Pro-Lifers Breathe Sigh of Relief after Trump’s Amendment 4 Announcement — but Tensions Remain High

A pro-life community on edge breathed a sigh of relief last week when former president Donald Trump affirmed that he will not support a Florida ballot initiative in November that would drastically expand abortion access in the state, despite his opposition to the state’s six-week ban on abortion.

Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins tells NR that Trump’s announcement is evidence that pro-life pressure does work — while other Florida pro-lifers said they never had any doubt that the former president would come out against the radical amendment in his home state.

Still, tensions remain between the pro-life movement and a Republican presidential nominee who has repeatedly spoken out against Florida’s heartbeat law in recent months, saying the six-week ban is too strict.

So Trump’s announcement came as especially welcome news to pro-life advocates on the ground in the Sunshine State who are leading the charge to defeat this constitutional amendment, which voters will consider this fall after the state’s highest court handed down a pair of rulings in April to uphold Florida’s 15-week abortion ban and allow a six-week ban to go into effect within 30 days.

The amendment, which must reach a 60 percent threshold to pass, would allow unrestricted abortion access in the state up until fetal viability “when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider,” and would eliminate parental-consent laws for minors seeking abortions. 

“I was thrilled to see” Trump come out against Amendment 4, says John Stemberger, a senior counsel to Liberty Counsel who is in charge of the ground game for Vote No on 4, a group that is leading opposition to the ballot initiative this fall. “It’s going to be a great help to us in Florida and beyond.”

But in other cases, Trump is fighting against, not with, the pro-life movement.

Hawkins says pro-life advocates know they’re going to “have to do battle” with a hypothetical Trump administration, saying that the former president has gone beyond the “leave-it-to-the-states” approach he adopted in the wake of the Dobbs decision toward an outright pro-choice stance in recent weeks. (He vowed on Truth Social last week that his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.”)  

“It’s very clear to us that we have to keep the pressure on the president. I think he’s risking a lot by adopting this pro-choice position,” she said. “He’s risking his election. Certainly he’s risking the deflation of the pro-life base, that third leg of the stool that President Reagan so brilliantly articulated.”

Hawkins’s concerns have already played out to some degree: pro-life activist Lila Rose, who runs Live Action and has a sizeable social-media following, is urging her followers not to support the former president unless he moves back to the right on the issue of abortion. She recently told Politico that if she were forced to vote now, she would write in a candidate other than Trump or Harris.

Yet Hawkins and other pro-life advocates acknowledge that they still feel comfortable supporting the former president because the alternative — a Kamala Harris and Tim Walz administration — would be much worse for the movement. 

“I would rather see us focus on policy over politics, and I feel like the Democratic ticket would love nothing more than to make abortion the issue and see us fighting against one another instead of taking them on time and time again for the extremism and what they continue to do,” said Melissa Ohden, who is the founder and CEO of the Abortion Survivors Network and a member of the Keep Florida Pro-Life Initiative.

On the ground in Florida, Vote No on 4 organizers are making church outreach a key part of their targeted approach to defeat the amendment. “We’re just trying to simplify by helping mainstream America see that this is not your mother’s pro-life bill,” added Stemberger. He told NR this week that the group just completed six pastor conferences in five days and hired six field directors to help with the ground game, which includes door-knocking, calling, printing campaign materials, and church-canvassing to get their message out.

But they face challenges on the messaging front just a few months after the state’s highest court allowed Governor Ron DeSantis’s six-week ban to go into effect. To defeat Amendment 4 this fall, pro-life advocates are hoping to convince Florida voters that the terms “patient’s health” and “healthcare provider” are definitionally vague, will pave the way for taxpayer funding of abortions in the state, and will undermine parental consent for minor abortions by preserving only parental “notification” laws in the state.

“It’s only 39 words. It’s very easy to see that it allows for that huge loophole of abortion up to birth,” says former state senator Kelli Stargel, who, while in office last year, sponsored the state’s 15-week limit on abortion. “If you wanted to say ‘healthcare practitioner,’ at least that’s defined within our laws. ‘Healthcare provider’ is not.”

This is one of the reasons anti-abortion advocates should be more proactive in advancing their own ballot initiatives moving forward, says Jay Shepard, a pro-life advocate and former vice chair of the Republican National Committee. 

“The left always wins with referendums because they write them in the way that they can promote it,” Shepard added. “We need to have referendums out there that roll back the extremism on the left, rather than being in the defensive position all the time on referendums, because the way a referendum is written really leads to how it’s going to be voted on.”

Around NR

• When it comes to “price-gouging,” Kamala Harris is on an island, writes Noah Rothman, who rounds up criticisms from various economists on the vice president’s latest economic proposal. One point they make is that there is very little evidence that price instability is the result of opportunistic companies’ gouging; another is that increased regulation stands to actually raise prices for consumers. Nevertheless,

Team Harris could not care less. The campaign is forging ahead with the claim that all that stands between American consumers and the pre-pandemic prices they once enjoyed is “corporate greed” and that Harris will put an end to that scourge after she is installed in the White House.

• While noting that Kamala Harris is “extremely likely” to win Minnesota in November, Jim Geraghty remarks that it is still “a bit hilarious” that Harris added governor Tim Walz to the ticket and her lead was cut in half:

Tim Walz: Minnesota voter repellent. If you want to know what kind of leader Walz would be as vice president, consult the voters who know him best!

• A theoretical President Harris would be a transformational left-winger, Rich Lowry predicts:

We’ve all seen the movie before — a Democrat runs on a centrist or centrist-sounding platform, then governs to the left as soon as he assumes office. Bill Clinton, who cut his political teeth in cultural conservative Arkansas, did it. So did Barack Obama, who swathed his program in gauzy generalities. So, of course, did Joe Biden, who was supposed to be a unifier above all else. The recent history suggests that it is impossible for a Democrat not to run this play, or, put another way, it’s the only play they’ve got.

• Ryan Mills profiles Minnesota’s Royce White, who has charted a remarkable course from a leader of the George Floyd protests to Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate:

Four years earlier, as the Twin Cities were burning during the 2020 George Floyd riots, the St. Paul native led thousands of protesters on a march down Interstate 35, eventually taking over the Hennepin bridge. He has since rebranded himself as a far-right populist, writing in a lengthy 2022 Substack that he’d left the Democratic “plantation!”

• While Harris and her supporters want voters to know that the vice president rose up the political ranks from her start as a hard-nosed prosecutor, Noah Rothman argues that her tough-on-crime story is nothing like her actual record: 

Upon her ascension to the national political scene, Harris made a point of endorsing every faddish de-carceral policy proposal that popped into progressives’ heads.

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