Melania Trump Comes Out In Favor of Abortion; Trump Voters Utterly Perplexed
Melania's new memoir includes an unapologetic defense of a woman's supposed "authority to terminate" a pregnancy
I am, and have always been, pro-life.
While my prior religious convictions informed this position, it’s one I still hold even from the standpoint of religious doubt.
As I indicated in a piece I first wrote over a decade ago, entitled, “It’s Time to Demand Intellectual Honesty About Abortion,” this is a science-based issue above all else:
As the hardened hearts and sin-dimmed intellects of so many in our civilization — which, through endless indulgence and brutality, now lies gasping on death’s doorstep — continue to find ways to justify, defend, and obfuscate what abortion is and what it does, we must press the case. We must continue to push forward with the truth. It is an interesting data point that many who have no ethical problem with abortion eschew religion, and instead worship at the altar of science.
But science is on our side.
As medical technology advances, we become every year more aware of the full humanity of the child in utero. We see in the ultrasound scan of her face the features of her mother, we notice the fine details in his tiny fingers and toes, we recognize the response to external stimuli, we are confronted with the inexorable reality that these are children, not “choices.”
It is for those who advocate their dismemberment and disposal to explain away these horrors. It is for them to be confronted with the science of embryology and fetal development and be forced to admit: “Yes, we know that abortion is the taking of a human life, and we are willing to stand by it.” Abortion proponents stand shoulder to shoulder not just with Margaret Sanger and George Bernard Shaw, but Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot, and their more modern progeny. Estimates are that Communism and Nazism alone are responsible for the death of over 100 million people in the 20th century.
But since 1980, the global abortion toll is over ONE BILLION LIVES.
It is completely perplexing why, with a critical presidential election a month away, and a great many Trump supporters holding ardently pro-life views, Melania Trump would publish a memoir in which she unequivocally gives voice to her support for abortion.
The Guardian obtained an advance copy of her eponymous book, Melania, in which she is reported to expresses views on abortion which “baffle both sides”:
“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” the Republican nominee’s wife writes, amid a campaign in which Donald Trump’s threats to women’s reproductive rights have played a central role.
“Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.
“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”
This week, she doubled-down on those comments, releasing a video on her X page reiterating that “there is no room for compromise when it comes to this essential right which all women possess from birth: individual freedom.” She goes on to ask, rhetorically, “What does ‘My Body, My Choice’ really mean?”
Trump himself has courted controversy with pro-lifers this year, announcing that he “would not support a federal abortion ban, under any circumstances, and would, in fact, veto it, because it is up to the states to decide based on the will of their voters.”
While I tend to agree that a federal ban is unworkable for legal and political reasons at this point in time, I understand the concern from pro-lifers about this seemingly significant change from the man most responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade.
On X/Twitter, reactions seem to be a mixture of surprise, alarm, and bewilderment.
(Click the image to go to the original tweet)
Dana Loesch:
Jesse Kelly:
Molly Hemingway:
Allie Beth Stuckey:
And here’s Trump on what he thinks:
I still believe, for a number of significant reasons, that it’s critically important for Trump to win this election — or we may never have another real election in this country at all.
But this is not reassuring. You hate to see it. When it comes to such an absolutely fundamental issue, it’s hard not to feel like we’ll always be on our own.
There's a naiveté amongst Catholics and conservatives that often can't grasp that someone who (might) be on their side politically isn't on their side in terms of belief, morals, lifestyle. It's a lack of perspective.
(I guess you could say the same about the "other side" too, but being on the conservative side, I'm most familiar with it there).
Last month I wrote an article for The American Thinker entitled "Do Pro-Lifers Care About Actions or Words?" The gist of it was that pro-lifers should keep supporting Donald Trump, because his actions (keeping his promise to appoint pro-life Supreme Court justices) have done more to advance the pro-life cause than those of any of the last three Republican presidents, who made the same promise but made no attempt to keep it. (I recopied the article at my own substack here:
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/do-pro-lifers-care-about-actions)
But Trump is a politician. He has the power he has because he gives his voters what they want. Making abortion a states' rights issue is workable - barely. Banning it nationwide is not. Roe v. Wade let a lot of pro-lifers hide from the fact that Americans in general think babies' lives are unimportant. It let them say that most Americans were horrified by abortion and would ban it if the Supreme Court would let them, and in the meantime they needed to work really hard to create a "culture of life." These people thought they were being optimistic about their country; in reality they had just rediscovered the Nuremberg Defense - basically, they said that unlike those nasty Europeans, who had often voted for abortion, Americans who tolerated abortion were just following orders, and therefore less guilty.
But in reality the mere fact that Americans put up with Roe v. Wade for 49 years, instead of launching a massive, 1848-style barricades-in-the-streets insurrection the day after it was decided, is proof positive that unborn lives never mattered that much to us after all. (It sounds harsh, but do you think that Americans would respond peacefully if the Supreme Court ordered the reinstatement of slavery? The pro-lifers who compare their movement to the abolitionists generally miss this.)
When Roe v. Wade fell, it was by accident, not because a critical mass of Americans wanted it to end. Justice Ginsburg just happened to die at the right moment to let Trump nominate three justices despite only being in office one term. And then, Republicans couldn't hide from the fact that their abortion position was deeply unpopular. It worked when it was a matter of empty virtue-signalling to one out of many factions withn their base; it does not work now that it is something they might actually have to enact.
One other thing: I don't really buy your arguments that opposition to abortion can be justified, or even bolstered much, by secular science apart from religion. The Christian Church has condemned abortion from the beginning, and neither the Apostles, nor the Old Testament Prophets before them, needed ultrasounds or anything like that to convince them a baby in the womb was fully human. The impression I get from reading the Bible is that everyone from Genesis onward just accepted it as obvious that life begins at conception.
Meanwhile, while science can give us facts about embryology, it can't give us values. It can't actually tell us that murder (or any other sin) is immoral. (And just consider what the facts-vs-ethics situation would look like from, say, a Hindu perspective. It must be frustrating that science's discovery of the common evolutionary origin of all life hasn't convinced everyone in the world that animals are our brothers and sisters and that we shouldn't eat them. But you can't derive ethics from facts; science is, at best, an aide to living by the values you already have, and for most people, those pre-existing values will always come from religion.)