The President Who Delivered Dobbs Deserves Better From the Pro-Life Movement

After securing the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, President Trump now finds himself lectured to by a vocal minority of pro-life activists who seem to have forgotten who delivered the greatest pro‑life victory in half a century. A movement that spent decades fighting for the end of Roe should be united in gratitude to the president, yet an increasing number of pro‑lifers have chosen to treat President Trump not as the leader who delivered the impossible, but as a disappointment measured against their ever‑shifting purity tests.

In an article published in Catholic Culture, entitled “Will Pro-Life Marchers Boo Trump and Vance?” at the 2026 March for Life in Washington D.C. the author suggested that Trump — despite reinstating the Mexico City Policy, cutting Medicaid abortion funding, rescinding Biden‑era abortion expansions, banning HHS-funded research using human fetal tissue collected from elective abortions, pardoning FACE Act defendants, and suspending Planned Parenthood funding — has somehow “abandoned” the pro‑life cause. (RELATED: A Haunt of Demons Shuts Its Doors … The Fall of Margaret Sanger’s ‘Clinic’)

Ignoring the reality of a divided Congress, the limits of executive power, and the fact that overturning Roe v. Wade — made possible by Trump’s three Supreme Court appointments — demonstrates that President Trump has delivered more for the pro‑life cause than any previous president, and remains the central figure behind the most consequential pro‑life gains in modern American history.

Despite all the dire predictions on social media that the crowd would erupt in boos at the president and vice president, nothing of the sort happened. Vice President Vance was greeted warmly, and President Trump sent a videotaped message reassuring the crowd that his heart was with them in protecting unborn children. This was six years after becoming the first sitting president ever to show up at the March for Life in person — and the audience received him without a hint of the hostility his critics were so eager to imagine. (RELATED: How Trump 2.0 Can Get Back to Trump 1.0 on the Abortion Pill)

President Trump is a champion for life. His appointments of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett formed the decisive majority that overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, ending the federal constitutional protection for abortion and returning the authority to regulate abortion to the American people in the states and their elected representatives. It is not his fault that progressives in democrat majority states have decided to enshrine abortion in their state constitutions. It is also not his fault that the tremendous growth in medication abortion has made Planned Parenthood obsolete for early-term abortion. (RELATED: The Nation Must Face the Abortion Pill Legal Monster)

Some in the pro‑life movement have criticized President Trump for supporting in vitro fertilization (IVF), a practice that the Catholic Church has long held to be morally incompatible with its teachings because it separates procreation from the marital act and often results in the destruction of embryos. But acknowledging that moral concern does not erase the reality of Trump’s unmatched impact on the legal landscape of abortion.

In an August 2024 NBC News interview, the president argued that IVF should remain accessible and affordable — going so far as to say that government or insurance should cover the cost — because, unlike faithful Catholics, he views helping infertile couples have children as pro‑family.

It appears that neither President Trump nor Vice President JD Vance completely understands why Catholics find IVF abhorrent. It is the duty of faithful Catholics to educate others on the fact that a fertilized embryo is an embryonic child and cannot be destroyed, as happens to those embryos that are not implanted. But this is also where moral theology and political strategy must be carefully distinguished. (RELATED: Eugenics: The Dark Side of IVF)

Catholic teaching offers a clear, principled framework for evaluating the morality of IVF, and within that framework, the practice is impermissible because it not only separates procreation from the marital act, but it most often results in the loss of embryonic life.

But political strategy operates in a different register: it asks what concrete outcomes are achievable in a pluralistic nation and how best to advance the protection of unborn children within that reality. President Trump’s support for IVF reflects a political judgment about what most Americans view as pro‑family, not a theological endorsement of the procedure itself. Confusing these categories — treating every political calculation as a theological statement — risks obscuring the fact that Trump has done what no other president has in protecting unborn children.

The pro‑life movement cannot afford to collapse political judgment into a series of ideological purity tests. Catholic moral theology rightly evaluates IVF as impermissible, but political coalitions are built in a pluralistic nation where not everyone shares that framework. Holding every elected official to the standard of perfect alignment with Catholic teaching on every life issue would leave the movement with no viable partners and no path to legislative or judicial progress.

President Trump’s record makes this tension clear: his support for IVF reflects a political judgment about what most Americans consider pro‑family, even though faithful Catholics recognize that IVF is incompatible with Church teaching. But a movement that demands total doctrinal conformity from political leaders risks marginalizing itself and squandering the very gains it has spent decades fighting to secure.

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Image licensed under Creative Commons Public Domain Mark.