As Lincoln understood about slavery back in the 1850s, the eventual political consequences of tolerating abortion in some states will be the acceptance of it in all the states. (We’ve already seen this with the abortion referendums in Kansas and Ohio, with more referendums on the way.) Moral neutrality on abortion — Trump’s “popular sovereignty” approach — will weaken the foundation for legal prohibition and open the way to tolerance and eventually political acceptance. //

Because of the first principles at stake here, the logic of America’s antebellum slavery debate applies entirely to the abortion debate of our time. Indeed, the two issues are closer than even most pro-lifers realize. Today’s Democrats view abortion just as antebellum Democrats viewed slavery. They think the constitutional rights of an entire class of people (women) depend for their vindication on the denial of all rights to another class of people (the unborn). This is precisely what southern Democrats believed about blacks and slavery, and why they were so adamantly against emancipation.

But the two issues are alike in another way as well: They both represent a grave danger to freedom itself and the survival of our republic. //

Abortion is more than that, though. It cuts right to the heart of our understanding of democracy and self-government — which, as Lincoln said, must have limits, or it becomes despotism. If one person can snuff out the life of another, and no third person is allowed to object, then in what sense do we have self-government? Democratic practice, after all, must be rooted in the principle of human equality. There are some things even a majority cannot justly decide to do, and to deny that is to open the way to tyranny. //

Trump, using the same flawed logic, thinks he can compromise with the pro-abortion power.

He’d be better off following Lincoln, who knew that America could not continue forever divided between slave states and free states, that we would “become all one thing or all the other.”