(LifeSiteNews) — When Senator J.D. Vance refuses to back federal protections for preborn babies and lay out any meaningful policy positions to reduce abortions, he appears to betray his national conservative leanings.
National conservatives, should, by definition, support federal protections for preborn babies and other measures that will crush the abortion industry.
First, what is national conservatism?
“We are citizens of Western nations who have watched with alarm as the traditional beliefs, institutions, and liberties underpinning life in the countries we love have been progressively undermined and overthrown,” signers of the National Conservatism “Statement of Principles” wrote.
Organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation, the statement lays out the values of national conservatives.
“We see the tradition of independent, self-governed nations as the foundation for restoring a proper public orientation toward patriotism and courage, honor and loyalty, religion and wisdom, congregation and family, man and woman, the sabbath and the sacred, and reason and justice,” the statement reads. “We are conservatives because we see such virtues as essential to sustaining our civilization. We see such a restoration as the prerequisite for recovering and maintaining our freedom, security, and prosperity.”
Another section on the family states, “the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy” and the traditional family “is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations.”
The foundation’s National Conservatism Conference has hosted Vance three times since it began in 2019. It is reasonable then to assume Vance either considers himself a national conservative or is sympathetic to it.
But yet, he refuses to apply his worldview on issues of family and morality to the issue of stopping the killing of preborn babies in the womb.
Vance, who is President Donald Trump’s running mate, said the “pragmatic” approach to abortion is to defer to the states. He also said he supports nationwide “access” to deadly abortion pills.
But Vance, a Catholic convert, likely knows that the correct position is to support federal protections for preborn babies.
Because on other important moral issues, he has backed federal bans. For example, the Ohio Republican has previously voiced support for a federal ban on pornography, even linking the issue to abortion.
“I think the combination of porn, abortion have basically created a really lonely, isolated generation that isn’t getting married, they’re not having families, and they’re actually not even totally sure how to interact with each other,” he told traditional Catholic magazine Crisis in 2021. Jessica Kramer, the author of the article, said Vance told her he wants to “outright ban pornography,” according to her paraphrase of his comments.
That position is aligned with national conservatism, since pornography is linked to the “disintegration of the family.”
Vance has supported a federal ban on transgender drugs and surgeries for minors, realizing the harms of having children permanently mutilated.
No person, child or adult, can change his or her sex, and the ideal would be to prohibit all procedures outright. That being said, Vance at least is right in wanting to prohibit the procedures in some ways.
The Protect Children’s Innocence Act “would ban the genital mutilation, chemical castration, and sterilization of innocent children by classifying the performance of so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ on a minor as a Class C felony,” according to a news release from July 2023. It would also ban taxpayer funding of the procedures and even prevent foreigners who committed the procedures in their country from obtaining visas.
In other words, it would use federal power to protect vulnerable and innocent American citizens from harmful “procedures.”
It seems that national conservatism, based on the idea on preserving the moral character and foundations of the United States, would necessitate laws to stop families from being destroyed through abortion.
Furthermore, it would seem a national conservative would want a federal role to step in when lower institutions fail.
Both Trump and Vance have spoken out against the Democratic Party’s support for abortions in the seventh, eighth, and ninth months. Yet they refuse to endorse any federal limits on abortions, effectively letting these states continue to go forward with allowing ninth-month abortions.
This means that states including California, New Jersey, Illinois, New York, Michigan, Vance’s own Ohio, Vermont, and New Mexico can have virtually no limits. These states contain at least 30 percent of the country’s population. A national conservative should not accept allowing so many people to be able to kill their babies.
The Trump-Vance ticket has not laid out any pro-life policies they would implement if elected. In fact, the 2024 platform is watered down and includes the weakest pro-life language in decades.
An objection will surely follow – there are likely not enough votes in the Senate and House to pass a national abortion ban. Oddly, on this issue, Vance and Nikki Haley agree. It was a reason given by Haley to refuse to endorse any federal limits on abortion.
And this might be true – it would not remove the moral imperative to fight for the protection of all human life, but it is likely that a straight vote on a federal abortion ban would likely not pass in 2025 unless Republicans had an overwhelming majority in both chambers. However, that does not mean the abortion industry cannot be squeezed and crushed through a thousand cuts, as previously argued.
The post-Dobbs legal landscape, as previously noted, is wide open. That opens the door for creative legislative and executive actions to defund Planned Parenthood, yank federal funds for hospitals that commit abortions, and to attach riders to a variety of must-pass bills that would force abortion facilities to close. Trump and Vance should start from the premise that they want to stop abortion and then come up with 1,000 ways to do it.
Returning to the pornography example, there is not currently a federal ban on pornography. And in fact, no state has passed an outright ban. However, by using age verification requirements, a handful of states have forced at least one major peddler to stop operating in their states.
In other words, by using craftiness, they were able to enact a moral policy.
Vance should consider how his worldview is otherwise correct in the necessity of using power to stop immoral actions and apply it to the pressing issue of abortion.
Preborn babies need a champion in the White House and the country needs to restore its moral order to respect human life.
Editorial note: J.D. Vance announced his conversion to Catholicism in 2019. He has described himself as “100 percent pro-life” and has previously made strong statements on abortion, such as insisting on the right to life of unborn children conceived in rape and incest.
“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society,” Vance said during an interview in 2021.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Vance said.
In 2022 during a debate in the lead up to his election to the US senate Vance said that he has “always believed in reasonable exceptions” for allowing an abortion, but did not expand on what those exceptions would be.