Identifying Pro-Life Politicians
October, 2002
Pro-life voters are desperately seeking candidates who unequivocally support the right to life of all innocent human beings without exception. Unfortunately, in many contests, neither the Democrat nor the Republican is interested in abolishing abortion. The underlying difficulty is that establishment pro-life organizations often endorse those who favor some abortions. Examples of such confusion abound.
In a number of congressional and gubernatorial elections, for instance, the Democrat supports child killing on demand, while the Republican supports only limited restrictions on abortion (e.g., regulating partial birth abortion and/or permitting abortion in cases of rape, incest, or purported threat to the mother's life). The Republican who supports a lesser degree of abortion often earns the National Right to Life stamp of approval and is touted as "pro-life."
Is blanket National Right to Life support for Republican candidates surprising? As one of my advisors frequently tells me, "follow the money!" Various Republican Party committees have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to National Right to Life during the past few election cycles. Connect the dots. Absolute opposition to abortion is not a requirement for earning a National Right to Life endorsement. But membership in the Republican Party appears to be a major criterion.
In my humble opinion, a politician who merely wishes to regulate abortion is not pro-life, whether he is Democrat, Republican, third party or independent. Such a candidate does not deserve to be called "pro-life," and such a candidate does not deserve an iota of support from any pro-life voter. Abortion is an act that kills a person. It must be opposed in all cases, not just some. There is no middle ground.
The law can never legitimately tolerate the direct killing of innocent human beings, born or preborn. If a politician is unwilling to honor this most fundamental duty of law, he is unworthy of even one pro-life endorsement, regardless of his party affiliation.
While NRLC and others maintain that it is critical to support the more restrictive pro-abortion candidate in order to chip away at the culture-of-death, history contradicts that proposition. If there is one lesson we have learned from the last 30 years, it's that compromise of fundamental principle enables the death peddlers to chip away at us, while continuing to slaughter our most vulnerable brothers and sisters.
It's time to put to rest the flawed concept of voting for the lesser of two evils. There's no such thing when dealing with acts of murder. Abortion is intrinsically evil. No one should admit to the admissibility of even one act of abortion. To do so is to contradict what is clearly an absolute value: the personhood of the human being. Pursuing the so-called lesser evil option is not acceptable.
Pro-life Americans must insist that political candidates, in order to claim the pro-life mantel, must honor their moral obligation as legislators to defend and protect all innocent human beings from the moment of conception. Organizations that purport to represent pro-life philosophy must stop settling for politicians whose support for a little abortion violates the most fundamental purpose of civil law. The alternative is to squander another 30, 50, or 100 years to sanctioned child killing.