Ross Douthat on the Faustian “Pro-Life” Movement

Jesus famously asked, “What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

Uncle Screwtape remarks, “To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return–that is what truly delights the heart of Our Father Below.”

Ross Douthat performs the autopsy on the “pro-life” Cult of Death’s Faustian Bargain with Trump:

I believe in versions of all these explanations; the world is a complicated place. But I also think there is a reason that if you look at the trend toward pro-choice-without-exceptions sentiment, across several different polling sources, the shift seems to accelerate right around 2016.

Before 2016 Americans had already become more liberal on issues like same-sex marriage without abortion polling changing all that radically. Before that year, Americans had also already experienced a sustained challenge to Roe v. Wade, when Ronald Reagan’s Supreme Court appointees seemed poised to overturn it — and while that threat did create a spike in pro-choice sentiment in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was smaller than the surge in the Trump era.

The trends in anxiety and alienation among young people, meanwhile, show their sharpest break earlier in the 2010s, several years before the bigger shift in abortion opinion seems to start.

So what does coincide with that bigger shift? Well, the rise of Donald Trump. And one does not need to be a monocausalist to see how the identification of the anti-abortion cause with his particular persona, his personal history and public style, might have persuaded previously wavering and ambivalent Americans to see the pro-life movement differently than they did before.

If you set out to champion the rights of the most vulnerable human beings while promising protection and support for women in their most vulnerable state, and your leader is a man famous for his playboy lifestyle who exudes brash sexism and contempt for weakness, people are going to have some legitimate questions about whether they can trust you to make good on your promises of love and care.

With that kind of standard-bearer, the accusations of your opponents — that your cause is organized more around repression than protection, more around hypocrisy than high ideals — are going to carry more weight. And some people who might have been your allies, who share your general moral worldview, are going to find reasons to disassociate themselves from your political project.

Crucially, some people might even think less of the pro-life movement in this way, or trust it less with policymaking, while still casting a vote for Trump. For instance, certain voters might like his toughness toward their enemies, his un-P.C. assault on woke and feminist politesse, without wanting that harsh style to be applied toward abortion policies that might affect them or their families. They might prefer Trump over, say, Nikki Haley on foreign policy or immigration, while also tilting more pro-choice than they would under a Haley-led G.O.P. — because you want the tough guy building the wall but not deciding on the trimester limit.

To this kind of analysis, Trump’s staunchest supporters come back with two responses: How can you say he’s been bad for the pro-life movement, when he’s the one who actually delivered the end of Roe? How can you complain about his effect on pro-life political strategy, when he’s now the one trying to find a more pragmatic and persuasive abortion stance, while activists alienate voters by championing the most absolute bans?

The answer is that many things can be true at once. Trump did deliver on his judicial promises to pro-lifers, and in his craft and cynicism he is more attuned to political reality than some anti-abortion activists and leaders. Indeed there are ways in which a pro-Trump but not pro-life conservative could reasonably complain that the pro-life movement can’t be his captive, because he’s the one who’s hostage to unpopular anti-abortion ideas.

But he is also a cause of their increased unpopularity, an instigator for the country’s pro-choice turn — because the form of conservatism that he embodies is entirely misaligned with the pro-life movement as it wants and needs to be perceived.

That’s the price of the bargain abortion opponents made. The deal worked on its own terms: Roe is gone. But now they’re trapped in a world where their image is defined more by the dealmaker’s values than by their own.

Time was when about 13% of Americans wanted abortion totally outlawed, 20% wanted abortion on demand without apology, and the remaining 60ish% both disliked abortion, did not want to think about it, but also did not want to outlaw it.

Thanks to the utter prostitution of the “pro-life” movement to a vindictive, racist, cult of nihilist power, oppression, theft, rape, misogyny, treason, racism, and violence there has been a marked move away from the “outlaw it” end of the spectrum (down to about 7% last I heard) and a marked move of many in the mushy middle toward the “legal in all cases” end of the spectrum. Now that the utter lie of the “love them both’ rhetoric of the “pro-life” movement (with the honorable exception of the Consistent Life Ethic folk) has been exposed to broad daylight, large percentages of people are realizing that most of the movement has no interest in the sanctity of human life and are all about using the unborn as human shields for a cynical crime syndicate of MAGA predators who will go to the mat in defense of a rapist when it suits their hunger for power. Meanwhile, the GOP, led by Trump, is striving to court the vote of the “pro-life” sucker while doing all in their power to get away from the issue as fast as they can.

When the backlash against Dobbs finally comes, the “pro-life” cult of death will have nobody but themselves to blame. Then, perhaps, we can start focusing on the actual (and by no coincidence) Democratic policies that reduce abortion by attacking the demand instead of vindictively assaulting the poor for doing what the “pro-life” cult pressure them into doing by cutting off financial help to poor women in crisis.