For almost as long as I can remember, voters who understand the vital importance of the pro-life cause have had their consciences held captive by politics. Every election year, pro-lifers have been bullied, and have bullied each other, into voting for one candidate and shunning the other, with their very souls allegedly on the line.
People who more or less held the same views were invited or outright commanded to denounce each other as the enemy. But now that’s over. It’s done. We’re free.
Oh, folks on both sides are still arguing that it’s crystal clear we absolutely must vote this way or that way if we want to call ourselves pro-life. But now, neither party is willing to even fake an interest in actually being pro-life. The masks have come off entirely.
“But Simcha,” you may say. “I thought Trump and the Republicans were the pro-life party? Sure, Trump isn’t perfect but we’re looking for a politician, not a saint, and he’s clearly the only one who is willing to stand up to protect the unborn. At least compared to the alternative.”
Except that he just said into a reporter’s microphone that six weeks is “too short; there has to be more time … I want more weeks”; ie, the law should give women more time to decide whether or not to get an abortion (or, as often happens, more time to get pressured or coerced into an abortion). He said he would vote for just that in the upcoming Florida election.
Then, when people got upset, his campaign said he didn’t really mean it or really say anything and we’re just dumb for thinking he said anything.
He also said that, if he’s elected, his government will cover the cost of IVF for anyone who wants it, because “we want more babies.” IVF is intrinsically immoral because it replaces a sacred, creative act of love with a mechanised act of production in a lab. But even if that doesn’t bother you, IVF means millions of extra embryos are made, and then either imprisoned in a freezer indefinitely, or thrown away.
There is no IVF that is untainted by this wholesale murder of tiny humans. Babies are good; but cranking out babies like widgets and then throwing most of them away? That’s wrong.
This same Republican party absolutely lost their minds a few years ago when President Barack Obama said he was going to require Catholic employers to include contraception in their insurance coverage for employees. We were told this was a direct violation of religious freedom, and we must vote for Trump so he can liberate us from a government that would spend our tax dollars on the culture of death.
And now here we are. Maybe you will reply, “Well, this is all a shame, but you have to admit, he appointed judges to the supreme court who did what he promised, and they overturned Roe v Wade! Hard to argue with that as a pro-life win!”
Except that since this happened, the numbers of abortions have gone up. Yes, really. Why? My guess is this: Republican laws in many states were written so poorly, and in some cases so idiotically, that medical professionals really didn’t know what they were supposed to do in emergency situations. Democrats seized on this confusion and escalated the panic and chaos because it makes for a good fundraiser.
Both parties made it seem like the US was on the verge of organising torch-wielding posses to hunt down and brutalise any random woman with a suspiciously round belly. So a vulnerable woman on the fence about whether to go ahead with a pregnancy or not might have smelled the panic in the air, got scared, and figured it was safer to go ahead and get that abortion while it was still early, legal, and simple.
And this happened a lot. In other words, exactly what I predicted would happen back in 2016.
“All right, Simcha,” you may continue. “Obviously the Republicans have not been genuinely pro-life for quite some time. This isn’t news. So, surely the clear answer is to turn your backs on Republicans and vote for the Democrats, because even though they’re fine with abortion, at least they tend to show some compassion to other vulnerable populations. At least they have steadfastly opposed, for instance, government executions.”
But actually, they don’t. The anti-death penalty plank was quietly removed from the Democratic platform. And the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, the “joy” lady, was a prosecutor whose office blocked DNA evidence that would have exonerated a Black man on death row. She was also very gung ho about putting people in jail for smoking pot. That’s her legacy.
If you want to ignore her history as a prosecutor, that leaves very little else on her resume at all. Certainly nothing that would warm a pro-lifer or even a whole-lifer’s heart. She can’t even claim compassion toward migrants: The Biden administration, with Harris as VP, ended up deporting just as many migrants as Trump.
“But what about independents? Can’t we just scrap both parties and take the alternate route?”
Well, Robert F. Kennedy recently suspended his campaign, and has glommed onto Trump; but if you’re thinking that an independent influence is exactly what we need to temper the extremism of the Trump candidacy, consider that, in a recently-released video, Kennedy can be heard chatting with Ghislaine Maxwell about the good old days, when he used to run a secret gambling ring for gladiatorial games between pregnant teens.
I made that up, but you did wonder for a second, right? Anyway RFK is an absolute wash on life issues, doesn’t care, is willing to say anything; and is nuts.
And yes, you can vote for the Solidarity Party. That’s probably what I’ll do, because I was raised to understand that you can’t just not vote. But if I do vote that way, it will be purely, entirely for the sake of retaining my dignity, like washing my face before reporting to the guillotine.
As I said, pro-lifers are now free. Free from spending even one fraction of a second of our time wondering which party we should swear allegiance to, because they both openly despise us and are working against the most basic things we value. It’s like being a child who’s seen his mother and father both waste away with horrible, heritable diseases, and wondering which side you’ll take after—and then suddenly finding out you’re adopted.
You don’t have anything in common with any of these people! You are free—not only free from, but free to.
Were you planning to donate money to one party or the other? Now you’re free to send it to a food pantry, instead. Were you expecting to spend some time arguing with people about politics? Now you’re free to read poetry, instead. Put on an eye mask and put on some music, or do a little gardening. I promise you, this will be time better spent.
We’ve never been so free to vote however we want, as long as we’re not voting with the intention of hurting somebody innocent.
But we don’t have to spend a single moment of our time thinking that our vote says anything about us as pro-lifers. It doesn’t. We’re free.