AP Photo/Jeff Dean.
Senator JD Vance (R-OH) is running on the most pro-choice Republican presidential ticket in decades.
As a candidate in 2016, Donald Trump unapologetically confronted Hillary Clinton with the ugliness of the Democratic Party’s position on abortion. As president, he appointed three excellent justices to the Supreme Court who corrected the egregious error made in Roe v. Wade and returned the ability to decide abortion policy to the people and their representatives.
Overturning Roe was pro-lifers’ first major battle, one that had to be won before anything else could be accomplished, and one that Trump played an enormous role in helping them win.
But he is utterly uninterested in helping them win the larger war.
Across the country, Democrats are using ballot measures to enshrine expansive rights to abortion into law, oftentimes by misleading voters about what those measures will do and what voting against them would mean. Pro-lifers are in desperate need of persuasive advocates who can be empathetic, pragmatic, and forward-thinking, yet also unyielding in their arguments. Building a culture of life will take decades of hard work from activists, politicians, and laymen, just like disposing of Roe did — and it’s essential that that work start now.
Trump resents this commission. During the Republican presidential primary, he called the ban on abortion after 6 weeks gestation — that’s about the time an unborn child’s heart starts beating — signed into law by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) “a terrible thing.”
So terrible a thing, in fact, that Trump indicated on Thursday that he would vote in favor of a pro-choice ballot referendum that would enshrine a right to abortion up to viability, or well into the second trimester of pregnancies.
“I think six weeks is a mistake. And I’ll be expressing that soon, but I want more than six weeks,” Trump told the Daily Mail.
“And in Florida, we have a six-week program, and that’s what I believe that you’re voting on, and I think it should be more than six weeks,” explained the woefully misinformed former president.
After pro-lifers erupted over the Republican standard bearer endorsing a return to Roe-era abortion policy in one of the few states that has enacted meaningful, life-saving restrictions in the last two years, the Trump campaign tried to walk back what he had said… kind of.
“He has not yet said how he will vote on the ballot initiative in Florida, he simply reiterated that he believes six weeks is too short,” an advisor told Semafor. Is that supposed to be reassuring? How to explain his promise last week that “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” then? Does anyone with true conservative convictions on this issue use the preposterous euphemism “reproductive rights”?
Vance weighed in on Trump’s betrayal of the pro-life movement in a remarkable statement rebuking his running mate.
“If you’re not willing to stand up to the left on abortion, you can’t be trusted on anything else. The pro-life position is the pro-people position and I’m proud to be 100% pro-life,” protested Vance on social media.
Just kidding. That’s what he wrote back in 2022 when he was trying to get pro-life primary voters to support his bid for federal office.
If you’re not willing to stand up to the left on abortion, you can’t be trusted on anything else. The pro-life position is the pro-people position and I’m proud to be 100% pro-life. https://t.co/8FyiwZja8K
— JD Vance (@JDVance) February 18, 2022
Now, Vance is openly boasting about how a Trump-Vance administration would “absolutely” veto any national restrictions on abortion whatsoever and misleading the public about the content of a recent Supreme Court decision in order to tout their support for wide access to the abortion drug mifepristone.
With friends like these, what does the pro-life movement need enemies for?
JD Vance warned us in 2022 about the charlatans who would sell out the unborn for political expediency’s sake; he just didn’t know at the time that he would become one.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
