Former Vice President Mike Pence has long signaled a strategy to run to the right of the GOP primary field on abortion and has loudly endorsed a federal ban. Even as abortion continues to be a major electoral loser at the state level for Republicans, Pence is vowing to put his competitors’ feet to the fire on the issue at the first Republican debate later this month.
“My former running mate, the governor of Florida, and others are suggesting that the Supreme Court returned the question of abortion to the states,” Pence said on Friday at the Iowa State Fair. “I truly do believe it’s vitally important that we seize the opportunity at the national level to advance protections for the right to life, and I’ll do so as president,” he added, promising that the issue “will be on the stage in Milwaukee.”
In June, Pence called on his fellow GOP presidential candidates to support a 15-week federal abortion ban. His political organization, Advancing American Freedom, has gone even further, endorsing a six-week federal ban and even a fetal personhood law, which would make practically all abortions illegal.
Though former President Donald Trump appointed the three justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 and consistently describes himself as the “most pro-life president” in U.S. history, he came to believe a federal abortion ban was a political loser after the 2022 midterms, when Republicans turned in a lackluster performance.
In June, he attacked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who signed a six-week abortion ban in his home state in April. “Many people within the pro-life movement feel that that was too harsh” Trump said in an interview with The Messenger.
DeSantis shot back, saying the bill “was the right thing to do.” Yet the Florida governor has also been reluctant to embrace the anti-abortion movement’s most radical proposals on the national stage. In a late July interview with Megyn Kelly, the Florida Governor said he felt abortion was best left up to the states, earning him a harsh rebuke from the influential anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro Life America, which called his comments “unacceptable.”
This internal GOP squabbling signals the difficulty that Republican candidates will face in 2024, as the anti-abortion movement has been resoundingly defeated at the ballot box in the year since Dobbs. The latest blow came last week, when Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected a referendum that would have made it harder to amend the state’s constitution. The vote was widely seen as an attempt by Republicans to make it more difficult to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution, which will be on the ballot in November 2024.
Trump has long suggested that he’ll skip the first debate, citing his gargantuan lead over the primary field. But Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman reported last week that Trump’s deepening legal troubles might propel him onto the stage in Milwaukee on August 23.