July 10, 2024
Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee (RNC) voted on its platform – and there’s good news about this platform, despite what some of the naysayers have said. Students for Life Action (SFLAction) got engaged in the Platform debate more than six months ago with two hopes. And after tremendous effort, our hopes were realized:
- To affirm that the 14th Amendment protects ALL
- This was our DAY ONE messaging after Roe fell – and the fact that this is in the party platform is a major win.
- To oppose the GOP making, as a policy aspiration, a late-term abortion limit.
- Because more than nine in 10 abortions take place by 12 weeks of pregnancy, embracing this limit (as many have tried to) would have resulted in almost no life-saving benefit.
However, it’s worth acknowledging that some things we would have liked to have seen were absent from the platform. On X (formerly Twitter), SFLAction President Kristan Hawkins had this to say:
“The platform is disappointing to all of us in that it makes it seem as if abortion is merely a states issue. And President Trump is wrong on this because the Dobbs decision said abortion was going back – should go back to the people and their Representatives. And last I checked we have a whole hell of a lot of Representatives in Washington D.C.
Abortion is a federal, state, and local issue. So, two things can be right at the same time.
I’m not upset at they removed the call for a late term abortion prevention act in the platform. Why? Because for so long that’s been the excuse for a lot of GOP officials really not to do much… just to say they signed onto a bill that had no chance of passing the Senate, therefore I am done.
What we really need is the GOP to step up to help us defeat Chemical Abortion Pills which are the leading cause of infant death in our country.”
