All pro-life people need to support and vote for Trump in the 2024 election. They need to take the huge, giant “W” (aka the win) on abortion that the Supreme Court gave America with the Dobbs decision and carry their fight against abortion to the state level. They also must understand that the moral fight over abortion is inextricably intertwined with the greatest cancer of 20th-century American government, namely, judicial activism. If we lose this one, we’ve lost the nation.

This is how close we are:

They want to overthrow The Constitution pic.twitter.com/d1g35Vavwy

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 1, 2024

A vocal minority of pro-life supporters are claiming that Trump has turned his back on the pro-life cause. A number are threatening to withhold their vote for Trump because of it, while in the most extreme cases, some claim they will vote for Harris. Many of these people are well-meaning, but they don’t understand the law nor why Trump’s position is as pro-life as possible. And they do not appreciate the existential stakes at issue.

Our Constitution, at Article I Section 8, enumerates the limited areas in which the federal legislature may create laws. Abortion is not mentioned there, nor is it mentioned in the Bill of Rights. Thus, for 186 years after Americans ratified the Constitution in 1787, abortion was wholly an issue of state law. During this time, abortion was never mentioned in a Republican Party platform.

That changed in 1973 when seven activist judges used Roe v Wade to usurp the power of the people to amend the Constitution by penning a right to abortion on the margins. But in truth, this was just one of a series of radical and unconstitutional Supreme Court decisions that have dramatically altered our nation’s fabric.

Since they took root on our shores around 1900, progressives have always looked at the Constitution as an impediment to their goals and have sought a way around it. Progressive justices have been methodically removing Jewish and Christian religions from the public square for well over a century, turning our nation ever more secular and atheist.  Roe v. Wade was the centerpiece of an equally long effort to use sex to attack religion and the role of the family. In the 1964 case of Reynolds v, Sims, the Court did away with geographical representation as the basis for state legislatures, turning our states into democracies akin to those our Founders decried. Indeed, we are eating its bitter fruit now as states become ever more dominated by their urban centers and ever more radical in their politics.

These are just a few of the ways in which progressives and judicial activists have unconstitutionally worked fundamental changes to our nation. And they promise to continue doing so if not stopped.

That hard stop may have come with Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The decision accomplished two goals.

First, Dobbs moved abortion back to state law, where it had been for most of our nation’s history. That happened because Donald Trump, true to his word, appointed originalist judges who honored the Founders’ intentions. As Justice Thomas wrote in Gonzalez v. Carhart, abortion has “no basis in the Constitution,” and federal regulation of abortion was not “a permissible exercise of Congress' power under the Commerce Clause...”

Second, if Dobbs stands and is honored, it sounds the death knell for judicial activism. It gives teeth to the Tenth Amendment’s statement that any rights not explicitly written in the Constitution can only be recognized if they had a firm basis in law and custom at our founding. This makes Dobbs as important for abortion and morality as it is for the law and the continued existence of our Republic. 

What Trump accomplished with Dobbs is to put the abortion question beyond the reach of federal legislators. It is up to those who oppose abortion to see that their policies are reflected in state law. The only other way to regulate or abolish abortion is through an Article V constitutional amendment.

To those who want to restrict abortion, this is everything that they could ask for under our constitutional Republic. They should not be upset that Trump will not sign federal laws restricting abortion; they should be thankful that the federal government does not have that power. And they should be mindful that if Harris gets elected, Dobbs will not be respected, judicial activism will return, and Harris will reinstate unlimited abortion in federal law.

Image by AI.