Campaigns against unborn life

The news stories regarding the 2024 presidential campaign focus on the two major party candidates—President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. The main reason makes perfect sense: They remain the overwhelming favorites to win another term in the White House this November. Since the development of a consistent two-party system, a non-major party candidate has never won the White House. Yet with both men deeply unpopular and the race considered a toss-up, other candidates receive more attention, particularly in their potential role as spoilers for either Biden or Trump.

Robert Kennedy Jr. is one independent candidate who can get national headlines. He gets those headlines because he could siphon enough voters from one side or the other to change the outcome. But he also has the advantage of his name, being the son of former attorney general, U.S. senator, and assassinated presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. The “Kennedy Mystique” has been tarnished and grown old, but it isn’t yet dead.

Kennedy surged into the news again last week due to an interview with Sage Steele. He spoke thoughtfully concerning his own youth, especially regarding his struggles with addiction and his search for religious faith. Yet those components did not get the headlines. Instead, Kennedy also declared it his policy position that no bans should exist on abortion. When pressed, he confirmed the totality of his understanding. Neither states nor the national government should be permitted to ban abortion; nor should the age of the child in the womb matter as he included the right to ending unborn life up to the last month of a pregnancy.

Sadly, the extremity of this position places him within the mainstream of the contemporary Democratic Party, the party to which his family has for generations been linked. Kennedy did try some moderation of the position by saying that “every abortion is a tragedy.” He advocated for policies like increased governmental support for childcare as a way to reduce the number of women choosing abortion. In so doing, he harkened back to the position of President Bill Clinton, whose mantra on the issue was, “safe, legal, and rare.”

However, this moderation seems little more than rhetorical. Certainly, pro-lifers can make common cause with others in supporting policies that undermine economic reasons for ending unborn life. But on the issue of legal protections for the unborn, Kennedy offers nothing for their cause. And, given the current public state of the abortion issue, we must not settle for abstracted, indirect pro-life policy. It is a nearly empty offer that anyone serious about justice for the unborn should not take.

Kennedy’s position gives yet another instance of a broader problem, namely the lack of presidential moral leadership on abortion. President Biden, and especially Vice President Harris, offer essentially a full-throated endorsement of abortion on demand, one that often even lacks the rhetorical points Kennedy made.

Former President Trump’s position has settled into leaving the issue to the democratic process. That is much better than non-negotiable abortion anytime, anywhere, for any reason. There is an argument for some kind of incrementalism, for taking what you can get in moving the ball toward increasingly pro-life policies. But what Trump’s defenders on this issue miss is that such commitment to the democratic process, and to incrementalism within it, then requires serious engagement, not passive hand-washing. It demands expending political capital to make the case for what the voters should do and the moral underpinnings for why. This we have not gotten nor can expect to receive from the Republican candidate.

Kennedy shows again that all of these players in the presidential race seem unwilling to face the essential question of the abortion debate: the moral status of the unborn and the legal ramifications for that status. Biden and Harris run to euphemisms like “women’s healthcare” to elide this core point. For Kennedy, what exactly does he think tragic about abortion? If its tragedy includes the violent, intentional taking of innocent life, then does that not entail governmental responsibilities? If government does not exist to protect the basic human ability to live against violent attempts against that life, then what real duties does the state have at all? Finally, regarding former President Trump, an unwillingness to make the moral case by default treats the question as at best negotiable.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not a candidate with a serious chance to become president. As noted above, his best opportunity for electoral impact lay in spoiling the election either for President Biden or former President Trump. But he at least had the chance to provide something different on the issue of abortion, perhaps a position that pushed the major party candidates to confront the issue in its full moral implications. On even this possibility, he failed. The unborn deserve better than these choices.