The End of the Principled Pro-Lifer

and an Eminem reference for good measure

It’s no surprise that a huge reason why Donald Trump was elected in 2016 was because evangelicals gave him a gold star. Pro-life evangelicals are a huge voting bloc, and their vote can and does sway elections. Did he laugh openly about sexually harassing women? Sure. Did he have a very shady business history? I mean, yeah. Was he a walking tweet, full of loud opinions and less-than-nuanced ideas? Obviously. But he held one very important golden ticket:

He was going to overturn Roe vs. Wade.

It’s hard to deny that Trump played a huge role in the current state of abortion law in the US. By appointing not one, not two, but three Supreme Court justices who voted to essentially overturn the notorious ruling, he was a big player in the abortion game. People can and do crow about how any conservative president could have done that, but, well—they didn’t. He did.

When I was a campus missionary at Tulane University, I attended a talk by Serrin Foster. Serrin was (and is) the president of Feminists for Life, a group that fights to end abortion. It does so through the lens of attacking root causes: by looking at why women get abortions, and making it easier for women to choose motherhood. In 2013, this was fairly novel. It was the first time I had heard abortion described as a band-aid—the first time I had really imagined utilizing social resources as pro-life tools. I walked out of that talk fired up. Where would women on campus nurse? Where could they get free ultrasounds? Where could they find clothes for job interviews? These became the new questions on my tongue, not just how many cells a baby has at X number of weeks or whatever.

Fast-forward 11 years. That kind of rhetoric is everywhere.