By: Dan McLaughlin – nationalreview.com – July 11, 2024

The current Republican Party should’ve taken notes from Abraham Lincoln when writing the party platform plank on abortion.

[There’s a lot to dislike in the 2024 Republican Party platform’s one-paragraph plank on abortion:]

4. Republicans Will Protect and Defend a Vote of the People, from within the States, on the Issue of Life

We proudly stand for families and Life. We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights. After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the States and to a vote of the People. We will oppose Late Term Abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments).

This is a significant retreat from the party’s historic endorsement of a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, and leading pro-lifers such as Mike Pence are disappointed. The platform plank is a hash. It seems to take a pure states-rights approach, but in pledging to “oppose Late Term Abortion,” it implies that the party may yet support federal legislation on that front. It cites the due-process clause as evidence that “the States are . . . free to pass Laws protecting” the right to life, but in the absence of any constitutional guarantee of a right to abortion (which was invented by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade and abandoned in Dobbs), the states already had that power, as acknowledged by the Tenth Amendment. The platform dodges the question of whether the 14th Amendment actually treats the unborn as having a right to life — in which case, as some pro-lifers argue, it would already ban abortion nationwide. So why mention it at all?

Moreover, what is conspicuously absent here is any discussion of what the federal government under Joe Biden is already doing to promote abortion with federal funds, on federal property, through federal executive order and federal agency action, and in lawsuits aimed at restricting states from enforcing their pro-life laws. That is where a pro-life president could do the most good, much of it right away.

My own oft-stated view is that Republican pro-lifers should follow the playbook of the Republican anti-slavery movement. That doesn’t mean never changing the wording of the platform. The inaugural party platform in 1856, for example, declared “the right and the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism — Polygamy, and Slavery.” The “relics of barbarism” language was dropped after that. But it is worth considering how the 1860 platform dealt with slavery. Bear in mind that, as with pro-lifers after Dobbs, abolitionists after John Brown’s 1859 raid were rhetorically on the defensive, straining to convince skeptical moderates that they were not actually trying to force a ban upon states that would bitterly resist one. The party’s nominee, Abraham Lincoln, had built his Cooper Union speech in February 1860 around three main themes: that the Founding Fathers had opposed the expansion of slavery, that it was the pro-slavery side that was acting radically to use federal power to advance their cause, and that opponents of slavery should reassure the South of their willingness to leave slavery alone — but without compromising their conviction that slavery was wrong and should be called wrong:

What will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of [the Republican party in 1854], but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them…what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. . . .

Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored — contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man — such as a policy of “don’t care” on a question about which all true men do care. . . .

The platform reflected this balancing act among unyielding moral principle, pragmatic political reality, respect for federalism, and an understanding that simple incantations of federalist principles were insufficient to address what the federal government was already doing. So, the platform gave no quarter to slavery morally, invoking the principles of the Declaration of Independence and branding the slave trade “a crime against humanity and a burning shame to our country and age” demanding congressional action:

2. That the maintenance of the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Federal Constitution, “That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” is essential to the preservation of our Republican institutions; and that the Federal Constitution, the Rights of the States, and the Union of the States must and shall be preserved. [Emphasis added.]

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9. That we brand the recent reopening of the African slave trade, under the cover of our national flag, aided by perversions of judicial power, as a crime against humanity and a burning shame to our country and age; and we call upon Congress to take prompt and efficient measures for the total and final suppression of that execrable traffic. [Emphasis added.]

It pledged to let states alone to make their own laws on the topic as an exercise of their “inviolate” rights to self-government:

4. That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the states, and especially the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of powers on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends; and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any state or territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes. [Emphasis added.]

It set freedom as the presumptive federal policy, in line with history and tradition; pledged significant rollback of pro-slavery federal activity; promised restrictions on slavery within the proper sphere of federal power (e.g., on federal lands and in foreign commerce); and railed specifically against the use of federal power to preempt local self-rule:

5. That the present Democratic Administration has far exceeded our worst apprehensions, in its measureless subserviency to the exactions of a sectional interest, as especially evinced in its desperate exertions to force the infamous Lecompton Constitution upon the protesting people of Kansas; in construing the personal relations between master and servant to involve an unqualified property in persons; in its attempted enforcement everywhere, on land and sea, through the intervention of Congress and of the Federal Courts of the extreme pretensions of a purely local interest; and in its general and unvarying abuse of the power intrusted to it by a confiding people. [Emphasis added.]

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7. That the new dogma that the Constitution, of its own force, carries slavery into any or all of the territories of the United States, is a dangerous political heresy, at variance with the explicit provisions of that instrument itself, with contemporaneous exposition, and with legislative and judicial precedent; is revolutionary in its tendency, and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country.

8. That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom: That, as our Republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that “no persons should be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law,” it becomes our duty, by legislation, whenever such legislation is necessary, to maintain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it; and we deny the authority of Congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States.

10. That in the recent vetoes, by their Federal Governors, of the acts of the legislatures of Kansas and Nebraska, prohibiting slavery in those territories, we find a practical illustration of the boasted Democratic principle of Non-Intervention and Popular Sovereignty, embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and a demonstration of the deception and fraud involved therein. [Emphasis added.]

This is how you write an anti-slavery platform when a national anti-slavery law is politically radioactive. Under it, Lincoln won all but one state where slavery was illegal, and won the presidency. It should have been the model for this platform’s approach to abortion.

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Source: How to Write a Pro-Life Platform | National Review