Yesterday — before the President’s speech last night — Phil Lawler published an excellent opinion piece on an issue that is or should be of paramount importance to Catholics who would like to see respect for the Natural Law enshrined in our politics: “Don’t give Trump a pass on IVF.”
There are those who lecture us on how things work in the real world, accusing us of being naive about politics and encouraging us to “take the win, man!” — as if the candidate-turned-president is now somehow beyond reproach because the other choice was so much worse. (The election being now long over, that one needs to be put to rest and the office-holder needs to be assessed objectively, not by a constant appeal to the bullet that was dodged back in November.)
The Catholics and conservatives who are criticizing us for this are more cheerleaders for a regime than disciples of Christ the King.
To such, I recommend Phil Lawler’s piece, wherein he writes of his experience forty-five years ago in the Heritage Foundation, during the euphoric early days that began the Reagan era. In 1980, Ronald Reagan met with leaders from various conservative organizations, including Heratige’s Ed Feulner. He told these assembled conservative leaders that “he needs pressure from the Right.”
It’s hard to get more realpolitik than that.
While Trump has not asked for such pressure to my knowledge, that does not mean he should not get it. Obsequious pandering to an administration hardly incentivizes that administration to listen to one’s voice. It’s a species of cowardice and it is not politically intelligent, either.
Beyond that, Lawler makes a compact case for just how bad IVF is. We need to turn up the volume on this, not mute our objections.
Informed Catholics have a duty to educate their coreligionists on this matter — and everyone else, for that matter. As I recently learned in my preparation to interview Dwain Currier, of the American Life League, IVF kills more humans in one year than Planned Parenthood kills in ten! And that is only one reason it is so bad.
Read Phil Lawler’s fine piece to find out what else is wrong with it. If you want to know more than that, listen to my interview with Dwain Currier premiering this Wednesday at Noon ET.
