Last week, I wrote an article about the election (always a fraught thing to do). I argued that who pro-lifers should vote for is an important question and that not all answers are equally correct, but I also argued that how we think of and treat fellow pro-lifers who vote differently from us is even more important.

The responses I got were pretty much exactly what I expected. Some people loved the article, some people engaged thoughtfully with particular claims it made, and some people I lost completely as soon as I said that it’s possible to both be pro-life and vote for Harris.

If that’s you, I have immense empathy with where you’re coming from. I think Harris is very, very terrible—both her personal character and her policies, especially her policy goals on abortion, which are to make it federally illegal for states to impose restrictions on abortion at any time, for any reason. If she’s elected and she gets the congressional support she needs to succeed at passing that law, it will cost the lives of thousands and thousands of babies, including babies late enough in pregnancy that they can certainly feel pain and will die in agony. I’m not voting for Harris, and I think voting for Harris is the wrong choice.

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

What I’m Asking For

So if you’re one of the people my last article lost as soon as I said it’s possible to be pro-life and vote for Harris, you and I have important common ground. But we also have an important disagreement: I think there are some pro-life people who are planning to vote for Harris, and you think it’s not possible to be pro-life and vote for Harris. My goal in this article is to dig into that, explain where I think the root of our disagreement is, and ask if we can work together to create a healthy dialogue—to do the same things with each other that we do with pro-choice people:

• Read each other’s arguments with an active listening framework: pause our inner monologues that want to come up with counter-arguments while we’re reading, and focus just on working to fully understand the strongest version of each other’s argument.
• After finishing that step, make focused objections to the things we disagree with: not just saying “your conclusion is wrong, so something must be wrong in your argument somewhere,” but digging in and looking for the root of the disagreement to be able to say “here’s the step in your argument where I think you took a wrong turn, and here’s why I think that turn is wrong.”
• Take the time to remind ourselves that the person on the other side of the keyboard is a real human being, with hopes, fears, joys, and sorrows, not just an argument.

If we can do those things with the even more important disagreements we both have with pro-choice people, I have faith that we can do them with the disagreements we have with each other. I have done them (though not perfectly) as I read your comments and emails in response to my last article. I commit to doing them again as I read your comments and emails in response to this article. But good dialogue is a two-way street—I can’t make this a healthy disagreement without your help. So I’m also asking you to do those things for me as you read this article. Our ability as pro-lifers to disagree well with pro-choice people—to dialogue with them in a way that changes minds and saves lives—starts with being able to disagree well with each other.

My Argument

Let’s imagine a guy (call him Bob) who thinks and does all the pro-life things. He’s deeply grieved by abortion. He donates to all your favorite pro-life organizations, he does sidewalk counseling outside abortion clinics, and he advocates with lawmakers to make laws against abortion. Whatever you think are the most important things for pro-lifers to do, he’s doing them. He agrees with you on everything: your beliefs about abortion, the specific language you think pro-life laws should have, the most effective ways for the pro-life movement to work against abortion. Except for one thing—he thinks that Trump winning would be even worse for the pro-life movement in the long run than Harris winning, and he’s planning to vote for Harris.

Now let me be really clear right up front: I fully agree with you that Bob is wrong about voting for Harris. If Bob and I were friends and he were up for it, we would probably have long conversations about our disagreement where I try to convince him that he shouldn’t vote for Harris. But here’s the question: Is Bob pro-life?

If you think the answer is no—if you think it’s not possible to vote for Harris and be pro-life—then you have two options:

1. You can say it’s not possible for someone like Bob to exist. I can tell you to imagine him, sure, but I could also tell you to imagine a married bachelor. That doesn’t mean either a married bachelor or Bob could actually exist.
2. You can say that Bob could exist, but if he does then he’s not actually pro-life. Even though Bob says he’s pro-life, does all the other most important pro-life things, and agrees with all your other pro-life beliefs, the fact that he’s voting for Harris means he’s by definition not pro-life.

I’m going to reply to each of those options one at a time.

Reply to 1. If you tell me Bob doesn’t exist, my reply is pretty straightforward: I know Bob. As I mentioned in my last article, I have at least one good friend who is extremely passionate about ending elective abortion and making it illegal, who consistently gives his money and his time toward making those things happen, who you would definitely say is extremely pro-life if you looked at everything about his life except his voting plan, and who is planning to vote for Harris. You can tell me he shouldn’t vote for Harris. (I agree.) You can tell me that even though he’s so passionate about ending abortion, he’s by definition not pro-life. But you can’t tell me he doesn’t exist.

Reply to 2. If you say that Bob is by definition not pro-life despite believing, valuing, and doing all the pro-life things he does, here’s my reply. What does it mean to be pro-life? Imagine there’s a pro-life club, and you get hired as the bouncer. Who are you going to let into the club? Who are you going to keep out? There’s a lot riding on your choices: you’re functionally deciding what we as the pro-life movement are all about. Everyone you let in and everyone you exclude makes a value statement about what is fundamental and most important to the pro-life movement—about what we should be unified around.

There are some people you need to say are out. If you let in people who say they wouldn’t personally prefer to have an abortion but they don’t care one way or another whether other people have abortions, you would be diluting the word “pro-life” until it’s basically meaningless.

But there are also some people you need to say are in. If you bounced everyone who likes cats, you would be saying that the core of the pro-life movement is about being against cats—that that’s as important to what it means to be pro-life as being against abortion is. For a slightly less silly example, I think that the Equal Rights Argument is the most effective pro-life argument out there. But you shouldn’t bounce people who think that another pro-life argument is more effective and we shouldn’t be using the Equal Rights Argument. Why not? Because the core of the pro-life movement has to be opposing the killing of prenatal humans. We should absolutely want to use the most effective means possible to achieve that goal, and we should let iron sharpen iron as we work together to figure out what the most effective means is. But if you bounced people who agree on the goal but disagree on the most effective means to achieve it, you would be saying that the pro-life movement is most fundamentally about being for the Equal Rights Argument, not being against killing prenatal humans.

And I’m going to argue that bouncing Bob from the pro-life club would do the same thing. Remember, Bob wants killing prenatal humans to stop, wants it to be illegal, and passionately works to make those things happen in lots of effective ways. He has everything you could possibly want in a pro-life club member. Except he makes one choice—voting for Harris—that he thinks is his most effective option for saving babies in the long run but that you and I strongly think is ineffective and counterproductive. Bob disagrees with us about what the most effective means to our goal is, but he passionately agrees with the goal. So we have to choose. We can say that being pro-life is fundamentally all about being against one particular presidential candidate, and bounce Bob from the pro-life club. Or we can say that being pro-life is fundamentally all about being against killing prenatal humans, and let him in. But we can’t have it both ways.

I don’t want to put voting against Harris at the center of what the pro-life movement is all about. I don’t want to give her that much power. The pro-life movement is fundamentally an anti-killing-prenatal-humans movement. I don’t want to turn it into fundamentally an anti-Harris movement (or a pro-Trump movement, for that matter).

So by all means, walk Bob up to the bar, buy him a drink, and talk his ear off for as long as he’ll listen about why he shouldn’t vote for Harris. But let him into the club.

Why Does This Matter?

What we say about pro-lifers who vote for Harris matters because they’re real people, and people matter. And there are also many more real people in the pro-life movement who aren’t voting for Harris, but with whom many of us have other really strong disagreements. There are atheist pro-lifers. There are politically progressive pro-lifers. And often the rest of our movement doesn’t treat them very well. That matters first and foremost because how we treat people matters. It also matters because who we think is in the pro-life club and who we think is out says a lot about what our movement is all about. And frankly, it matters because the cause of stopping abortion needs all the help it can get. If we drive everyone who disagrees with us about the best means to stop abortion, or about issues besides abortion, out of our club, we’ll be a much weaker movement.

So why didn’t I endorse Trump (or any other candidate)? Well, for one thing, ERI is a 501(c)(3), so we legally can’t endorse political candidates. But I wouldn’t have wanted to even if I could. Because even though I think who pro-lifers should vote for is an incredibly important question, I wanted to spend these two articles talking about an even more important question: how we will think of and treat pro-lifers who vote differently from us, and what we will choose to make the core of our pro-life movement.

The post Why Didn’t I Endorse Trump In My Last Article? originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.” 

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