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Seventy years pro-life activists have called their opponents baby-killers and it did not swerve their opposition's resolve by one inch.
Conservatives, particularly MAGA conservatives, must harden their hearts as such. In the coming months and years, there will be no end to the wailing. They will beg you in the name that all that is decent and humane to give them the one exception and save many lives. The rationalist crowd will come to you with spreadsheets and lives per dollar and give logical arguments to save lives. You will be constantly bombarded with propaganda designed to psyop you to support the return of the old status quo.
Put on your biggest smile and say no. That's your cross to bear. Resist the temptation to give in, and to be seen as 'one of the good ones'. Mercy and compassion are the luxuries of the victor, and you have not won yet. This is but the first of many battles in a long war. If your opponents say that your proposals will cost millions of lives, say to them: "Billions." And do what you intended to do, and do it so throughly and completely that it does not have to be done again. Embrace the virtue of Lycurgus and destroy what you must to save what you can.
The crux of the abortion debate is the moral status of the fetus, and the moral permissibility of ending life support to the fetus. It's not that activism did not swerve the opposition's resolve - the opposition has a fundamental disagreement of fact with the pro-life activists.
The situation is more similar to animal rights activism (in that it is a debate over the moral status of a living being not everyone considers morally important/relevant) rather than the foreign aid debate (where almost nobody assigns literally zero moral value to foreigners, even if they assign less moral value to them than their fellow countrymen.)
It's fine on the object level if an election result means a federal program is gutted, even one that a lot of people like and which does a lot of good in the world. Even so, I think it would be better to advance the principled reasons for stopping such a program, instead of reveling in how much you're owning the libs or whatever.
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