Former president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is not a libertarian, not a conservative, and not a constitutionalist, but this doesn’t mean that he never gets anything right.
In a video released on his Truth social media platform, Trump said that abortion laws are a matter for the states:
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My view is, now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land. Many states will be different. Many will have a different number of weeks, or some will [be] more conservative than others, and that’s what they will be. At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people.
Trump, who used to claim that he was pro-choice, has claimed to be pro-life since he began thinking about running for president in 2012. However, he has said that he supports exceptions in cases of rape, incest, and to protect the life of the mother.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, condemned Trump’s statement: “We are deeply disappointed in President Trump’s position. Unborn children and their mothers deserve national protections and national advocacy from the brutality of the abortion industry. The Dobbs decision clearly allows both states and Congress to act. Saying the issue is ‘back to the states’ cedes the national debate to the Democrats who are working relentlessly to enact legislation mandating abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy.”
Trump’s vice president Mike Pence said that his former boss’s announcement was a “retreat on the Right to Life” and a “slap in the face to the millions of pro-life Americans who voted for him in 2016 and 2020.”
Lindsey Graham, the Senate minority leader, also criticized Trump: “I respectfully disagree with President Trump’s statement that abortion is a states’ rights issue. Dobbs does not require that conclusion legally and the pro-life movement has always been about the wellbeing of the unborn child — not geography.”
Dannenfelser, Pence, Graham—and every pro-life Republican and conservative Christian who agrees with their criticisms of Trump—are enemies of the Founding Fathers, the Constitution and the American system of government.
Of course abortion laws are a matter for the states.
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As James Madison, the “father of the Constitution,” wrote in Federalist No. 45:
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will for the most part be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people; and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.
The Constitution only mentions three crimes: treason, piracy, and counterfeiting. The federal government should no more concern itself with abortion than it should concern itself with murder, rape, arson, assault, battery, armed robbery, shoplifting, burglary, speeding, or running a stop sign or red light.
Now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned, pro-lifers should focus all of their attention on state legislatures, not the federal government. Better still, they should devote their time, energy, and resources to changing the hearts and minds of women so that they won’t consider abortion an option or have an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy in the first place.
