Under Pope Leo, Pro-Lifers Are Rejecting JD Vance
As the vice president delivered the keynote at the March for Life, many in the pro-life movement saw the moment not as a triumph, but as a jarring contradiction wrapped in hypocrisy.
Dear friends —
Today’s subscriber-only essay captures a quiet but consequential rupture inside the American pro-life movement.
For the first time in years, a growing number of Catholic pro-life leaders and institutions are no longer willing to pretend. They are openly breaking with JD Vance — and, by extension, the Trump-Vance White House — over what they see as a pattern of hypocrisy, abandonment, and moral retreat.
What makes this moment striking is not simply the criticism itself, but where it’s coming from.
These are not longtime critics of the Republican Party. They are movement veterans. Institutional conservatives. Catholics who spent years defending uneasy alliances in the hope that political power would ultimately protect the most vulnerable.
Now, many of them are saying the bargain has failed.
At the same time, Pope Leo XIV has issued a clear reminder of what the Church actually asks of the pro-life movement: to protect life at all stages, without exception and without ideological carve-outs. The contrast between that moral vision and the record of the Trump-Vance administration has become impossible to ignore.
The result is a reckoning — not just with one politician, but with an entire strategy that fused pro-life witness to MAGA power regardless of cost. The backlash to Vance’s appearance at the March for Life, and the broader unease with pro-life institutions drifting deeper into partisan theater, reveal a movement struggling to reclaim its credibility.
This essay is about that reckoning. About why it’s happening now. And about why many Catholics find it unexpectedly consoling to see conscience reassert itself — even at the price of political access.
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For years, the U.S. pro-life community have given both Donald Trump and J.D. Vance the benefit of the doubt. They hoped a second Trump administration would push bold protections for human life. Instead, the opposite has unfolded.
In just one year, the Trump-Vance team has systematically steamrolled core pro-life priorities.
Earlier this month, President Trump publicly told Republicans they “have to be a little flexible on Hyde” — signaling openness to taxpayer-funded abortions, a bipartisan red line for decades. Late in the 2024 campaign, Trump strangely promised to be “great for women and their reproductive rights.”
As Catholic writer Peter Laffin summed up in The Washington Examiner: “the Trump-Vance administration is the most anti-life Republican administration in history. By a mile, by any metric.”
Laffin was particularly incensed by Trump’s waffling on the Hyde Amendment — which prohibits public funding of abortion procedures.
“No Republican president has ever wavered on Hyde until now,” Laffin observed, noting Trump asked Congress to be “flexible” on Hyde — a capitulation even prominent Democrats hadn’t dared until recent years. By abandoning Hyde’s principle, Laffin argued that Trump is “heading down the same path” as abortion-extremists in the other party.
One thing is clear: with a weakening social safety net, rising prices, and uneven and differing laws in different states, abortion is once again on the rise again in Trump’s second term.
Perhaps most striking for Catholics is how little regard this White House has shown for life after birth. Pope Leo’s constant theme is that every person — born or unborn, migrant or citizen — is a child of God.
But when a 37-year-old mother of three, Renee Good, was shot and killed during a Trump administration immigration raid on Jan. 7, the response was chilling. Vice President Vance dismissed Good as just a “deranged leftist,” showing no sympathy for her death. President Trump even suggested she had “forfeited her right to her own life” by daring to object to ICE agents.
This is the administration that claims to be “pro-life.”
As the National Catholic Reporter put it, “the deeds of the Trump administration have stood in sharp contrast to the reassuring words they have offered to religious believers.” Good’s unnecessary death — and the callous official reaction — make it “impossible to ignore” the hypocrisy. How can leaders who boast “every human life is a gift” then treat a living woman as disposable?
In truth, many pro-life Americans now feel betrayed.
“The pro-life movement has clearly lost influence in the Trump administration,” former pro-life Democratic Congressman Dan Lipinski (D-IL) observed bluntly.
Trump’s cynical calculations were made easier, Laffin notes, because many pro-life organizations muzzled themselves to protect Trump.
They “handed over their leverage to Trump on a platter”, hailing him as a hero and persuading the rank-and-file to see Trump and Vance as “irreproachable.”
With such blind loyalty, the administration felt free to ignore pro-lifers’ concerns — confident there would be little pushback.
March for Life’s Miscalculation — Honor the Politician, Forget the Principle?
If the past year was disillusioning, the March for Life’s decision to celebrate JD Vance as its headliner poured salt in the wound. The March for Life is supposed to be a values-based witness to truth, not a partisan pep rally.
Yet this year, its organizers invited Vice President Vance to give the keynote address — effectively an endorsement of Vance and the Trump administration. Many lifelong pro-lifers were aghast.
“Honoring Vice President Vance as an exemplar of what it means to be pro-life will not” advance the cause, Lipinski argued in The Pillar. It will only muddy the movement’s moral clarity. Vance, after all, “has not been a pro-life hero” at all, but part of an administration that has undermined pro-life efforts at every turn.
The problem is “not just his role in this administration” but his rhetoric during the 2024 campaign, Lipinski wrote, urging the March to think twice.
Dr. Abby Johnson — a prominent pro-life advocate and Catholic convert — blasted the invitation even more bluntly. On social media, she called the March for Life’s choice of Vance as keynote “quite honestly, insanity to me.” How could they put Vance on a pedestal given what the Trump-Vance team has done?
When the White House let them down time and again, Johnson said, “Certainly, the pro-life movement did not talk about it. They really want to help the Trump administration save face.”
To Johnson, pretending Vance is a pro-life champion is dangerously disingenuous. “Every pro-life leader except for me endorsed Trump,” she lamented, and now those leaders were twisting themselves into knots to ignore Trump’s betrayals. Enough is enough.
The conservative outlet National Review called Vance’s invitation a “regrettable miscalculation” that prematurely gives Vance “the imprimatur of the pro-life movement” despite his record.
The risk, as Lipinski noted from experience, is that the rally’s attendees will get the wrong message – that “being pro-life [now] means supporting J.D. Vance and Donald Trump no matter what they do.” This exact mentality has poisoned the movement before.
Lipinski recalls attending a pro-life march in 2020 as a Democrat who had voted to impeach Trump; he was harangued by some fellow marchers who told him “You are not pro-life because you voted to impeach Trump,” never mind his impeccable 16-year record defending the dignity of life from womb to tomb. Their sole litmus test had become loyalty to Trump, not loyalty to life.
Such partisan distortion of pro-life identity is precisely what Pope Leo XIV warns against. And by feting Vance, March for Life’s leadership fueled that distortion.
As one Catholic commentator quipped, the event’s organizers showed themselves willing to “wed themselves to the MAGA movement no matter the cost to [their] values.” The optics couldn’t be worse for a movement rooted in moral principle rather than any party.
Is there an alternative? Lipinski proposed a bold idea: If Vance insists on speaking, then do what March for Life founder Nellie Gray once did to President Ronald Reagan. In 1988, Gray introduced Reagan’s phone call to the marchers — but first she publicly admonished him for a policy misstep, telling the president in no uncertain terms, “it’s great to hear your words, but you must do better on policy.” It was a courageous moment of truth-speaking to power.
“The movement would not offer unconditional praise to a politician, not even President Reagan,” Lipinski recounts.
That is the kind of integrity needed now. If Vance was to mount the podium, pro-life leaders should have used the opportunity to deliver a tough message — to call him and Trump to account for failing the cause from womb to tomb. Unfortunately, Jeanne Mancini and today’s March for Life leadership chose applause over accountability.
The result was a rally that felt more like a Trump campaign stop than a Gospel witness to life. In fact, President Trump himself sent a video message to the march in 2022, touting himself as “the most pro-life president in U.S. history” — a claim that rings hollow in light of his policies.
The official apparatus of the March seemingly cares more about political optics than prophetic truth.
Putting Principle Above Party – A New Pro-Life Generation Stands Up
And yet, amid the disillusionment, there are signs of hope. Most consoling of all is the chorus of Catholic voices insisting that authentic pro-life values must come before politics. These Catholics are, in a sense, standing with Pope Leo against the distortion of the Gospel for political ends.
Here are some of these voices crying out at the hypocrisy of Trump and Vance and the ‘pro-life’ leaders who enable them.
