[Henry Olsen: Why those who oppose abortion continue to fight]

The message to pro-life conservatives was clear: They were the black sheep of the Republican coalition. Their presence was tolerated because their votes were needed. But while Republican presidential candidates couldn’t win the nomination without declaring themselves pro-life, the GOP establishment not-so-secretly loathed pro-lifers. The prevailing attitude was: There they go again, making people uncomfortable by talking about abortion.

Pro-lifers took the scraps they were thrown from the GOP table because they had nowhere else to go. In today’s Democratic Party, abortion is no longer treated as a necessary evil but as something to be embraced and even celebrated. In 2018, for example, New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, lit up One World Trade Center — the Freedom Tower — to celebrate the passage of a new law that removes most restrictions on abortion, even in the third trimester.

Pro-life Democrats have all but disappeared on Capitol Hill, and the Democratic orthodoxy today is taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand up to the moment of birth. Dissent from that orthodoxy is not tolerated. For more than 40 years, former vice president Joe Biden supported the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funding for abortions. He said that as a Catholic, he was personally pro-life and that “those of us who are opposed to abortion should not be compelled to pay for them.” But in 2020, that isn’t good enough. Biden, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, caved in to the pro-abortion radicals last June, abandoned his principles and embraced taxpayer funding.

Given their lack of other options, pro-lifers accepted their second-class-citizen status in the GOP. Then along came Trump, a man who doesn’t care what the Republican establishment thinks. He has embraced the pro-life movement in a way no other president has. In 2018, he became ….