The up-and-down-around-and-around-here-today-who-knows-where-tomorrow presidency of Donald J. Trump leaves a writer—not to mention the majority of us—in guessing mode, hands over eyes.

Gee, if we say something searching, something discerning about our president’s second White House go-round, will that observation hold true next week? For that matter, an hour from now? As I write, no one—including, I expect, the president himself—knows what tariffs are in the offing, nor on whom exactly they will be levied, nor their likely effect on prices and jobs. The Trump regime, for all the advance work that supposedly went into its takeover, has an improvisational quality such as never seen before in this country, I do not scruple to say.

Under Trump, orders and directives fly in every direction. The New York Times spoke of “a hailstorm” of early policy initiatives. Hardly had he taken the oath of office than the new/old president issued some 200 executive orders and proclamations. They concerned immigration, taxes, tariffs, diversity requirements, and matters almost beyond tallying. “The exhibition of energy and self-confidence,” says the critic Roger Kimball, “was extraordinary.”

Likewise the breadth of the new administration’s agenda, in which pro-life objectives and causes so far fit snugly.

There is much of a pro-life nature to enumerate, such as a presidential order restoring the U.S. commitment to the Mexico City Policy, whereby foreign non-governmental (NGO) organizations are required, as a condition of receiving U.S. global family planning aid, not to “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning.” Nor may they use non-U.S. funds to such a purpose.

The Reagan administration initiated the policy in 1984 at the second International Conference on Population, held in Mexico City (hence the policy’s colloquial name). Democratic presidents make a show of withdrawing from it, leaving Republican presidents to rejoin it, as Trump has now, following Joseph Biden’s cancellation of the first Trump administration’s cancellation of Barack Obama’s exit . . . you see how it goes.

The next Democratic president will doubtless cancel Trump’s second cancellation, but for now it’s like the Reagan days again, only better. Trump has ordered that the plan’s requirements be extended to the global health assistance provided by all U.S. departments and agencies: such, I guess, as manage to duck Elon Musk’s woodcutter’s axe.

As I say, a lot of guesswork and projection goes into evaluation of the efficacy and/or do-ability of the president’s actions.

Next stop: Trump’s abandonment of a Biden administration lawsuit challenging Idaho’s abortion ban, which narrows the window for abortion to occasions like saving the mother’s life or intervening where rape or incest caused the pregnancy. This happened early on. Biden’s Justice Department wanted abortion allowed not just to save the mother’s life but to prevent her from grave health consequences. That’s off now, what with Trump overseeing the Justice Department.

Likewise the president pardoned 23 people, their identities unspecified at the time, whom he described as “peaceful pro-life protestors.” Ten are known for their participation in the 2020 blockade of a Washington, DC abortion clinic. He announced the pardons in his brief video speech to the annual March for Life, held near the White House. “I know your hearts are warm and your spirits are strong,” he said, “because your mission is just very, very pure: to forge a society that welcomes and protects every child as a beautiful gift from the hand of our Creator.” It sounds, does it not, like the kind of thing Ronald Reagan used to say. Then, in his first public speech since the inauguration, Vice President JD Vance seconded his boss’s motion with enthusiasm.

There was some proportion to the occasion. The chief executive had promised a decade ago to shape, through nominations of new justices, a U.S. Supreme Court that would knock Roe v. Wade on its ugly head. It worked. This single, signal promise, expressed in October 2016 during his first presidential campaign, strikes me as having earned Donald J. Trump something odd-seeming amid the policy warfare of 2025. It has earned him, from the pro-life standpoint, a measure of tentative trust. Maybe more than that, but those who have been the longest around politics like to hedge their bets.

This, we have to bear in mind, is the president who wants to make Canada the 51st state and Gaza a sort of Mediterranean Riviera under American supervision. I am not suggesting that bells should peal and cannons roar as the Trump of 2025 pledges allegiance to the pro-life cause the way he imagines it. That is to say, susceptible to his belief in letting each state determine its own individual abortion policy: no abortions; some abortions; who cares, as many as you can handle.

I realize the delicacy of any Trump/pro-life alliance: dependent as it has to be on the Good of the Moment, as defined by the president, not the most recently imprisoned clutch of pro-life activists. There is in the whole idea of such an alliance more than a little ummm-hmmmm, yeah, let’s see how it works.

That is a prospect due in part to the inbred changeability of Donald J. Trump, the variousness of his moods, and recollections of Trumpian pronouncements such as “I am very pro-choice. I hate the concept of abortion . . . I just believe in choice” (October 1999).

The custom of hoisting political figures atop our shoulders and marching with them around the town square is definitely out. It cannot exist in our climate of distrust as to political promises of every sort. We do not for the most part, I am guessing, really, truly expect to see political promises fulfilled. By whoever makes them.

Nor do I believe even the loudest, most intense members of the Trump cheering section really look for the Trump agenda to be fulfilled in its entirety: likely not even the greater share of it. They know, or should by now, the frustrations of electoral politics amid the social and cultural divisions of the moment.

Polls in the post-Roe v. Wade moment continue to demonstrate general if hardly unanimous public support for legal abortion. With whatever degree of regret, the public has come to reject what earlier publics accepted—namely, the supposition that life was a continuity; that the unborn deserved the same legal protection and security as the born.

The transition achieved main-force following the Second World War, when liberation from long-standing norms became the cultural norm—in music, dress, entertainment, social arrangements, you name it. To demands for individual autonomy over human bodies, for choice in the bearing, or the not-bearing, of life, the U.S. Supreme Court, as everyone knows, nodded in solemn agreement. Sure; take the wheel; go ahead.

Over the long haul, as perpetually happens in situations of revolution, doubts set in: more and more all the time. This new thing in the understanding of Western men and women had gone too far; it needed pulling back. And so, over time, advocates for unborn life succeeded through unceasing toil in achieving such pullback as proved possible, albeit not to the status quo ante Roe.

On goes the struggle into which Donald Trump now wades as—as what? Crusader-in-chief for the unborn? Hardly that.

Whatever Trump’s thoughts and intentions—which it would not be a good idea to overestimate one’s confidence in when the man in charge is Donald J. Trump—no objective case can be made for early reversal of pro-choice dominance in American thinking. I stand ready to be corrected if that is wrong. I fear it is not. Not when Pew Research shows 61 percent of men and 64 percent of women favoring legal abortion. Only among conservative Republicans and the Republican-leaning is opposition to abortion strong. The rest of America takes the other side, to one degree or another. The country’s elected leader is walking among fallen power lines when it comes to addressing an issue few—including the leader himself, I would guess—see as more urgent than immigration or the economy.

How do you change such an unpromising calculus, in strictly political terms? Trump’s federalist approach to the problem has much to commend it, leaving Congress out of it, letting state legislatures sort it through: either restricting abortion as much as possible or loudly, proudly, in the vigilant hearing of progressive voters, refusing restrictions of any kind. The federalist approach allows the president, with plausibility, both to claim credit and deny responsibility whenever he desires to: affirming at the same time, with the voice of the Founding Fathers, the de-centralization of national power. It is no contemptible approach to a political problem.

In the time of Trump, I am guessing that pro-life lawmakers will take courage, pointing to, inter alia, a national trend, evidenced by the 2024 election, toward social conservatism and the need to restore cultural stability.

News stories about the falloff in the birth rate throughout the Western world are hard to miss. Among the prime explanations for the falloff: abortion, a forceful turning away from motherhood, underwritten by seekers-after and holders-of political office; however, with negative political implications, such as bigger and bigger drop-offs in the number of workers contributing to Social Security. These things seep slowly into public consciousness. They can work changes.

Howsoever that may be in the case of the abortion of human life, the perplexities of today’s politics remind us how relatively little the politics of any day determine the tenor of life. Politics does no more than reflect and protect, so far as it can, the moral understandings of humanity. These underlie the surface of thought and action, not to mention legislation and regulation.

What a society does, to put it in practical terms, depends on what it believes. The value of unborn life? We believe in it? We therefore keep it from harm. We disdain that asserted value? We yawn at measures meant to safeguard it. We sometimes more than yawn.

By that reasoning a mother hostile to the prospect of admitting one more brat into the sanctuary of personal privilege is, on certain terms, a mother we should leave to do her own thing. Whose business is it but hers? Society’s? Faugh. God’s? When was the last time you heard from God about anything?

Such is how the run of political men and women have come to deal with the essentially moral question of abortion: so intimate a thing that the rights and wrongs of it look exotic in a legislative chamber crowded with men and women scouting the room for camera angles. It is how we do politics. It is not necessarily how, or where, we iron out questions having to do with the nature of life and duties and the responsibilities that flow from that nature.

The recapture of the high ground on abortion depends upon—it is clear to many of us after decades of trips down the political garden path— restoration of the power of moral reflection. It is not presently a power our society possesses in large quantity: noticing it, feeling it, living by it. We need it back.

And who is going to do those particular honors? The faculty of Harvard? The Ford Foundation? The American Association of University Professors? The federal Department of This-and-That? How about, to shinny a little higher, the White House?

None of that, I think. Cultural rebuilding, featuring patched-up, dusted-off understanding of our classical and religious traditions, with names like Plato and Paul and Luther and Churchill scribbled in notebooks, goes on slowly, meticulously at institutions of one kind and another across America: most of them small, hardly noticed. But that’s all right, because a sense of mission, from what I observe, keeps them focused on the job at hand. That job is the mission of restoring to full view the truths our culture brought with it from Europe, and by which more or less it formerly lived; not the least of those truths being the danger of laws lacking foundation in Truth itself.

We reckon things are tough at present. It’s tougher still when all the friends of the new order see you advancing and turn on the alarm system.

No one, neither these friends nor their opponents, wins forever. Such is life, the old teachers taught us; the nature of things. The past few years of U.S. history, under Republicans and Democrats alike, have shown clearly that, as T. S. Eliot observed, there are no Lost Causes because there are no Gained Causes. “We fight rather,” said Eliot, “to keep something alive”—a sonorous way to put it when the question before our vexed and broken house is human life itself.

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Original Bio:

William Murchison, a former syndicated columnist, is a senior editor of the Human Life Review. He will soon finish his book on moral restoration in our time.