The Republican Party Has Never Been Pro-Life

It is no surprise that Mitt Romney has refused to sign a pro-life pledge. When has the the Republican Party ever been pro-life? It has signed up in recent decades to an economic system, and in recent years to a foreign policy approach, which are about as anti-life and anti-family as it is possible to be.

Contrast the historic bipartisan commitment to federal and state-protected full employment on a living wage to the paterfamilias, a position to which Democrats held longer, even if hardly anyone in front line politics does now. The GOP unconditionally venerates Reagan, who legalised abortion in California and who went on to appoint two pro-abortionists to the Supreme Court.

In 2008, Catholics finally stopped waiting for the GOP to deliver the goods on abortion and went home to the Democratic Party, since it had rejected a Clinton and instead nominated a candidate with economic and geopolitical views in line with the Church's Teaching and with their own interests.

The treatment of Mike Huckabee, now not once but twice, will contribute to the same process among blue-collar white Evangelicals who must now realise that the GOP will never nominate one of them, any more than it will ever appoint a white Evangelical to the Supreme court (Obama has missed a trick there, although he might not in his second term).

Henry Hyde was not only a conservative Republican, but almost a sort of Continental Catholic monarchist. However, his Amendment was passed by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by Jimmy Carter.

The Senate Bill, eventually enacted in the forlorn hope of bringing on board a few Republicans, is not as good as the House Bill would have been. But even it, combined with the Obama-endorsed Pregnant Women Support Act of the Obama-endorsing Democratic dynast Bob Casey, will reduce abortions dramatically; the claim that in fact it authorises federal funding of abortion is so completely false that it has landed GOP activists peddling it in court in some places. Yes, even in America.

Sooner rather than later, Middle America, rapidly won round by entitlement, will revolt against using public money to pay private insurance companies to deliver it. The House Bill will then be taken down off the shelf, combining both the public option and the Stupak Amendment so as to make abortion practically impossible, while the PWSA and a return to America's historical norm of social democracy in all but name in the service of traditional family values, would in any case eradicate most or all possible reasons for having an abortion.

All eyes must now be on the Democratic nominee in 2016. That the Republican Party is an irrelevance to this pro-life fight is by its own choice, so to speak. But the Republican Party is an irrelevance.