The Abortion Van At The DNC Is A Glimpse Of America’s Future

Did you hear about the free abortions and sterilizations on offer at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week? Incredibly, the news is real. Abortion-inducing drugs (mifepristone and Plan B) will be doled out from the back of a Planned Parenthood RV, along with vasectomies, just a few blocks from a convention that will embrace a radical abortion-until-birth policy that would have been unthinkable, even for Democrats, just a decade ago.

Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance was savaged by the corporate press for repeatedly describing Democrats as “anti-family” in media appearances last week. Now, as if to prove Vance’s point, here they are with an abortion van at their convention and supporters marching through the streets dressed as abortion pills. As my colleague Jordan Boyd noted, Planned Parenthood’s euphemistically labeled “mobile health center” might not be an officially DNC-sanctioned part of the convention, but it fits right in with the party’s macabre platform that would federalize abortion law and allow it through all nine months of pregnancy.

So yes, Democrats are anti-family, anti-child, pro-death, pro-stagnation, pro-civilizational suicide. The abortion van, abortion pill marchers, and inflatable IUD at the DNC this week are merely cartoonish, grisly confirmations of what everyone already knows—including Democrats themselves.

What’s more difficult to understand and accept is how all of this is the inevitable consequence of a leftist worldview that the GOP has already accepted, which means what we’re seeing this week at the DNC we will eventually see at the RNC.

I don’t just mean that the Trump campaign and the Republican Party have softened their opposition to abortion in the post-Dobbs era. It’s not merely that abortion was all but removed from the GOP platform and the GOP’s previous position in favor of federal abortion limits was abandoned. It’s that Trump and his Republican Party would like very much to stop talking about abortion altogether now, as if the matter is settled and we can move on to more important matters, like the border and inflation.

That’s the same attitude they have about gay marriage, which, like abortion once was, is supposed to be a settled debate, not up for discussion anymore. The choice to take these issues off the table, or try to, is usually framed as pragmatic. We want a big tent, Democrats are radical, Republicans can present their side as reasonable.

But it doesn’t work like that. There’s a reason the Democrats went from talking about how abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” in the 1990s to celebrating it with free abortions from the back of an RV in 2024. Once you cede the principle of the thing, once you accept the premise that it’s justifiable to kill the unborn under certain circumstances, the list of allowable circumstances will continuously expand.

This is of course true of any moral principle, which is why the left moved with alarming speed from arguing that gay marriage wouldn’t hurt or affect anyone to demanding that everyone actively endorse and celebrate it or face ruin. There is no limiting principle to the argument that consenting adults have a right to have their sexual arrangements officially recognized by the state. That’s why the rationale used in the gay marriage debates of the 2010s is exactly the rationale deployed today in the transgender debate, which will in turn eventually be successfully deployed on behalf of plural marriage, polyamory, and pedophilia and things we have yet to imagine.

The point here is not to sow discord on the right or decry a big tent strategy for the GOP, but merely to point out that when you violate the moral principles on which a social order is based, you don’t get to say when enough is enough. The slippery slope does not cease to be slippery when you think you’ve had enough. You will go all the way down it.

Put another way, the time to say “no” was before the moral principle was violated, not after. Having accepted, for example, that abortion is morally licit in cases where the child is conceived through rape or incest, or that it should be allowed in the first trimester because that seems a reasonable compromise with the left, today’s Republican Party has lost the ability to object to abortion on any grounds whatsoever.

Either an unborn child is a human being, with the same right to life as an infant or a toddler, or it has no rights and can be killed with impunity. Compromising on this is incoherent. It is to admit defeat.

Plenty of people on the right think this is impolite or unhelpful to bring up. You see it in the tsk-tsking that erupts whenever someone points out, for example, that IVF as it’s commonly practiced involves the intentional killing of unborn children, and that a conservative movement worth the name would object to that and try to outlaw it. But no, we’re not supposed to talk about IVF because it’s a distraction, it’s divisive, it’s unimportant. Let’s change the subject, shall we, and talk about marginal tax rates instead.

What nonsense. We have to recognize that on these kinds of issues there is no middle ground on which to compromise, and if we don’t win on these issues, the rest of them won’t really matter. Democrats at least understand that and are willing to follow their logic to it ghastly conclusions, come what may. That’s why they castrate and mutilate children in the name of transgenderism. That’s why they bring their abortion van to the DNC. They accept the philosophical premises of their own arguments, and act accordingly. 

We cannot say the same for Republicans, whose position is typically that they will bring us the same policies as Democrats but on a slightly slower timeline.

So sneer and mock the DNC all you like for its bloody abortion extremism, but understand that this is happening because we lost the ability to say “no.” From abortion to gay marriage and even to issues like immigration, divorce, and feminism, we thought we could be clever and argue for compromises and carve-outs, assuming that the moral logic of our opponents would not win out in the end.

That was wrong. Some issues cannot, in the long run, bear compromise. Having abandoned traditional marriage, you will first have gay marriage and then plural marriage and eventually no marriage at all, because the institution will be destroyed utterly.

Having abandoned the abolition of abortion, you will first have states decide the question through “popular sovereignty” and then Congress will nationalize abortion and eventually you will be arrested for praying silently outside abortion clinics like they do in Britain. Having accepted the premise of feminism, you will begin by celebrating women in the workforce and end by insisting the objectification of women is “empowering.”

The lesson for Republicans is that it’s no use basing a political coalition on a shared preference for, say, lower tax rates while papering over disagreements about what constitutes a family, or a person. If that’s how you cobble together a political coalition, it will lose every time, because even its victories will be pyrrhic. Eventually you will assent to the thing you once objected to, and you will be ashamed you ever had an objection to begin with.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.