Former Vice President Mike Pence on Friday challenged the entire 2024 Republican presidential field to support a national abortion ban at 15 weeks, demanding that the party go farther than its primary front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump, has so far been willing to go.
“The cause of life is the calling of our time, and we must not rest and must not relent until we restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law in every state,” Mr. Pence said on Friday in a speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference, a major evangelical gathering in Washington D.C. He added, “Every Republican candidate for president should support a ban on abortion before 15 weeks as a minimum nationwide standard.”
That is a line that Mr. Trump has so far resisted embracing even as he has taken credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade a year ago.
The former president’s rivals, including Mr. Pence and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, see abortion as providing a political opening on Mr. Trump’s right flank and a chance to appeal to key evangelical voters.
Mr. DeSantis recently signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida that Mr. Trump said some in the anti-abortion movement considered “too harsh.” Both Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Pence have seized on that phrase to criticize the former president.
In a sign of the unquestioned sway that Christian conservatives are expected to have in the party’s primaries, the Faith and Freedom Coalition gathering is the first occasion to draw the top candidates for the Republican nomination to the same event. Evangelicals are an especially large voting bloc in two of the early voting states, Iowa and South Carolina.
Seven Republican candidates are set to address the gathering in the windowless ballroom of the Washington Hilton on Friday, including Mr. DeSantis. Mr. Trump will headline an evening gala on Saturday. The two-day gathering coincides with the first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.
“Thank God almighty for the Dobbs decision,” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, another Republican presidential candidate, said on Friday.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly avoided taking a clear stance on whether he would support a national abortion ban that would curb access to abortion even in Democratic-controlled states. In his CNN town hall earlier this year, Mr. Trump said he would strike some type of undefined deal on abortion if he was returned to the White House. “What I’ll do is negotiate so people are happy,” Mr. Trump said at one point. “Make a deal that’s going to be good,” he said at another.
Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, told reporters after his own speech on Friday that a 15-week ban was a “consensus position.”
“The deal ought to be 15 weeks,” Mr. Hawley said. “There, made it easy.”
Mr. Pence received a polite reception in the familiar crowd, but there was notably louder applause for his statement that Mr. Biden must never been re-elected than his own declaration that he was running for president. And the applause was even louder when he vowed, “We will end the gender ideology that is running rampant in our schools,” as transgender politics have emerged as a leading motivator on the right.
“God is real, unborn life is life, there are two genders,” Vivek Ramaswamy, another Republican candidate for president, said in his speech on Friday.
The uphill battle for Mr. Trump’s rivals, however, was apparent throughout.
Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, was booed by the crowd as he criticized Mr. Trump and the former president’s penchant for blaming aides for his own shortcomings. “That is not leadership, everybody,” he said, “That is a failure of leadership.”
The crowd hissed, with some shouting “We love Trump!”
“You can love him all you want, but I can tell you, doing that kind of thing makes our country smaller,” Mr. Christie retorted.
Earlier, when Mark Robinson, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina who is running for governor, made a surprise endorsement onstage of Mr. Trump, he was greeted by a deafening ovation as loud or louder than any that Mr. Trump’s rivals had received.
“This nation is at war,” Mr. Robinson said. “We need a warrior.”
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