Former President Donald Trump’s shifting rhetoric on abortion has unsettled some conservative faith-based activists, with evangelical Christian leaders especially fretting over the Republican presidential candidate’s recent remarks on Florida’s proposed abortion amendment and allowing federal funding for IVF procedures that some say are tantamount to abortion.
But even amid the backlash, several of Trump’s longterm evangelical supporters are insisting the previous president, who still publicly takes credit for nominating the conservative justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, stays the perfect candidate for his or her cause.
Trump has distancing himself from hardline abortion stances since no less than September 2023, when he riled anti-abortion activists by calling Florida’s six-week abortion ban a “terrible thing and a terrible mistake.” But last month, he called Florida’s current limit on abortion to the primary six weeks of pregnancy “too short” and, when asked a couple of ballot initiative within the state that will enshrine abortion access, said, “I’m going to be voting that we’d like greater than six weeks.”
The comments drew swift blowback from anti-abortion activists corresponding to Jeanne Mancini, head of the March for Life, an annual anti-abortion event in Washington where Trump spoke in 2020. In a pair of posts on X on Aug. 30, Mancini responded to Trump’s remarks without mentioning him by name.
“Any politician that will consider voting affirmatively for such a measure will undoubtedly lose the support of pro-life Americans,” she wrote. “We must not lose sight of the incontrovertible fact that the human rights issue of abortion takes the lives of the unborn and deeply harms women each mentally and physically. The reality is that the tragedy of abortion can’t be reduced to politics alone, much less sacrificed for what’s perceived to be politically expedient.”
Trump’s campaign insisted he didn’t say precisely how he would vote, and the candidate himself eventually clarified to Fox News that he wouldn’t support the ballot initiative. But the back-and-forth got here the identical week that Trump announced plans to federally subsidize in-vitro fertilization, a procedure opposed by some anti-abortion activists since it often involves the disposal of embryos.
In June, an effort to guard IVF access failed within the U.S. Senate after most Republicans, including Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, voted against it. About the identical time, the Southern Baptist Convention, at its annual meeting, voted in support of a measure calling for more government regulation of the method.
Al Mohler, the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who in June called IVF “immoral,” warned Trump in an editorial this week that he risks alienating his anti-abortion base.
“(Trump) must do not forget that he cannot win without strong — very strong — pro-life support,” Mohler wrote in World Magazine, an evangelical Christian publication. “The other side is just not impressed along with his equivocations on the difficulty, whilst his base is endangered by any confusion.”
Lila Rose, head of the influential anti-abortion group Live Action, blasted the Trump campaign on social media on Aug. 29, saying, “Given the present situation, we’ve got two pro-abortion tickets. A Trump win is just not a pro-life win immediately.”
In an interview with Politico Magazine, Rose refused to say whether she would vote for Trump, saying only, “I’m going to see how the following few weeks unfold,” and urging her supporters to place pressure on his campaign.
Trump has suggested his shift on the difficulty is a results of raw politics: Since the 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe and allowed states to make their very own abortion policy, abortion-related ballot initiatives have gone the way in which of abortion rights activists — even in red states corresponding to Kansas and Ohio. Trump blamed the Republican Party’s anti-abortion stance for its middling leads to the 2022 midterm elections.
With 10 more abortion-related ballot initiatives in November — including in swing states like Arizona — the difficulty has the potential to fracture the Republican coalition. White evangelicals, who’ve long heavily supported the GOP and who alone make up 30% of the party in response to a Public Religion Research Institute, are disproportionately against abortion: 72% consider the practice must be illegal in all or most cases, in response to a separate PRRI survey conducted in March.
Nationwide, 64% of Americans told PRRI that abortion must be legal in all or most cases — including 62% of white Catholics and 57% of Hispanic Catholics, despite official opposition from the Catholic Church. When it involves IVF, 70% of Americans say IVF access is thing, in response to an April poll from Pew Research, with majorities of each major religious group saying the identical — including 63% of white evangelicals.
In July, the RNC published a recent platform that omitted the rationale for a federal abortion ban for the primary time in many years, likely reflecting Trump’s misgivings in regards to the political liability of the party’s traditional position.
Abby Johnson, who runs the anti-abortion group And Then There Were None, suggested in an announcement sent to Religion News Service that activists have been pushing Trump and his campaign behind the scenes to vary course.
“President Trump’s comments surrounding life issues have been troubling for a lot of within the pro-life movement,” Johnson said. “That is why lots of us have been working behind the scenes with him and his campaign team, hoping to vary the course he’s on. We have already seen some course correction and we hope to see far more.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence, a conservative Christian, was also critical of Trump and told the National Review this week, “The Trump-Pence administration stood for all times without apology for 4 years. The former President’s use of the language of the Left, pledging that his administration could be ‘great for girls and their reproductive rights’ must be concerning for hundreds of thousands of pro-life Americans.”
But despite the criticism, a few of Trump’s longtime religious supporters proceed to rally around him. The Rev. Franklin Graham, the son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham who has called abortion “a genocide of the unborn,” insisted Trump’s past actions were more vital than his campaign rhetoric.
“I do not just consider a candidate’s words, I have a look at their actions and what they’ve done,” Graham told RNS in an announcement. “Former President Donald Trump has a four-year track record of appointing judges who protect life. While his position on abortion is probably not as absolute as some would hope, it doesn’t change the incontrovertible fact that he has been probably the most pro-life president in my lifetime and is the one pro-life presidential candidate on the ballot this election.”
Ralph Reed, who has spent many years organizing evangelicals as head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said he doesn’t see evangelicals abandoning Trump due to his abortion stances. Saying he was “never concerned” that Trump would support the ballot initiative in Florida, Reed suggested conservative voters will back Trump because the choice — voting for Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee — is solely untenable.
He contrasted Trump’s record on the difficulty with that of Harris, whose campaign has placed her support for abortion rights front and center. Harris has tied abortion access to private freedom — the campaign’s slogan — as has her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who has sung the praises of IVF on the stump while connecting it to his circle of relatives’s fertility struggles (though they’d not, he needed to make clear, turned to IVF but moderately used a less invasive procedure).
Citing Harris’ support for policies corresponding to laws that will restore abortion access nationwide, Reed called her “probably the most radical pro-abortion nominee for president in the trendy political era.” Her positions, he argued, are so “extreme” that she is ultimately “unacceptable to voters of religion.”
“For all these reasons, evangelicals will prove in record numbers in November and vote overwhelmingly for Trump,” Reed predicted.
© Religion News Service
