Former Vice President Mike Pence revived his call for a nationwide abortion ban on Monday — the two-year anniversary of the landmark Dobbs decision — taking an implicit shot at former President Donald Trump in the process.
In an op-ed in the conservative magazine National Review, Pence wrote that leaving abortion up to the states, which is Trump’s stated policy, is “to tolerate the height of injustice.”
“We must work to advance the sanctity of life at every level, state and federal, though some in my party may disagree,” Pence wrote. “There is no reason for conservatives to abandon the fight for life at the federal level and focus exclusively on the states. We can and should do both.”
It is the former vice president’s latest public rebuke of his one-time boss, who he does not mention by name in the piece. The divide between the two illustrates the difficulty the Republican Party has had talking about abortion rights since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, which Pence called a “historic victory 50 years in the making.”
Pence pushed for a nationwide ban on the medical procedure at 15 weeks of gestation when he was making a bid for the White House. Trump, however, said abortion should be left to the states in a bid to avoid alienating swing voters.
Pence declined to endorse the former president earlier this year, and a month later called Trump’s abortion stance a “slap in the face.” Two days later, Trump responded on Truth Social that Pence “never felt I would be able to kill Roe v Wade” and that his former vice president “has been getting very bad advice,” mocking his presidential polling numbers.
“We have also achieved what the pro-life movement fought to get for 49 years, and we’ve gotten abortion out of the federal government and back to the states, the way everybody and all legal scholars always said it should be,” Trump told a crowd of conservative Christians on Saturday.
Trump also said he supports access to in vitro fertilization after the Alabama Supreme Court imperiled access to the procedure in the state earlier this year. Pence said in the past that he supports fertility treatments, citing his and his wife’s struggles with infertility. But when the Alabama decision came down, Pence, along with John Mize, CEO of Americans United for Life, said the Alabama Supreme Court made the “morally right” decision.
Pence has long been against abortion. When he was a representative in the House, Pence introduced legislation for three legislative sessions in a row that would have prevented any entity that provides abortion from receiving funds through Title X.
“We took one crucial step closer to being a more compassionate nation the day Roe was wiped away,” Pence wrote in the National Review op-ed. “Now the question facing the conservative movement, and our nation as a whole, is where we go from here.”
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