Donald Trump has been struggling to find his footing on right-to-life issues. Pro-lifers should celebrate his most recent step — coming out against a sweeping pro-abortion initiative in Florida — and encourage him to follow up on it.
That recent step came after a series of debacles.
Yesterday, Trump announced that as president he would act to ensure that either the government or insurance companies would pay for all of the costs of in vitro fertilization. Asked how he would vote on Florida’s initiative to enact a sweeping abortion right, he said he would vote to liberalize the state’s abortion law.
Subsidizing IVF would be enormously expensive, raising taxes and insurance premiums. More important: Given the way that IVF is practiced, it would result in the deliberate destruction of many human embryos. Often, more embryos are created than implanted, and those that are not implanted are typically frozen. If not retrieved later by their parents or given up for adoption, those embryos are eventually destroyed. Sometimes, embryos are culled for eugenic reasons. Better regulation of IVF might avoid these practices — but such regulation is not in the offing for the same reason that Trump thought his proposal would be a political masterstroke.
The Florida initiative, meanwhile, is not a multiple-choice test. Florida law prohibits abortion after six weeks with exceptions for rape, incest, fatal fetal abnormalities, and threats to the mother’s life or physical health. Trump has said several times that he believes six weeks is not long enough even as he has also said that abortion should be prohibited late in pregnancy. This position can reasonably be described as a moderate pro-choice stance. If it does not comport with the position he took in 2016, it does reflect public opinion.
But it’s also not what the Florida initiative proposes, as Trump has belatedly recognized. The initiative would instead require that abortion be legal even late in pregnancy so long as “the patient’s healthcare provider” — a term not limited to physicians — believes it would serve her “health.” The language does not specify that it has to be physical health or that the risk to health has to be significant. The initiative would, in other words, make an unlimited abortion right part of the state constitution. After justified pro-life criticism, Trump therefore came out against the initiative.
The logical next step for Trump to take, given everything he has said so far, is to pledge to veto any similar legislation at the federal level. Such a promise — accompanied by a short list of sound judges for any Supreme Court vacancy that arises in the next term, and a quiet abandonment of the harebrained IVF scheme — would instantly end any murmuring among pro-lifers about what difference the presidential election would make to our cause.
It’s the right thing to do. It would be consistent with his efforts to avoid being pushed too far to the right of public opinion. He could still say that he would not ban abortion federally or take any action to curtail IVF. But he would not be making a vain effort to court voters who favor abortion and place a high priority on it, since they will never forgive Trump for having played an integral part in ending Roe v. Wade. And it would be a position that lets him get back on offense, which is where one would think he wants to be.