Donald Trump defends push to restrict abortion rights after rebuke from pro-life group

Donald Trump, stinging from a rebuke by the nation’s leading anti-abortion group, used a speech on Saturday before influential evangelicals in Iowa to spotlight his actions as president to try to restrict abortion rights.

Chief among the accomplishments Trump listed were his nominations of three conservative judges to the US Supreme Court. The appointments paved the way for the overturning last year of the landmark Roe. v. Wade ruling, which had affirmed a federal right to abortion.

“Those justices delivered a landmark victory for protecting innocent life. Nobody thought it was going to happen,” Trump said, appearing via video to a gathering of the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition. “They thought it would be another 50 years. Because Republicans had been trying to do it for exactly that period of time, 50 years.”

Trump has often avoided talking about abortion as he campaigns again for the White House, sidestepping the issue less than a year after the court overturned Roe.

But his position that abortion restrictions should be left up to the states, not the federal government, drew a sharp rebuke on Thursday from the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America group, which called it a “morally indefensible position for a self-proclaimed pro-life presidential candidate.”

Trump didn’t take a stance on Saturday on a national ban. Instead, he ticked through a record as president that aimed to satisfy abortion opponents that form the core of evangelical Christians, who hold sway in the Republican Party primary contest and particularly Iowa’s first-in-the-nation Republican caucuses.

Trump won applause noting he was the first president to attend the annual March for Life abortion opposition rally.