Conservatives are trying to politically defeat progressive Leftists using the methods of the latter and are utterly failing.  Mr. Jude Russo also falls victim to this in his essay on the failure of the pro-life cause at the ballot box.  He believes it has failed because it often speaks in terms of restricting rights:

Framing things in terms of curtailing rights in any respect is a loser. The pro-life movement has failed to instill a positive vision of its goals into the American people. It has accepted the pro-abortion framing of abortion laws as a curtailment of rights, rather than the protection of a class of persons that ought to be protected.

Every major change in American politics has been framed in terms of the expansion of rights (or the recognition of rights that were there all along, given our national ideology’s sort of fuzzy fundamental understanding of what a “right” is). The massive entitlement expansions—Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare—have been framed in terms of granting de facto rights to freedom from want, to health-care, or the like. The Reagan revolution and its sequel, perhaps the last era in which those entitlement programs faced a serious challenge, was built around the expansion of economic rights. (This was part of the wisdom of the first generation of fusionism, unfashionable as it is to say now.)

His solution is therefore predictable – conservative pro-lifers must find a way to convince Americans that they will personally benefit from supporting pro-life measures:

The pro-life movement must do the same. It must articulate itself in terms of rights expansion—ideally, not just for the unborn baby, but for the voting public as well. We must speak to the nation about itself as a nation. This unfamiliar dialect does provide certain natural advantages. The possibility of demographic collapse threatens the health of entitlement programs, which depends on an expanding pool of payors. (Do you want to bet on per capita GDP increasing quickly enough to keep Social Security afloat?) The old conservative analyses of those programs’ solvency can be repurposed for the cause of population growth, a cause that has as a component restrictions on abortions. Existing entitlement programs give us another tool. The de facto right to healthcare can be extended to a right to free birth; such proposals already have some legislative traction. Finally, the most difficult and least concrete: We must be tireless in our arguments forwarding the humanity of the unborn. We must convince the American people that the unborn are Americans, too.

Most of this is nothing but secular materialism intended to appeal to individual self-interest.  Only at the end, with appeals to recognizing the humanity of unborn children, do we get into different metaphysical territory, something savoring of the spiritual, of the image of God in man.

Sir Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, warned against accepting things like rights and utility as the criterion for judging the goodness of political actions.  Dr. Russell Kirk, summarizing Burke’s views, writes,

What other basis exists for realizing the natural moral order in society? “Reason,” Voltaire might have answered; “Utility,” Bentham was to declare; “material satisfaction of the masses,” the Marxists would reply half a century later. Burke looked upon reason as a feeble prop, insufficient to most men; utility was for him a test only of means, not of ends; and material satisfaction he thought a grossly low aspiration.

Burke’s solution lies not in materialism as such, but in the religious sphere:

Another foundation for social principle is Burke’s. “Obey the Divine design”—so one might paraphrase his concept of obedience to a natural order. How do we find the means of dutiful obedience? By a proper regard for prescription and prejudice. The collective wisdom of the species, the filtered experience of mankind, can save us from the anarchy of “rights of man” and the presumption of “reason.”

Most importantly is this thought of Burke’s:  ‘Man’s rights exist only when man obeys God’s law, for right is a child of law.’

A remarkable 20^th-century Californian, Father Seraphim Rose (+1982) of blessed memory, builds on this.  Remarking on the insights of an arch Spanish conservative, Juan Donoso Cortes (1809-53), he writes,

And he is most significant because he clearly saw that this revolution [against Christianity, tradition, etc.—W.G.] is not some kind of an aimless thing; it has definite purpose behind it. And he even said that the revolution is theological. In order to defeat it, you must have a different theology.

He was especially against the great anarchist of his time, Proudhon, whom we’ll talk in the next lecture. Proudhon, we’ll see, is quite profound, more profound than many other revolutionaries. And he [Cortes] quotes even Proudhon, at the very opening of this book. He says, it’s called “How a Great Question of Theology is Always Involved in Every Great Political Question”:

“In his Confessions of a Revolutionist Monsieur Proudhon has written these remarkable words: ‘It is wonderful how we ever stumble on theology in all our political questions!’ There is nothing here to cause surprise except the surprise of Monsieur Proudhon. Theology, inasmuch as it is the science of God, is the ocean which contains and embraces all sciences, as God is the ocean which contains and embraces all things” (Orthodox Survival Course, Lecture 8, p. 121).

This is what pro-life conservatives like Mr. Russo are missing.  We cannot beat progressives at their own game, on their own ground, of expanding rights, of giving away more material goods.  To fight battles in that way is to accept the secular, materialistic, utilitarian ideology (or theology, per Donoso Cortes) of self-interest of the Left.

Winning pro-life electoral victories by stoking the passion of avarice in the peoples of the United States – the end doesn’t justify the means.

There is room, of course, for policy proposals like the ones Mr. Russo advances.  However, to consistently win pro-life political battles, conservatives must completely switch paradigms.  We must join Dr. Kirk and Burke in saying ‘Obey the Divine design.’  And the Divine design for man is not the selfish individualism manifested in the modern obsession with rights, etc., but precisely in its opposite:  self-sacrifice.  Jesus Christ, the God-man, the archetype of perfection for all of humanity, made this abundantly clear in His own self-emptying, in the ‘curtailment of [His] rights:’

3 Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility count others better than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. 5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians 2:3-11).

For men and women, true joy comes through the sacrifice of ourselves for others.  This is found again and again in Christian history and teaching.

In hymns (bolding added):  ‘Come all ye faithful, let us venerate Christ’s holy resurrection, for behold, through the cross joy has come into all the world.’

In the lives of ancient saints:

Saint Irene lived in the XII century and was a beautiful and virtuous daughter. The Emperor Alexios Komnenos noticed her and married her to his son John, who was called Kalioannis because of his many virtues. The virtuous Empress Irene, therefore, spent generously on charitable works. She even went to poor homes by herself in order to give not only money, but also greater aid and comfort: hope in Christ. She also built homes for the aged and left large sums of money for their safety and comfort.

And in the radiant joy and love of modern suffering saints like Elder Porphyrios (+1991).

Mr. Russo is deathly afraid of it, but the only way that pro-life conservatives will have any long-lasting victories is to establish the Christian ethos of self-sacrifice, of voluntary rights restrictions, in the United States.  This is the path to the true enjoyment of life.  Motherhood and fatherhood are themselves emblematic of this (parents sacrificing themselves over and over again, day in and day out, for the good of their children), as is the sacrifice of one’s leisure time to study for the sake of making good grades, athletic training to win a contest, and so on.  Conservatives attempting to build a pro-life culture on individual rights alone, which generates selfish impulses, is self-defeating.  That will, on the contrary, destroy the virtues from which families are created in the first place, and by which they are held together and flourish.

A theocracy isn’t necessary, but conservatives in the U.S. do need Christian statesmen campaigning on something more than materialistic utilitarianism to win some substantial pro-life electoral victories that will endure for generations.