FT: Carter – “The Last Pro-life Democrat President”

This short essay is from the interfaith journal First Things. It’s written by Dan Lipinski, one of the last pro-life democrat members of Congress. 100% pro-life. After multiple attempts to get rid of him he finally lost a primary in 2020 to a pro-abortion democrat. The link to the full article should be free – a good look at the Democrat Party past – so sad what they’ve become. 

James Earl Carter Jr., the 40th president of the United States, who died at age 100 on December 29, has been called an enigma. Many say he was a failure as president but a good man who lived an exemplary life. One distinction, however, should be receiving more attention. …  Carter was a Democrat and pro-life. He never ceased to be either, even as radical pro-choice—arguably pro-abortion—activists took over the Democratic party in the forty-four years after the peanut farmer from Georgia left the White House.

The 1976 presidential election was the first to be held after the Supreme Court found a Constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973). In an interview on Meet the Press during that campaign, Jimmy Carter uttered a statement that would disqualify any Democratic candidate today: “I think abortions are wrong.” Though he never endorsed overturning Roe, Carter played a critical role at a key moment for federal abortion policy. The Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding of abortion, was first added to a federal spending bill in the year Carter was elected president. But when he was sworn in it had yet to be implemented, due to a court injunction. Carter chose Joseph Califano, an avowedly pro-life Catholic, to serve as secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Today it is impossible to imagine a Democratic president appointing a pro-life figure to lead this department’s successor, Health and Human Services. (We can no longer be confident that a Republican president will do it, either.) With Carter’s support, Califano fought successfully to have the injunction vacated, and annual spending bills continued to include this life-saving provision. Some in Carter’s party, including not just pro-choice groups but top White House staffers, tried to stop Carter from supporting Califano. Carter held firm, and Hyde survives to this day.

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… During that campaign, Clinton famously declared that “abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.” When he ran for re-election in 1996, the platform stated that “our goal is to make abortion . . . more rare.” Pro-lifers were explicitly embraced: “We respect the individual conscience of each American on this difficult issue, and we welcome all our members to participate at every level of our party.” But the radical pro-choice forces did not want a “big tent” party or any negative connotations about abortion. They won. The 2004 platform dropped the rhetoric of inclusion, and the goal of making abortion “more rare” disappeared in 2008.

This was too much for Jimmy Carter, who in 2012 joined Democrats for Life of America in a letter that called for the party to de-emphasize abortion and recognize that some Democrats “find abortion wholly immoral and others find it acceptable only under limited circumstances.”

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Though Jimmy Carter was a Baptist, he was not a conservative evangelical, and he remained a Democrat until the end of his life. Many deplore that he did not carry his personal views on abortion more fully into his public policy positions. But Carter never stopped speaking out on abortion. In his 2018 Liberty University commencement address, he condemned sex-selective abortions and lamented the “160 million girls and women who are not living today.” We must never forget the injustice of abortion, which Jimmy Carter proclaimed. May all Americans, especially Democrats, heed that voice of conscience now. And may he rest in peace.