INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Donald Trump on Monday urged a staunchly anti-abortion Christian group to stand up for “innocent life,” ambiguously revisiting an issue that Democrats want to make a focus of this year’s presidential election.
The former president and presumptive Republican nominee’s pre-recorded message praised the work of those attending the event hosted by The Danbury Institute, which is meeting in Indianapolis in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. The newly-formed institute is an association of churches, Christians and organizations that wants to eradicate abortion in its entirety.
A panel of in-person speakers doubled-down on that anti-abortion stance on Monday, and a top Southern Baptist leader called for a hardline position against in vitro fertilization. Albert Mohler, the president of the SBC’s flagship seminary, said IVF is a “commodification of the embryo” that assaults human dignity. He criticized pastors as well as politicians showing openness to it including in Alabama, which shielded IVF providers from prosecution and civil lawsuits after a state Supreme Court ruling said frozen embryos are children.
Trump has repeatedly taken credit for the overturning of a federally guaranteed right to abortion — having nominated three of the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade — but has resisted supporting a national abortion ban and says he wants to leave the issue to the states. At odds with Mohler’s view, Trump does support IVF access.
In his recorded remarks, Trump thanked the audience for their “tremendous devotion to God and Country” and said everyone needs to pull together to preserve their values, including religious liberty, free speech, innocent life and America’s heritage and traditions.
“You just can’t vote Democrat. They’re against religion. They’re against your religion in particular,” Trump said. “You cannot vote for Democrats and you have to get out and vote.”
Both Southern Baptists and Republicans at large are split on abortion politics, with some calling for immediate, complete abortion bans and others more open to incremental tactics. Polls over the last several years have found a majority of Americans support some access to abortion, and abortion-rights groups have won several statewide votes since Roe was overturned, including in conservative-led states like Kansas and Ohio.
Like the GOP, the Southern Baptist Convention has moved steadily to the right since the 1980s, and its members were in the vanguard of the wider religious movement that strongly supported Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to Trump. The Conservative Baptist Network, one of the event’s sponsors, wants to move the conservative denomination even further to the right.
Although they criticized President Bill Clinton’s sexual behavior in the 1990s, Southern Baptists and other evangelicals have supported Trump. That has continued despite allegations of sexual misconduct, multiple divorces and now his conviction on 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex. Trump gave his address on the same day he was appearing virtually for a required pre-sentencing interview with New York probation officers.
