The absolute freakout by the mainstream media and Democrats over the likely-imminent overturning of Roe v. Wade didn’t surprise me.
What did surprise me was how some of conservatism’s erstwhile leading lights want to pump the brakes. Shouldn’t we be celebrating? What gives? I wondered. Then I remembered: Trump.
I expected the left and sympathetic media to frame overturning Roe as the coming end of Western civilization, but I was baffled by some Never Trump conservatives expressing opposition to the pro-life movement’s biggest victory.
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This was the moral issue of the conservative movement for the last fifty years, during which time most of these folks were loyal conservatives. To the degree the Republican “big tent” had a litmus test, this was it.
But this decision (should it become official next month), couldn’t have happened without Trump, who nominated three of the nine justices on the Supreme Court. This is where things get weird to be a Never Trumper who still identifies as a conservative.
The first example out of the gate was New York Times columnist Bret Stephens. To be fair, Stephens contends he was always a “pro-choice conservative,” but he previously said he “wouldn’t be entirely sorry if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade” because “abortion rights would be more secure, not less, if they had been achieved through normal legislative processes or ideally with a constitutional amendment.”
But once it actually became clear that the court was on the verge of overturning Roe, Stephens immediately published a column saying that although Roe “was an ill-judged decision,” overturning it “would be a radical, not conservative, choice.”
The gist of his take is that conservatism, as a philosophy, opposes abrupt change. If you call a fifty-year struggle to return to the pre-1973 status quo where state legislatures had a say “abrupt,” I suppose that’s what this is. But it’s also how our system is adjudicated; if Roe is overturned, it will be because conservatives went through the proper channels in our democracy.
Having previously written that we should “repeal the 2nd amendment,” Stephens’ drift away from conservative orthodoxy is not surprising.
I was more surprised by the next example, Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, who served in the 1990s as a pro-life Republican congressman from Florida. This week, Scarborough used his Twitter feed to promote columns that were critical of overturning Roe. He also took to the air to express his dismay at the likely end of Roe.
“This isn’t about abortion. This is about a woman’s freedom,” Scarborough said on MSNBC this week. “This is about Americans’ freedom. It’s about autonomy over their lives. Control over their lives. Freedom with what they do with their lives. It’s autonomy over a woman’s reproductive freedoms. You talk about extreme..."
During another segment, Scarborough said 70 percent of Americans support abortion as a “constitutional right,” adding “Americans will rightly conclude that their voices and their votes no longer matter.”
Reached for comment, Scarborough, a lawyer by training, told me he worries that overturning this popular precedent will harm the legitimacy of the court. He also noted: “The embrace of increasingly extreme positions makes my previous view that social issues should largely be handled by states, and not nine unelected federal judges, untenable.”
“When I previously held this [anti-Roe] position,” Scarborough continued, “I looked to Republican governors like Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, and George Voinovich as examples of Republicans who were more reasonable than radical. Those days are long gone.”
He’s not wrong. Moreover, we have a conservative legal community that, as Scarborough tells me, “now celebrates the likes of John Eastman and Ginni Thomas.”
In my mind, the question over whether Roe is constitutional (and whether abortion is morally correct) are separate (and more pertinent) questions from whether Republican-controlled states will handle the next step in a competent and compassionate manner. But Scarborough’s concerns about the Republican Party and some red states are not insane.
Indeed, even some Never Trump conservatives who support overturning Roe have concerns about how the states will handle the next step. "Returning Roe to the states, which I think is the correct decision as a constitutional matter, will be landing this issue into the dumbest wave of culture war legislation that I've seen in my life,” says David French of The Dispatch. Of course, when it comes to abortion, as French points out, Democrats are doing the same thing, in reverse, in blue states.
To be sure, there are gradations of Never Trump conservatives.
People such as The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin or MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace have long-since abandoned any pretense of being conservative or Republican. Others have come to the opposite conclusion when it comes to this issue. Consider Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal piece “The End of Roe v. Wade Will Be Good For America.”
Then, there are some people who are no longer making an issue on moral or ethical grounds, but instead focusing on political grounds.
Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele (now a political analyst for MSNBC) fits into this latter category. While I disagree that this former seminary student has gone “full abort lib” (as one conservative outlet put it), during a recent segment on MSNBC, Steele seemed to focus his commentary on the political backlash—and on extreme hypotheticals, such as a 10-year old girl who is raped by her father and lives in a state that bans all abortions—not on whether abortion is good or whether the 1973 decision was constitutional.
During a phone call on Friday, Steele confirmed that he still believes in a culture of life, and agrees that Roe was wrongly decided fifty years ago. “I have always been and still firmly remain pro-life as a Catholic, as someone who, when I was in the seminary had the opportunity to minister in this space with some folks that I knew. So this for me is very personal,” he said. “Also, as an adopted child,” Steele continued, “I understand more than many can appreciate what choice means—especially when your mother chooses life, which is what Deuteronomy and the gospels teach.”
But Steele’s position is nuanced. He notes that abortion rates are already falling, and credits science and technology for changing the narrative around the issue. He believes the pro-life cause has not done enough to support women who might be left in a lurch if abortion is no longer an option. And he worries that overturning Roe now will put the lives of women in the hands of state legislatures that are "putting a bounty on her womb."
Along those lines, over at The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last (formerly of the Weekly Standard), wrote that, “For the first time since the days of Jim Crow, it is going to matter a lot what state you live in.”
This inevitably brings us to Donald Trump and the Trump-era Republican Party. In recent years, many decent conservatives who could not abide Trump’s illiberal policies and vulgarian rhetoric, made common cause with Democrats (and Democratic-adjacent media outlets). Theoretically, many opposed the elevation of a New York pro-choice politician because of their pro-life worldview, not in spite of it.
That’s a crisis of Never Trumpism.
In these tribalistic times, however, it’s nearly impossible to sustain an à la carte ideology. There are immense pressures on members of both parties to conform to their side's entire slate of policy preferences. Not doing so requires constantly reasserting your independence.
By embracing Trump, pro-lifers helped elect a man who would nominate three Supreme Court justices, making it possible for Roe to (likely) be overturned. It is understandable why some people who prioritize the life issue would ultimately make peace with Trump.
"On social issues, the GOP and the Democratic Party remain miles apart, even if Trump acts like Hugh Hefner,” French told me. But by embracing Trump, pro-lifers also allowed their noble cause to be tainted by all the bad Trumpian baggage. This allowed their political opponents to plausibly conflate authoritarian Trumpism with the right to life, and thus causing some former allies to head for the hills.
What we are seeing now is the likely inevitable next step in the GOP reordering—whereby more Never Trump conservatives will effectively be absorbed into the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, a generation of young Americans will likely conflate the life issue with MAGA and QAnon and The Big Lie. This is both tragic and ironic.
