President Donald Trump addressing the March for Life in January 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Image: Screen shot / EWTN/YouTube)

It was an electric moment. After a three year build up that featured two vice-presidential visits, hitherto unprecedented, and one live video address, also unprecedented, Donald Trump did what no sitting American president had done before: he attended the March for Life and gave a speech to the crowd. The timing was not an accident: it was 2020, and Trump was courting pro-lifers in his re-election bid. Yet both his actions and his words spoke loudly to pro-lifers who, long frustrated at their second-class status in national politics, rejoiced at finally having a political champion.

“We’re here for a very simple reason,” Trump began. “To defend the right of every child, born and unborn, to fulfill their God-given potential.” He then saluted pro-lifers who made the annual trip for 47 years “to stand for life. And today, as President of the United States, I am truly proud to stand with you.”

Five years later, on the eve of Trump’s second inauguration and the 52nd March for Life, pro-lifers should issue their former champion a friendly challenge: “Do you still stand with us, Mr. President?”

Much has been written, including at length by Edward Feser on this page here and here, about Trump’s pro-choice messaging in his re-election campaign. There is no need to repeat those points here. Suffice it to say that, in 2024, Trump ran from pro-lifers rather than stood with them.

Overlooked in the focus on Trump has been a change in focus of the pro-life movement and the March for Life in particular. Since the November 2024 election, which also featured ten state referenda on abortion, with pro-lifers narrowly winning just three, pro-life leaders have been silent about proposing federal legislation to limit abortion—even with a Republican president, 53 Republican seats in the Senate, and a slim five seat Republican majority in the House. The dual reality of an unwelcoming president and a populace strongly in favor of abortion in early pregnancy seems to have dampened pro-life resolve for seeking votes on the national political front.

The former is noteworthy. Are pro-lifers who once cheered Trump now intimated by him—at least enough not to hold him accountable to his March for Life promises? In that speech he boldly declared of himself: “Unborn children have never had a stronger defender in the White House.”

Since the election, instead of asking Trump how he will mount his defense of the unborn, conversation on the federal level has focused on preserving the Hyde Amendment prohibition of using government money for abortions, overturning the Mexico City policy that finances abortion abroad, and undoing Biden-administration regulations that facilitated abortion. Yet these are all regular features of an incoming Republican administration. There is nothing new or exciting here—and certainly nothing new to gain ground nationally in this new situation: the first Republican administration after the fall of Roe.

This year’s March for Life’s organization and route is telling. Formerly, the March terminated at the Supreme Court building in protest of Roe. In the two years since Roe was overturned, the March courageously charted a new route to reflect the new status: the March veered toward the Capitol building to send a message to Congress to protect unborn life with federal laws. And this with a sitting Democratic president and Democratic control of the Senate. The insurmountable odds that situation presented did not dampen pro-life fervor.

This winter, by contrast, the March route was listed as “to be determined” for some time. Only in the second week of January was it posted: a zig-zag around Congress to the Supreme Court building. Under the website’s subheading “Why will we continue to march?” federal legislation restricting abortion is not mentioned among the desiderata.

Will Trump’s campaign-expressed will to leave abortion entirely to the states—and thus remove it from national politics—win the day, despite what he told marchers five years ago? The Wall Street Journal editorial page hopes so. Without abortion to drag the GOP down, it argued, Republicans can focus on winning federal elections. The Trump-Vance team seem to have taken this cue. If pro-lifers allow Trump to take the lead on pro-life priorities, their cause may disappear from national politics in ways that John McCain and Mitt Romney’s teams could only have dreamed of. Then the unborn will have no defenders in the White House for the foreseeable future, Republican or otherwise.

The opposite has to happen: pro-lifers have to press their case before Trump as they did in his first term, and remind him of his pledges at the 2020 March for Life. And they ought not back down. In 1975, Nellie Gray, the intrepid founder of the March, organized monthly pickets outside the White House to protest First Lady Betty Ford’s enthusiastic endorsement of Roe. Fifty years later, with a vacillating president and now a first lady who recently wrote passionately in support of a “woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty…to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes,” do today’s pro-lifers have Nellie Gray’s determination to stand down their president, and his wife, on the need to protect human life?

Of course, pro-lifers must press their case prudently, mindful that the American electorate overwhelmingly supports first trimester abortion.

But prudence does not mean surrender to the status quo of state choice. In the campaign, both Trump and Vance adopted a “state relativism” approach: what one state decides on abortion may not be right for another. They sounded as if they were equating abortion, a moral question that concerns life or death for innocents, with mundane procedural items like drivers’ licenses and zoning laws. To acquiesce to “state relativism” smacks of the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which was a moral compromise that, in hindsight, cries out to Heaven.

Prudent steps forward include finding a winning approach to abortion limits and advocating it on the national level with the proper phrasing. (As a wise old priest once taught me, “He who wins the language wars wins the culture wars.”) Nebraska’s Initiative 434 prohibiting abortion in the second and third trimesters, the only ballot referendum that pro-lifers have won handily, 55-45, provides a model. From it I propose this pro-life talking point for Trump’s second term: “We want to pass a federal law protecting babies from abortion in the second and third trimesters, except in medical emergencies and for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. These children have beating hearts, functioning brains, and can feel pain. Their lives deserve protection like all other human beings. It is our responsibility as government officials to protect the most vulnerable among us, and babies in the womb need our help.”

Wording is crucial. Since Roe fell, as I have written here before, public conversation about abortion has been conducted on pro-abortion turf using pro-abortion terminology. Pro-lifers have to argue on their turf to win the public. We are not “banning abortion.” We are “protecting babies from abortion in the second and third trimesters.” The former repels the average voter; the latter appeals to him. Pro-lifers can then capture the public’s moral imagination with its vocabulary: heartbeat, human being, protect life. These words contribute to building a culture of life.

This pitch is not very different from what Trump told pro-lifers in his 2020 speech at the March—but never did. “I’ve called on Congress to defend the dignity of life and to pass legislation prohibiting late-term abortion of children who can feel pain in their mother’s womb.”

A similar rhetorical offensive will help fight the other looming federal battle, one that Trump cannot duck: prohibiting doctors in one state from proscribing abortion pills for women in states where abortion is illegal. This battle will eventually involve all three branches of the federal government. Pro-life messaging should frame abortion-dispensing doctors as the malefactors. To wit, I propose a first draft: “Doctors are supposed to promote healing, not harm. Any doctor who violates a state law promulgated to protect women and to protect babies will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

The language of protecting women and babies is directed to sway the political center on abortion—the place where Trump resides. To advance this position more broadly, and to win back the president to the pro-life side, we can repeat his own words back to him and to the world:

• “All of us here understand an eternal truth: every child is a precious and sacred gift from God.” • “When we see an image of a baby in the womb, we glimpse the majesty of God’s creation.” • “One life changes the world.”

• “Every life brings love into this world. Every child brings joy to a family. Every person is worth protecting. Every human life—born and unborn—is made in the holy image of almighty God.”

Mr. President, do you still believe your own beautiful words? If so, let’s start working together to make them a cultural and political reality in your second term. Please use your powerful influence to direct the national conversation towards protecting life in the culture and in the law. We have so much work to do.

If not, then pro-lifers will push back, immediately and forcefully. And the first push can be opposing the nomination of long-time abortion supporter Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to head the Department of Health and Human Services, which directs federal abortion policy.

“We all know how to win,” Trump proclaimed in his March for Life speech. The unborn will only win if their president has the courage to strongly defend them as he once promised. Pro-lifers have to do their part to make sure the president’s promises were not just empty words.

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