Former president Trump over the weekend accused pro-life groups of being a political liability that exist to make money.
Taking credit for the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade by way of his appointing multiple conservative justices, Trump bragged that he gave “tremendous negotiating power to the pro-life movement.”
“The pro-life was fighting it,” he said in an interview with The National Pulse. “We have these groups fighting this thing for so many decades. But it’s exactly 52 years as a date in the not too distant future. And that’s a long time. Everybody’s raising money all the time, everybody, I don’t know, maybe it’s some kind of a business.”
Since the Dobbs decision, many Republican-controlled states have implemented pro-life laws limiting abortion at various points of pregnancy. Trump warned that passing these restrictions could cause Republicans to lose elections.
“We don’t want to blow it,” he said. “We also bring it back to the states, which everybody, all legal scholars, both sides wanted it brought back to the states. We’re in a tremendous position to negotiate something very good right now. And we’ll see what that is.”
Trump took aim at Florida governor Ron DeSantis, currently his top rival in the 2024 GOP primary race, for signing a law in Florida that banned abortion after six weeks of gestation, claiming that his polling in the GOP primary plummeted as a result. The Florida law also increased state funding for the Pregnancy Care Network, which partners with crisis-pregnancy centers throughout the state to provide care for pregnant women, from $4 million to $25 million. Two early primary states, Iowa and South Carolina, enacted similar heartbeat bills.
“We have to win elections,” he said. “I can take a view, I can tell you my view is a strong view. But we have to win elections. You know, you can say, oh, I think Ron [DeSantis] … But he did the six week thing. If you notice his numbers started going down before that. But they started to really crash when he did that. Because most people, that’s not acceptable to. You have to win elections.”
In a May interview with The Messenger, Trump also said that many view Florida’s heartbeat bill as “too harsh.”
“A lot of people don’t even know if [Governor Ron DeSantis] knew what he was doing” when he signed the bill, Trump said.
Since the GOP’s underperformance in the 2022 midterms, Trump has attempted to blame the pro-life movement for the failure.
“It was the ‘abortion issue,’ poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother, that lost large numbers of Voters,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social earlier this year. However, the Republican governors of Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas all won reelection by wide margins after signing pro-life laws.
Earlier this month, Trump said during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press that members of his own party have spoken “very inarticulately” about abortion, insisting that he will mediate between Republicans and Democrats on the issue.
“We’re going to agree to a number of weeks or months or however you want to define it,” Trump said. “And both sides are going to come together and both sides — both sides, and this is a big statement — both sides will come together. And for the first time in 52 years, you’ll have an issue that we can put behind us.”