Hillary Clinton does not want to kill all the little babies. She doesn’t sanction the murder of the defenseless. Yet to hear conservative Christians who continue supporting Donald Trump tell it, they have no choice because Clinton is supposedly a threat to the unborn and doesn’t value life.
“Because based on what she is saying, and based on where she’s going and where she’s been, you can take a baby and rip the baby out of the womb. In the ninth month, on the final day and that’s not acceptable,” Trump roared during the final presidential debate, surely speaking directly to pro-lifers who might be skittish about him but won’t even consider Clinton because of abortion.
Some even complained that during the subsequent Alfred E. Smith dinner, the archbishop of the Diocese of New York was caught “laughing and joking with Hillary Clinton less than twenty-four hours after Hillary announced she supports abortion up to the moment of birth.”
First, she announced no such thing. It’s nonsense.
But this denunciation of Clinton, and support of Trump over the abortion issue, is a fig leaf many conservatives are using to hide their hypocrisy.
Recall that this is a group of people who have long claimed that character matters, that they are guided by a higher power in everything they do and think, including their politics.
And yet Trump has bragged about casually sexually assaulting women, an action (allegedly) confirmed by a growing list of victims. He has been buoyed to the top of GOP politics on a bigoted tide of birtherism. And in business he has repeatedly taken advantage of “the least of these” instead of helping them.
So the only way conservatives can back a man like Trump is by advancing the absurdity that each candidate is equally flawed — but only with one (Trump) would they have a chance at saving the little babies. They believe the falsehood about Clinton, pushed by Ted Cruz during the primary season, that she is in favor of unlimited abortion on demand “up until the moment of birth.”
Clinton is a pro-choice Christian Democrat who supports a ban on partial birth abortion — if it comes with exceptions concerning the health of the mother. That’s why she opposed the 2003 late-term abortion ban, because it didn’t. (Only about 0.2 percent of all abortions involve the so-called dilation and extraction procedure, and mostly because of health concerns concerning the woman or fetus.)
Clinton is on record declaring that she wants abortions to be safe but rare and decisions about them left to women and their doctors, not politicians. The policies she supports, including more comprehensive health care and health education, are among the reasons the abortion rate is at a historic low and could fall further if they are expanded — something Clinton wants to do.
That the rate of abortion has been going down under this Democratic presidency, and that there is scant evidence that having a Republican in the White House would make it rarer, seems to matter little to conservative Christians, too many of whom are quick to label anyone “baby killer” or “pro-abortion” for having the temerity to not see the world in the black-and-white terms they do.
The irony, of course, is that when pressed, they are quick to acknowledge the obvious: The issue is complex, which is why so many anti-abortion groups spoke up when Trump said that women who have abortions, if they are made illegal, would need to be punished, forcing Trump to clarify and back off.
They empathize with women who even have to consider aborting a fetus, they say, which is why it would make little sense to arrest and imprison any woman who does (though in a post Roe v. Wade world, they wouldn’t mind punishing the doctor).
They say this while not appearing to recognize that such a stance proves that a two-week-old fetus is not the same, legally speaking, as a two-week-old infant. No one would excuse a mother of a two-week-old for killing her child, even if she handed off the act to a doctor, each of whom would be arrested and charged with murder.
Understanding that a developing fetus is a developing human being, somewhere within the various stages between conception and birth, is not anti-life. Neither is having personal principles that say you would never sanction an abortion in your own life, but remain leery of governmental overreach into the lives of others.
Conservatives’ distortion of the pro-choice view held by many Democratic candidates helps explain how a man like Trump could make such inroads into a party that has long believed itself to be about family values. Misrepresenting the positions of political opponents does not seem to trouble conservative Christians when it is done in the name of being pro-life.
In truth, Clinton’s views on abortion are as complex as those of most Americans. Why? Because many Americans who don’t like abortion feel it is a bridge too far to essentially turn over the body of a pregnant woman to the government for nine months, and that medical procedures are better left to the woman, her family and her doctor. That’s not being pro-abortion; that’s being pro-individual rights, something conservatives say they treasure except, apparently, when it comes to a woman and her body.
They may not know it, but those conservative Christians who continue to back Trump have sent messages that morality is contingent not upon right and wrong but upon whether you back the right political party; that adultery can be explained away; that lying about those with whom you disagree is perfectly fine; and that neither sexual assault nor open bigotry is reason to not support a candidate.
Maybe in this calculation God should be written with a small “g” because a god whose image can be used to support one’s every politically expedient position — even if that position flouts one’s stated religious principles — isn’t a god to be worshiped, but rather one to be pitied.
This election cycle has been heavy and ugly in many ways. But it has also been revealing, showing that maybe Republicans shouldn’t be so quick to declare their positions correct in the name of God and that Democrats should be less afraid of explaining their own faith positions.
