Pro-lifers who withold their votes from Trump will learn the hard way how badly that will backfire
One of the more disappointing things about American politics is how much time is often spent debating policies that have no actual chance of ever being enacted in this country.
Such is the case with the recently “proposed” federal abortion ban that has apparently sent a large number of pro-life Republicans into a tizzy after Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have said they would not sign such a bill were it to be put on the desk of the president, and has them claiming they will not vote for the GOP ticket as a result.
Let's, however, look at this from a realistic angle.
In order for any bill limiting abortion to pass through Congress, whether it be a total ban or something along the lines of a requirement that only people over the age of 18 years old would be eligible to get an abortion, it would require 60 votes in the Senate to survive a filibuster.
But because we can safely assume that Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski would also vote against any such measures, that increases the number of Senate votes needed to 62. Currently the Republicans have 49 Senators, meaning that they would need to flip 13 Senate seats to achieve that number, assuming Collins and Murkowski were the only Republican holdouts, something I would not bet money on.
To put that in perspective, in an absolute best case dream scenario in the 2024 elections where Republicans were to flip every Democrat Senate seat in a somewhat competitive state, they would only pick up 9 seats, far short of the 13 needed to shepherd an abortion ban through Congress.
Not to mention that the way Senate elections are cycled it’s hard to see a scenario where there would ever be enough vulnerable seats at any one time to flip the necessary number of seats in future elections.
What’s more, even if the opportunity were to present itself, the pro-life community has demonstrated conclusively that they are not up to the challenge of getting those candidates elected.
Since the Supreme Court issued its decision reversing Roe, pro-lifers have suffered a string of humiliating losses including many of them in deep red states like Kansas, Kentucky and Montana. So in essence, these pro-lifers are trying to transfer the blame for their own failures onto Donald Trump by creating a hypothetical situation that will never come to fruition.
Those same people don’t seem to understand, however, that the repeal of Roe v. Wade removed the umbrella protection from state and local regulations that had existed for decades for abortion clinics.
Regardless of whether such laws required clinic doctors to have hospital-admitting privileges, or forced those clinics to keep accurate records or insisted that they maintain basic hygienic standards, courts would routinely toss any such regulations under the rubric of them violating Roe v. Wade.
Because Donald Trump’s Supreme Court picks overturned Roe however, abortion clinics can now be saddled with the same types of red tape and onerous regulations of the sort that liberals subjected organizations like the Boy Scouts to.
In fact, how is it that liberals have been able to successfully block new Chick-Fil-A franchises from opening in their districts but pro-lifers haven’t been able to figure out how to use government bureaucracy to block abortion clinics from opening or operating, even in deep red states?
Oh, right … because if they tried to do so, the same conservatives who are whining about not getting a federal abortion ban would complain that the Right was abandoning its principles by using government regulations to punish a private business.
In short, Donald Trump was massively successful in doing what his office allowed him to do in order to end abortion. On the flip side, the people accusing him of being insufficiently pro-life have failed spectacularly in doing their part in winning state and local elections over the issue of abortion.
Instead of focusing on pie in the sky “principled” solutions like a federal abortion ban, conservatives would be much better served by looking at the reality of the situation. For example, if a state passed a law banning all abortions except those performed in the case of rape, incest or the life of the mother, there’s no way that any standalone clinic could afford to stay in business serving that miniscule customer base.
Focusing on under-the-radar regulation of abortion clinics via state and local legislative bodies that people mostly ignore is the way to go in a post-Roe era, not some high profile election referendum that’s guaranteed to fail.
However if pro-lifers decide they are going to stay home and not vote for MAGA Republican candidates because some imaginary bill that won’t be implemented would theoretically be vetoed by Donald Trump, that would lead to a Democrat victory in the 2024 election, which would kill any momentum for the passage of such laws in local municipalities going forward -- and result in far more abortions in the long term.
Choose wisely.
Image: James McNellis, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY 2.0 Deed