Voting for Pro-Choice Politicians

2 comments

I’ve had a three different conversations recently related to voting for pro-choice politicians. Each time I’ve had these conversations, I’ve been told that pro-lifers shouldn’t let a politician’s opinion about abortion be a deciding factor as to whether or not one can vote for that candidate.

The argument is made that a candidate may indeed be in favour of “reproductive rights” (a delightful euphemism for something quite so barbaric), but I’m told that this is okay if that candidate is in favour of some social programme. I’m told that this is what it really means to be pro-life…

A game you can’t win

The real advantage of this position for the pro-choice advocate is that he can play this game ad infinitum. He will always be able to come up with another social cause which he’ll say demands our attention before we can get around to looking at abortion directly.

Even in some utopian future where there are state-funded programmes for every possible social ill, the pro-choice advocate can still postpone protecting the unborn by demanding first that more money be devoted to these government programmes.

The unanswered question

Each time I’ve had this conversation, I’ve asked a question:

Would you mind engaging in a thought experiment? Let’s say that there was a party or candidate which was onboard with all of your desired social programmes…but they also campaigned for the right for parents to have their child killed up until their first birthday. Would you vote for that candidate or party?

Question posed to pro-choice advocates

I’ve used different versions of this question, sometimes talking about a party which supports slavery, rather than infanticide. Either way, I have yet to hear an answer to this question.

Questions like this put the pro-choice advocate in a bind. After all, very few people could countenance supporting a politician who supports infanticide or slavery. This intuition points to an important truth, that one cannot vote for a party which endorses something obviously intrinsic evil.

I explain that I cannot vote for a candidate who endorses the killing of the unborn for the same reason that my interlocutor would refuse to vote for someone who endorses slavery, regardless of the candidate’s economic issues.

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2 comments

  • pilgrim
    January 30, 2020 12:36 pm

    One of my friends sent me this post from Robert P. George which I thought was spot-on:

    Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump (and my own views about the President’s delinquencies are well known) surely it’s not hard to understand why large numbers of Evangelicals and Catholics favor him over any of the Democrats seeking their party’s nomination (despite the fact that many Evangelicals and Catholics aren’t happy about the President’s character, coarse rhetoric, and some of his polices). There is the fealty of every single one of the Democratic nominees–every single one–to the abortion and sex lib lobbies. If you believe, as Evangelicals and Catholics believe, that abortion is the unjust killing of innocent and defenseless members of the human family, then it is nigh impossible to imagine circumstances under which one could support a politician who pledges to work night and day to deny unborn children any legal protection against the lethal violence now visited with impunity upon nearly a million of them each year. And that is precisely the pledge every Democratic candidate makes to Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the enitre base of their party. But that’s only for starters.

    Evangelicals and Catholics have watched as Democrats and progressives across the country have worked to shut down Catholic and other religious foster care and adoption agencies because, as a matter of conscience, these agencies place children in homes with a mom and a dad. They have watched as cake bakers, florists, caterers, wedding planners, and others (even the pizza shop-owning O’Connor family ad the software designer Brendan Eich) have been harrassed in efforts to drive them out of business and deprive them of their livelihoods because of their beliefs about marriage and sexual morality. They have watched as the Democratic and progressive mayor of Atlanta terminated the employment of Kelvin Cochran, the city’s Fire Chief, for the same reason–he had published a book upholding Biblical teaching on marriage and sexual morality. They have watched as Democrats and progressives have tried to “cleanse” entire fields of medicine and healthcare of Evangelicals, Catholics, and other pro-life people by imposing on them requirements to implicate themselves in the taking of innocent life by abortion. They watched as Beto O’Rourke proposed–over no truly meaningful opposition from his fellow Democratic presidential aspirants–to selectively yank the tax exempt status from churches and othere religious organizations that refused to fall in line with progressive ideological orthodoxy on sex and marriage.

    I could go on.

    Now, none of this is to deny that there are some Evangelicals and Catholics (and other Trump supporters) who seem entirely to overlook Donald Trump’s faults and failings. They see nothing but good in the man. But at least in my experience these Evangelicals and Catholics are in the minority. Most recognize his faults and failings and wish he were better. Their support for him is based on a prudential judgment that the overall situation for the common good would be made much worse if he were to lose to one of the Democrats. And they fear–with justification–that the consequences for themselves and their religious institutions would be dire if such a thing were to happen. In this respect, their position is formally like that of their anti-Trump co-religionists who favor a Democrat because their prudential judgment is that, though a Democratic president would do great harm to values they cherish (such as the sanctity of human life, and religious liberty and the rights of conscience), the harm would be less than the harm Trump will do to those values and others in the long run.

    My point here is not to try to adjudicate this dispute. (For what it’s worth, I think that it’s a more complicated business than most people on either side suppose. I may say more about that on another occasion after I’ve reflected on it a good deal more.) It is simply to say that no one should be surprised that many Evangelicals and Catholics (including some like my pal Keith Pavlischek who refused to vote for Trump in 2016) support the President over the Democratic alternatives. Whether one assesses and weights the reasons as they do or not, they do have reasons.

    Reply
  • Greg Mockeridge
    February 1, 2020 11:55 am

    The terms we use are crucial to our effectiveness in these kind of debates. The other side understands this far better than our side does. In fact, they are so effective at it, they have most on our side describing them with very euphemisms they create. Nowhere is this more true than with the use of the term “pro-choice” . As long as we use that euphemism to describe pro-abortion folks, our effectiveness will continue to be significantly hindered. Notice, they rarely, if ever, call us pro-life for that very reason. Personally, I prefer to be called anti-abortion than pro-life when it comes to abortion. Damned right I’m anti-abortion! And I have no problem saying that.

    But yet, they do have a problem saying what they are for and we only enable them even further by using their euphemistic terms like pro-choice. And no, it not wrong to call them pro-abortion. If you favor the decriminalization of abortion, you are, at least to some degree, pro-abortion.

    Reply

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