Trump/Vance must undo the harm caused by the RNC platform
By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Jul 22, 2024
Pro-lifers should not have been so shocked by the setbacks that the right to life has suffered since the Dobbs ruling. A backlash for repealing Roe v. Wade was inevitable, regardless of whomever it was who overturned it.
For nearly fifty years many Americans organized their lives under the false belief that abortion was a constitutional right. A half-century of genocidal evil has warped our nation. We have much work ahead of us to undo the harm.
Thus it is that the pro-life cause finds itself in a precarious political environment at the present moment. We must accept that politicians who lean our way will have to do some fancy dancing if our cause (and their political futures) are to survive.
But there is a difference between recognizing a political reality and being reconciled to it. There is a difference between making a prudential compromise regarding one’s principles and throwing out those principles altogether.
The Trump/Vance Campaign, and particularly the 2024 GOP Platform, have crossed those lines in spectacular fashion. They must remedy their error while there is still time.
First, credit where credit is due. We face this problem precisely because Donald Trump, building on the work of others, accomplished what they did not. It was Trump who gave us the Supreme Court that overturned Roe.
But just as the end of slavery was followed by further attacks on the dignity of African—Americans, so too the end of Roe v. Wade has led to even more unholy rage against the right to life of the innocent unborn child.
The difference this time is that the Republican Party is blowing it.
Legal fallacies
Ever since April 8th, Trump’s position has been that the legality of protecting—or killing—the unborn child is a matter that ought to be left up to the states. Trump has already contradicted his own position by criticizing states, such as Arizona and Florida, when they pass laws he considers to be too pro-life.
But Dobbs did not return the abortion issue to the states. It returned it to “the people,” which includes our elected representatives on the federal level. Democrats know this and are fighting hard for federal laws to kill the unborn. Republicans who only play defense against such attacks, but never go on offense for the unborn child, are engaging in unilateral disarmament.
Trump has picked Sen. J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert, to be his running mate. On July 7th, Vance told NBC he supports access to the mifepristone pills by which most abortions now occur in the United States. But if you support the process by which most abortions occur, you are not pro-life. You are, at best, a moderate pro-choicer.
On July 15th, the Republican National Convention replaced the GOP Platform’s previous commitment to the unborn child’s “fundamental right to life” with a philosophically incoherent claim that, because the 14th Amendment “guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process…States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.”
But the whole point of the 14th Amendment is to guarantee rights regardless of the popular will. If the 14th Amendment guarantees the right to life, a state vote to that effect ought to be unnecessary. And Trump’s position—that individual states may permit the legal killing of the unborn—ought to be unconstitutional.
Previous GOP platforms listed dozens of ways it opposed abortion. The 2024 platform explicitly opposes only late-term abortion, which even Democrats claim to oppose. And the 2024 platform states unqualified support for access to IVF (fertility treatments), even though such treatments can involve the death of large numbers of human embryos.
Whatever the 2024 GOP platform is, it is not pro-life. Neither is President Trump’s position. Neither is Sen. Vance’s.
The Church’s guidance for pragmatists
Against such objections it will be noted that Trump/Vance, and the Trump-controlled GOP more broadly, are simply engaging in political realism. There is no pro-life majority in the matter of IVF or chemical (or other) abortions in the early stages of pregnancy. As Trump himself has told pro-lifers, before you can accomplish anything you must first get elected. Is it wise for pro-lifers like me to make a fuss, potentially undermining the candidate who is the more favorable of the two to our cause?
As a pro-lifer in deep blue Connecticut, I am no stranger to such calculations. Within the pro-life movement itself, the rift between the absolutists and the pragmatists is as old as the hills. I have always been on the side of the pragmatists. Take whatever victory you can on behalf of the unborn and live to fight another day.
But as Catholics, even pragmatists like me have guidance for how to go about those compromises—and how not to. Stephen P. White in The Catholic Thing was virtually alone in dusting off Pope St. John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae in response to Trump’s abortion position this past April. It should have been the touchstone for every Catholic response to the evolving positions of Trump and the GOP on abortion throughout 2024.
John Paul II came down firmly on the side of the pragmatists—but with a caveat. It is this caveat with which Catholic pro-lifers must contend, when assessing how to approach the Trump/Vance campaign. According to John Paul II, “...an elected official, whose absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well known, could licitly support” incremental pro-life strategies [emphasis added].
This is where Trump/Vance, and the GOP more broadly, have lost the plot. Making prudential compromises is one thing. Erasing the end-goal is quite another.
This is why, despite the near impossibility of ever seeing it in my lifetime, I begin my speech at the Connecticut March for Life (17:17) every year by re-stating our goal. Riffing off a line from the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, I always remind the crowd that we want a Connecticut “where every unborn child is protected in law and welcomed in life.” Every incremental victory is a means toward that end.
Trump/Vance somehow needs to make the same point. They need to meet the caveat laid out by Pope St. John Paul II. Especially as their recent moves have put in doubt whether they do share the pro-life movement’s goal.
And yes, I know that Trump probably never did share our goal. The overall costs and benefits to the pro-life cause of Trump’s transactional nature is a separate topic. What matters right now is remedying the damage done to the cause of the unborn by the post-Dobbs GOP’s failure to adhere to John Paul II’s guidance on pro-life incrementalism.
This is why the gutting of the GOP platform’s pro-life commitment was such a serious error. The platform was not empty symbolism. The platform was, as veteran pro-life lobbyist Tom McClusky recently said, “a promissory note. This is what the Republican Party stands for, this is the ideals that we strive for.”
In fact, maintaining that “promissory note” would have allowed Trump/Vance to bob and weave on the life issue without violating John Paul II’s caveat about compromise. The party’s principles would have been explicit even as its leaders chart a sometimes—contradictory path forward in a challenging political environment.
Trump/Vance—and particularly Vance, the Catholic convert—must somehow cure the harm caused by the gutting of the GOP platform. In a speech, an article, an offhand comment in an interview or a debate. Somewhere along the line, the message must be sent to pro-life voters that the compromises being made at the expense of the unborn are being made by an elected official “whose absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well known.”
And John Paul II did not mean “personal” in the “personally opposed, but…” sense of pro-abortion politicians. Pro-lifers need to know that the candidates who want their votes share our goal as stated by Fr. Neuhaus: a United States of America “where every unborn child is protected in law and welcomed in life.”
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Posted by: Thomas V. Mirus -
Aug. 03, 2024 8:52 PM ET USA
Grateful1: Mr. Wolfgang did not say not to vote for Trump. But the Church, and Catholics, are obligated to urge politicians, especially Catholic ones like Vance, to adopt policy positions in accord with right morality. It is not our job to pretend the candidates we vote for are better than they are. If the salt loses its savor...
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Posted by: grateful1 -
Aug. 02, 2024 6:14 PM ET USA
Spare us, Mr. Wolfgang. With good reason, most faithful Catholics--even those who dislike Trump's personality and temperament--will thank God for the opportunity to vote for him. https://www.ncregister.com/cna/trump-says-democrats-are-after-catholics-calls-out-harris-for-her-criticism-of-knights
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Posted by: jalsardl5053 -
Jul. 24, 2024 2:22 PM ET USA
"Trump/Vance—and particularly Vance, the Catholic convert—must somehow cure the harm caused by the gutting of the GOP platform." The only thing politicos understand is pressure so how do pro-lifers get them to a "somehow"? The fact that no discussion was allowed makes this task more difficult but someone with connections to state Republican organizations from which a grass roots ultimatum to RNC could be effective. One idea anyway.
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Posted by: timothy.op -
Jul. 24, 2024 1:29 PM ET USA
VERY excellently stated. I've been eager to see this addressed with the proper distinctions; thank you for this lucid exposition of where we currently stand.
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Posted by: FredC -
Jul. 23, 2024 9:11 PM ET USA
I don't think that Trump/Vance need to make public their ultimate goal, which I hope is the abolition of abortion, even if accomplished incrementally. They probably think that if they were to state this as their ultimate goal, they would not be elected. By discarding reason and emphasizing emotion, the Democrats have made abortion the sine qua non for a majority of voters. Trump wanted to remove abortion from the Democrat arsenal.
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Posted by: CorneliusG -
Jul. 22, 2024 5:07 PM ET USA
They won't fix it. I'm abstaining from voting. I'm now politically homeless. Let it burn.
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Posted by: mooreshi7489 -
Jul. 22, 2024 3:52 PM ET USA
“Trump/Vance must undo the harm caused by the RNC platform”? Whose orders can we suppose Marsha Blackburn was following when she stifled the speech of known pro-life delegates on the platform committee ? See The First Things article by Jonathon Van Maren, Is the Republican Party Becoming Pro-choice. I don’t think there is any reason to hope that Trump/Vance see the platform as a problem. Far from it. I am from Tennessee and when Trump says “jump”, Marsha asks “how high”?