Erika Bachiochi, a pro-life legal scholar who refused to vote for Donald Trump in 2016, has penned an essay for the New York Times expressing gratitude that other pro-life voters did vote for him.

While she once advocated against pro-lifers casting a vote for Trump, Bachiochi softened after reflecting on the ramifications of the Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court case. Thanks to the pro-life justices nominated by Trump and confirmed during his presidency, Dobbs could lead to a dramatic victory for the pro-life movement when the Court issues its ruling next year.

Bachiochi lives in a blue state (Massachusetts) where Republican presidential votes are virtually guaranteed to make no difference, she wrote. During the past two presidential elections, however, “I felt a strong sense of relief that I was free from the hard trade-offs of voters in battleground states and could just cast my vote for a write-in candidate.”

“Yet listening to oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last week, I realized more clearly than before how grateful I am to those pro-lifers who did what I did not, would not, could not: cast a vote for Donald Trump,” Bachiochi wrote.

Judging from last week’s oral arguments, Bachiochi noted that “Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, all appointed by Mr. Trump, seem ready to join Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito (and perhaps Chief Justice John Roberts) in sending the issue of abortion back to the people to resolve.” 

“But it’s not only that,” Bachiochi went on. “Mr. Trump’s economic populism (at least in rhetoric) blasted through the libertarianism that has tended to dominate the G.O.P., a libertarianism that has made the party’s alliance with pro-lifers one of strange bedfellows indeed.” She added that in a “post-Roe world,” the GOP will “have to offer the country the matrix of ethnic diversity and economic solidarity that Mr. Trump stumbled upon, but without the divisiveness of the man himself.”

Full story at Catholic Vote.