Pro-life advocates have long sought national protections for unborn babies and their mothers

The corrupt corporate media and even some self-proclaimed pro-lifers feigned shock this week that those with the explicit goal of outlawing abortion were unsatisfied with former President Donald Trump’s declaration that the fate of unborn babies should be left “up to the states.”

When Trump released an official video Monday with mixed messaging on in vitro fertilization and abortion heading into the 2024 election, pro-life groups criticized him for failing to support federal limits on ending the lives of unborn babies. They pinned his “states’ rights” claim as a means of giving Democrats and abortion giants a free pass to wreak destruction on Republican states using deceptive ballot measures.

Corporate and some conservative media mouthpieces quickly painted that criticism as a political flip-flop rather than a goal that’s been at the forefront of the movement for more than 50 years. They acted like it was a bait and switch that pro-lifers were only partially satisfied with the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling as a victory for life in the womb.

“While there can be some sincere outrage over Trump’s callous flip-flop in an election year, most of the feigned shock is for show,” Time magazine asserted.

Corporate media had a similar reaction on a much greater scale in 2022 shortly after Sen. Lindsey Graham introduced legislation that would bring U.S. abortion law up to speed with most European countries, which strictly limit abortions somewhere around 12 weeks of gestation.

Only 37 percent of U.S. adults believe abortion should be allowed during the second trimester, which begins at 13 weeks. Yet Democrats, the corporate press, and even some Republicans claimed that even the tamest of federal laws limiting abortion to 15 weeks gestation, more than three months into pregnancy, is a losing issue.

Even now, those within Trump’s campaign and Senate Republicans, according to the Washington Post, say “backing a national ban would be further inserting [Trump] into an issue that has been politically damaging for Republicans.”

Pro-lifers supporting federal limits on abortion is not an earth-shattering shift in policy or a sudden exposure of a secret agenda. Protecting unborn babies and their mothers on the national level has been a consistent goal of the pro-life movement since its inception.

The idea is that if life begins at conception, which modern science, medicine, many states, and even abortion giant Planned Parenthood agree it does, we are morally and logically obligated to shield it from harm in any way possible.

Leaving abortion limits up to the states does not fulfill this goal. Instead, it makes mothers and unborn babies in even the most Republican of states vulnerable to the schemes of Democrats and abortion activists, who have figured out how to exploit weaknesses in states’ constitutional amendment processes to codify unlimited abortion through all nine months. Anyone who settles for that reality does not truly believe the very premise that drives the pro-life movement.

Republicans like Trump often shift their stance on abortion to meet the political moment, an action deserving criticism. The pro-life movement as a whole, however, hasn’t changed.

For decades, the people sworn to protect life in the womb have consistently called for a federal policy that would spare women and babies the emotional, physical, and fatal turmoil that abortion causes.

For pro-lifers motivated to live out their principles, Dobbs was only the beginning. Their mission to protect the sanctity of life doesn’t even begin to slow until children and their mothers are completely protected for good.