[Image by Michael Bußmann from Pixabay]

Note: This post discusses contemporary US politics. If you can’t take any more US politics at the moment (and frankly, who could blame you), read no further.

Donald Trump’s pro-life credentials always seemed pretty suspect to me. And his behaviour is generally so egregious that charitable interpretations of statements and actions don’t come easily. I was slightly more charitably disposed towards his vice-president, JD Vance, whose outlook at least seemed more coherent. But despite his unapologetic identification with the pro-life cause, and his 2019 conversion to Catholicism (a faith with pretty unequivocal views about human beings’ right to life), it seems clear now that JD Vance is a lot less pro-life than many of his supporters still seem to think.

Last summer, Vance firmly voiced his support for in vitro fertilisation (IVF), joining other Republican senators in a statement which read, in part: ‘In vitro fertilization is legal and available in every state across our nation. We strongly support continued nationwide access to IVF, which has allowed millions of aspiring parents to start and grow their families.’

With IVF (going by information from Illume Fertility, an IVF clinic chain) seven or eight embryos are typically created per patient. It is estimated that 238,000 Americans attempted IVF in 2021. Fewer than 100,000 embryos were brought to term. As journalist Tyler Arnold points out, if seven or eight embryos were created per patient, that means between 1.5 and 1.8 million IVF embryos were never born. Compare this with the estimated 985,000 lives lost to abortion in the United States between July 2022 and June 2023.

Yes, some discarded embryos are adopted, but the figure for this is tiny: in the United States between 2004 and 2019, live births from donated embryos were fewer than 8,500.

Vance has also openly stated that he supports the accessibility of mifepristone, a drug commonly used to bring about a medical abortion. In an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker on 7 July 2024, Vance was asked (in the context of abortion): ‘But just to be clear: you support mifepristone being accessible?’ ‘Yes, Kristen, I do,’ he replied.

Vance’s support for mifepristone and IVF didn’t seem to bother attendees at the March for Life last January as they enthusiastically chanted his name. And if you scour the internet you will find surprisingly few condemnations of Vance’s position from pro-lifers.

On one level, I understand where they’re coming from. In November 2023, after voters in Ohio approved a right to abortion amendment in their state constitution, Vance wrote on X: ‘I am as pro-life as anyone, and I want to save as many babies as possible. This is not about moral legitimacy but political reality.’ Vance portrays himself as a pragmatist and I could understand qualified pro-life support for him on that basis. But does he really ‘want to save as many babies as possible’?

If JD Vance ‘strongly supports’ a process which claims almost twice as many lives as abortion, in what meaningful way is he pro-life? According to the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute, almost two-thirds of US abortions in 2023 were medicated abortions, and the most common regimen in these cases is a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol. Considering this, how pro-life is Vance’s continued support for the accessibility of mifepristone? And that’s just pre-born humans. What about his support for the current widespread deportations to prisons in El Salvador? Or his enthusiastic endorsement of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, which has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of innocent civilians?

In light of all this, pro-lifers’ silence is seriously troubling. Vance’s position – and, by extension, US pro-lifers’ unqualified support for him – is hypocritical. And if you’re trying to convince someone of the validity of your position, hypocrisy really doesn’t help.

We’ve written here before about the Consistent Life Ethic, which holds at its core that the right to life of all human beings goes beyond the issue of abortion. I think JD Vance would do well to study it – but so too, it seems, would many other self-identified pro-lifers.

Cian