Opinion | I Couldn’t Vote for Trump, but I’m Grateful for His Supreme Court Picks (Published 2021)

For a pro-life voter living in heavily Democratic Massachusetts, casting a ballot for president feels like a deeply inconsequential act.

After all, the abortion-rights candidate carries the commonwealth handily every four years. That said, over the past two presidential election cycles, I felt a strong sense of relief that I was free from the hard trade-offs of voters in battleground states and could just cast my vote for a write-in candidate.

Yet listening to oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last week, I realized more clearly than before how grateful I am to those pro-lifers who did what I did not, would not, could not: cast a vote for Donald Trump.

Politics is an art of prudence, and what I regarded as a deal with the devil they took to be a prudential act to achieve an essential end. For ending the abortion regime must be the keystone of standing against the individualistic libertarianism that characterizes our politics, left and right — and privileges the powerful over the weak and dependent. Ironically, and perhaps accidentally and certainly boorishly, Mr. Trump may have brought about what others could not.

Despite the manner, meanness, even maladjustment of the man — and despite the fact that he remains an ill-suited representative of our cause — Mr. Trump kept his promises to pro-lifers, nominating justices who now appear poised to overturn Roe v. Wade.