WASHINGTON – This campaign season has offered an unexpected form of reality television entertainment: Watching the light of discovery and calculation in Donald Trump’s eyes when he is presented with difficult policy issues, apparently for the very first time.
Abortion is the current case in point. In the late 1990s, Trump supported the legality of partial-birth abortion. For a few hours on Wednesday, he endorsed criminal sanctions against women who have abortions.
On this issue, Trump has been to the left of Harry Reid (who voted for a partial-birth abortion ban) and to the right of Mike Huckabee (who has consistently rejected punishment for women who have had abortions). And Trump is utterly incapable of defending either position. He shows no capacity for ethical reasoning – balancing claims about the moral and legal value of nascent life against claims about autonomy and choice.
If that seems harsh, let’s go to the transcript of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews trying to corner Trump on criminalization. Asked if this is the logical consequence of pro-life views (it isn’t), Trump doesn’t advance an argument about religion, morality and the role of law (other than to call attention to Matthews’ Catholicism). At the outset, Trump observes that “people in certain parts of the Republican Party and conservative Republicans would say, ‘Yes, they should be punished.'” Trump eventually embraces what he thinks a social conservative would say.
In fact, this is not the pro-life position. It is the left’s stereotype of the pro-life position. “No pro-lifer would ever want to punish a woman who has chosen abortion,” responded Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life.