Generally, pro-lifers support Donald Trump not because they believe he’s truly one of them, but because he’s clearly preferable to Hillary Clinton. Sarah Jones of The New Republic, however, claims Trump is “the candidate the pro-life movement deserves.” That’s not meant as a compliment to either Trump or pro-lifers.
Jones’s peg was a Washington Post column by Charles Camosy, a professor of theology at Fordham. Camosy contended that pro-lifers “have nearly everything going our way,” but warned that a President Trump “could halt our momentum,” since pro-choicers could “rightly point out that the antiabortion movement is led by a misogynist, racist, narcissist who is blinded by his own privilege. Successfully making this case is the only way left for abortion rights activists to stop antiabortion momentum, but it plays into deeply held stereotypes of the movement” that originated in the “culture wars of the 1970s.”
Jones doesn’t buy Camosy’s argument that today’s pro-life movement differs greatly from that of forty years ago: “The pro-life movement still frames abortion as murder. That framing makes it a binary issue by default and therefore lends itself easily to hyperbole: Good and moral people hate baby murder. Bad and immoral people don’t.”
Trump was well-suited to take advantage of such unsophisticated thinking (bolding added):
If there is anything he knows how to do very well, it’s crafting a sales pitch. Trump understood that he simply needed to repeat a few pieces of boilerplate in order to win the bulk of the pro-life vote, despite being famously squishy on the issue. And it worked. Pro-lifers backed him; they campaigned for him; they even joined his advisory committee. By endorsing Trump, prominent pro-lifers proved their critics correct: They really do prioritize the welfare of fetuses over the welfare of everyone else.
