Pro-life movement is reborn under Trump, as abortion fades from the national debate
Reports of the pro-life movement’s death have been greatly exaggerated.JD Vance spoke in person at the March for Life last week, becoming only the second sitting vice president to do so. President Trump recorded a video for the occasion, in which he vowed to “stop the radical Democrat push for a federal right to unlimited abortion on demand up to the moment of birth and even after birth.”He also pardoned 23 protesters convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE, Act during Joe Biden’s presidency — including Paula Harlow, a 75-year-old woman sentenced to two years in federal prison for blocking access to an abortion clinic.Were these the signs of a party wavering in its pro-life commitments?In the lead-up to last year’s election, publications not generally known for anti-abortion sympathies devoted column inches to writers castigating Donald Trump for supposedly betraying pro-life voters.Peter Wehner, a long-ago George W.Bush speechwriter, took to the pages of The Atlantic with an essay attempting to poison social conservatives against the 2024 Republican nominee.“The pro-life justification for supporting the former president has now collapsed,” readers were told — but The Atlantic isn’t exactly considered a trusted source by the evangelical voters Wehner hoped to turn.Far from being shut out of Republican politics by Trump, pro-lifers seem to be honored more than ever, and they’re well aware there’s no place for them in today’s Democratic Party.Efforts to drive a wedge between Trump and this steadfast conservative constituency are usually in bad faith, but liberal outlets opposed to the president and pro-lifers alike will keep trying to provoke conflict between them.What’s remarkable, however, is not only how well the alliance between abortion foes and Donald Trump has held up but how abortion has begun to recede from national politics.Democrats counted on a backlash against overturning Roe v.
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