The following comes from a January 26 Stream article by Jason Jones and John Zmirak:

If you were pro-life in the same way that the head of the NRA is pro-gun rights, would you settle for a candidate who had spent most of his life as a radical anti-gun advocate, supporting the seizure of all private weapons? Well, Donald Trump favored abortion on demand until … some point after he decided to run for president.

In 1999, he expressed support even for partial birth abortion, the destruction of near-newborns who could survive outside the womb. By 2011, Trump claimed to be pro-life, recalling that he knew “a friend had a child who they were going to abort, and now they have it, and the child is incredible.”

The greatest disappointment to social conservatives of three Republican presidents has been their mixed record of choosing Supreme Court appointees. Notice that Democratic presidents never, never disappoint the abortion lobby. Why do you think that is? Because they wouldn’t get away with it. Republican candidates know that they can, so they do. Since up to four Supreme Court seats might become vacant in the next presidential term, this issue matters more than ever, and more than most. The next four (or eight) years of presidential Court appointments could change America radically, revoking gun rights and gutting the First Amendment’s free exercise of religion.

So you’d think that the fervent pro-life convert Donald Trump would be keenly attuned to the need for appointing solid Constitutionalists to federal courts, especially the Supreme Court. But you would be wrong. When asked about this issue, Trump didn’t offer some mealy-mouthed speech about avoiding “litmus tests,” as too many weak pro-life politicians do. No, he didn’t hint with a wink that he might betray us. He outright promised to. Trump cited as the kind of judge he’d appoint to the Court his left-wing, judicial activist sister, who in the Trump tradition supports partial birth abortion. Some were tempted to write this statement off, even excuse it, as a mere example of charming, roguish nepotism. Really? Would Wayne LaPierre of the NRA settle for such an excuse? So why should we?

If pro-lifers accept at face value Donald Trump’s half-hearted, fingers-crossed, nod-and-a-wink conversion, then they really are as clueless as Donald Trump thinks all Republican voters are. He boasted just this weekend that he “could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” If voters choose such a man as the legal champion of innocent unborn life, then they deserve to be betrayed. But those unborn babies don’t.