Yesterday, the world's largest annual human rights demonstration took place in Washington D.C. For more than fifty years, pro-life Americans have gathered in our nation's capital for their annual March for Life. Both the President, by means of a brief video, and the Vice President, in a personal appearance, addressed the thousands who had come and braved the bitter cold for the sanctity of human life. While Vice President Vance, as well as President Trump, both patted themselves on the back for the Trump-Vance Administration's protection of the unborn child's right to life; the truth is, the comments of both amounted to little more than smoke and mirrors. In fact, it's safe to say that the Trump-Vance Administration is the most anti-life Republican Administration in American history. If you don't believe me, just take the time to read the following.
To begin with, Trump, for pure political expediency’s sake, had all debate cut off at the GOP’s Platform Committee meeting prior to the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The reason Trump had all pro-life voices on the committee censored or muted was so that he could compromise the party’s stance on abortion by removing, for the first time in the history of the GOP, its pro-life plank, which called for a federal ban on abortion.
It was the party’s new compromised stance on abortion that narrowed Trump’s pick of vice presidential candidates to Marco Rubio and J. D. Vance, who proved to be Trump’s eventual selection, since other possible vice presidential candidates, like South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, were unwilling to compromise their pro-life principles by no longer calling for a federal ban on abortion. Of course, our president’s own wife and our country’s First Lady, Melania, unlike her husband and his Vice President J. D. Vance, doesn’t even pretend to be pro-life, but proudly and publicly professes her belief in a woman's fundamental right to terminate her pregnancy and exterminate the life of her unborn child.
Both Trump and Vance are guilty of political sleight of hand when it comes to their championing of the pro-life cause. They claim credit for ending the divisiveness in our country over abortion, which has not even been curtailed, much less ceased, by passing the buck on abortion to the states. According to them, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs Decision, which was made possible by Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, has defused the abortion issue by leaving it to the states to decide. Yet, far from absolving the Trump-Vance Administration of all culpability in the continuing carnage of unborn children in our country, all the Trump-Vance Administration has really done is empower states to legalize abortion, even late-term abortions, which some states have legalized right up to the moment of birth. Not only has our president completely contradicted his avowed opposition to late-term abortions, by allowing states to permit and perform them, as well as being personally mum and mute about them, but he has also been caught talking out of both corners of his mouth, by opposing the state of Arizona’s ban on abortion and calling Florida’s ban on abortion after six weeks a “terrible idea.”
In flagrant violation of his promises to his pro-life supporters, Trump, in the first year of his second term in the White House, has not only expanded access to in vitro fertilization (IVF), a process in which multiple human embryos are discarded and destroyed, but he has also protected access to abortion drugs. Trump, who has proudly called himself “the father of IVF,” has also fought for and defended rules, put in place by the Biden-Harris Administration, that permit the abortion drug mifepristone to be prescribed via “telehealth” and sent to pregnant women all across America through the mail. Of course, this completely nullifies the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade in the Dobbs Decision, by allowing women to chemically abort their babies even in states where abortions are banned.
The abortion pill mifepristone, despite causing serious or life-threatening complications in 11% of women who take it, accounts for two-thirds of all abortions in today’s America. Although Trump vowed to restrict it, his administration is actually fighting for it. For instance, Trump’s DOJ asked a Texas federal court to dismiss a lawsuit brought by three Republican-led states against the rules allowing mifepristone to be mail ordered by women in their states. Adding insult to injury, the Trump Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services has just announced the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a new generic version of mifepristone, which will make it cheaper for women to chemically terminate their pregnancies with mailed mifepristone.
Just a couple of weeks ago, President Trump told Republican lawmakers, who had gathered at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., that the time had come for Republicans “to be a little flexible on the Hyde Amendment,” which outlaws the use of taxpayer dollars to fund abortions. This, despite the fact, that for fifty years no Republican president, until Donald Trump, has ever wavered on his wholehearted support for the Hyde Amendment. Both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush staunchly supported it; and George W. Bush even expanded it, by signing the Weldon Amendment, which protected healthcare entities that refuse to either provide or pay for abortions from lawsuits. Even Democrats, such as Joe Biden, once supported the Hyde Amendment, agreeing that no pro-life American’s pocket should ever be picked by the federal government to pay for an abortion.
Trump’s call for Republican lawmakers to “be a little flexible on the Hyde Amendment” came to fruition on the House Floor just two days after he called for it at the Kennedy Center. On Thursday, January 8, seventeen Republicans joined with Democrats to pass a spending bill that extends enhanced subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, which is better known as Obamacare. Never mind that these seventeen Republicans, by voting with the opposition party, gave Democrats the very thing that they orchestrated a 43-day government shutdown over, but they also voted, in violation of the Hyde Amendment, to subsidize insurance plans that cover abortions.
The number of abortions in America are not declining, but actually on the rise again. For instance, in spite of other health services provided by Planned Parenthood being on the decline, Planned Parenthood’s abortion numbers are increasing. In fact, 97% of pregnant women who enter a Planned Parenthood facility exit it no longer pregnant. While Trump and Vance may have touted their administration’s pro-life record to thousands at yesterday’s March to Life, I’m sorry to say that it was really nothing more than smoke and mirrors, from the most anti-life Republican Administration in American history.