Open letter to Lila Rose and other pro-lifers planning not to vote for Donald Trump

Dear Lila,

We’ve never personally met, but as a pro-life journalist I’ve appreciated your activism since way back when you were a teenager doing awesome hidden-camera sting operations with James O’Keefe. Here at WorldNetDaily we’ve highlighted your work for many years. My wife and I support Live Action. Enough said.

As for me, my main pro-life contribution has been exposing how legalized abortion was sold to a largely Christian America decades ago, starting with my 1991 interview with Bernard Nathanson (during which the repentant former top abortionist revealed all the lies and marketing techniques they employed), and then later in much greater detail in my book, “The Marketing of Evil.”

But Lila, we need to talk.

Recently, expressing your disappointment in Donald Trump’s current stance on abortion (essentially, he says each state should determine its own abortion laws, plus, whether wise or not, he has strategically moderated his prior abortion positions because he thinks it will help him win a very tight and all-important election) you declared, “I think that it’s the job of the pro-life movement to demand protection for pre-born lives. It is not the job of the pro-life movement to vote for President Trump.”

You added, “If the election were today, I would not vote for Harris or Trump based on their policies and their statements and their positions.”

Please allow me to explain why I believe you’re wrong on this point. Perhaps catastrophically wrong.

But first, let’s back up for a moment. As you know, for half a century America’s pro-life movement has had two major long-term goals.

First goal: Reverse Roe v. Wade. Dissenting Justice Byron White described the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling as “an exercise of raw judicial power,” since there was obviously no basis in the Constitution for striking down the anti-abortion laws of all 50 states and thereby removing all legal protection from the unborn child.

Second goal, once the first goal was accomplished: Pass a Human Rights Amendment to the Constitution, explicitly enshrining within the highest law of the land the preborn child’s right to life.

As president, Donald Trump did what none of his pro-life predecessors, including the great Ronald Reagan, could accomplish: While under continual heavy fire from Democrats, the media and the Deep State, who persecuted, impeached, undermined and lied about him at every turn, Trump somehow managed to appoint three pro-life, Constitution-honoring justices to the U.S. Supreme Court … and thereby threw the doors wide open to accomplishing the first of the pro-life movement’s two great goals.

Of course, as the Catholic News Agency reported, Trump also “used his executive power to restrict foreign aid funding of abortion and to prevent Title X funding from going to the abortion industry. As president, Trump also signed an executive order to protect infants who were born alive after a failed abortion.” And in June, “Trump said in a speech to the Faith and Freedom Coalition that, if elected, he would ‘rapidly review the cases’ of pro-life activists and ‘every political prisoner’ who has been jailed under President Joe Biden’s administration and get them ‘back to their families where they belong.'”

Now consider what Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will do with regard to abortion if elected next month. Both are beyond radical in their passionate love for abortion. Harris has repeatedly vowed to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law. She and Walz have absolutely no problem with performing abortions all the way through nine months of pregnancy up to the moment of birth, and in fact oppose “born-alive infant protection” laws of any sort. (In May 2023, Walz signed a bill into Minnesota law removing a requirement to try to save the life of a baby born alive after an attempted abortion.)

Considering Harris’ and Walz’ abortion advocacy from within a religious framework, it’s clear that their giddy obsession with, and open glorification of, sacrificing beautiful unborn children can reasonably be called satanic. For America to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – knowing what they stand for – would be to spit in God’s face.

Please also consider a couple of unchangeable facts:

1. By all accounts, November’s election will be very close, which means every vote counts.

2. If a registered voter decides not to vote, or to write in someone else’s name on their ballot, he or she is voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. The math is simple and inescapable: Not voting for Trump is mathematically identical to voting for Harris when the ballots are counted. The candidate with the most votes wins and takes over the country.

And as I wrote shortly before the 2020 election: “When you vote for a president, you are not choosing only one leader and his policy agenda, but a multitude of leaders and policies in every area of life, and therefore a whole ‘future’ for the country, as Franklin Graham put it. Most prominently, you are choosing a vice president who may well become president (as has happened 14 times in U.S. history). You are also choosing Cabinet and department heads. And you are choosing federal judges, including Supreme Court justices with lifetime tenure who will decide issues of stupendous importance that affect every American. And you are choosing thousands of other people – about 4,000 federal government appointees in all – who will profoundly shape the nation in which your children and grandchildren will live for a long, long time – whether for good or for ill.”

Yet, in every U.S. election, huge numbers of Christians fail to vote, and all for reasons they consider righteous! For some, their particular church denomination tells them they are “citizens of Heaven” and “not part of this world,” and therefore don’t need to vote; others believe God will determine who leads America without their help, while others believe church and state should be “separate”; some simply believe “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference” between the two candidates, while others insist their focus as Christians should be solely on the gospel, not “politics.”

Or, in the current election, perhaps some believe they’re called to make their stand for the unborn … while ironically contributing to the victory of the most rabidly pro-abortion president ever, while defeating the pro-life president who finally got Roe overturned.

With all love and respect, Lila, this is a huge mistake you are about to make. I beg you to reconsider.

One last point: These are not normal times. This is not an era when one can reasonably greet defeat by saying, “Oh well, so the Democrats won this time, that’ll teach the Republicans to be more diligent in their pro-life walk the next time.” There may be no next time, as many of today’s best historians and analysts are currently warning. If Trump loses, this could be the last genuine election America ever has.

Also, Lila, even if – as I suspect – you regard your public statements (“If the election were today, I would not vote for Harris or Trump”) as strategic, a form of leverage you hope will influence Trump to publicly adopt more purely and explicitly pro-life positions prior to the election, you’re still making a huge mistake: You’re an influential pro-life leader and many people will follow your lead and not vote for Donald Trump, which will constitute de facto electoral support for Kamala Harris.

I’ll end with a prediction. And I say this with genuine, heartfelt love and respect for the pro-life movement, of which I have been a part for close to five decades: If you fail to vote for Trump and advocate that others do likewise, and he loses, you will come to bitterly regret it for the rest of your life. I would rather spare you that personal agony – in addition to the greater agony of unwittingly contributing to the demise (or as Obama put it, “the fundamental transformation”) of the nation you obviously love.

Lila, you’re all about LIFE. Innocent life. Which includes not only the lives of the preborn, but also the lives of tens of thousands of children currently being sold into sexual slavery thanks to Biden-Harris immigration policies, as well as the lives of young people killed by fentanyl poisoning (currently the biggest cause of death of young Americans 18-45), and the lives of countless children being destroyed by being seduced into transgender madness (Tim Walz last year made Minnesota into a “sanctuary state” for minors seeking mutilating transgender surgeries, even against the wishes of their own parents) and on and on. All of this madness, heartache and death will increase exponentially under a Harris/Walz administration. It cannot be otherwise.

God bless you, Lila Rose, and may He give you wisdom, humility and grace. Before it’s too late, please rethink your public position on this election and voice your support for the president who, by God’s grace, finally accomplished the first of the pro-life movement’s two greatest goals.