Trump protects the tools pro-lifers need to save the unborn
A number of articles over recent days, including the Washington Examiner’s “Why the anti-abortion movement is upset with the president who overturned Roe,” have painted a picture of a pro-life movement angry at President Donald Trump. They are simply not persuasive.
As a national leader in the pro-life movement since 1993, I organize quarterly meetings of other national leaders, and at a recent gathering, I told them that the pro-life movement is in the best position it has ever been to achieve its goal, thanks precisely to Trump.
This is true because the Golden Age of America has begun. Trump is literally dismantling the financial and ideological pillars of the pro-choice movement that for decades has imposed unlimited abortion on an American public that has never bought into that ideology.
I don’t need the president to give pro-life speeches or articulate the principled basis of our opposition to abortion. We, pro-life leaders and activists, can do that just fine. We need the president to preserve the tools we need to do so: freedom of speech, of religion, of the press, of association, of protest, and more.
Trump’s victories in all these areas help the pro-life side more than the pro-abortion side.
I have been to most of the recently concluded hearings of the Religious Liberty Commission, now drafting its recommendations for the president. At every one of those meetings, the freedom of pro-life Americans to speak up and to protest peacefully has come up. Trump pardoned peaceful pro-life prisoners and weakened the FACE law.
Greater election integrity and redistricting help Republicans more than Democrats. School choice, now funded more than ever, helps more students learn the pro-life message.
Pro-life speech is protected more than ever, on social media, on campuses, where Trump has used financial pressure to preserve pro-life speech, and even in the pulpits, where, by executive action, the president has protected and emboldened the clergy to speak their minds.
The president has led the charge to rein in bias in traditional media and on university campuses. Again, which side does this favor?
Look at his executive order defining federal policy on gender. Its name, Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, puts us precisely on the right track for the abortion issue. The same biological truth that a man is a man and a woman is a woman says a baby is a baby.
The president’s decision to withdraw the United States from some 66 international organizations and alliances has helped the pro-life movement in a major way, as these groups fund abortion efforts, with USAID and UNFPA as key examples.
The Trump accounts and child tax credits are making it easier for families to welcome new life.
These victories for the pro-life cause are generational and far more important than casual comments from the president on the issue, or on how long it takes his administration to evaluate the harmful effects of abortion drugs.
There is a narrative circulating about a MAGA civil war and eroding support for Trump. Yet, even CNN has had to admit the rock-solid support behind MAGA and Trump from his base.
We don’t need a similar narrative within the pro-life community. Rather, we should be celebrating and building on victories that are, in unprecedented ways, shifting the very foundations of the abortion debate in our favor.
Frank Pavone is national director of Priests for Life, and the national pastoral director of Rachel’s Vineyard Ministries and the Silent No More Awareness Campaign.
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