The president of Americans United for Life (AUL), Catherine Glenn Foster, said President Trump may well deserve the title of most pro-life president in American history but the test will be whether Roe v. Wade is ultimately reversed through his influence.
“There’s no question that President Donald Trump is delivering substantial pro-life victories,” Foster told Charles Camosy when asked whether Trump was indeed the most pro-life president. “And his transformation of the judiciary through his work with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has the potential to ensure judges properly interpret the Constitution for decades to come.”
“However, the majority of President Trump’s pro-life achievements have come by means of executive order or other administrative action,” said the head of America’s oldest national pro-life organization. “And all those achievements can be reversed when, inevitably, another president with different views enters office.”
Under Foster’s guidance, AUL has pursued a mother-child strategy that defends the interests and vulnerabilities of both, protecting them from abortion industry abuses. Foster has testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Select Investigative Panel and Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
“While we have not seen permanent victories for life, in many respects that’s not his failure, but the Congress’s failure,” Foster continued. “We cannot forget the disaster that was the House of Representatives’ total failure to defund Planned Parenthood when they had the chance to deliver an historic and life-affirming legislative victory for the American people.”
“We cannot afford to squander those opportunities to deliver permanent legislative achievements that support the human right to life,” she added.
According to Foster, Trump’s pro-life legacy will ultimately depend on actions by the Supreme Court.
“But in the long run, I suspect President Trump’s pro-life bona fides will be judged by whether the U.S. Supreme Court reverses Roe,” she said.
Many legal scholars consider Roe to be one of the worst rulings in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, independent of where one stands on the abortion issue. Even liberal academics such as Yale law professor John Hart Ely and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, as well Alan Dershowitz, Cass Sunstein, and Kermit Roosevelt have criticized Roe as bad jurisprudence.
As one scholar noted, Roe “was poorly reasoned and not grounded in law, giving it little intellectual legitimacy.”
Row v. Wade has been compared to the notorious Dred Scott decision by the Court that denied the rights of blacks and has been referred to by some as a “travesty” of constitutional law.