The 2024 Republican Party platform confirms that neither major national political party — nor their respective presidential candidates — is pro-life. In the sole place the Republican platform does discuss abortion, it is incoherent mumbo jumbo. Abandoning the issue to state legislatures, the platform displays alarming ignorance of the meaning and purpose of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. And it expressly endorses procedures that always lead to the destruction of prenatal life.
Of course, we already know that Joe Biden and the Democratic party endorse abortion on demand for any or no reason through the full term of the pregnancy. They will assertively continue working to prevent laws that provide even a hint of protecting unborn life. And they will continue persecuting crisis pregnancy centers and other sanctuaries for desperate pregnant women. Joe Biden and the Democrat party are aggressively, unapologetically and fanatically anti-life.
In its attempt to distinguish itself from the Democrats, the Republican platform proclaims, “We proudly stand for families and Life.” (All quotations preserve the helter-skelter capitalization of the platform.) But as a statement of principles, the platform is certainly not pro-life. Let’s not mince words: under the influence of Donald Trump, the national Republican party has abandoned its pro-life, anti-abortion principles, and has embraced the moral legitimacy of widespread destruction of unborn human life.
Dropping abortion from the platform
In the 2016 Republican platform, the word “abortion” appeared 35 times, always in the context of strong protection for the lives of unborn children, and federal policies consistent with that commitment. (The Republicans did not publish a platform in 2020, running instead on the 2016 platform.) The 2016 platform provided detailed policy positions to regulate access to abortion and to prohibit federal support or taxpayer subsidy of abortion.
The 2024 platform mentions abortion one time. And it does so in a plank that abandons moral opposition to abortion, reducing it to mere policy choices in the states.
Put another way, the sole plank in which the Republicans mention abortion is a legally incoherent word salad. And it invokes the 14th Amendment for a policy position that is exactly opposite the meaning and purpose of the Amendment.
In Chapter Nine, plank 4, the platform states, “We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.” This is — quite literally — legal nonsense. It invokes the wrong clause of the Amendment for the principle it attempts to endorse. And that principle is exactly what the 14th Amendment prohibits.
Misusing the 14th Amendment
Ratified in 1868, the 14th Amendment protected the rights and liberties of newly-freed African American slaves from hostile state legislatures. The relevant section of the amendment has two clauses. The first says that no state may “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This is called the “due process” clause. Its concern is to ensure that states follow duly-enacted legal procedures in imposing criminal or civil penalties on alleged wrongdoers. It has no relevance to the issue of abortion. Yet it is the clause invoked in the Republican platform. And it is invoked to provide a power to the states that the amendment proscribes.
The section of the 14th amendment the Republican platform should have invoked is the so-called “equal protection” clause. It provides that no state may “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” But even had the platform cited this appropriate clause, it completely misconstrues the very purpose of the 14th Amendment. The party platform implies that the amendment leaves states “free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.” But the 14th Amendment does not license states to make laws as the citizens of each state see fit. To the contrary, its purpose is to prevent states from passing laws that violate the rights and liberties of African Americans — and by extension — all persons. The 2024 Republican party does not even understand the Constitutional amendment that the 1866 Republican party proposed and championed.
If the 14th Amendment relates to the issue of abortion, its application would prohibit states from passing laws that do not offer equal protection to unborn children — not permit them to do so. The persons who drafted and endorsed the 2024 Republican Platform seem innocent of that distinction.
Endorsing birth control and IVF
And it gets worse. The same plank of the platform supports “access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments).” Even leaving aside the fact that many forms of hormonal birth control are abortifacients, to endorse IVF (in vitro fertilization) is to condone procedures that almost always involve the destruction of human embryos. This plank is consistent with Donald Trump’s declaration that he supports federal protections of IVF. It is also consistent with his express endorsement of widespread access to chemical abortion, the most common kind of abortion in the United States.
In the 2016 and 2020 elections, some Catholics justified their votes for Donald Trump because he was the pro-life candidate, running on a pro-life party platform. If that rationalization was legitimate in those elections (and I do not concede that it was), it is not available in the 2024 election. Single-issue anti-abortion voters now have no place to hide. And Catholics do not have a viable choice between the two major parties.
