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In this episode, Trent examines the results of the 2022 mid-term elections and what they mean for pro-life political goals moving forward.
Narrator:
Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everybody. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answer’s apologist and speaker Trent Horn. And today I want to talk about the midterm elections, but in particular, I want to talk about how the pro-life movement moves forward with its goal of making sure that every single human being is protected under the law. Now, I am going to talk about politics, but I’m not going to turn this into a big political episode. I definitely don’t want to turn the podcast into a big political podcast. That’d be very easy to do. There’s a huge temptation to just talk about politics because that’s what a lot of people want to hear. But that’s not what I want to do. That’s not what I feel called to do. I feel called to build up the church Jesus Christ established to help people find the truth in it, to come to know Jesus Christ and to carry out the work of evangelizing.
But part of that work of evangelism includes evangelizing the gospel of life. It means going out and combating evils against innocent human life like euthanasia, assisted suicide, abortion. And some of that is in the private sphere, helping people who are facing unplanned pregnancies, educating people to show them that abortion is gravely immoral. But part of it is in the political sphere of crafting laws. And that’s okay. I mean, it’s funny, some people will say, you shouldn’t focus on the laws. You can’t change laws until you change hearts. That’s true. But the law has an ability to also change people’s hearts. It has a function there as well. The law is a teacher. When people see that something is illegal, they begin to question it. Oh, maybe that shouldn’t be illegal. At least more so than if it were just strictly legal.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The law can’t make a racist love me, but it can stop him from lynching me.” And I think that’s pretty important too. And so I agree, the law may not be able to force someone to love an unborn child, but it can stop him or her from killing that unborn child. And it has done that. Since the Dobbs decision, since Dobbs v Jackson came down this past summer, and in doing so, has allowed some states to implement their laws banning abortion., states like Georgia, Texas, for example. In doing that, they’ve done studies to show the number of abortions has gone down dramatically. If you average out the states where abortions decrease, and then where they increase, if some people go across state lines, for example, to get an abortion, there have been 10,000 overall, fewer abortions since the Dobbs decision came down.
That means 10,000 human lives were saved through this one verdict. Now, I would say that’s completely worth it. Thanks be to God. I’m so happy with that. And yet, there are some people, especially, I don’t know how I want to describe it, more progressive people in Catholicism, certain commenters on Twitter and social media, they think abortion… Honestly, they’ll give you the spiel. They’ll say, “Well, abortion, Yeah, abortion is bad. Abortion is wrong. But you know what? We can’t outlaw abortion until we’ve made sure that nobody needs abortion. We can’t outlaw it until we’ve made sure to address all the underlying causes of abortion.” That’s what they’ll say. So you’re telling me we can’t make abortion illegal until what, poverty doesn’t exist anymore? Well, that means abortion’s always going to be legal because Jesus said, the poor will always be with you.
Now, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t address poverty. Absolutely we should. But the thing is, there are always going to be people who find themselves in difficult situations. Abortion is primarily a moral problem. It is not a social problem because people find themselves in difficult situations all the time, and they don’t kill their infants. They don’t kidnap strangers in order to make money. They don’t do things because either they recognize they’re immoral or they aren’t willing to risk the legal consequences of doing those things to address their difficult circumstance. But abortion is different. They might think there’s something wrong with it, or they think there’s something wrong with it, but they’ll still do it anyways because only a legal barrier would stop them. And so we as pro-lifers need to pass laws to protect the unborn.
How do we do that? There’s basically two ways. You can either pass a law directly through a ballot proposition. I’ll talk about those in a little bit. Or you elect people, representatives either at the local, state or the federal level, and then they pass the laws for you. That’s how most laws are passed. We don’t live in a pure democracy, we live in a democratic republic. So we elect lawmakers and then they craft laws. And the executive branch, whether it’s a governor or the president signs… I feel like this is a Schoolhouse Rock. I’m just a bill. And so we need to do that in order to pass these pro-life laws, well, we need pro-life legislators. And it’s so funny, these same progressive Catholics for years, were saying, “Oh, electing pro-life politicians, they’re never going to overturn Roe. They’re just saying that to get your vote.” And then Roe gets overturned and instead of just saying they were wrong, they’ll say, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t overturn it.”
And what they said after Roe was overturned, they would say this. They would say, “Well, get ready for the backlash. It’s going to be even worse for the unborn after Roe versus Wade is overturned. This was the biggest mistake pro-lifers have ever done.” And my response to that is, how could it be worse for the unborn than what we had under Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood versus Casey? How could it be worse? Under Casey and Roe, abortion was legal through all nine months of pregnancy for virtually any reason. The only reason some states did not have late term abortion was because there weren’t doctors who could stomach doing something so monstrous. And you’d have to fly to a state that had a monster doctor working there like George Tiller, pray for the repose of his soul. Or Dr. Hern in Colorado, or that other doctor in New Mexico who do these gruesome late term procedures.
How could it be worse? And yet, as we see now that Roe is overturned, the simple fact of putting Dobbs into play has saved 10,000 lives. So what they’ll say is, “Oh, there’s going to be this giant backlash against pro-lifers.” And some of them have tried to say that what happened in the midterm elections is proof of the backlash and that pro-lifers made a catastrophic mistake and that we shouldn’t try to change the law. We shouldn’t have tried to overturn Roe. This was a mistake. And I will say to them, you’re wrong. You’re just wrong about that. The Dobbs decision is not the end. It is the beginning of it is not the beginning of the end, it’s the end of the begin… What were we saying before? The point is it’s not the end, it’s the beginning. All right?
That was an important battle, but we have a long fight ahead and this midterm election really did show that. But I want to tell you what it did not show. So it did not show a massive backlash against pro-life politicians. All right? It did not show that at all. Because good candidates, candidates who were even tempered, had good experience, had all the right credentials to make them good candidates for office and who were solidly pro-life, they did well on election night. So if the midterm results were a referendum on pro-life politicians saying The country is really mad about Dobbs and they’re going to stick it to pro-life politicians and to people who banned abortion, that did not happen. Think about it. Look at Florida. Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio have historic wins in Florida. And DeSantis passed a 15 week ban on abortion. You look here in Texas, Greg Abbott, Greg Abbott handily defeated Beta O’Rourke, or Abbott likes to call him Beto.
Beto over here, Beto O’Rourke, he defeated him here and wasn’t close at all. Although I do wonder what Beto is going to do now after losing three elections in a row. We’ll have to see. But people thought, you know that the Texas abortion law, because there were two different laws that were passed that were subject of news stories back in 2021, saying, “Oh, the midterms, Abbott’s going to go down. Women aren’t going to stand for that.” Nope, he did just fine. Even though here in Texas, I can’t find an abortion facility to pray at. Thanks be to God. Did he lose his governor? Did he lose the governor’s mansion for doing that? Nope. He turned out just fine. Same thing with Brian Kemp in Georgia. They passed the six week ban in Georgia that was ridiculed in the media. And Kemp handily defeated Stacy Abrams. There was no question there.
You look at Ohio, for example, Ohio passed a heartbeat bill. And Ohio had that story about the 10 year old girl who was raped, who crossed state lines to get an abortion. That was a big thing in the news. Remember when that happened? By the way, pro-lifers, it’s not good to say things like, this story is fake, unless you can prove it’s fake. Because it turned out to be real. Go with the facts. Let the facts lead you. Don’t, don’t go anywhere else. But there in Ohio, what happened? J.D. Vance won his senate race against, what was it? Tim Ryan, I think was his name. And Ryan lost a lot of pro-life democrats because he is so extreme on abortion. And DeWine won the governor’s seat in Ohio. And once again, they passed restrictive abortion laws and they were not penalized.
So yes, you will find solidly pro-life people running for races in the midterms who lost. But the question was, did they lose because they were pro-life or did they lose for other reasons? What were those reasons? I’m not going to get into that because this is not a political podcast. But my point here is that do not let anyone try to craft a narrative saying that being pro-life is a liability. It is not a liability. It is an asset. Being pro-life does not keep you from being a successful politician. DeSantis, Rubio, Abbot, Kemp, Vance, DeWine, there’s lots of examples of that. And here’s interesting, this is not just partisan either for me. You look in Alaska, I’m interested to see what’s going to happen there because the fight for the Senate seat there is between two Republicans, Kelly Tshibaka and Lisa Murkowski. Murkowski is pro choice, pro abortion. She defends abortion. And so it’s not every Republican is pro life. Basically every Democrat at the federal level I would say is pro-choice.
Bob Casey’s son, I think he’s in the Senate, but he’s basically turned in totally pro-choice. I can’t think of one at the federal level, but there are pro-choice Republicans. So it’s not just Republican Democrat. I want pro-life politicians. And so there in Alaska, well look, at least Tshibaka was running ahead. It’s going to go to a runoff, a rink choice. But she was not decimated for being pro-life. If anything, what hurts people, if you look in Georgia, what hurt Herschel Walker, it was not his support for abortion. It was the allegation that he had paid for an abortion in the past. That is what hurt him. So being pro-life, as long as you are a solid candidate, that is a strong asset for you. And we should encourage pro-life politicians to continue to defend the unborn. Doesn’t prevent them from being successful.
Number two though, let’s talk about the ballot propositions because some people will say, “Look, the ballot propositions show America’s not ready for illegal abortion.” And in a sense, they’re not ready for a complete ban on abortion. That’s true. Remember, overturning Roe was just opening the door so we could actually make progress. We’re not going to make a 90 yard touchdown. Okay, that’s just making a successful snap and starting to run across the field. I don’t know anything about football. I’m doing the best I can with the metaphors here. I don’t watch it too much. There were five ballot propositions that dealt with abortion in some way. So Vermont and California passed a right to abortion in their constitutions. That’s not surprising. Doesn’t surprise me at all. In overturning Roe, we knew some states were going to go strong pro-abortion.
So I see these progressive Catholics. “Can you believe now states are passing right to abortion in their constitutions?” Well yeah, they already assumed that was the case and it’s there. It can be undone in the future. But we knew there were always going to be some states that were very pro-abortion. Overturning Roe doesn’t mean you’re going to get all 50 at once, but you can at least get some. Texas, Georgia, Florida. We are moving at an incremental approach. And I’ll get back to that, but incremental is probably going to be our best path.
Vermont passed a pro-abortion constitution 77 to 22. It’s a very liberal state. I mean if you look at it, people, when you compare Wyoming and Vermont, they got similar income levels, similar population levels. But what’s interesting is that Vermont has a bunch of abortion facilities. It’s a tiny state and has a bunch of them. And Wyoming has one. But Wyoming has a pro-life culture. So even though they have similar populations, similar income distributions, Wyoming has much fewer abortions because it has a pro-life mentality and their laws and what they have done socially, they only have one abortion facility. Vermont has six. So no wonder they have a very pro-abortion culture there. 77-22 Vermont’s pro-abortion.
California, enshrines a right to abortion in their constitution that passes 65 to 35. Once again, no surprise there. I mean when I’ve done work with pro-lifers in the past in California, you can barely try to get a parental notification law. Not even consent, just notifying a parent their child is going to go and get an abortion. It’s a difficult state. There’s going to be places where the fight for life is like climbing Mount Everest. Other places it’s like hopping up a hill. Other states it’s like climbing Mount Everest. It’s really, really tough. Michigan and Kentucky is where it gets more interesting. But even there, Michigan has more of a pro-choice outlook among the electorate. And so Michigan passed a law proclaiming a right to abortion in its constitution. That passed 55 45. So that was not a blowout like Vermont, California. That was still close. And we have to remember this is also Kentucky too, because Kentucky comes up here as well.
Michigan and Kentucky, when Dobbs overturned Roe, they had trigger laws in effect ready to go. And so Michigan was passing a referendum. Sorry, was passing the constitutional amendment to prevent their trigger law from outlawing abortion and any other similar laws. Kentucky was passing a constitutional amendment saying there is no right to abortion in their constitution. The reason Kentucky does that is because look what happened in Kansas. Kansas, several years ago, the Kansas State Supreme Court ruled there is a right to abortion in the Kansas constitution. So it’s like now you have a Roe v Wade in Kansas at the state level that you’d have to overturn. So it provides a real headache to try to protect life in that state.
So Kentucky did not want to have three judges say there’s a right to abortion in the Kentucky Constitution, and that would destroy any ability to pass a law protecting the unborn. So they sought to pass a constitutional amendment saying simply there is no right to abortion. But it failed. It was close 52-47. And this is not a ban on abortion, it’s just saying there’s no right to abortion. But the way it was interpreted, and the way that pro-abortion people advertised about this in their election materials, they’re saying, “Look, Kentucky is banning abortion. They have a trigger law in effect, the six week ban, and you need to vote against this otherwise they’re going to ban abortion.” So when you have these, like in Kansas as well, when you have states that want to protect the unborn and say simply there is no right to abortion, that’s all they’re saying, they’re leaving the door open for a wide array of restrictions. The other side will say, “Don’t be fooled. This is a way to ban every single kind of abortion. You need to vote against it.”
And people, they listen to that. So these bans, the vote, 55-45, 52-47, which are still close. And by the way, most people on abortion, 25% are super pro-life, 25% are super pro-abortion, 50% mushy middle. Don’t like abortion, but they want exceptions for rape, incest, health of the mother. And so when they’re mobilized, you can either mobilize the electorate to easily… You put two cases out there. It’s easy for pro-choice people to mobilize the mushy middle to say, “Hey, pro-lifers want to ban abortion even if a 10 year old is a rape victim,” and get them to move. But pro-lifers can activate the mushy middle by saying, “Hey, we want to ban abortions after 15 weeks. Here’s a picture of a four month old unborn baby.” So the mushy middle can be activated, you’ve just got to be very specific with them. But they’re definitely not the kind of people that you can activate to just do a total ban on abortion.
So I don’t consider this to be an intractable defeat in Michigan and Kentucky. That the voters there were reacting, saying that we don’t want a total ban on abortion. But most Americans do want some kind of reasonable. They don’t want abortion on demand nine months for any reason or no reason. They don’t want that. They’ll support a 15 week ban. They’ll support other bands. But they won’t necessarily, by the way, do it with a ballot proposal. Ballot proposals are very unwieldy. It can be very difficult to mobilize millions of people to support a particular ballot initiative. There are other tough issues, things related to gun control, things that are related to drug legalization.
If you look at the history of ballot propositions, like in California, two-thirds of ballot propositions get defeated. Most, it can be very difficult to try to enact change with a ballot proposition. And that’s kind of a good thing. You want democracy, but you don’t want a mobocracy. However, you can make a lot of headway by using laws through the state legislatures. We’re seeing that in Texas, Georgia, Florida. And so honestly, I think that pro-life advocates should really pursue incremental legislation like a 15 week ban, a 12 week ban, a six week ban, with exceptions for things like rape and incest. It doesn’t mean, I’m saying it’s moral. I’m not saying that, but paragraph 73 of the Gospel of Life, Pope Saint John Paul II says that a pro-lifer, a Catholic, a politician can vote for a law that allows some abortions as long as people know he’s against them, if his goal is to restrict evil, that’s present.
You can’t vote to make abortion more legal, but you can vote to make it more illegal even if you can’t get all abortions to be illegal. Does that make sense? All right. So I think the incremental path, that’s the way to go. Otherwise, people are not at the point with their social conscience to accept the full pro-life message. But we have to continue to educate them in that regard and be aware of that. I also want to add one more thing here in Montana, there was a born alive Infant Protection Act that attempted to pass, but it failed actually. And it was referendum 131, I think it failed, not by much, but it failed. And it was saying that a healthcare provider… Born Alive Infant Protection Act, if a child is born from an abortion alive, you have to keep them alive.
You would think, why would anyone vote against that? And what happened in Montana was that the other side said… I think the law was not worded well, there’s a good article about it and National Review by Wesley Smith. I’ll link to it below. But what happened there, the way the law was worded is that it says a healthcare provider is going to be punished unless they take appropriate and reasonable actions to preserve the life and health of the infant. But the problem here is that the other side said, “Oh, so you’re saying that if a baby is dying and can’t be saved, you’re just going to do any medical intervention to keep them alive, even though they are dying right now.” So they had a woman in an ad saying that I gave birth to a baby who was dying and under this law, I would not have been allowed to hold my baby while he dies. They would’ve taken my baby to another room, performed futile medical care, and my baby would’ve died away from my arms.
And so when people hear that, they just latch onto the emotionally difficult story and then they don’t think about any of the other reasonable implications that are involved. They’ll say, “Well, if a baby’s going to die anyways, he should die in his mother’s arms. And if you can’t do that, then this is a bad law and I’m not going to vote for it.” So I think the law could have had a better chance if it had been phrased a little bit differently. So that’s why, another thing to keep in mind, what Smith says in the article is that pro-abortion advocates will take any pro-life law. They will lie about it. I’m talking about the advocates, the public presenters of abortion. If they’re okay defending the killing of children ethically, what won’t they do?
They’ll lie about it through their teeth. They’ve done it to me before. And so they will. But we want to give them as little ammunition as possible to twist the meaning of what these laws are for. And I think an incremental approach is going to be the best way to do that. So ultimately though, I think that going forward we have to educate people, but we really need to focus on making abortion unthinkable. If the general electorate, when they hear the word abortion in their mind, they think of a victim of rape, they think of a woman whose health is in danger. If they don’t immediately think of a living unborn child or ideally a dismembered unborn child, if that doesn’t come to mind immediately when they hear the word abortion, we’re going to have a rough road. We have to make abortion unthinkable in that regard.
It reminds me of the story of, we used to tell justice for, we used to talk about the law, Emmett Till. In fact, there’s a new movie coming out about Emmett Till. He was a 14 year old black boy who was lynched. His mom held by two white men who were found not guilty. She had an open casket funeral. His body was unrecognizable, but she had an open casket funeral so people could see the ugliness of racism and not forget it. And his image was featured on Jet Magazine, a leading black publication then and now. And so I think that if we are going to move forward, there’s a lot of different areas to focus on, but the thing I’m going to focus on is helping people to make abortion unthinkable and to present the pro-life case in a persuasive way.
If you want to do that, I would definitely recommend I have a new booklet out Why We Are Pro-Life. You can buy them for pennies a piece to give them away. And I wrote it in a tone so you could give it to a pro-choice person. It’s written in an accessible tone for them to read why we Are. You can get it at Catholic Answers. I’ll have the link to it below. And yeah, I hope this is helpful for everybody and just keep fighting the good pro-life fight everyone, and I’m always glad to help out. So thank you guys and I hope you have a very blessed day.
Narrator:
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