What does it say about a government—and a political movement—that claims to value the unborn, but once you are born, that concern evaporates?

When life upon birth becomes expendable, subject to force, punishment, neglect, and death so long as it serves "law and order," "national security," or political convenience—when you can be shot by the police state, executed by the police state, starved, surveilled, displaced, raided, abused, or discarded by the police state—and this is treated not as a moral failure but as policy and doctrine, then you're not dealing with a government that is truly pro-life.

If the measure of a society's morality is how it treats its most vulnerable—the living, breathing, conscious—then a worldview that sanctifies life before birth but abandons it afterward is morally hollow.

Consider that on January 24, 2026—one day after the Trump administration paid lip service to the annual March for Life in Washington, DC—37-year-old Minneapolis resident Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive care nurse who worked at a Veterans Affairs hospital, was shot and killed by an ICE agent during a federal immigration enforcement operation that exemplified the militarized, unaccountable force that has come to characterize ICE's tactics.

Pretti's death has sparked widespread protests, legal challenges, and national outrage, especially as videos and eyewitness accounts appear to contradict official claims about how the encounter unfolded.

The Pretti shooting did not occur in a vacuum.

It was the second federal agent-involved shooting of an American citizen in Minneapolis in January alone, part of the Trump Administration's Operation Metro Surge that brought more than 3,000 federal agents into the city and ignited protests nationwide.

Yet the problem is not merely who occupies the Oval Office. It is a bipartisan willingness to trade constitutional restraint for raw power—and to accept human casualties as the price of governance.

While President Trump has been particularly vocal about his willingness to act on his lack of respect for the lives of those he perceives as enemies, the erosion of respect for life all along the spectrum has accelerated under presidents of both parties, through expanded executive power, militarized enforcement, surveillance, detention, and lethal force in the name of safety, efficiency, or order.

When the government claims the power to decide whose life has value and whose does not—who may live and who may die in the name of "security," "order," or "efficiency"—it is no longer governing. It is playing god.

A government that acts as if freedoms—and life, in turn—are privileges granted by the state has abandoned the foundational principle that rights are inherent and inalienable.

We see it in a system that celebrates the sanctity of life before birth while expanding the machinery of death after birth—through executions carried out in the name of justice, militarized policing carried out in the name of order, indefinite detention carried out in the name of security, shoot-first enforcement regimes that treat civilians as threats rather than human beings, and endless wars driven by greed, profit and ego.