In 2016, many Catholics wrestled with whether their vote for Donald Trump, a former pro-abortion Democrat running for president as a pro-life Republican, would truly do anything to save the lives of the unborn. Liberal Catholics the virtual-world over said Trump could not be trusted, and anyone who supported him supported evil.
Pro-life Catholics hoped Trump would be good for his word, and he was.
Aided by recommendations from the Federalist Society, President Trump made good on his campaign promise to appoint pro-life judges and has been called the “most pro-life president” in history. He appointed a total of 234 judges, including three to the Supreme Court and 174 judges to the district courts.
Last year, Trump-appointed Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch, along with two other conservative justices, struck down Roe v. Wade in the landmark case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Pro-life Catholics had been praying and working toward this outcome for nearly half a century.
“The end of Roe v. Wade at the hands of Trump-appointed justices, and the 32,000 fewer … abortions just in the ten months since Roe’s demise, have proved the pro-life movement correct. Focusing on politics and the courts was the right strategy. Lives have literally been saved by the thousands,” said Peter Wolfgang, executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, ruled earlier this month that the FDA illegally approved the abortion drug mifepristone 22 years ago. He said the FDA “stonewalled judicial review” and illegally ignored years of petitions questioning the drug’s approval process.
The case has risen to the Supreme Court. If the district court’s ruling stands, several restrictions will greatly reduce the abortion-inducing drug’s accessibility.
Mifepristone is part of a two-drug regimen that is responsible for half of all abortions in the United States, so restricting access will result in many fewer abortions.
“Many liberal Catholics seem unable to separate the basic human right to life, which all faithful Catholics must support, from their views on other social and political issues, about which Catholics can disagree in good faith. But protecting innocent human life from slaughter is something every Catholic must support,” said Josh Mercer, communications director at CatholicVote.
Jesuit Daniel P. Horan said in 2016: “Less abortions are achieved by better healthcare and care for the poor!”
Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky called Trump “disingenuous” and accused pro-life Trump supporters of “willful ignorance.” The bishop made those remarks in 2020, despite the fact that Trump had already appointed two conservative Supreme Court justices and was about to appoint a third.
Bishop Stowe is the same bishop who, without the full story, said he was “ashamed” of courageous Covington high school students, embarrassingly accused pro-lifers of not caring about the poor, and broke with the USCCB in support of the Democrat-supported Equality Act.
Catholic blogger Simcha Fisher wrote in 2016 that she would probably vote for Hillary Clinton because men like Donald Trump “are (the) reason” women have abortions. She admonished Catholics that “it would be better to hang a millstone on your ballot and throw it into the sea” than to vote for Trump.
“Liberal Catholics, for all their histrionic screeds over the last seven years, were wrong about Trump. Trump did more to protect the lives of the unborn than any modern politician,” said Mercer.
