Simcha Fisher, Columnist for Sydney’s Catholic Weekly – the only weekly religious paper in Australia – summed up the new situation for US pro-lifers: “We’ve never been so free to vote however we want, as long as we’re not voting with the intention of hurting somebody innocent.
“But we don’t have to spend a single moment of our time thinking that our vote says anything about us as pro-lifers. It doesn’t. We’re free.”
Or in blunter terms: pro-lifers, don’t think you have to vote for Trump.
We are talking about the words of a writer with a strident catholic anti-abortion point of view. the title of her book The Sinner’s Guide to Natural Family Planning tells you that she is absolutely traditional Catholic on sex and pregnancy.
But she has proclaimed liberty to the captives who have thought they needed to vote for Trump.
The first reason is that the recent flip-flops by Trump reveal that he was never really a convinced pro-lifer. It was good politics to run on making over the US Supreme Court so that Roe v Wade could be overturned. After all, evangelicals had come along and supported Catholics in having the court’s interpretation that abortions were a constitutionally backed human right scrubbed out. White evangelical votes secured Trump the presidency in 2016.
That opened abortion as an issue to be decided by the states.
But Fisher points to Trump’s comments about Florida’s law, which bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. She writes, “Except that he just said into a reporter’s microphone that six weeks is “too short; there has to be more time … I want more weeks”; ie, the law should give women more time to decide whether or not to get an abortion (or, as often happens, more time to get pressured or coerced into an abortion).”
Since then, Trump has been under pressure and has flipped again. He will vote to keep the existing Florida law. But he has outed himself as not being opposed to abortion on principle – perhaps unreconstructed since his days as a new york democrat.
The second reason is that Abortions in the US have increased since the Dodds decision. Here’s the Other Cheek’s story “An inconvenient truth, abortions increase as the pro-life movement is abandoned by Trump.” Fisher cites the same source.
Simca Fisher suggests that the anti-abortion laws that conservatives wrote were so badly drafted that they led to confusion with cases of doctors refusing treatment to women miscarrying, leading to their unpopularity.
(The Other Cheek can suggest a more fundamental reason strong anti-abortion laws receive pushback – Roe v Wade’s stance on abortion is available for up to 23 weeks reflects popular opinion in the US. Here’s a Pew Research poll showing that 61 per cent of Americans believe abortion should be legal but also support restrictions. 56% per cent of those polled say that how long a woman has been pregnant matters and that, in some cases, abortion should be illegal.)
Simcha Fisher’s case is that both major parties are now pro-choice, varying only in degree. So, pro-lifers should not be wedded to voting for the Republicans. After decades of being urged that only one party can be voted for on principle, she has now set the captives free. This means the US now lines up with Australia, where both major parties have a big majority of pro-choice MPs.
Over in Protestant-land, this big change has raised alarm. Albert Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, on his Briefing podcast, described ” the aftermath of the Dobbs decision in 2022, reversing Roe v. Wade.”
“The pro-life movement has to be very sober, very serious and very honest. We’ve lost virtually every one of these statewide votes since the Dobbs decision in 2022, even in places such as Kansas and Kentucky, which have been red states with a pro-life sentiment.
“It just turns out that the states weren’t as pro-life as we thought when it actually came to a voter action.”
… “So we’re looking at a very dark political calculus here. We’re also looking at a very significant challenge, a challenge to the pro-life movement. A challenge that comes down to the fact that many of our neighbours are not nearly as pro-life as we thought they were. And when the question is put on the ballot as it is going to happen in these ten states, we’re about to find out what. You can’t say the people those states actually believe. You have to say, technically, that the voters of the state believe, and in this case, it’s the voters who turn out to vote, which is another part of the moral equation. What are the ten states? Well, they are Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New York, South Dakota, and Nebraska. Now, not only are they not all the same thing in terms of the actual measure that will go before voters. What is in common here is that the voters in all ten of those states are going to be voting one way or another, up or down on abortion rights.
“That means up or down on restrictions on abortion in those states; that means up or down on the question of the sanctity of unborn human life.”
When taken to a statewide vote, the pro-life movement has lost in seven states already. These ten could follow the same path.
Mohler looks at Florida, where the state Governor Ron DeSantis strongly backs the six-week ban. “You look at this amendment in a state like Florida, and if it passes, especially given the supermajority that is necessary there in Florida, you know, that’s going to indicate not only that we have been losing ground, it might indicate we’re losing the argument when it comes to American culture.”
American Christians might be close to drawing the conclusion that many (but not all Australian Christians arrived at long ago: that politics is no longer a good way to advance Christianity or even Christian morals.