Mike Pence had a message: always vote against abortion rights – even if, he suggested, that means voting for Donald Trump.
“That’s why we have primaries. We sort ’em out at every level. But after the primary’s over, you vote pro-life,” the former Republican vice-president to Trump told a downtown Washington DC ballroom of young, diehard anti-abortion activists on Saturday. “You go get behind men and women who are going to stand for the right to life.”
The room erupted into applause.
The activists had gathered in the ballroom for the National Pro-Life Summit, the conclusion of a two-day extravaganza of anti-abortion activism in the US capital. On Friday, many had walked through the snowy streets of Washington to support the March for Life, the largest annual anti-abortion event in the United States.
But while the March for Life is a mass show of force, the National Pro-Life Summit is far more focused. It aims to arm the foot soldiers of the anti-abortion movement, high school- and college-aged activists, with the education and energy they need to effectively advocate against abortion rights – especially in an election year.
In the months since the US supreme court overturned Roe, abortion rights supporters have repeatedly defeated abortion foes in ballot referendums, even in conservative strongholds such as Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio.
This string of losses, though, has seemingly hardened the stance of summit attendees and speakers. Rather than compromising, summit speakers urged young people: don’t give up. Do more.
“We need to be bolder. We need to be louder,” Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, the organization behind the Pro-Life Summit, said. “We’re working in 10 to 17 states this year, introducing various pro-life laws, doing as much as we can to save as many lives. So I want to see no abortions be legal, ever.”
In the morning, summit attendees gathered in a massive ballroom lit in shades of purple, purple and pink. Speakers spoke against a teal backdrop emblazoned with logos for groups such as the Heritage Foundation and the Alliance Defending Freedom, two powerful organizations that are spearheading much of the conservative political and legal charge against causes like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
The speakers’ talks portrayed the abortion foes in the room as the descendants of freedom fighters such as soldiers in the US revolutionary war and the second world war. The historical analogies did not stop there: they also drew comparisons between abortion, the Holocaust and the 7 October attack in Israel.
The fight against abortion, they suggested, was no less than righteous spiritual warfare.
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“Make no mistake: this idea of human inequality, that some people count and some people don’t, doesn’t come from the media, or the government, or the elite, or even Planned Parenthood,” said Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation. “It comes straight from hell.”
Attendees cheered wildly – even more than they had for Pence’s remarks.
This weekend marked a kind of official kick-off around abortion organizing, for both sides of the aisle, since the would-be 51st anniversary of Roe is on Monday. While anti-abortion activists amassed in Washington, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have announced that they are launching a new blitz of ads and events to spotlight the impact of Roe’s demise.
That strategy seems well placed. Polling in the US still suggests strong support for a legal right to abortion, despite an intense wave of crackdowns and restrictions by Republican-run state legislatures. That also has translated at the ballot box, where Republican losses in the 2022 midterms and Virginia’s elections last year were partly blamed on anger over Republican extremism on abortion.
But if Democrats are hoping that outrage over Roe will lead them to victory in the 2024 elections, abortion opponents remain equally as determined to stay strong.
“In every struggle between good and evil, we know the enemy’s outrage can be wielded as a powerful weapon. However, the key to victory always lies in those who persist,” Hawkins told attendees in a speech, a cross swinging from glittery beads looped around her neck. “And that’s what those on the other side just don’t understand about us. That we will never go away.”