegedly coerced one of its staff members into performing an abortion despite her conscientious objections. The Trump administration even singled out the nation’s largest provider of abortions, Planned Parenthood, for defunding on the very first page of its 2018 budget.
And in 2017, Trump became the first president ever to participate publicly in the March for Life, an annual gathering of pro-life activists in the nation’s capital to mark the Roe vs. Wade decision.
Trump’s personal comments over the years point to a man who is generally unfamiliar with the basics of the pro-life movement, including when he said during the 2016 election that women who get abortions ought to be punished. In fact, in 1999, Trump even described himself as being “very pro-choice.”
Yet he has done and said more for the pro-life movement than any other president in the last 40-plus years, and it is still not entirely clear whether he even has a strong opinion on the matter personally.
How is that for irony?
