The tragic electoral irrelevance of life issues

I am pro-life. The person who made me pro-life was my daughter Eleanore, who was yet unborn at the time. Just as with folks like Mehdi Hasan, my pro-life turn had absolutely nothing to do with religion – I was an Episcopalian both before and after it, and my basic beliefs on religious subjects had not changed at all. Still, I oppose abortion as a practice, I believe it is the deliberate destruction of human life, and I support efforts to curtail it along multiple dimensions including both legal sanctions and œconomic measures to make carrying a child to term and raising it to adulthood less of a financial burden. I’m a huge fan of crisis pregnancy centres and donate to charities like ZOE. I voted for the pro-life presidential candidate Mike Maturen in 2016. I would like to see (for starters) a legal regime implemented here similar to what Western European countries like Finland and Austria have: mandatory paid parental leave and social benefits for expecting mothers; mandatory physician consultations, ultrasounds and waiting periods; and legal confinement of termination to life-threatening cases past the first trimester.

That having been said, in American politics there is no other group of issues that is more cynically used as a manipulative and pandering ploy for votes, unless it’s gun politics. Senator Rand Paul recently caused quite a stir and got in trouble with his party when he said this exact thing at a Faith & Freedom Coalition conference last year. But he said nothing but simple truth. Republicans have voted, repeatedly, to keep funding not just Planned Parenthood but research using parts from aborted fœti – and the president gleefully signs off on this funding. The ‘pro-life’ stance of the Republican Party is an utter sham. They’ll condemn the abortion lobby to their supporters, but turn around and fill their pockets when they think voters aren’t looking.

The same goes with the delusional notion that Republicans will appoint Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe. That idea should have been utterly discredited when Trump snubbed Amy Coney Barrett – a lawyer with impeccable pro-life credentials – for nomination, in preference to the pro-choice Brett Kavanaugh. Yes, Kavanaugh is pro-choice. He has said so himself, openly and repeatedly. We may speculate on the reasons Trump passed over Barrett for Kavanaugh. They may be as simple and contemptible as mere misogyny. Or it may have been that Trump wanted a judge who would reliably cover for executive abuses and executive lawlessness, as Kavanaugh did under Bush. Nonetheless, this is what the president did. And what tops the farce of this nomination and the argument over it, is that the last Republican holdout against Kavanaugh – Senator Susan Collins – was convinced to nominate Kavanaugh because he’s pro-choice!

In either case, both his budgetary arrangements and his Supreme Court nominations should put the lie to the oft-repeated claim by the president and his supporters that he’s the ‘most pro-life in history’. It’s really a rather pathetic claim. And I say so not merely because it’s an obvious electoral sham and ruse. The party clearly has no qualms about funding corporate abortion providers, or shoving aside pro-life women for more biddable men without the same qualms. But the cause of ending the obscene practice of destroying life in the womb for the sake of convenience and œconomic efficiency, has been tarnished irrevocably by its willing association with this reality-TV huckster who lies as much to them as he does to everyone else. The real reason that the president appears at events like the March for Life is for the attention, the rush he gets from campaign-rally adulation.

There is the occasional rare case of a politician who is willing to stand up and do something against his own partisan interest – like, say, John Bel Edwards or, as mentioned above, Rand Paul. But what is striking to me is how utterly irrelevant life issues actually are in our national political life, in terms of actual outcomes and changes in the culture. Instead, unborn children, rather than being valued for themselves with their own inherent human dignity, serve as mascots or totemic tribal markers for a farkakte movement conservatism that has long since lost any intellectual or moral coherence. On the other side, sadly, they are regarded as moral irrelevances and inconveniences, as ‘blobs of tissue’, and that is equally monstrous. At this point, absent some sort of revolution of values, a revolution of hearts toward a society that values people over wealth, our culture will remain a culture of death regardless of what the big political machines do.

EDIT (29 June): It seems this post was premonitory, although that was completely accidental. A Louisiana regulation signed into law by the state’s Democratic governor was just struck down by a Republican-dominated Supreme Court with Bush nominee Justice John Roberts casting the deciding vote. You literally cannot make this up. If nothing else, this ruling shows definitively that the Republican Party does not care to end abortion, and that the issue is, unfortunately, literally irrelevant to electoral politics except as a symbolic totem for the party faithful.