Our Elected Officials Fail to Uphold Life Because We Let Them
President Trump has announced his plan to redirect Title X funding away from providers that refer for or collocate with abortion vendors (think Planned Parenthood). The regulations are similar to Reagan-era requirements that were upheld in court but never actually implemented. I appreciate that the President is making good on another pro-life campaign promise. Meanwhile, Congress continues to punt on every promise to defund the abortion giant.
I have a Representative to Congress that votes in a way I feel represents me well. On the issue of life, his voting record is nearly perfect. However, though he votes for life, he does not fight for life. I want a Representative that will go out of his way to protect life, not just vote the right way as bills come forward, knowing that the most critical of them will not make it through to become law. Voting with the Party is easy. That doesn't cost anything. That keeps most of the constituents happy. So that is what most of them do- just sit back and vote the "right" way, but never really get into the fight.
As with Down syndrome abortion bans, which I commented on several weeks ago, I see many pro-life votes as a move by politicians to appease constituents. But so many self-proclaimed pro-life politicians are not really going to take the personal risk of entering into the battle to actually save lives... to refuse to compromise or give up until effective legislation is on the Governor's or President's desk. The votes of many pro-life elected officials are designed to appease constituents in order to get re-elected, but not really to change anything. We need to make it clear to those politicians that their re-elections ride on their fidelity to our pro-life values.
It is time for us, pro-life Americans, to demand more of our elected officials. It is not enough that they usually vote the right way. When the party that runs on a pro-life platform controls both houses of Congress and the White House but refuses to pass legislation that will actually rescue lives, we must do something different. We must elect new Representatives and Senators who will do something, not just talk about doing something. This is not just for those at the federal level, but also in our states.
For 45 years pro-lifers have fought and clawed and prayed and screamed and cried and done everything we could to protect the lives of those in the womb. But we have also been gullible to politicians that have continued to tell us what we wanted to hear and we have believed them, supported them, and voted for them again and again. We have allowed them to make careers out of politics, while not actually doing the main thing we sent them to the capital to do. Enough is enough. We have to make a change. And that change has to start in the election booth.
