The war against women's rights heats up
Trump says he’ll work 'side by side' with group that wants abortion 'eradicated'
During two-minute recorded remarks played at The Danbury Institute’s inaugural Life & Liberty Forum in Indianapolis, Trump avoided using the word “abortion,” but said he hopes to protect “innocent life” if reelected in November.
“We have to defend religious liberty, free speech, innocent life, and the heritage and tradition that built America into the greatest nation in the history of the world,” Trump said. “But now we are, as you know, a declining nation.”
Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, said that he hopes to work alongside the institute to defend those values.
“These are going to be your years because you’re going to make a comeback like just about no other group,” Trump said. “I know what’s happening. I know where you’re coming from and where you’re going. And I’ll be with you side by side.”
Trump also called on The Danbury Institute and church members to vote for him during the November presidential election, saying that President Joe Biden and Democrats are “against religion.”
Biden-Harris 2024 spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a written statement released before Trump’s message was played that a second term for him “is sure to bring more extreme abortion bans with no exceptions, women punished for seeking the care they need, and doctors criminalized for providing care.”
“Women can and will stop him by reelecting President Biden and Vice President Harris this November,” Chitika wrote.
Abortion position
The Danbury Institute writes on its website that it opposes abortion from “the moment of conception, meaning that each pre-born baby would be treated with the same protection under the law as born people.”
“The intentional, pre-meditated killing of a pre-born child should be addressed with laws already in place concerning homicide,” its website states. “We also support bolstering the foster care system and encouraging Christian adoption and are working with churches around the country to help them become equipped to care for children in need of loving families.”
Another section of the Danbury Institute’s website states the organization believes, “the greatest atrocity facing our generation today is the practice of abortion—child sacrifice on the altar of self.”
“Abortion must be ended,” the website states. “We will not rest until it is eradicated entirely.”
The website doesn’t mention if the organization supports exceptions in cases of rape, incest or the woman’s life, nor does it say if women who receive abortions should be protected from criminal prosecution. The institute did not return a request from States Newsroom seeking to clarify if it supports any or all of those three exceptions.
The institute writes on its website that it “does not endorse any candidate for public office nor participate in political campaign activities. Contributions to The Danbury Institute are not used for political campaigning and are conducted in accordance with IRS regulations for nonprofit organizations.”
Florida minister takes issue with abortion letter
Tom Ascol, president of Founders Ministries in Florida, spoke on a panel discussion about the “Sanctity of Life” at Monday’s event, during which he said “abortion is the greatest evil of this nation in our day.”
Ascol also appeared frustrated with a public letter released by dozens of anti-abortion organizations in May 2022, arguing that no laws should criminalize women who have abortions. He took particular exception to the acting president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission signing his name to the document.
“It grieves me that when there was legislation before the Louisiana legislature that had a real opportunity to be passed, because there were lawmakers that were willing to go forward … that 75 pro-life organizations penned an open letter, including the leader of our Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission Brent Leatherwood, who attached his name to that letter, saying, ‘We do not think that any legislature should criminalize abortion to the degree that those who offer their bodies up to be given over to abortion would be held liable,’” Ascol said during the conference.
That letter was released the same day in 2022 that state lawmakers in Louisiana were debating House Bill 813, which had been on track to criminalize women who receive abortions in addition to the doctors who provide them. Prosecutors would have been able to charge the women with murder.
Louisiana lawmakers instead opted to rework the language of the original bill to replace it with another anti-abortion measure that didn’t include criminal penalties for women who receive abortions.
Ascol said he believed the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission must say publicly if “the goal (is) the abolition of abortion. And if it is and they’re sincere, then okay, let’s work together.”
“If we can do that, I think we can have some opportunity for coalition building,” Ascol said. “If we get more of these open letters by so-called pro-life organizations helping to spike legitimate legislation, then I think we’re going to continue to see the fragmentation and understandably so.”
National Right to Life, Susan B. Anthony List and Americans United for Life were among the organizations that signed the May 2022 letter.
Trump and abortion, contraception
Trump’s comments to The Danbury Institute on Monday didn’t clear up the confusion stemming from his comments to news organizations during the past few months.
Trump said during an interview with TIME Magazine published in April that his campaign would be releasing a policy in the weeks that followed on access to medication abortion, a two-drug regimen approved for up to 10 weeks gestation.
“Well, I have an opinion on that, but I’m not going to explain,” Trump said, according to the transcript of the interview. “I’m not gonna say it yet. But I have pretty strong views on that. And I’ll be releasing it probably over the next week.”
That policy had not been released as of Monday.
Medication abortion, which include mifepristone and misoprostol, makes up about 63% of pregnancy terminations within the United States, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute.
U.S. Supreme Court justices heard oral arguments in a case about mifepristone’s use in late March and are expected to publish their ruling before the Fourth of July.
During an interview with a Pittsburgh TV news station in May, Trump hinted that he might be open to states limiting or banning access to contraception, though he walked back his remarks the same day in a social media post.
“We’re looking at that and I’m going to have a policy on that very shortly and I think it’s something that you’ll find interesting,” Trump said on KDKA after being asked if he could support any restrictions on a person’s right to contraception. “It’s another issue that’s very interesting. But you will find it very smart. I think it’s a smart decision, but we’ll be releasing it very soon.”
Southern Baptists are poised to vote at their annual meeting Tuesday and Wednesday on whether to crack down on women in pastoral leadership and whether to condemn the use of in vitro fertilization, setting up a referendum on the role of women in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination and in American society.
With almost 13 million church members across the United States, the Southern Baptist Convention has long been a bellwether for American evangelicalism. Its reliably conservative membership makes it a powerful political force, and its debates have attracted widespread interest from outside pundits and politicians this year. The denomination has experienced the same turmoil over politics and priorities that has divided the conservative movement more broadly in the wake of the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump as president.
“I hope every single person in this room is voting not only in November but is voting tomorrow because of what is at stake in the Southern Baptist Convention,” Ryan Helfenbein, the executive director of a think tank at Liberty University, told attendees at a lunch on Monday in Indianapolis near where the annual meeting will take place.
Mr. Trump recorded a brief message for the “very respected people” gathered at the lunch, which was hosted by the Danbury Institute, a new conservative Christian advocacy group with Southern Baptist ties.
“You just can’t vote Democrat,” Mr. Trump said in the video message, which some attendees had waited two hours to hear. “They’re against religion, they’re against your religion in particular.” He assured them that under a second Trump presidency, “you’re going to make a comeback like just about no other group.”
The group is expected to vote on Wednesday on whether to amend its constitution to mandate that Southern Baptist churches must have “only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture.” The group’s statement of faith already forbids female pastors, and in recent years messengers have ousted several churches over the issue, including Saddleback Church in California, which had been one of its largest and most prominent congregations. The amendment would strengthen enforcement and remove the ability of individual Baptist churches to make their own leadership decisions, a defining feature of Baptist life.
Messengers are also poised to vote on whether to oppose in vitro fertilization, as anti-abortion activists seek to build on their gains after the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. The resolution, put forth by an ethicist and the president of a Southern Baptist seminary, calls for Baptists to “reaffirm the unconditional value and right to life of every human being, including those in an embryonic stage, and to only utilize reproductive technologies consistent with that affirmation.”
It will be the first time the denomination has asked its members to confront the issue in this form. A vast majority of delegates oppose abortion, but fertility treatments are widely used by evangelicals. Although in vitro fertilization often results in the destruction of unused embryos, many Southern Baptists see fertility treatments as fundamentally different from abortion because the goal is to create new life. Some pastors expressed concerns about the prospect of returning to their home churches and reporting that they voted to condemn a process that created their congregants’ children and grandchildren.
