Why Trump is right on abortion

I previously wrote that I voted for Trump because my faith requires winning.

Now let me start to flesh out exactly how I think Trump can help us Christians "win." Let's start off with our flagship sociopolitical cause: abortion. Thanks to The Donald, we may finally have an opportunity to honestly and objectively discuss the whole abortion issue as an economic problem.

Abortion is fundamentally a function of economics. In the first place, notwithstanding the untold tens of thousands of abortions that take place even among the relatively well-off, let's not fool ourselves: stats all across the board show us that not only does abortion disproportionately impact poorer minority and working class communities, especially women and their partners from broken families (itself largely a consequence, in part, of poverty), but historically the rate of abortions has correlated quite well to the business cycle, i.e. it's been higher during recessions and lower during booms. Intuitively, this makes perfect sense.

But even beyond this, intuition and experience tells us something much deeper: even where no clear imperative for abortion might exist, a woman or her partner (or both) may choose to end a pregnancy merely for the sake of their own comfort and convenience.

And there's the rub: in our hyper-materialist consumer culture - of which even Christians are more a part of than we'd like to admit - the pro-life argument boils down to asking free individuals to choose a lower "standard of living" in the conventional economic sense.

Sounds pretty straightforward in theory - after all, that's why we evangelize - but let's not forget that this evangelism also entails actual material and monetary assistance.

And on the whole, we as a society - even we as Christians - have provided nowhere close to the scale and level of financial largess necessary to make the kind of massive dent in the abortion rate that we still think could be achieved by legislation.

It's great to be "pro-life" intellectually and morally; it's a lot more painful to our collective pocketbook to actually pay for the room and the resources that new life demands.

So that's where Mr. Trump comes in. He sees abortion as merely a symptom of the real issue - a materialist culture that can't deliver on its promises of prosperity for most ordinary folks anymore. Either we change our materialism or we actually deliver on prosperity.

Given that the pro-life movement is overwhelmingly white middle class, I don't see how the former is feasible: nobody's asking us to literally follow the footsteps of St. Francis. By default, that means we should focus on making life better and easier for the less fortunate. It's time for our elected representatives to be "pro-life" not merely with letters to prevent destructive decisions, but with the purse to make the alternatives more attractive.