Kellyanne Conway, the Trump 2016 campaign manager and senior White House counselor, is urging Republicans in her party to embrace their often extreme anti-abortion positions and run on them in the November election. For some Republicans, those positions include total or near-total abortion bans, a nationwide abortion ban, and in some cases they include supporting homicide charges for women who obtain an abortion, even if an abortion is medically necessary to save the life of the pregnant woman.
Pointing to New York Democrat Tom Suozzi’s major win in Tuesday’s special election to fill the House seat of expelled Republican former U.S. Congressman George Santos, Conway claimed Suozzi had gone against his party on the border, by running on fixing it.
“Suozzi, instead of lying, like every other Democrat seems to be doing these days,” said Conway, a pollster and political consultant, on Fox News Wednesday morning (video below). “What did he do? He said, I better go against my party on the border. And he did it. Paid advertising, mailers, press conferences, public appeals. So he has shown the Democrats how to run on the border.”
“I think Republicans should do the same thing with abortion,” Conway declared. “Instead of being ostriches and pretending with their head in the sand, they should be peacocks and say, ‘Look, this is what it means to be pro-life in 2024, this is what it means to be pro-choice in 2024.’ And instead of hiding, own it, and message it. I think he did a great job with that going against his party. Let’s see how many Democrats follow suit.”
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For many Republican politicians, their position on abortion includes overriding individual state laws and imposing a federal ban on the right to abortion, sometimes including bans on abortion due to rape or incest, and in some cases, even if the life or health of the mother is in danger.
The means in some states young girls have been forced to give birth to their rapist’s child, or leave the state. Even when there are exceptions for life or health, some laws they have passed are ambiguously worded and some doctors have refused to perform possibly-life-saving abortions.
Nikki Haley supports a nationwide abortion ban, saying she would, if elected president, support “anything” that Congress would pass. She has also said she would have signed a six-week ban as governor.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has “voiced support for revisiting Supreme Court decisions that struck down restrictions on the use of contraception, barred bans on gay sex and legalized same sex marriages,” CNN reported last year. “From endorsing hard labor prison sentences for abortion providers to supporting the criminalization of gay sex, his staunchly conservative rhetoric is rooted in an era of ‘biblical morality,’ that he says was washed away with the counterculture in the 1960s.”
Across the nation, Republicans have attempted to pass countless anti-abortion bills since conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Republicans in New Hampshire, for example, attempted a 15-day abortion ban earlier this year. The bill “would also tack on criminal penalties to any health care providers caught performing abortions, categorizing the offense as a class B felony,” The New Republic reported. The legislation was put on hold February 1.
Just last week Republicans in Missouri blocked “an effort to add rape and incest exceptions to Missouri’s near-total abortion ban.” One GOP state lawmaker supported her decision to add any exceptions, saying, “God does not make mistakes. And for some reason he allows that to happen. Bad things happen.”
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Last year, Republicans in Texas, Kentucky, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Arkansas “introduced legislation proposing homicide and other criminal charges for those seeking abortion care,” The Guardian reported.
Watch Conway’s remarks below or at this link.
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