“I don’t understand at all why pro-life Americans say they won’t vote for Donald Trump,” said the Hungarian pro-life activist sitting across from me. Well, let me explain—and say why European pro-life voices, however few, are urgently needed to steady the political thinking of their American counterparts.
Pro-life American Christians have been in crisis during this election season as Trump has steadily abandoned pro-life policies, and attempted to establish his pro-choice bona fides. The loudest cry of alarm went up when Trump last week said he would vote for a Florida ballot initiative that would effectively restore the permissive Roe v. Wade standard in state law. Trump’s campaign walked that back, which temporarily doused the fire, but make no mistake: pro-life conservatives are running scared.
They—we, because I am one of them—should be. It was always a fiction that Trump was pro-life. Only the truest of the MAGA faithful believed it. Nevertheless, Trump provided the Supreme Court justices who finally achieved the great goal of the pro-life movement for nearly fifty years: slaying the Roe dragon.
European readers should be aware that the effect of this was not to ban abortion, but simply to declare that there is no constitutional right to the procedure, thus, in the American system, leaving the decision to state legislatures. The Dobbs decision of 2022, which overturned 1973’s Roe ruling, returned the abortion issue to democratic political deliberation.
So far, Dobbs has been a Pyrrhic victory for the pro-life side, which has lost all seven of the state referenda on abortion since Dobbs—even in red states. Trump has been backpedaling on abortion because polls show that the pro-choice line is popular with American voters. Many pro-lifers, for decades the most reliable GOP voters, are shell-shocked by the Trumpified party’s swift collapse on abortion.
They shouldn’t be. America is a pro-choice country. According to a Gallup poll, only 12% believe abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Almost three times as many—35%—believe it should be legal in any circumstance. Fifty percent say abortion should be legal under some circumstances (3% had no opinion). So: 85% believe in some form of legalized abortion.
Plus, 60% polled say that overturning Roe was a bad thing. That figure is not new. As Gallup says that number has been stable for the more than three decades that it has been polling on the question. It was easy for Americans who don’t feel strongly about abortion rights to downplay the issue in their voting when Roe was the law of the land. Now that abortion has been put back into political play, being pro-life has become an election liability.
What’s more, when it comes to in vitro fertilization (IVF), Americans overwhelmingly endorse it. An overwhelming 82% endorse the practice, while only 10% oppose it. IVF involves the lab creation of surplus embryos, which are usually frozen and stored. If one believes that life begins at conception, there’s no way around it: these embryonic human lives will one day die when they are thawed. There is no way to be consistently pro-life and pro-IVF—but a lot of American pro-lifers are. In fact, if the argument for or against abortion rights stands or falls on the moral status of the embryo at conception, you could argue that the only consistent thinkers about abortion are idealists at both extremes.
The messy truth is that most Americans are squeamish about abortion, but most see it as a socially necessary evil. In a democracy, you should not be surprised when politicians shift their positions to go where the votes are.
In Trump’s case, there is a major difference between his moderate pro-choice position and Kamala Harris’s view. Trump wants to leave it to the states to decide. Conservative states can tailor their laws to the views of the majority there, and liberal states can do likewise. Harris, though, believes in imposing unrestricted abortion on every state, through federal law.
And this is what my Hungarian pro-life activist friend was getting at. She was visibly shocked that this is even an issue for American abortion opponents. Why would you see no meaningful distinction between someone who won’t give you everything you want on the life issue, versus someone who would take away everything you have, and shove her pro-abortion beliefs down your throat?
Besides, said the Hungarian, the Democratic Party is so opposed to what conservative Christians believe on other key issues—LGBT rights, religious liberty, and others—that the idea of U.S. Christians abandoning Trump to punish him is simply bizarre.
I told my companion that I agreed with her, and that her view is the result of living as a pro-life Christian in a culture and on a continent that has been de-Christianizing for several generations. America is not yet in that post-Christian spiritual desert, but its people are moving there quickly. I suspect that pro-lifers, most of whom are Christians, have been shocked by Trump’s walking away from pro-life orthodoxy because they haven’t confronted how post-Christian America has become in our lifetimes.
Put another way, they are shaken up by this because they—because we—are part of what it likely to be The Final Christian Generation.
This is a reference to The Final Pagan Generation, a 2015 book by historian Edward J. Watts. The title refers to Roman pagan elites born at the beginning of the fourth century, when the Empire changed gradually from pagan to Christian.
What made them the “final” generation is not that pagans ceased to exist in Roman society after they died out. Rather, as Watts tells it, they were the last generation in Rome’s history to have lived in a time when paganism was the default religious mode of their civilization.