This is a piece that I wanted to get published somewhere else but which ultimately didn’t work out. It’s a bit different to our usual fare here but figured I’d publish it here on the off-chance there’s anyone in the country still undecided going into election day.
Ben
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If pro-lifers want to vote tomorrow for a presidential ticket which unambiguously supports the rights of the unborn, then they should vote for Peter Sonski and Lauren Onak of the American Solidarity Party. The ASP’s 2024 platform calls for the right to life to be respected at all levels of government, up to and including a Human Life Amendment to the US constitution. The ASP pairs those clear legal protections with policies which provide economic assistance to mothers and children, including cash payments to carers and a commitment to make childbirth free.
By contrast, Donald Trump has stripped from the Republican platform the party’s longstanding acknowledgement that the unborn has a fundamental right to life, replacing it with opposition only to late abortion. He’s criticised an Arizona abortion ban for going “too far” and announced himself as the champion of IVF, current methods of which create so many never-implanted “surplus embryos” that the practice likely ends more unborn lives than abortion in the United States. His vice-presidential nominee, J.D Vance, once a pro-lifer, has come out in support of free access to the abortion pill. The GOP ticket is a pro-choice ticket. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has made access to abortion the centrepiece of her campaign. If pro-lifers want to vote their conscience, the right choice is clear.
Of course, things aren’t so simple. The ASP has no chance of winning. Principle is all well and good, but under a first-past-the-post electoral system surely the pragmatic, tactical thing to do is to hold your nose and vote for the less-bad candidate on abortion? It’s just this kind of argument that has lead many pro-lifers, including leaders in the mainstream movement, to endorse Trump even as he abandons the unborn.
That argument is, I think, completely mistaken. It’s not that pro-lifers should throw pragmatic concerns aside. But in this election a vote for the ASP is the tactical choice. In the long run, it’s the vote most likely to lead to justice for the unborn.
Think about what happens if Trump wins the election. The GOP will be sent the clearest possible message that they will pay no price for throwing the pro-life cause under the bus. Pro-life voters are theirs regardless. If pro-lifers always vote for the more anti-abortion party, they have every incentive to be as pro-choice as possible short of being more so than the other party. That’s a one-way route to the GOP becoming like the UK and Canadian conservative parties: pro-choice parties that throw pro-lifers the occasional bone. It would be the end of national level influence for the pro-life movement.
Imagine instead that some minority of pro-life voters vote ASP, and they get to a national total of two or three per cent. Trump loses a close election to Harris. The GOP will know exactly why they lost, and that they can’t hope to win presidential elections on the kind of campaign Trump ran this time. A short-run defeat would prevent long-run obliteration.
The usual response to this is that a Kamala Harris win would be so disastrous for the rights of the unborn that it must be stopped at all costs. The worry advanced is that Harris as President would make good on her threat to “codify Roe”, passing federal legislation that would reinstate a right to abortion across the US.
There are a number of reasons this is very unlikely to happen. First, notice which party currently holds the presidency, with no codification of Roe in sight. Republicans control the House of Representatives and Democrats hold the Senate with a razor-thin majority. Democrats are overwhelmingly likely to lose more Senate seats, while the House could go either way.
Even in the unlikely event that the Democrats managed to gain control of both houses of Congress, ordinary legislation in the United States is still subject to the Senate filibuster. That means it needs sixty votes to pass rather than fifty-one (or fifty plus the vice-president, who can vote to break ties). Kamala Harris is more likely to endorse Trump for President than the Democrats are to win sixty seats in this election or the next midterm. Harris is threatening to end the fillibuster for ordinary legislation, but this is an empty threat. Moderate senators, even ones who might vote for Roe codification, have expressed opposition to ending the filibuster, and many more are known to be quietly opposed.
Even if this is all mistaken and Congress were to codify Roe, the current Supreme Court would strike the legislation down on states’ rights grounds. This would be less than ideal for pro-lifers, as it would set the precedent that federal legislation couldn’t regulate abortion. But this is exactly the position Trump is running on anyway. A Harris administration would certainly make the position of the unborn worse at the margins. But the damage she can realistically inflict with a 6-3 Supreme Court pales in comparison to the prospect of a United States with two pro-choice parties. (As for the argument that pro-lifers should vote for Trump out of gratitude for appointing these justices, it’s silly stuff. This is a human rights movement, not a playground game of tit-for-tat. We vote for politicians based on what they will do in the future.)
This isn’t a case for voting for Harris. A Harris win with no significant ASP vote will send the message to both parties that running pro-choice on abortion is a winning strategy. More than anything she’s likely to accomplish in office, this would be bad for the rights of the unborn in much the same way a Trump win would be. An ASP vote is the only one that has a chance of sending the right message. Even if Trump wins, a rebellion by pro-lifers will still do some work to show Republicans that their votes can’t just be taken for granted.
Abortion is not the only issue at play in this election, and the long-run prospects of human rights universalism in America depends on deeper factors than the winner of it. I’ve written elsewhere that the pro-life movement needs to focus on actually persuading people at ground level of the equality of the unborn. The movement also needs to do far more to build the kind of economically just society that the end of abortion will require.
But in the short run it would be foolishness to sacrifice what political leverage the movement still has. Whether or not you’ve voted for Trump before, tomorrow the realistic, pragmatic pro-lifer should vote for the American Solidarity Party. This time, the tactical vote is the conscience vote.
The Minimise Project 