I like JD Vance. He seems a remarkably competent man with an even more remarkable backstory. He speaks well, he debates well, he breaks the fourth wall well, but he doesn't talk about abortion well. I noticed this first at last year’s vice presidential debate and then again in his interview with Joe Rogan. As someone who knows a bit about abortion and thinks about it quite often, it became immediately apparent to me that JD Vance doesn’t—which is understandable. He has a lot of other things to worry about. And just because someone is educated, articulate, and pro-life doesn’t mean they can make a compelling case against abortion. They may not even have a working knowledge of the facts. Few people do, which is why so many “civilized” folks put up with such a barbaric practice. Is there anything in the world more quintessentially profane than child sacrifice? But that, of course, is not how it’s presented. Abortion isn’t sold as an ancient evil. It’s sold as a modern phenomenon—or as Tim Walz insisted—a fundamental human right. Though I shouldn’t be surprised at Vance’s struggle to mount a convincing condemnation of abortion, that doesn’t change the fact that people are being misled by his inability to do so. It feeds into their misconception that a credible condemnation can’t be made. Here is Vance’s opening statement on abortion last October, after he was asked if he and President Trump would establish a national pregnancy registry to monitor women’s prenatal behavior:

No, Norah, certainly we won't. And I want to talk about this issue because I know a lot of Americans care about it, and I know a lot of Americans don't agree with everything that I've ever said on this topic. And, you know, I grew up in a working class family in a neighborhood where I knew a lot of young women who had unplanned pregnancies and decided to terminate those pregnancies because they feel like they didn't have any other options. And, you know, one of them is actually very dear to me. And I know she's watching tonight, and I love you. And she told me something a couple years ago that she felt like if she hadn't had that abortion, that it would have destroyed her life because she was in an abusive relationship. And I think that is what I take from that, as a Republican who proudly wants to protect innocent life in this country, who proudly wants to protect the vulnerable is that my party, we've got to do a much better job at earning the American people's trust back on this issue.

I understand that abortion has been a losing issue for Republicans since the Dobbs verdict, but it’s a losing issue precisely because of responses like this. We have taken what should be a position of strength and turned it into one of weakness by simply failing to make the moral case—while apologizing for a host of fabricated sins. If Americans don’t trust Republicans on abortion, it’s not because Republicans haven’t been mealy mouthed enough. It’s not because they haven’t done enough genuflecting. It’s because they haven’t connected the ethical dots. Certainly Vance is in a difficult position. Whatever his personal convictions may be, he is saddled to a president who made it a priority to walk back his opposition to abortion. For political reasons. He knows abortion is a sacred cow to a large bloc of American voters—who are still fuming over the demise of Roe. Political gamesmanship is fine, biblical even, so long as it’s effective. You could even make a scriptural case for lying to save babies from death (read Exodus 1:15ff), but I don’t see the angle here. Not when the truth is so compelling. I would have much rather heard Vance respond with something closer to this:

No, Norah, certainly we won't. But let me say this. The reason I oppose abortion is simple. It’s because it kills an innocent human being. And that’s not a premise that’s open to debate. Look at any prenatal teaching text and you’ll find the same thing. Individual life begins at conception. And species always and only reproduce after themselves. It’s not a religious conviction. It’s straight biology. Abortion kills a human being, which every honest abortion advocate concedes. I know it’s inconvenient. I know lots of women have made this choice. Some of them were coerced; some weren’t. Some of them regret it; some don’t. But none of this changes the fact that we cannot kill someone—no matter how small they are—just because they get in our way. My Body, My Choice is a lie. Each and every abortion destroys precisely one body, and guess what, it’s not the woman’s.

Returning to the actual words of the Vice President, this is how Vance articulated the Trump policy on abortion:

Donald Trump has been very clear that on the abortion policy specifically, that we have a big country and it's diverse. And California has a different viewpoint on this than Georgia. Georgia has a different viewpoint from Arizona. And the proper way to handle this, as messy as democracy sometimes is, is to let voters make these decisions, let the individual states make their abortion policy. And I think that's what makes the most sense in a very big, a very diverse, and let's be honest, sometimes a very, very messy and divided country.

For my part, I am grateful that abortion is again a states' rights issue. But that doesn’t mean it should remain a states' rights issue. It’s certainly better than what we had before (federal protection for every abortion) but still worse than the ideal (federal protection for every human). Giving states the moral latitude to keep abortion legal is something akin to giving them the moral latitude to keep slavery legal. If you think the comparison unfair, it’s almost certainly because you’ve convinced yourself that the victims of abortion are somehow less than fully human. Which is precisely how large swaths of our nation once viewed the victims of slavery. Tim Walz bristled at being called pro-abortion, insisting instead that he is “pro-freedoms.” His advice for those who oppose abortion: mind your own business!—which is the same message once leveled at abolitionists. Only the choice in question has changed. We’re not pro-slavery, I can hear its defenders rationalize. We’re pro-freedoms. And if someone chooses to own a slave, that’s nobody’s business but their own. You’ve heard of victim shaming. This is even worse. Victim ignoring. 

In his interview with Joe Rogan, who frustrates me to no end on abortion, Vance maintained that President Trump wants “to just stop having a culture war over this particular issue and to let the voters in these states make these decisions while the national government focuses on things like lowering the cost of groceries and lowering the cost of housing and securing the southern border.” I don’t mind his conclusions in the least. As I’ve said before, making life more safe and affordable is a very practical way to help reduce the demand for abortion. But the notion that we can stop having a culture war over abortion by simply giving jurisdiction over to the states is naive. Not only does it ignore the fact that there are passionate abortion opponents in every blue state and just-as-passionate abortion proponents in every red state, it intrinsically accepts the premise that abortion is a matter of mere preference that can reasonably go either way. Like speed limits or helmet laws. It is not. 

Reasonable people can disagree about abortion, some will argue, and there’s a sense in which this is true. But that does not mean that the two positions are equally reasonable. It just means that some otherwise reasonable people are wrong about abortion. There was a time, let us remember, when reasonable people disagreed about slavery. Now supporting slavery is beyond the pale. How did that happen? Did people fundamentally change, or did their understanding of slavery fundamentally change? I think it was some combination of both, spurred on by an eclectic mix of mostly Christian rabble rousers who sufficiently demonstrated two things. One, love of neighbor is a superior ethic to dominion of neighbor. And two, the slave is your neighbor, created by the same God and endowed with the same intrinsic value. The 13th amendment did not make slavery wrong. It recognized that slavery is wrong and ruled accordingly. Abortion, like slavery, represents too fundamental an injustice to be left to the shifting whims of popular opinion.

The difficulty, of course, is that the only way to constitutionally move something beyond the whims of popular opinion is to first massively affect popular opinion. It’s a catch 22. The tyranny of the majority can only be thwarted by earning the support of the majority. Specifically, two-thirds of the House and Senate followed by three-fourths of state legislatures. It’s a high bar—and for good reason. So high, in fact, that by the time you reach that cultural tipping point, the legislation itself becomes almost superfluous. Almost, but not quite. We might wish that the founders had possessed the foresight to explicitly forbid abortion in the framing documents. Modern abortion’s primitive precursor has existed on the fringes of society since before the Declaration of Independence, but I doubt even those exceedingly prescient men could have imagined a future in which mainstream America would kill its own unborn children en masse. It was a threat wholly beyond their conception. And so here we are.

Ironically, it was Tim Walz who recognized that the state-by-state abortion solution is untenable. Access to basic human rights, he argued, cannot be determined by geography. What he misses, though, is that the most basic and fundamental human right is the right to life. The right to control your body is secondary and ends where your neighbor’s body begins. Or your child’s. With exceedingly limited exceptions, no one has the right to use their body to destroy someone else’s body. And who can argue with that? The only point in the debate where Vance drew attention to the barbarity of abortion was in reference to Minnesota’s policy of not requiring doctors to provide lifesaving care to babies who survive “a botched late term abortion.” Vance called it “fundamentally barbaric,” but this simply reinforces the notion that late-term abortions are not to be tolerated while early abortions are sort of okay. I can assure you that there is no substantive basis for making such a distinction. And please don’t speak to me of viability. How does the fact that a baby can’t yet survive outside the womb justify tearing that baby’s body to pieces or ingesting it with fatal toxins? Answer: it doesn’t. Born babies are no more capable of providing for themselves than unborn babies, but we don’t dismember them for it. 

At two different points in the debate, Vance spoke of earning back trust on the issue of abortion. Ditto for his Joe Rogan interview. It was a clear talking point. “We've gotta earn the people's trust,” he told Rogan, “because they don't trust the idea that when we say that we're pro-family, we don't just mean pro-birth.” This particular red herring—the notion that abortion opponents aren’t sufficiently pro-family or pro-child—is one of my longest-standing pet peeves. I roll my eyes when I hear it wielded by the opposition, but to hear it come from an ideological compatriot is genuinely painful. You should never apologize for something that isn’t true, and suggesting that abortion opponents don’t care about families or born children is about as far from the truth as you can get. Does anyone actually believe that those who oppose abortion care less about the health and well-being of children and families than those who support abortion?! You know, the ones who literally espouse tearing the smallest and weakest members of a family to pieces and count it a good thing? Can there be any debate as to whether Republicans or Democrats care more about preserving the nuclear family? Why would Vance give credence to such an inverted premise? 

Vance doesn’t specify how, exactly, Republicans are to earn the trust of abortion proponents, but he suggests “pursuing pro-family policies” like “making childcare (and fertility treatments) more accessible.” But is there any chance such gestures would cause our detractors to conclude, “Oh, they’re paying for daycare and IVF, I guess abortion is wrong.” Of course not. The only way we earn trust for an admittedly-unpopular position is by demonstrating that it’s the only one that’s ethically tenable. It’s the only position that doesn’t sanction the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent victims per annum. Trying to conciliate Democrats through subsidized childcare or IVF is silly and immaterial. Childcare and IVF are both symptoms of the crisis, not solutions. The American family is under siege, and the assault is coming almost entirely from one direction. From the side that thinks you can swap out husbands and wives, moms and dads, or men and women without impact. We’re all just interchangeable parts. Two moms. Two dads. Buying babies from surrogates. Conceiving babies in the lab. No big deal. It’s all good. Children can grow up without their mom, their dad, or both, so long as grown men and women can live out their fetishes. It is precisely because we care so much about children and families that we hold abortion and all these parallel delusions in such contempt. They are part and parcel. 

To give Vance his due, he spoke recently at the March for Life. That in itself is commendable. And he highlighted the injustice of abortion even more recently at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast—where he affirmed the Trump administration’s commitment to “protecting the rights of pro-life protesters [and] ensuring that we have an opportunity to protect the rights of the unborn.” Vance, who has experienced many blessings in his adult life, calls parenting his children alongside his wife “the single greatest blessing of [them all].” Granted, virtually no one in the world heard these remarks, compared to the audiences he had on CBS and JRE. And I could wish that Vance was as forthright with those who support abortion as with those who already recognize its abhorrence, but his remarks from the March for Life are still worth celebrating. Here is an excerpt. 

I know how many of you in this crowd have devoted immeasurable time and resources to help … lend a hand to young people facing a moment of desperation. But by and large, our society, our country, has not yet stepped up in the way you have; and our government certainly has failed in that important responsibility. We failed a generation not only by permitting a culture of abortion on demand but also by neglecting to help young parents achieve the ingredients they need to [live] a happy and meaningful life. A culture of radical individualism took root, one where the responsibilities and joys of family life were seen as obstacles to overcome, not as personal fulfillment or personal blessings. Our society has failed to recognize the obligation that one generation has to another, (which) is a core part of living in a society to begin with. 

You'll notice that this is not the same message Vance delivered in the VP debate or on Rogan. Some of the trappings are similar. We are at fault, but the nature of the guilt is entirely different. We have failed—not to provide childcare or IVF—but by “permitting a culture of abortion on demand” to materialize in the first place. Amen and amen. The cynical explanation for this shift is that Vance speaks out both sides of his mouth, tailoring his message to whatever crowd he is addressing so as to tell everyone what they want to hear. The more charitable—and I believe credible—explanation is that his earlier remarks were made before the election, when he was still courting votes. His more recent comments came when he had a much freer hand with which to operate and are therefore closer to his true convictions. The thing I appreciate most about Vance’s most recent messaging is its breadth. It’s not just: End abortion. It’s: Start a family. Its not: Get on birth control. It’s: Get married. Have children. Be who God made you to be, not who the miserable, godless activists insist that you be. “The task of our government,” Vance explains, “(is) to make it easier for young moms and dads to afford to have kids, to bring them into the world, and to welcome them as the blessings that we know they are.” That’s a good message, and hopefully Vance will get better at making it to those who don’t already agree with him. Soon.