To Make the Case for Life, Make the Case for Life

P atrick Brown argues that J. D. Vance put on a “rhetorical masterclass” in discussing abortion in his debate with Tim Walz and that criticism from pro-lifers (myself included) of that performance is misguided. I went back over the transcript, and it wasn’t quite as bad as my initial gut reaction, but Brown is both misunderstanding fundamental aspects of political communication and missing the point of what Vance was seeking to accomplish, which was to help the Trump campaign at the expense of the pro-life cause.

Now, we can start with some common ground here. I don’t argue for “opposing abortion in virtually all cases, even rape and incest” as a prudent litmus test for political candidates, or think that “calling Democrats ‘baby killers’” is “enough to flip the script.” I have argued that pro-life advocacy should be strategic, willing to make pragmatic compromises (without conceding the principle of life) and focused, for the moment, on protecting the beachheads of pro-life states. Brown argues:

Changing hearts and minds on the morality of abortion requires a willingness to meet people where they are; to have real and heartfelt compassion for the victim of domestic violence, economic deprivation, or other innumerable tragedies that cause women to seek the violence of abortion as a solution to an unwanted problem. Acknowledging the difficult circumstances that make abortion a desired option in no way undermines the pro-life cause; in fact, failing to speak about them with compassion and understanding threatens to undermine it.

I don’t disagree with any of that. And the good parts of Vance’s discussion of abortion came in his illustration of empathy and his promise to make our policies pro-family:

I want to talk about this issue because I know a lot of Americans care about it, and I know a lot of Americans don’t agree with everything that I’ve ever said on this topic. And, you know, I grew up in a working-class family in a neighborhood where I knew a lot of young women who had unplanned pregnancies and decided to terminate those pregnancies because they feel like they didn’t have any other options. And, you know, one of them is actually very dear to me. And I know she’s watching tonight, and I love you. And she told me something a couple years ago that she felt like if she hadn’t had that abortion, that it would have destroyed her life because she was in an abusive relationship . . .

I want us, as a Republican Party, to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word. I want us to support fertility treatments. I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies. I want it to make it easier for young families to afford a home so they can afford a place to raise that family. And I think there’s so much that we can do on the public-policy front just to give women more options.

So many young women would love to have families. So many young women also see an unplanned pregnancy as something that’s going to destroy their livelihood, destroy their education, destroy their relationships. And we have got to earn people’s trust back. And that’s why Donald Trump and I are committed to pursuing pro-family policies.

Vance also gave a good answer on respecting differences in state laws:

Donald Trump has been very clear that on the abortion policy specifically, that we have a big country and it’s diverse. And California has a different viewpoint on this than Georgia. Georgia has a different viewpoint from Arizona. And the proper way to handle this, as messy as democracy sometimes is, is to let voters make these decisions, let the individual states make their abortion policy. And I think that’s what makes the most sense in a very big, a very diverse, and let’s be honest, sometimes a very, very messy and divided country.

But there are three things wrong with how Vance approached the issue, and we can learn from them.

First, you will never convert anybody to an argument that you’re not willing to make yourself. Vance said that he is “a Republican who proudly wants to protect innocent life in this country, who proudly wants to protect the vulnerable,” and that Ohio’s referendum went against “my position.” But he couldn’t even spare a sentence to remind people why the unborn are human beings deserving of protection and love and life. He sounded like Mitt Romney when he told us he was “severely conservative” instead of advancing conservative ideas themselves. You don’t win arguments with labels, you win arguments with arguments.

The pro-life case is philosophical, scientific, and religious, sure — but it’s also emotional. Anybody who has seen an ultrasound knows they are looking at a living human individual. Anybody who has heard a pregnant woman speak or be spoken of outside of the context of an abortion debate knows that we customarily recognize that she is carrying a baby, a real person. We will never advance the cause if we are afraid to say why we care about it.

Fine, you may argue: This is an election campaign, and his job is not to talk about a losing issue. But if you are arguing about how to advance the pro-life cause, and to do so in an election year when many voters are being asked to vote on it directly (rather than just by electing pro-lifers), you ought to be for the thing you’re for.

Second, you don’t win arguments by dumping on your friends. If you think you’re having trouble reaching people, you want to show, rather than tell, them that you have something new to offer. Vance went on about how “we’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue where they frankly just don’t trust us” and “we’ve got to do a better job at winning back people’s trust.” The message that conveys is invariably to tell people, you’ve been right not to trust us. Vance — like Trump — has built a lot of his personal brand by telling people implicitly or explicitly that they shouldn’t trust Republicans or conservatives, and it may at times be a winning form of triangulation in the short run, but it’s a lousy way to build a team or a movement. It’s no surprise that Walz followed Vance’s breast-beating act with “I agree with a lot of what Senator Vance said about what’s happening.”

Third, you don’t win arguments by accepting your opponents’ premises. This happened in two major ways. One galling example came when Walz cited the case of Amber Thurman, who died as a result of complications after taking the abortion pill:

There’s a young woman named Amber Thurman. She happened to be in Georgia, a restrictive state. Because of that, she had to travel a long distance to North Carolina to try and get her care. Amber Thurman died in that journey back and forth. The fact of the matter is, how can we as a nation say that your life and your rights as basic as the right to control your own body is determined on geography? There’s a very real chance, had Amber Thurman lived in Minnesota, she would be alive today.

This is a lie aimed straight at the heart of state pro-life laws. Nothing in Georgia law prevented Thurman from receiving post-abortion care; by contrast, if federal permission for the abortion pill wasn’t undermining Georgia law, Thurman would still be alive. Did Vance push back on any of that? He responded, “First of all, Governor, I agree with you. Amber Thurman should still be alive. And there are a lot of people who should still be alive, and I certainly wish that she was.” And then he went on the attack against Minnesota for watering down protections for babies born alive after a botched abortion. That wasn’t a bad attack, although it’s far from the worst thing in the abortion bill Walz signed, and Vance let slide Walz’s false claim that he doesn’t support abortion all the way up to birth, which is exactly what that bill allows. But by accepting Walz’s premise about Georgia law and countering with what amounted to “Hey, Minnesota law kills people too,” Vance did a disservice to every state with a pro-life law that is under siege by lies such as this.

The bigger background is that the Trump-Vance ticket is deathly afraid to say a bad word about the abortion pill and is scrambling to reassure voters that they will do nothing to interfere with its availability even when that means eviscerating the pro-life laws of states where mothers can just get around the ban with the pill (which already accounts for more than half of all abortions nationwide). That’s why Vance previously flat-out lied to pretend that “the Supreme Court made a decision saying that the American people should have access to [the abortion pill].”

Vance is, of course, compounding the issue of accepting the premises of the Left when he talks about “trust” by framing the problem as one of Republicans not wanting to spend enough taxpayer money on the state providing goods such as child care, rather than simply removing obstacles to affordable parenthood. Democrats for years have argued that caring about people is measured entirely in terms of how much of other people’s money you’re willing to hand out to them — and, implicitly, that a child’s life isn’t worth living if there are no federal subsidies attached to that child. But at least the trade-off of whether we as a movement accept a larger welfare state in order to reduce abortions (even at all the other human costs of such a welfare state) is a live question about trade-offs. Defending the abortion pill is not.

If you want to make the case for life, make the case for life.