Trump Needs to Step Up and Save Babies From Abortions
The next time Donald Trump goes off script, there’s a good chance he’ll avoid abortion. After triggering a party-wide firestorm with his sudden openness to taxpayer-funded abortion, the blowback has been surprisingly — and refreshingly — intense. Now, after everyone from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to rank-and-file Republicans and pro-life leaders have openly disavowed the president’s position, White House officials are reportedly “looking to walk back that statement.” And not a moment too soon.
As disastrous — and shocking — as Trump’s call for “flexibility” on the Hyde Amendment was, it did serve one important purpose. After three years of hesitancy and mixed messaging, this controversy might have finally emboldened the GOP on life in a way that nothing since Dobbs has. “We have to continue to stand for life,” Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.) stressed Wednesday, becoming one in a long line of congressional members willing to challenge the president on the issue. “Federal dollars should not be used to pay for abortion, period,” he argued, echoing Johnson’s insistence that the protections are “sacrosanct.”
Click here to sign up for pro-life news alerts from LifeNews.com
In a rare rebuke of Trump, the House speaker pushed back hard on the suggestion that the 50-year wall between taxpayers and abortion should come down just to make the appropriations process “easier.” “We are not going to change the standard that we’re not going to use taxpayer funding for abortion,” Johnson told reporters. “I’m just not going to allow that to happen.”
Message received, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt seemed to say. Trying to put out the fire her boss started, Trump’s spokeswoman tried to reframe the remarks in her best attempt at damage control. “The president did not change the administration’s policy,” Leavitt said. “It was President Trump who signed an executive order protecting the Hyde Amendment. It’s the Trump administration that has taken multiple actions on various fronts to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not funding the practice of abortion.”
But, as Cassidy pointed out, “The president is the straw that stirs the drink. He’s the one that makes things happen.” So it would be helpful, pro-life leaders point out, if he were on the same page as the party he leads. Longtime experts, who’ve witnessed the long arc of GOP history on Hyde and abortion, continue to be troubled by the second iteration of Trump, who seems much less tethered to the bedrock principles of conservatism.
Chuck Donovan, whose career spans leadership positions in the Reagan White House, Family Research Council, and the Charlotte Lozier Institute, believes that what sparked the real concern with Trump’s comments is the unease that began taking root after the last Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. “[We’ve] been through more than a year now where, as a candidate, President Trump moved back strongly on the Republican platform and removed … language about protecting the personhood, the right to life [for] the unborn child.” That was “a dramatic change,” Donovan acknowledges, “and it was secured by basically closing down debate within the GOP platform committee.”
As someone who started working on the pro-life cause in Washington back in 1978 and watched the commitment of the Republican Party to the unborn grow and expand, that was disturbing to watch. “I attended most of the Republican platform hearings and conventions over the years and watched that language grow into what was,” Chuck explained to “Outstanding” podcast host Casey Harper. “For the last time in 2016, [we had] a very strong platform of embracing limits on abortion, funding pro-life judges, [supporting] constitutional protection for the unborn. And that was substantially weakened by the platform that was embraced in 2024,” he lamented. “So let’s just say, eyebrows have already been raised.”
Donovan pointed to the analysis he conducted of the states’ individual GOP platforms on issues like the sanctity of life. Locally, he explained, “it’s good news for pro-lifers, because what was done at the national level was not done [in] the states. The vast majority of the GOP platforms — we’re talking over 50 because the territories have them as well — [they’re] strongly pro-life and referenced the sanctity of the child’s life before birth. So the national platform was out of sync with the states,” he emphasized. “And I think what you’ll see in the coming year or two is a resetting of the clock, so that the standard that was pre-2024 of protecting life is either going to be reasserted, which I think it can be, or,” he says ominously, “it’s going to be changed.” And if it’s changed, he and others caution, political disaster will almost surely follow.
“I think it’s a cardinal commitment of the Republican Party. And it parallels very strongly [with] how the party was founded.” Once you start to chip away at this foundation, the GOP, “which was grounded, as Lincoln said, on these great moral and fixed principles, that all men are created equal, that’s up for grabs,” Chuck warned. “And in light of that, I do think people either stay home or they find someone else who will carry that fight forward.”
Pro-lifers have already had to live with the sting of Obamacare for more than 15 years, what Donovan called “a breach in the wall” where taxpayer-funded abortion is concerned. “It facilitated federal funds in the form of tax credits going to plans that include abortion coverage, and that had been directly contrary to the policy of the GOP and many members — even Democratic members of Congress — down the decades. So the question was, what did the president mean by ‘flexibility’? Why single it out? There’s a much bigger debate over health care involved here [over] insurance.”
But when you add this to Trump’s other “signaled retreat[s]” with respect to protecting the unborn at the state level — both on chemical abortion and local protections, the concerns grew. The president suggested “at one point that protecting a baby at six weeks was too much,” Chuck reminded people. “And that was very much on the table with Governor [Ron] DeSantis’s (R) proposals in Florida. So he’s had an unsteady relationship on life. … I think it raised alarms…”
Especially since, as Donovan reiterated, the Hyde Amendment “is not just a policy proposal.” He walked listeners back to 1976 when it was offered three years after Roe v. Wade when he says America was “trying to find a way back” to common sense on abortion. “There were proposals for a constitutional amendment. Everyone knows it’s very difficult to do by design of the Founders. You need two-thirds of each House of Congress, three-quarters of the states. So what do you do in the meantime?” Enter the late Congressman Henry Hyde.
The debate then was not like now, he contended. “You can turn on your YouTube or C-SPAN, and you’ll see a member holding court on the floor of the Congress, and it’s usually an empty chamber. … There’s rarely an audience clinging to every word. The Hyde Amendment was not like that,” Chuck reflected. “The debate would come down to a back-and-forth. And then for years, Henry Hyde would have the last word, and he’d come to the floor and give his speech on why the unborn life is precious and what we risk when we reject those children and say that life does not have the highest value. And his speeches riveted the Congress. Literally dozens of members of both parties would sit there waiting for him to have that last word,” Donovan recounted.
Back then, this was not a controversial idea, he underscored. Protecting taxpayers from a practice they find morally unconscionable was a bipartisan idea. “There were 107 Democrats who voted for it the first time it came to a floor vote. That’s because the pro-life Democrat at that time was not a rare bird,” Chuck noted. “He was a pretty common member of the flock.” Fast-forward a half a century, and he concedes, “It’s good that one party cares about the issue. But if we’re really going to move a society, we need the contribution of both.”
LifeNews Note: Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand, where this originally appeared.
The post Trump Needs to Step Up and Save Babies From Abortions appeared first on LifeNews.com.