While Democrats at their convention last week shied away from rhetoric focusing on abortion rights, Republicans this week have moved the issue front and center.
Anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson on Tuesday delivered a prime-time address in which she detailed her journey from Planned Parenthood clinic director to avid abortion opponent. Johnson, who has consistently praised President Trump’s positions on the issue, said that Planned Parenthood was a racist organization, whose founder Margaret Sanger used “to eradicate minorities.”
“Almost 80% of Planned Parenthood abortion facilities are strategically placed in minority neighborhoods,” Johnson said, adding that “every year Planned Parenthood celebrates its racist roots by presenting the Margaret Sanger Award.”
Johnson also described participation in performing abortions in a graphic, detailed manner, something she also did in her book Unplanned, which became a film last year in part because of financial backing from the prominent Trump supporter Mike Lindell. Johnson appealed to Trump’s base, citing his stances against abortion and pointing to his judicial record.
“Life is a core tenet of who we are as Americans,” Johnson said. “This election is a choice between two radical, anti-life activists, and the most pro-life president we’ve ever had. That’s something that should compel you to action.”
Trump promoted Johnson’s speech in a tweet shortly after she delivered it.
Johnson’s speech was followed by another anti-abortion activist, Nicholas Sandmann, a Kentucky high school student who became nationally known when he became the subject of a viral video at the March for Life last year. During his speech, Sandmann referenced the event, the largest annual anti-abortion demonstration, and said that afterward he bought a “Make America Great Again” hat because Trump “has distinguished himself as the most pro-life presidents in the history of our country and I wanted to express my support for him too.”
But wearing the hat after the march, Sandmann said, is what made him the target of an attack, first from other activists in the city, and then from members of the media who went into “attack mode” after a video of him allegedly smirking at a Native American activist stoked controversy. Sandmann said that he believes his MAGA hat made him a target “because the truth wasn’t important.”
“Advancing their anti-Christian, anti-conservative, anti-Donald Trump narrative was all that mattered,” Sandmann said.
Other speakers also pushed on the abortion issue during the Republican convention’s second night. Cissie Graham Lynch, the granddaughter of the Reagan-era evangelical Billy Graham, decried the Obama administration for its contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act, which many Christians disputed because of its requirement for companies to provide employees “abortion-inducing drugs.”
Lynch connected abortion to religious freedom, an issue Donald Trump, Jr. discussed on the convention’s first night, when he said that 2020 “is shaping up to be church, work, and school versus rioting, looting, and vandalism.” Lynch expanded on that remark, saying that Democratic leaders were biased against abortion opponents and Christians.
“Some Democrat leaders banned church services while marijuana shops and abortion clinics were declared ‘essential,'” Lynch said. “But, you know what is truly essential? Our right to worship freely and live our faith in every aspect of life.”
Trump himself in the past week has focused on abortion as well as other cultural issues, framing the Democratic platform a concerted attack on American values. During a speech on Monday, he accused Democrats at the Democratic National Convention of intentionally cutting the phrase “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, a claim that he made repeatedly over the weekend.
Last week, Trump claimed in a speech that Democrats wanted to jail churchgoers and foist “twisted, twisted, worldviews that nobody ever thought possible” on voters.
“They want to cancel you,” Trump said. “Totally cancel you.”
