With election outcome, life hangs in the balance

By the time you read this, the U.S. presidential election may have been resolved. Depending upon the outcome, our nation will take one of two starkly different paths. Since most of my work has been on pro-life issues, and the bulk of this in the international arena, let me lay out what these two paths mean to me, a fellow Legate who has been fighting for life for over three decades.

If Joe Biden becomes president, all our work is in the crosshairs. The most pro-abortion administration in American history would take office on January 20.

Biden has pledged to his progressive supporters that he would immediately sign executive orders that will:

• Force Americans to fund Planned Parenthood.

• Eliminate the Mexico City Policy, allowing taxpayer money to pay for abortions in other countries.

• Re-fund the UN Population Fund, which helped create the brutal Chinese One-Child Policy and everywhere pushes for abortion.

• Re-fund the World Health Organization, another UN agency that relentlessly pushes abortion, sterilization, and contraception overseas, and helped China cover up its COVID-19 crimes.

Other actions would happen as well, albeit largely out of sight of the American public. A Biden administration will:

• Demand that poor countries accept the radical anti-life, anti-family agenda.

• Insist that poor countries legalize abortion as a condition of receiving foreign aid.

• Appoint fanatically pro-abortion negotiators to the UN to push for abortion to be recognized as an international “human right.”

Am I painting too grim a picture of what a Biden administration portends? I wish I were. The actions I outlined above were all taken by two previous Democratic administrations—Bill Clinton’s from 1993-2001 and Barack Obama’s from 2009-2017—and there is every reason to think Biden’s will too.

Indeed, a Biden administration could pose more challenges for Catholic pro-lifers than earlier Democrat administrations because of the sharp left turn the party has taken on social issues in recent years. Democrats long ago rejected the position popularized by Bill Clinton: namely, that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” It now enthusiastically endorses a radical abortion activism that at times has even portrayed baby-killing as a positive act. Major figures in the Democratic Party advocate abortion on demand up to—and, in some cases, beyond—childbirth.

If Donald Trump is re-elected, the pro-life policies outlined above will not only stay in place, but they will also be expanded. I was an early supporter of the president largely because of the pro-life promises he made to me, and I have not been disappointed.

Even during the press of last month’s campaign, the president found time to sign a new executive order encouraging adoption over abortion. And there is a new rule, now in its final stages, which will further expand the Mexico City Policy, helping to keep U.S. funds out of the hands of those who would use it to perform or promote abortion.

The bishops tell us that the protection of innocent unborn life is the paramount issue, and on this the position of the two candidates could not be further apart.

The election will have only one of two outcomes. Either the light of Trump’s pro-life polices will stay on, or we will be plunged into the darkness of an administration that seeks to promote, in every way imaginable, the greatest evil of our time.

Whatever happens, of course, faithful Legates will not be cursing that darkness. Instead, we will be lighting candles — first before the altars of our churches, and then through the good work we do in assisting, for example, crisis pregnancy centers at home and pro-life projects abroad.

STEVEN W. MOSHER is president of the Population Research Institute. He was purged from Stanford University for criticizing the Chinese Communist Party and defending the unborn, and he is proud of it.