What About Abortion?

Pro-choice and anti-abortion demonstrators stage concurrent events outside the United States Supreme Court Building, Washington DC, April 26, 1989. Photo by Lorie Shaull from St Paul, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

I have been open about my decision to support Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in this year’s presidential election, One frequent objection I get is that a true Christian and pro-life conservative cannot vote for Harris because of abortion. I used to think the same way, but even though I’m still pro-life, that argument holds less sway than it used to.

For starters, a lot of people make the case that abortion is the be-all and end-all of moral issues, but that isn’t necessarily the case. For example, a commenter on the platform formerly known as Twitter recently cited Proverbs 6:16-19 as a text that proved voting Harris was incompatible with Christianity.

Here’s what the verse says:

There are six things the Lord hates,
seven that are detestable to him:
haughty eyes,
a lying tongue,
hands that shed innocent blood,
         a heart that devises wicked schemes,
feet that are quick to rush into evil,
         a false witness who pours out lies
and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.

The Twitter user focused on the “hands that shed innocent blood” phrase, but note that this example is third on the list of things the Lord hates. I freely acknowledge that shedding innocent blood is evil and I included elective abortion in that category, but taking the verse in context, “haughty eyes” (pride) and “a lying tongue” rank higher on the list of abominations (to use the King James translation). The Twitter commenter ignored how aptly those sins apply to the Republican candidate that he was supporting.

We should ask ourselves why the author of Proverbs places the sins of pride and dishonesty higher up the list of abominations than shedding innocent blood. It may be that God hates these sins because they often lead to the shedding of blood, but at the very least, it should make us reconsider the importance of these actions that too many of us often wink at and rationalize away.

And continuing on, the other bullet points on the list of things the Lord hates also scream “Trump!” A wicked heart, feet that rush to evil, a false witness, and stirring up conflict are all descriptors that warn us against support for Donald Trump, so why do so many Christians double down on The Former Guy and myopically focus on abortion while ignoring a plethora of other sins committed by the right?

If I had to guess, I’d say the reason is multifaceted. For one thing, abortion is a graphic sin that grips the imagination. It is difficult to justify or not have an emotional response to what abortion actually is: Brutally killing an unborn baby.

In our world of confirmation bias, it isn’t uncommon to talk to people who don’t believe that Trump is a liar. They either don’t hear the truth or discount it because they don’t like the source. The truth is not subjective but our acceptance of it can be.

But I think the focus is also the product of decades of intimate relations between the Christian Right and the Republican Party. The Christian Right has become so focused on abortion as a visible example of American sin that it has compromised it’s principles so that anyone who claims to be anti-abortion is considered to be automatically morally superior to anyone who is pro-choice.

But is that really the case? Take Donald Trump (please!). In recent years, Trump’s pro-life mask has slipped and he has increasingly let his pro-choice roots show. Much has been made of Minnesota’s abortion law that allegedly let babies that survived abortions be left to die. As it turns out, that is not the case since, as MPR News explains, Minnesota law still requires doctors to care for infants born alive but provides for palliative care for infants that will not survive despite the best efforts of doctors.

At any rate, even if Minnesota law did allow doctors to butcher infants that miraculously survived an abortion, that would be fine with Trump under his state-rights position on the issue. Per Trump, whatever a state wants to do on the issue is fine with him. (The new Republican platform also moves away from opposition to same-sex marriage.)

Is it true that any anti-abortion candidate is better than any pro-choice candidate? Consider a reductio ad absurdum in which Hitler is a candidate. He advocates for genocide against the Jews and other Untermenschen, but he’s anti-abortion because he wants to birth as many Aryan babies as possible. Would Hitler be a more moral candidate than, say, Kamala Harris? If you think so, your moral compass is bent.

If you acknowledge that other issues can outweigh abortion, then it becomes a matter of personal priorities and understanding as to where to draw the line. Is bearing false witness against the immigrant community and stoking racial hatred a sufficient reason to vote for a pro-choice candidate? How about provoking an attack on Congress while attempting to steal an election? I could go on adding weight to the scales.

Trump has other moral failings far beyond these. Aside from exhibiting a number of the abominations cited in Proverbs, Trump has been credibly accused of sexual assault and was found civilly liable for the rape of E. Jean Carroll. If the church is rallying around someone determined by a jury to be a rapist just because he implausibly claims to be pro-life, the church has lost its way.

And then there is the fact that the anti-abortion voters have an outsized understanding of how the president affects abortion policy. I do think that Trump’s Supreme Court appointments were good ones (largely because he only picked from a shortlist created by the Federalist Society and didn’t pick his sister as he instinctively wanted to), but the victory in Dobbs has essentially removed the issue of abortion from the federal level and returned it to the states.

Pro-life voters should understand that if Kamala Harris wins, there will be no codification of Roe. Harris may desire this pro-abortion legislation, but Republicans are likely to control at least one house of Congress, rendering her desires moot. Even if Democrats narrowly retain control of Congress, it would take removal of the filibuster to pass such a bill and Democrats have been unwilling to take that step over the past four years.

Killing the filibuster would be extremely short-sighted by either party. It would enable the passage of bills by party-line votes in at least some cases, but it would also make it easier for the opposition to reverse those gains and enact their own priorities. The benefits of nuking the filibuster are probably overstated because both sides tend to lose a handful of moderates when they attempt to force through extremely partisan bills.

Pro-life voters should also understand that there will be no national abortion ban if Trump is elected. Trump does not want a national abortion ban, and even if he did, Republicans couldn’t pass one. To save time in explaining why, just reread the last two paragraphs and substitute “Trump” for “Harris” and “Republican” for “Democrat.”

What we have seen since Dobbs is the utter failure of Republican abortion policy. Despite the Supreme Court victory and passage of a number of state laws restricting abortion, the US abortion rate reversed a long-term decline during the term of the vaunted “pro-life” president, Donald J. Trump, and began to steadily increase. That increase has continued during the Biden Administration and will likely continue regardless of who becomes president next year.

The reason for this is simple. The pro-life movement placed its emphasis on obtaining a top-down edict that would make abortion illegal without winning the hearts and minds of Americans on the issue. Pro-life groups did make some gains in persuading people that abortion was wrong through education and the use of technology to show life in the womb, but those gains have been largely reversed by the blowback from Dobbs.

Pro-life voters are in denial if they think that the Republican Party isn’t in the process of shunting them aside. The GOP is trying to have its cake and eat it too by keeping pro-life voters in the fold while increasingly trying to carve out a pro-choice position. Pro-life voters might want to ask themselves why not a single red state has banned abortion outright in the wake of Dobbs.

The bottom line for me is that Trump’s claims to be pro-life (or more accurately, anti-abortion, because the two are not the same) do not excuse his rampant corruption and dishonesty. It would be insane to vote for an authoritarian who tears down our constitutional guardrails on the flimsy premise that “at least he doesn’t support abortion.” That’s especially true given Trump’s increasingly wishy-washy positions on abortion and the fact that neither potential president is going to have much of an effect on the issue.

The conundrum for the pro-life reminds me of another Bible verse. In Matthew 16:26, Jesus cautioned, “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”

Political gains are fleeting, but the tradeoffs made to win them can be a problem for much, much longer.

I’m not saying that positions on abortion (especially elective abortion) should not be considered when deciding which candidate to vote for. I am saying that a candidate’s position on abortion should not be viewed in isolation and used to excuse other serious problems with that candidate.

With all other things being equal, I’d pick a pro-life candidate over a pro-choice one, but the other things are seldom equal. That’s especially true in these times of political realignment in which the Democratic Party is moving back toward the center while Republicans embrace their radical (and somewhat leftist) wing.