For the first time in my life a presidential campaign has come and gone without substantive discussion about the moral fabric of America. Roe v. Wade was an abhorrent Supreme Court decision, but it did have one positive aspect—it loomed in the background of national elections, forcing people to think about the right and the wrong of taking innocent life. Many voters decided that abortion was an acceptable evil. Others concluded abortion was even a societal good. But at the very least the issue had been raised, and the thought of babies being killed in utero had crossed the collective electorate’s mind.

Not this year. When Roe was remanded to the several states by the Dobbs v. Jackson decision in 2022, abortion was removed as a central point of contention in presidential contests. There was some talk this election season about national abortion bans, and about enshrining Roe in federal law, but abortion was largely absent from the conversation this year. It is as though most Americans have accepted that abortion is here to stay, and that the best for which one can hope in a world of hard political realities is that some states will take a kinder view of tiny human beings than other states. At any rate, the consensus seems to be that abortion is no longer an issue on which presidential politics must turn.

How different things would be if babies could vote. In the womb they can hear us hashing out policy prescriptions and debating budgets and appointments to various posts. Much of that must be of no interest to their little ears. But when talk turns to abortion, they surely go stiff with dread. Abortion is not an abstract concept to the preborn. It is a matter of life and death. Those who speak casually about “expanding access” to abortion, or who dehumanize babies by categorizing them as inanimate “products of conception,” no doubt fill the preborn with ice cold fear. Such talk is murder prefigured. Imagine if someone sitting next to you on a city bus were to say, in an offhand way, that everyone of a certain race should be subjected to death on demand, or that believers of a certain faith deserved to be exterminated en masse. Or that you, fellow passenger, were not living a life worth saving. You would be appalled, physically sickened. You might even, rightly, call the FBI.

But with unborn babies it is different. Big swaths of the American electorate dismiss their lives as a burden to society. Many other voters simply shrug and say, well, abortion is just how things go in our fallen world. Babies disappear from political life because babies have no say in democratic processes. On the list of things that drive elections, the sanctity of human life tends to get ranked way down in importance, far below having gas in the tank and groceries in the refrigerator. That thousands of the most defenseless among us will be dismembered today in the name of convenience or choice or personal autonomy is an afterthought, at best, for much of the American electorate. Babies don’t vote, and very few people care enough to vote for them. But if the slip of paper going into the ballot box were the only thing standing between your safety and a violent death by vacuum tube or forceps or scalpel, you would vote for the candidate that stood up for human life. As things go, however, babies face that gruesome contingency, and fewer and fewer people in America vote to do anything to change it.

If babies could vote, the political system in America would be stood on its head, in a good way. Advocating for abortion would be as unthinkable as advocating for terrorism or genocide. More broadly, a culture of life would unfold. Politicians would travel to maternity wards to give soft speeches about protecting life instead of boasting about taking it in foreign wars. Resources would be used to build up families, not to disintegrate them. The heartbreaking scenes of prostitution in the streets that are making news recently would be a national scandal, as the exploited women would have powerful backers in a voting bloc that did not tolerate mistreatment of mothers (present and future). Children in schools would be protected from sexual predators. The government would crack down hard on human trafficking, on drugs, and on the abuse of the elderly and handicapped. Politicians couldn’t get away with callous cynicism, because babies would vote them out of office—something we the jaded electorate have apparently forgotten how to do.

Most important, if babies could vote, abortion would not be a political issue at all, but a human one. Babies can’t vote, of course. But we can vote for them. And until we start doing so, American politics will likely continue descending into inhumane darkness.