I Am Anti-Trump Because I Am Pro-life

By now most of us are probably much more familiar than we would like to be with the leaked audio from a 2005 conversation in which Republican Presidential Nominee Donald Trump discussed his habit of kissing and groping women he found attractive, stating “I don’t even wait”, and bragging that the women “let” him do it because of his star status. Another audio revealed a conversation with Howard Stern in which he laughed over how, as owner of the Miss Universe pageant, he would get away with entering the contestants’ dressing room while they were not fully dressed. Multiple women have come forward with stories that Trump vehemently denies, but which corroborate all too well with both Trump’s 2005 assertion of serial sexual assault, and his brag about entering pageant contestants’ dressing rooms in order to view them naked (some of the women verifying the dressing room invasions were from the Miss Teen USA pageant, which accepts contestants as young as fifteen). Lest we be tempted to assure ourselves that this is just an example of women “coming out of the woodwork” in the final throes of a Presidential race, for attention or for money or because they are pro-Hillary, Mr. Trump has also been the subject of two sexual assault lawsuits prior to his run for President, both of which were settled out of court, and although major news sources are not covering it at this time, he is currently facing a lawsuit being brought against him by a woman who claims she was repeatedly raped by him at the age of thirteen (this case has been given a pre-trial date that is unfortunately a month after the election is over). While it’s quite possible that we will never know for sure if any of these allegations are true, what we do know for sure is that at least in the way he speaks, Donald Trump displays a marked contempt for women, and an attitude of entitlement to their bodies regardless of their consent.

Trump has received much back-lash over the comments, but many of his supporters have chosen to stick with him. A notable example is Dr. James Dobson of “Focus on the Family”. One of the main points to his argument for continuing to support Trump was the abortion issue:

“ Donald Trump hasn’t vetoed bills that would have outlawed the procedure known as partial-birth abortion. Bill Clinton alone is responsible for the brains being sucked out of unanesthetized babies during delivery. That naziesque procedure continued for years until the Supreme Court declared it illegal. Donald Trump is pro-life.”

This statement from Dr. Dobson perfectly illustrates what I would term as an abusive relationship between the Pro-life movement and the Republican party. Abortion has become the proverbial ring in the nose of “values voters”: if you can put a candidate as morally bankrupt as Donald J. Trump in front of a group of “socially conservative” voters and he gets a pass because he says the words “pro-life”, you can get them to do anything — and the Republican party knows this. What do pro-life voters get out of this relationship? Maybe some vaguely-written legislation that makes the politician appear to be pro-life (hence Planned Parenthood’s ability to get away with selling aborted babies’ body parts even though there is a law which is supposed to prohibit exactly that but is too poorly written to be enforced). Maybe a token mention of the issue in the Vice-presidential debate, where it is harmlessly framed as a merely religious issue. And what does the Republican party get? Everything they want. If their pro-life constituency gets a little antsy over some unrelated policy or some unsavory candidate, all they have to do is whisper the “A-word”, and they fall back in line.

This is understandable. In one sense, I can very easily sympathize with Pro-lifers who are making a choice that many of them hate because of an issue that they rightly see as perhaps the greatest moral question of our time. The problem is, as understandable as that reaction is, it is also suicidal and nonsensical.

Here is why it is nonsensical:

Why are we against abortion? Of course I can’t answer that question for you, but I can answer it for myself: I am against abortion because I believe that every person, regardless of class or creed or sex or perceived usefulness to society has equal, intrinsic, and inalienable value, and that, as such, they deserve equal protection under the law. Pro-lifers and advocates of women should agree: no one has a right to another person’s body. An unborn baby deserves protection from those who would attack its body and end its life, and a woman deserves protection from dehumanizing acts of sexual assault such as Mr. Trump described. Mr. Trump claims to be pro-life, but his view of women (which has been consistent with his comments in the 2005 video for his entire life) as objects at his disposal comes from the same place as a woman who considers the person inside her as an object to be kept or discarded at her discretion. I cannot and will not support either manifestation of the same view.

Here is why it is suicidal:

We live in a society that is, theoretically, self-governed. That means that (contrary to Harry S. Truman) the buck does not stop with the President, or Congress, or even the Supreme Court. It stops with the people. If you want to get a law changed, you do not start with casting a vote for a particular Presidential candidate, or even a Senator or House Representative (although these are all good things to do). If only it were that easy. But you have to start by changing people’s minds, which is much, much harder. If we are truly serious about ending abortion — not just getting a gold star for voting for the least pro-abortion candidate every election — we are going to have to change people’s perception about it.

There is a new generation emerging, and they are the voters who will decide the fate of the unborn in the years to come. This is unfortunately a demographic that the Republican party has, by and large, disdained to court and has therefore all but lost, perhaps forever. Since I am a part of this generation, I can speak to the fact that many of them are thoughtful people who are willing to question the world around them, whether it be the status quo of the political right or the political left. Although I may not always agree with their application, it can certainly be said that this is a generation who cares about human rights issues. They care about racial equality. They care about gender equality. This should be a starting point for a discussion about the ethics of abortion. Pro-lifers need to take the discussion out of the sphere of party politics, and even out of the sphere of religion, and take it where it belongs: the human rights sphere. Would it not make more sense to find common ground with people who already care about human rights, making the argument that the unborn, too, deserve equal treatment under the law? Whether Republicans or evangelicals or Pro-lifers like it or not, this is the task that we have to accept if there is ever to be any real change.

What does this have to do with your vote or my vote for or against Trump? A lot. Imagine you are a twenty-something observing the mayhem of this election. Like many people your age, you are an Independent, and not really into party loyalty. You’ve never really given abortion a whole lot of thought one way or another. From the Left side of the political sphere, you hear Republicans (and with them, Pro-lifers) characterized as ignorant, male-entitlement sexists who think women either belong in the kitchen or in the bed. Pro-abortionists are especially eager to espouse this narrative because it leads them into one of their favorite defenses of abortion: ignorant, male-entitlement sexist lawmakers are trying to wield power over our bodies because they think they own us, and we shouldn’t let them. Men (they choose not to bring female Pro-life lawmakers into it)trying to pass pro-life laws belong to the same ilk as men who think it’s okay to force themselves sexually on a woman with or without her consent. With all this in the back of your mind, you are observing Republican Pro-lifers reacting to Donald Trump’s infamous video. Some express distaste, but in the end it is not important enough to them to take a stand. Others minimize it, sharing things like this meme which puts video footage of a man bragging that he has grabbed women by the crotch the first time he ever met them, on the same level with forgetting to rewind a video.

Some dismiss it as “locker room talk”, taking up the phrase that Trump himself used, rushing to assure us that this is a completely normal and apparently acceptable way for men to talk as long as there are no women around. Some excuse it because they say it’s “just words”. Others go further, saying that even if it were not just words, we need to “get back to the issues” rather than getting caught up in sordid scandals (this is, no kidding, taken almost verbatim from a Ben Carson interview, by the way). Even more mystifying, you see some bringing up the scandals of Bill Clinton, who is not even running for President, as justification for Trump’s words, choosing to whole-heartedly believe his accusers, but choosing to give no credence to Donald Trump’s accusers, even though both may be said to be politically motivated. The message you are getting from Pro-life people is that 1)sexually assaulting women is not an “issue” — it’s just a distraction from “real” issues 2) Donald Trump gets a pass because he is a Republican while Bill Clinton (who, again, is not even in the race) gets pasted even though their situations are completely identical because he is Democrat, which kind of leads you to believe that Republicans are super passionate about sexual assault only when it is politically convenient to them, which leads you, logically enough, to believe they really don’t care about sexual assault at all, leading you to believe that they don’t care about women at all because they think they are second-class citizens. In short, everything you are hearing from Pro-lifers is resoundingly fulfilling the narrative that you’ve heard from the Left about them. Millions of young people who we cannot afford to lose are experiencing what I just described.

Put another way: I have been a Republican my entire life; voting Republican in every major or minor election since I turned 18, and the Republican party has lost me over Donald Trump. If they can’t even retain their own, how can we expect them to reach anyone outside the party? Hitching the Pro-life wagon to the Republican horse with Donald Trump as the driver is nothing short of suicide. Pro-lifers could have joined hands with many outside the Republican fold over an issue that both of us should care about, but instead we are losing credibility by aligning ourselves with a man who has been a symbol for chauvinism and entitlement his whole life. It will probably be a long, long time before the young people of America will forget that.

If we care about changing people’s minds about abortion, the best thing we could give to Donald Trump is not our vote, but as much distance as possible. And honestly, if this is the best that they can come up with for a Presidential candidate, it’s probably time to serve the Republican party some divorce papers.