On abortion, both Biden and the pro-life movement lack moral consistency

Today is the annual March for Life, and that fact leaves me thoroughly depressed. Thousands of Americans, rightly concerned that abortion is an infamy in our day, participate in the annual march, many of them good and large-hearted people, most of them Catholics. Because of the pandemic, this year's march is virtual, but that is better than last year's march, which was a counter-witness to the Gospel of life because Donald Trump became the first president in history to address the group in person.

How to say this gently? The pro-life movement is the worst thing to happen to the pro-life cause. Aligning themselves with that moral grotesquerie of a man stained a movement that had already miscalculated and misjudged the culture in which they sought to make a difference.

It is no sin to be politically naive, but it is a sin to be morally irresponsible on behalf of a morally upright cause. Long before Trump disgraced the nation, the pro-life movement had become embedded in a kind of conservative politics that seemed incapable of exercising solidarity on behalf of anyone who had already been born. Only the unborn moved them to empathy.

Pope Francis has been crystal clear that the West's indifference to the vast number of unborn children killed in abortion is a prime example of what he rightly condemns as a "throwaway culture." But you can't convince anyone if you endorse that culture in every other regard and only denounce it when the unborn are tossed aside. When racism kills and maims, when climate change kills and maims, when war kills and maims, when the death penalty kills and maims, those who are genuinely pro-life must raise their voice. Cozying up to Trump was morally obscene and politically stupid.

The late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's "consistent ethic of life" was the only viable approach that had the promise of changing our culture. It was an approach the pro-life movement abandoned.

Ah, you ask, but isn't the U.S. Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe v. Wade? Or Planned Parenthood v. Casey? Perhaps. In recent years, the decision to focus on gaining a pro-life majority on the court — call it the "Federalist Society approach" — has led to decisions that have undermined our democracy, such as the failure to confirm Judge Merrick Garland when President Barack Obama nominated him in 2016.

But even if the court kicks the issue back to the states, what then? Because the pro-life movement stopped trying to persuade people that abortion is wrong, they are completely unprepared for the backlash that awaits them, and not just if Roe is overturned. What will happen when a woman dies procuring an illegal abortion?

The leaders of the movement do not see this because they are too busy walking to the bank. As my colleague Tom Roberts recently noted:

Tens of millions of dollars, in some cases hundreds of millions, annually pour into organizations, extreme left and extreme right, intent on maintaining their pro-abortion and pro-life positions without compromise. What exists is the equivalent of a far-flung and deeply funded industry — the lobbying organizations themselves and the attendant universe of lobbyists for hire, consultants, advertising specialists, pollsters and digital specialists that make up the infrastructure for the endless war.

Something in the culture will need to change before attitudes change, and attitudes need to change before the politics will change. I have no idea what that cultural change will be. As I noted in June, I used to think American society would rediscover its need for solidarity if we faced a horrible and indiscriminate threat, "something like a pandemic." Well, here we are.