Posted on 07/11/2024 5:54:17 PM PDT by Morgana
The Republican National Committee adopted a softened party platform on abortion that aligns with President Donald Trump’s position that the issue should be left to the states and the GOP should not pursue a national abortion ban.
The 2024 Republican convention platform committee voted 84 to 18 on Monday in favor of the proposed platform during a closed-door session. The proposed party platform, backed by Trump, softened the GOP’s language on abortion and same-sex marriage.
According to a copy of the document obtained by The Washington Post, the platform proposal states: "After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the states and to a vote of the people.” While the document clarifies that the GOP will oppose late-term abortion, the party will also advocate for policies that “advance prenatal care, access to birth control, and IVF (fertility treatments).”
The Republican Party’s 2024 platform has drawn criticism from some pro-life leaders and organizations.
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said in a statement on Monday that while the 2024 platform includes campaign priorities, it is not “a declaration of enduring principles for a political party.” Perkins, a member of the RNC Platform Committee from Louisiana, claimed that delegates were not given enough time to review the platform.
"Delegates were only given a few minutes of discussion before 'debate' was ended and a vote was taken,” the FRC president said. “Ironically, the document calls for a vigorous defense of free speech and the end of government censorship. Deprived of the opportunity to discuss amendments to the 'draft' platform document, we have submitted a minority report to supplement that campaign's platform.”
"The submission of a minority report is further evidence that the pro-life movement will continue to advance pro-life principles and policies at every level of government,” Perkins added. "The right to life transcends other political debates and the interests of any and all political parties and candidates. It is truly the right without which no other right has any meaning.”
Live Action Founder and President Lila Rose released a statement Monday that denounced abortion as “the intentional destruction of an innocent human life.” The pro-life leader called it a “devastating indictment” of our national values when neither political party supports federal protections for preborn children “targeted for death by the abortion industry.”
Rose cited the North Star, a plan supported by various pro-life groups that calls for equal protection for all under the 14th Amendment. The Live Action founder also emphasized that the 2024 platform would be the first time in decades the GOP platform did not include language calling for national abortion restrictions.
“While the new language is correct that the ‘14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied life or liberty without due process,’ it is wrong when it says that the ‘power’ to decide life or death ‘has been given to the states and to a vote of the people,’” Rose added. “When states discriminate against preborn children by denying the equal protection of their laws against homicide, they act unconstitutionally.”
As Trump campaigns on the promise that he will not sign a national abortion ban, several prominent Republican lawmakers appear to have also adopted a more subtle stance on abortion.
Here are three Republicans who have adopted a softer position on abortion:
Donald Trump
Former President Donald Trump ran on a platform in 2016 and 2020 that called for a constitutional amendment to protect preborn children and a national abortion ban that allowed for some exceptions at 20 weeks of pregnancy.
While the former president has taken credit for appointing three U.S. Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, Trump has stated several times during the 2024 race that he believes the abortion issue should be left to the states. Trump has also criticized some Republicans for taking what he views as a strict stance against abortion, having referred to Florida’s six-week abortion ban that Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law as “harsh.”
During the CNN presidential debate earlier this month, Trump expressed support for the Supreme Court’s recent rejection of a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Food & Drug Administration's approval of abortion pills. The 2024 presidential hopeful also clarified his position on abortion, saying that it’s up for the states to decide and that he supports exceptions in cases of rape, incest, or during a medical emergency to prioritize a mother's life.
The former president still condemned the Democratic Party’s position on abortion as “radical,” however. Trump said that Democrats support abortion "in the eighth month and ninth month and even after birth.”
“He’s willing to, as we say, rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby,” Trump said about Biden. “Nobody wants that to happen, Democrat or Republican. Nobody wants it to happen.”
JD Vance
Ohio Senator and vice presidential hopeful J.D. Vance said during a Sunday interview with NBC’s "Meet the Press" that he agreed with Donald Trump about the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision regarding the abortion pill.
“On the question of the abortion pill, the Supreme Court made a decision in saying that the American people should have access to that medication. Donald Trump has supported that opinion; I support that opinion,” Vance said.
The Republican lawmaker’s comments about the abortion pill were in response to a question from "Meet the Press" host Kristen Welker about The Heritage Foundation’s Project 25. The think-tank’s initiative is intended to serve as a guide for a conservative administration. The Trump campaign said Friday that the presumptive Republican nominee for president has nothing to do with Project 25.
Project 25’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise states, “Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world.” The document asserts that due to the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, the Food and Drug Administration is ethically and legally obliged to revisit and withdraw its initial approval.”
“The Heritage Foundation does a lot of good work. It does a lot of things that I disagree with, a lot of things that I agree with,” Vance said during the Sunday interview. “I guarantee there are things that Trump likes and dislikes about that 900-page document. But he is the person who will determine the agenda into the next administration.”
In 2021, Vance addressed Texas’ ban on abortions after a baby’s heartbeat becomes detectable, usually at six weeks gestation, during an interview with Spectrum News. The Ohio senator asserted that the Democrat Party’s view that preborn children are not entitled to legal protections is “wrong.”
When asked if he supports exceptions in cases of rape or incest, Vance said, “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” and questioned whether people want to live in a society that looks at preborn babies as “inconveniences to be discarded.”
“My view on this has been very clear, and I think the question betrays a certain presumption that is wrong,” he said. “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term” but “whether a child should be allowed to live even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to society.”
“We want women to have opportunities, we want women to have choices,” he continued, “but above all, we want women and young boys in the womb to have the right to life.”
Vance began to call on Republicans to take a different approach to abortion after Ohio approved a ballot measure in November 2023 to amend the state's constitution and make abortion a constitutional right. Last December, Vance told CNN that the Republican Party needs to accept that people do not want “blanket abortion bans.”
“They just don’t. I say this as a person who wants to protect as many unborn babies as possible,” Vance said. “We have to provide exceptions for the life of the mother, for rape, and so forth. That is just a basic necessity.”
Marco Rubio
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, another potential vice presidential pick for former President Donald Trump, appeared to express support for removing the plan to pass a national abortion ban from the GOP’s party platform. Rubio asserted that it’s up to voters to decide how they want to restrict abortion or whether they want to restrict it at all.
“Our platform has to reflect our nominee, and our nominee’s position happens to be one grounded in reality,” Rubio said during a Sunday interview with CNN’s Dana Bash.
In response to a question about whether he's concerned that pro-life donors and voters would stop supporting Trump, Rubio replied, “Not really.”
“Because I don’t think that there’s much of an option here. It looks like no matter who the Democrats nominate — it looks like maybe [Vice President] Kamala Harris would be the most liberal presidential candidate in American history or a continuation of whoever’s running the White House now with [President] Joe Biden as its figurehead — the issue is that they are going to be radical,” Rubio said.
The Republican lawmaker asserted that Trump is the only pro-life candidate in the 2024 presidential race, adding that Republicans couldn’t pass a federal abortion law now even if they wanted to.
Rubio stated that the Supreme Court, in overturning Roe v. Wade, decided that abortion is a “political issue,” and now voters can “decide via the people they voted for or voted against at the state level, and that’s the reality.”
The battle has been won. The Democrats’ blessed sacrament has been overturned.
The “Republicans” who were never against abortion anyway can potificate all they like.
False, the battle has not been won. Republicans are in retreat and acting like shameful cowards on human rights.
Let them have their abortions. Just be sure they perforate the uterus so they become sterile. While they are getting the abortion be sure to scream the F word constantly and spit on them as they leave or twerk at them as they leave-THAT is what they do to the pro lifers. I am sick of them screaming THEIR opinion at me. Sterilize them all.
Turning it over to the states was ABSOLUTELY AND INDISPUTABLY the correct course for the Republic.
It was the Constitutional course.
And that means some states are going to make it legal, and some illegal.
For those concerned about the states that have it legal, they should go there and convince the citizens of those states to make it illegal.
Go on, tell us what you REALLY feel...
it’s not a federal issue.
the battle is within each state, as it should be.
thinking it’s a federal issue is taking the bait of those that just want the electorate divided, and distracted from the all the evil so many of our “leaders” are up to.
RvW has been overturned, the issue is back in the hands of the State. That’s where it always should have been.
Pro-Life starts in the home with raising your children to respect all life. It is not an issue for the Feds to involved in.
A reasonable position that would look great on a bumper sticker next to the wwjd one.
Xactly. Move to Cali and sign ballot initiatives petitions to ban abortions in the state constitution. You can also practice pissing into typhoons as well.
The mantra of Republican senators: “This is not the hill to die on.”
All hail the new liberal Republican party.
Political oppurtunism in the face of the destruction of human life. Gotta love it.
This just shows the GOP is just worthless at this point.
They’re basically assistant demonrats at this point.
Trump is Biden Lite.
We need to remember that, in the war between good and evil, there is no room for conscientious objectors. We need to be determined to be on the front line in the battle, not hidden away somewhere in the bleachers. Each one of us needs to muster the courage to take a stand. Each one us needs to have chosen in our heart a hill that, if necessary, we are willing to die on.
I decided long ago, in the slippery slope of our increasingly immoral culture, that the homosexual movement is my hill to die on. For some, abortion is that hill. For others, not so. The problem is that, for many in our often weak-kneed cowardly Party, they have no hill whatsoever that they are willing to die on. They are cowards without a moral compass riding a handbasket down the slippery slope all the way to the cesspool at the bottom. When they eventually reach bottom and wade hip deep in the cesspool there, they will likely say that it doesn’t actually smell so bad.
If you have any courage left, if you have any morality left, choose a hill that you are willing to die on, and refuse to move. Otherwise you will eventually decide that the cesspool at the bottom smells just fine.
I believe the state has an interest in protecting human beings from murder regardless of age.
If there are laws against murder against two year olds and twenty year olds why not they unborn. They are just as human.
Should innocent human beings not have legal protection from murder?
Yeah ok, Trump is an assistant Democrat. Stupid.
No, Biden lifht is all the globalists we have had running in the GOP.
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