“For faithful Jews and Christians, the God of Scripture has already spoken: “So God created mankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
There is only one pro-life candidate who will be on the ballot in the 2020 presidential elections. Period.
President Donald J. Trump, like President Ronald Reagan before him, took the long road to the pro-life movement, but once there, you have to give him credit – he has not run away from the issue in public, and he seems as clear and firm now as he did in 2016.
As late as 1999, the President was pro-abortion. He came to the pro-life side, in his own words, because of witnessing his friend’s raise children whom they had planned to abort. As he explained in an interview:
“I [always] hate[d] the concept of abortion. And since then, I’ve very much evolved. And what happened is friends of mine years ago were going to have a child, and it was going to be aborted. And it wasn’t aborted. And that child today is a total superstar, a great, great child. And I saw that. And I saw other instances. And I am very, very proud to say that I am pro-life.”
As a candidate and now as President, he has been politically blunt, some say brutal, in a way that no modern politician has, and more courageous on the issue of life than many in the official “pro-life” movements.
The President has been consistent in his pro-life positions, throughout the 2016 and 2018 election cycles. He boldly championed his pro-life position in the nationally televised debates with Hillary Clinton in 2016. At one point he left Mrs. Clinton speechless when he directly challenged her on the so-call “partial-birth abortion” procedure, asking her whether or not she thought a child only days away from birth should be killed. Mrs. Clinton, clearly stunned, only offered one of her strange smiles in response.
As a candidate, the President was also very specific. He made public a list of potential Supreme Court Justices, that were “all pro-life” in general philosophy. He went on to state that he believed that with two or more appointees, the court would overturn Roe v. Wade and send the determination of abortion’s legal status back to the individual states – where it had been until 1973.
In an unusual public letter to national pro-life leaders in September 2016, the then-candidate outlined four specific objectives he would pursue as President:
1) Nominating pro-life justices to the U.S. Supreme Court.
2) Signing into law the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would end late-term abortions nationwide.
3) Defunding Planned Parenthood as long as they continue to perform abortions, and re-allocating their funding to community health centers that provide comprehensive health care for women.
4) Making the Hyde Amendment permanent law to protect taxpayers from having to pay for abortions.
The progress on these pledges is remarkable. He has sent two pro-life Justices to the Supreme Court, as well as already seating a record 150 conservative federal judges.
While the Pain-Capable Act did pass the House in 2017, it never made it out of the Senate to the President’s desk. However, he has reaffirmed his intentions to sign a bill if it is voted out of Congress.
In February 2019, the Administration issued rules that prohibited Planned Parenthood, in the absence of Congressional defunding, from spending money on abortions from referrals. In response in August, Planned Parenthood stopped accepting funding for abortions from the Federal Government.
Finally, while the Hyde Amendment still has not been made permanent, the President has recently reaffirmed his intention to sign legislation if it reaches his desk, and did reinstate the Mexico City Policy that forbids funding of abortion services using U.S. foreign aid.
Perhaps the most significant contribution made by President Trump, however, is to help expose just how fervently radical the Democratic Party is in pushing abortion on demand, even after birth. The President began that process in 2016 by attacking in plain language Hillary Clinton and the out-going President Obama as rabid pro-death proponents supporting third-trimester abortions and condemned Planned Parenthood for selling body parts of aborted babies for profit.
President Trump has been consistent in championing the pro-life message and condemning the pro-death “DNA” of the radical left. He has forced them to defend their real agenda into the public debate. When the Democratic Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, (disgraced when photos of the then twenty-six-year-old medical student surfaced showing him wearing “blackface” and another student wearing KKK garb) spoke favorably on January 30, 2019, of infanticide – killing a delivered baby – President Trump led the debate with customary bluntness. “The governor [Northam] stated that he would even allow a newborn baby to come out into the world, and wrap the baby, and make the baby comfortable, and then talk to the mother and talk to the father and then execute the baby. Execute the baby!”
The current field of 21 Democratic candidates for President in 2020, is virtually unanimous (in debate and on their websites) in their support for abortion on demand with minimal, if any, restrictions. Most of these candidates leave no doubt that they support former President Obama, Hillary Clinton and Ralph Northam in their enthusiasm for third-trimester and post-birth abortions. It is their intellectual heritage that is witnessed by the 60 million babies aborted in the U.S. since 1973.
For those who believe that the preamble to the Declaration of Independence is expository, that each person has “…certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” then only one candidate agrees with you.