Ahead of the next Republican primary debate, there is a lot of chatter about “fracture” in the pro-life movement.
The movement is not fractured. It’s free. And that is an essential characteristic of the conservative approach to politics. There is no ideological purity test for conservatives, no political machine enforcing the party line. We rally together for the defense of political goods and debate each other in the public square.
I, for one, enthusiastically welcome such debate. Every person arguing over the future of the pro-life movement wants to save preborn children. Every politician who decides to take a stance on abortion bans — whether they’re at 15, 12, eight or six weeks — is a politician who has staked his or her future on successfully saving lives.
Of course, it’s politically essential to pro-abortionists that this public discussion of tactics seem like a difference of principle. And that’s because they are terrified the public will discover just how abhorrent their policies really are.
When former President Donald Trump pointed out in September that Democrats want late-term abortion and even post-birth infanticide to be fully legal, newly-minted “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker flatly contradicted him: “That’s not true.”
It is true, though. Democratic leaders have pushed for policies that would legalize late-term abortion and, arguably, post-birth infanticide in just the past two years. House Democrats introduced and passed a bill — twice — that would abolish all restrictions on abortion on the grounds that such restrictions are “tools of gender oppression.”
Eleven states liberalized their abortion laws after Roe fell in June 2022. Oregon, Minnesota, Vermont and New Jersey have expanded access to the point that they now have no restrictions on abortion.
A 2022 California bill that was likely intended to establish the state as an abortion destination gained notoriety upon its first introduction as an “infanticide bill,” generating so much backlash for its language protecting people from legal liability in the case of “perinatal death[s]” that it forced an amendment.
It’s also the case that President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice is arresting pro-life protestors.
This isn’t the behavior of a moderate party. Democrats very much want late-term abortion, and it seems likely that a few might like to defend post-birth infanticide.
The pro-abortion machine operates effectively in part because it has no reservations about crushing dissent within its ranks. Its goal is to make abortion accessible at any point in pregnancy, and it will use any means to do so.
Of course, it also aims to do this covertly. Even pro-abortion Americans are too squeamish to explicitly embrace full-term abortion as a reality, so they resort to euphemism and political sleight of hand. They call the murder of preborn children of any age “women’s healthcare,” and refer to the grisly killing and dismemberment of late-term children as “increased access” to such care.
Pro-life conservatives, on the other hand, have always made use of the public square to advance political goals. We always have, and we continue to do so. That’s what our current disputes over abortion bans really are: our movement doing what it has always done best, in good faith and full transparency.
We can and should rejoice in the fact that GOP presidential candidates are discussing how best to preserve life, just as we can and should rejoice that the fall of Roe has made such discussion possible at all.
Timothy Head is the executive director of the Faith & Freedom Coalition.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.