President Donald Trump bragged on Friday that his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights” — a statement that should alarm pro-life Republicans, Vice President Mike Pence said.
“The Trump-Pence administration stood for life without apology for four years,” Pence told National Review. “The former President’s use of the language of the Left, pledging that his administration would be ‘great for women and their reproductive rights’ should be concerning for millions of pro-life Americans.”
“Republicans should embrace the language of life, not the language of those who support abortion on demand. The pro-life movement must stand with the vulnerable, the mothers and the babies. We must never accept retreat on the fight for life,” he added.
Reproductive rights is a term broadly interpreted to mean “the need to recognize health and reproductive health as human rights issues impacted by social, political, cultural and economic factors,” according to the National Institutes of Health, and is frequently used by pro-abortion activists to describe a woman’s supposed “right” to acquire an abortion. Trump’s use of the phrase comes just weeks after the Republican Party platform cut, for the first time in decades, mention from its document that an unborn child retains a “fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed.”
Pence was one of the only Republicans to loudly condemn the party’s shift in rhetoric when the platform was released. The updated platform was a “profound disappointment to the millions of pro-life Republicans that have always looked to the Republican Party to stand for life,” Pence said at the time.
“Unfortunately, this platform is part of a broader retreat in our party, trying to remain vague for political expedience,” he added. “But history shows that those who stand without apology for life and make their case to the American people are rewarded at the ballot box. But beyond the politics of the issue is the immorality of ending an unborn human life. We must never lose the moral clarity to say that abortion is wrong. The GOP platform may be retreating, but we in the pro-life movement never will.”
Trump has said that the issue of abortion should be left squarely up to the states, and in April, confirmed that he supports exceptions for rape, incest, and to protect a mother’s life. This week, Trump said that he would not ban mail-delivery of abortion pills, and that the “federal government should have nothing to do with this issue” — a position not held by many pro-life Republicans.
“It is not a pro-life position, it’s not an acceptable position, and it does not provide the contrast on this issue to the degree that we have had in the past between him and Kamala Harris,” the President of the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins, said. “What President Trump is doing is suppressing his own support.”