In the final months of the 2024 presidential campaign, the pro-life movement felt that Donald Trump was drifting.
Alarmed by Trump’s public flirtation with supporting a Florida abortion-rights ballot measure, Live Action founder Lila Rose traveled to the president’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club in September 2024 for a private intervention. During a sit-down that lasted more than two hours, Rose tried to persuade the president to adopt a stronger pro-life position on the campaign trail. She showed Trump videos narrated by former abortion doctors explaining how procedures are performed in graphic detail, hoping to convince him not to abandon a social-conservative movement that had stood by him for three presidential campaigns. But his response unsettled her.
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“He expressed deep revulsion to late-term abortion,” she recalled in a wide-ranging interview with The Free Press. But she left the conversation feeling Trump’s understanding of the issue differed fundamentally from her own. “It seemed that his opposition was based on the disgusting aspects of abortion, which is not necessarily the reason that millions of Americans want to stop abortion,” she said. “They want to stop it because it ends human life, and he seemed to have this misunderstanding about why abortion was so deeply wrong.”
Even more concerning, in her view, was the sympathy Trump expressed for some first-trimester abortions, especially those that involve young women who aren’t ready to have children, are in college, or are at the start of their careers. According to Rose, he also suggested that he wouldn’t restrict access to mifepristone, the chemical abortion pill that has become the newest front in the abortion wars during Trump’s second term.
