Reports of the pro-life movement’s death have been greatly exaggerated. 

Vice President 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 Act during Joe Biden’s presidency — including a 75-year-old woman sentenced to two years in federal prison for blocking access to an abortion clinic, Paula Harlow.

Were these words and actions 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 Mr. Trump for supposedly betraying pro-life voters.

A long-ago George W. Bush speechwriter, Peter Wehner, 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 Mr. Wehner hoped to turn. 

Far from being shut out of Republican politics by Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Trump has held up but how abortion has begun to recede from national politics.

Democrats counted on a backlash against overturning Roe v. Wade to propel Vice President Harris into the White House.

This was the first presidential election since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that ended Roe and returned abortion law to the states.

If ever there was going to be a nationwide referendum on Roe, and abortion as a federally protected right, this was it.

Yet Mr. Trump won that referendum for pro-lifers.

Ms. Harris actually lost ground with women voters compared to Mr. Biden’s performance four years earlier. 

State-level referendums turned out worse for pro-lifers — they lost in seven of the ten states that put abortion on the ballot last year.

In all ten of those states, Ms. Harris underperformed relative to the vote in support of abortion rights.

According to Sarah Varney of KFF Health News, “about three in ten voters in Arizona, Missouri, and Nevada who supported the abortion rights measures also voted for Trump,” and the pattern was similar in the other states with abortion on the ballot.

The Trump-Vance ticket won the middle ground by standing against Roe and in favor of leaving abortion to the states. 

That doesn’t satisfy the most ardent pro-lifers, who would prefer a national abortion ban.

Yet given a choice between fighting their battles at the state level or seeing Roe reimposed nationally, even the most uncompromising abortion opponent will opt for some success in the states over total defeat at the federal level.

The Trump-Vance approach has given pro-lifers victories that would have been impossible if abortion had remained a national issue.

Nebraska wouldn’t have been able to pass an amendment to the state constitution prohibiting abortion after the first trimester, and Florida voters wouldn’t have been able to uphold their state’s ban on the procedure after six weeks — to name just two recent successes.

The most hardline supporters of abortion, meanwhile, have been thwarted: Not only did they lose the showdown over Roe, they risk losing all their political momentum as Americans become more used to settling this most contentious of issues at the state level.

In the states, neighbors can search for consensus with neighbors, instead of strangers across the country arguing with each other over ideological principles. 

Such is the variety of culture and values from state to state that no American, whatever his or her views on abortion, need feel as if there’s no place in this country to live among those who share the same fundamental commitments and under laws that respect their conscience.

There won’t be an end to debate, of course, either within the states or at the national level. 

Only as long as federal power isn’t in play, even arguments over abortion can become less acrimonious.

That, too, may serve the pro-life cause well, easing the way to winning hearts and changing minds — and saving lives.

Creators.com