(LifeSiteNews) — If you think watching America’s elites try to outdo each other in callous disregard for pre-born life was already maddening, try watching from behind bars. Though incarcerated over 9 months now, I’m still able to follow current events. Nearly every week there’s a new story on abortion. Rarely is it good news.
Predictably, the 2024 campaign season is shaping up like the plot of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (which, by the way [plot spoiler], ended with the part good, part evil Dr. Jekyll, succumbing to his alter ego, the purely evil Mr. Hyde, who then ended both their lives by committing suicide). To me, it looks like we’re once again faced with choosing between a party of shameless, morally bankrupt, yet supremely confident pro-murder radicals and a party of hesitant, morally confused, and inarticulate wannabe diplomats. To put it another way: they advance their position, we apologize for ours.
President Joseph Biden, who by all accounts has never met an abortion he didn’t like or an ethical standard he didn’t sink beneath, has made killing babies a central focus of his campaign. Biden boasts about authorizing doctors to approve abortion drugs remotely, authorizing pharmacies to mail those drugs anywhere in the nation, funding abortion overseas, and trying to expand abortion funding stateside. In February’s state of the union address, he praised women who took the lives of their children and vowed to “make Roe v. Wade the law of the land.”
Meanwhile, former president Donald J. Trump, “the most pro-life president ever,” who did all the normal things pro-life presidents are supposed to do and more, gave us the Supreme Court that finally overturned Roe v. Wade and became the only president to ever address the March for Life, now behaves like he regrets ever getting involved. Last year, Trump called Florida’s 6-week abortion ban a “terrible mistake” that was “too harsh,” and this year complained that Arizona’s short lived total abortion ban “went too far,” calling on lawmakers to ” remedy it.” After weeks of toying with the idea of a 15-week national abortion ban that, in his view, “the most powerful people in the pro-life movement” and “the vast majority of Republicans” would support, Trump finally washed his hands of the debate and announced that abortion would be an issue for the states alone to decide.
They advance their position, we apologize for ours (even Trump, who never apologizes for anything).
What about those states, then? Glancing at a map of the US, things certainty appear to be improving: a broad swath of states across the South and Midwest now “ban abortion” completely!
Not so fast. Since 2020 the abortion rate has been increasing.
While the most solidly pro-life states have banned clinical abortion, pro-choice governments are digging in everywhere else. Several legislatures have made abortion a constitutional right, and 7 states have held referendums to do the same. In each case, voters chose death. California pays women to travel there and murder their babies. It may now be more inconvenient to obtain a clinical abortion, but it’s by no means impossible.
Meanwhile, no state bans chemical abortion. Pro-life governments have prohibited the sale of abortion pills, but not their use. A pregnant woman who somehow obtains these drugs and uses them to kill her preborn child is immune from prosecution everywhere.
Since these drugs can kill until the 12th week of pregnancy, the majority of abortions will still take place. Pro-life America has altered how babies die, but they still die.
I see this same pattern being repeated everywhere. They advance their position; we apologize for ours.
After the 2022 Dobbs decision, Michigan should have automatically upheld its pre-Roe total abortion ban. Instead, Governor Gretchen Whitmer refused to enforce the law until a state referendum enshrined abortion into Michigan’s constitution! By contrast, in 2023 Virginia Republicans proposed 3 separate pro-life bills, each weaker than the one before: the first, a standard clinical abortion ban, would have permitted moms to kill at home. The second, Governor Glenn Youngkin’s, would have permitted any abortion before 15 weeks, while the third would have allowed all but the most late-term abortions. Each bill went down in defeat, thus demonstrating the futility of compromised legislation.
In the US Congress, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) spent 10 months heroically blocking military promotions to protest Biden’s policy of paying for the abortion related travel of female service members. That is, until December 2023 when he inexplicably abandoned the effort (partially due, no doubt, to harassment from fellow Republicans). And just this month in the US Senate, both parties demonstrated a sickening disregard for the image of God with competing bills designed to virtue signal support for IVF procedures.
In April of this year, when the Alabama Supreme Court correctly ruled that embryos created via IVF were legal persons, that state’s Republican dominated legislature hurriedly passed new legislation to protect IVF clinics from prosecution, essentially giving them a license to continue making and destroying tiny human beings in perpetuity.
It’s not like all the news has been bad. I’m encouraged that anti-abortion leaders are finally sounding the alarm on the chemical abortion trade, and that some are willing to castigate Donald Trump for throwing preborn kids under the bus when it suits him. But for every step forward we seem to take one backwards. I don’t know if we’ve made any net progress since the fateful summer of 2022. The truly sad part is that these retreats need not have happened. They were motivated by the irrational terror that protecting the innocent is somehow an embarrassing position to hold that life is a liability.
Witness the guidance issued this March by the National Republican Congressional Committee to Republican candidates seeking election in 2024. Obviously concerned that abortion is a winning issue for Democrats, the guidance doesn’t advise Republicans to champion a consistent defense of human life but rather that they highlight Democratic support for those disgusting but less common late-term abortions, express empathy for women and discuss “common sense solutions” (i.e. compromise).
READ: America on the brink: How do we turn around our political and spiritual crisis?
Donald Trump, who has a knack for verbalizing what other politicians only think, pretty much summed it up in September of 2023 when, in an interview with Kristen Walker of “Meet the Press,” he said:
You have to go with your heart. But beyond that you also have to get elected, okay? And if you don’t have the 3 exceptions [rape, incest and the mother’s life], I think it’s very, very hard to get elected.
Trump himself has several times blamed Republican losses in the 2022 midterms on the fact that certain candidates were too strictly anti-abortion, and offended voter sensibilities.
As recently as April he reiterated this point in a campaign video, saying:
Follow your heart on this issue. But remember, you must also win elections to restore our culture and, in fact, to save our country, which is currently and very sadly a nation in decline.
There you have it. To save the nation and fix the culture, you must win elections (in other words, cultural change is a top-down process). To win elections, you must pander to pro-choice voters. This is nothing new. It’s straight out of the GOP playbook. It’s the campaign strategy followed for 50 years.
Again and again, they advance their position, we apologize for ours.
To someone sitting in prison, hoping their defiance of pro-death policies might inspire their countrymen to forsake cowardice and finally rescue preborn children from the slaughter that daily awaits thousands, all this talk about winning elections can be heartbreaking. Last year, upon learning of Trump’s rather pathetic 15-week national abortion ban idea, and the Susan B. Anthony List’s support for such a measure, my friend Laura Geis, serving a multiple month sentence for taking part in a red rose rescue, wrote:
I’m in a jail cell … screaming to be heard, watching and listening to your rhetoric … [you] playing with the lives of the unborn in a fear driven panic over whether or not we will WIN THE ELECTION. What? This is crazy talk!
I’ve always been an activist, never a professional political strategist. The vicious cycle of appeasement that pro-life candidates and office holders have stuck to for so long makes no sense to me. Yes, I realize that polls report most Americans think abortion should be “legal most of the time.” But I also know that the average pro-choice person has never heard the arguments against abortion, knows almost nothing about fetal development or what abortion does to a human embryo, and has never witnessed anyone suffer or sacrifice anything in defense of preborn children.
When people are finally exposed to the truth (which is, by the way, all on our side), remarkable transformations often occur. During my 15 years of educational activism, I’ve seen minds change right in front of me! I’ve heard testimony by others who, years after speaking to anti-abortion advocates, admitted that the seeds we planted in their hearts eventually blossomed into an appreciation that the crazy Christians were right all along.
It’s impressive enough when this happens individual by individual. What would transpire if a major political party, with unlimited resources at its disposal and the ability to speak to multiple millions at once, was united in presenting a factual, morally consistent, unapologetic stance against baby-killing? Perhaps for a few years that party might lose elections in particularly pro-abortion districts. But eventually, after the other side had worn itself out trying to defend the defenseless, I believe the momentum would shift irreversibly towards truth.
This, however, would require some delayed gratification, and most pro-life politicians are focused on now. They lack the foresight (or rather, do not care) that taking a hardline stance today will pay dividends tomorrow, and clear the path for greater and greater victories in the future. No, all that matters is this election (i.e. their election). And as we’ve been told time and time again, “If we don’t win this year, it’s all over!”
I suppose we should be glad Joe Biden and the Democrats have decided to make baby-killing so central to their campaigns. They’ll force Republicans to address the issue! Whether pro-life politicians react as they’ve usually done, or finally see beyond myopic self-interest, is the big question of 2024. If Jekyll doesn’t stop hiding from Hyde, Hyde will be the death of both of them.
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Jonathan Darnel is an anti-abortion activist incarcerated for participating in a 2020 rescue at a Washington, DC abortion mill. Jonathan’s activism site is GetSeriousChurch.com. To help incarcerated anti-abortion rescuers go to SmashTheFACE.life.