March for Life’s Miscalculation

By Alexandra DeSanctis

Thursday, January 22, 2026

 

Vice President JD Vance will speak at the annual March for Life on Friday. It is a regrettable miscalculation to elevate Vance as a pro-life leader given his recent track record on abortion, as well as that of the administration he serves.

 

Surely, this invitation is part of a strategic effort to accomplish pro-life objectives over the rest of President Donald Trump’s term. Developing a prudent political strategy is essential, and compromise will always be part of political life.

 

But we cannot lose our moral clarity. We must be willing to call a spade a spade. Inviting Vance to headline the march offers him the imprimatur of the pro-life movement and gives him a chance to misrepresent the administration as an ally of the pro-life cause.

 

The vice president himself publicly supported legal, accessible chemical abortion during the 2024 campaign and presently serves as a figurehead for an administration that has done markedly little to earn the celebration of pro-lifers — in fact, quite the opposite.

 

One year in, the Trump administration has failed to enact meaningful pro-life policies available to it and has continued the pro-abortion policies of the Biden administration.

 

Over the past week, for instance, the Trump White House has shown a willingness to abandon the Hyde Amendment, a longtime pro-life non-negotiable, which prevents taxpayer funds from directly subsidizing abortion. The White House omitted Hyde from its new health-care proposal just after Trump urged congressional Republicans to “be a little bit flexible” on Hyde, if that’s what it would take to get a policy through.

 

Meanwhile, the administration has spent its first year refusing to use its executive authority to regulate mifepristone, the primary drug used in chemical abortions, which now account for about two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. each year.

 

A pro-life administration would have wasted no time in immediately reenacting safety regulations on mifepristone — undone by President Biden’s executive action — and would have taken steps to limit chemical abortion further.

 

Increased access to chemical abortion is the foremost reason that, in the three years since Roe was overturned, the abortion rate has risen by 24 percent — from an estimated 955,000 abortions in 2022 to about 1.19 million in 2025.

 

Under Biden, the Department of Health and Human Services did away with the requirement that women visit a doctor in person before obtaining mifepristone, a policy that puts women’s health at risk and is likely the primary factor for this recent increase in the abortion rate.

 

Despite having overturned countless Biden-era policies, the Trump administration has failed to reverse this one. Indeed, the administration has not only left mifepristone unregulated but has actively opposed the efforts of pro-life states to regulate it. The Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, has claimed it will look into reinstating the pre-Biden safety regulations but has instead slow-walked its study on how mifepristone harms pregnant women. This, despite research suggesting that abortion drugs are about 22 times more harmful to women than the FDA currently discloses.

 

This pro-abortion posture of the Trump administration should not come as a surprise.

 

During the 2024 campaign, both Trump and Vance stated their support for legal chemical abortion and announced that they didn’t intend to regulate it. Both candidates gave themselves cover for this stance by claiming that the Supreme Court had approved chemical abortion, when in fact no such ruling occurred.

 

Asked whether he would “block abortion medication” as president, Trump said, “First of all, the Supreme Court just approved the abortion pill. And I agree with their decision to have done that, and I will not block it.”

 

Vance, meanwhile, said in an interview, “The Supreme Court made a decision saying that the American people should have access to that medication [chemical abortion]. Donald Trump has supported that opinion. I support that opinion.”

 

But the Supreme Court did not protect chemical abortion. In fact, the ruling in question did not engage the legality and safety of chemical abortion, deciding only that the health-care professionals suing the government over the mifepristone regulations did not have standing.

 

Trump has spent the years since Dobbs blaming the pro-life movement for electoral losses. He and Vance have consistently taken the position that abortion should be handled by state legislatures alone, ignoring that the Court in Dobbs left room for federal lawmakers to act on abortion.

 

At Trump’s behest, the GOP removed pro-life language that had been in the party platform for decades, language that invoked the unborn child’s “fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed.” It also removed language calling for a constitutional amendment and legislation “to make clear that the 14th Amendment’s protections apply to children before birth.”

 

Today’s Republican Party platform no longer mentions the fundamental right to life of unborn children at all. It supports no pro-life policies in particular, pledging only to “oppose Late Term Abortion.” The platform also supports in vitro fertilization, which pro-lifers have long opposed because it destroys embryonic human life — and the administration itself has acted to expand access to IVF.

 

Over the past few years, Trump and Vance have proven that Republican politicians need not be pro-life to earn the support of the pro-life movement, a shift that will have ramifications well past the Trump era. By enabling the fiction that this administration deserves to be called pro-life, the movement is willingly surrendering whatever political leverage it still has.

 

The March for Life has long been a foremost champion of the right to life of every unborn human being and an essential vehicle for the sentiments of pro-life Americans across the country. The future of the pro-life movement is at serious risk if Vance and the Trump administration are what it chooses to celebrate.